TWiT 1078: The Great British Marmalade Scandal - Building Your Own Router

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Ian Thompson is here, Abrar Alheedi, Patrick Beja. We'll talk about Outlook crashing in space. They did manage to fix it. OpenAI buys a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars, not ours, I'm sorry to say. And the end and maybe rebirth of Zombo.com. TWiT is next.

[00:00:28] Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, Episode 1078, recorded Sunday, April 5th, 2026. The Great British Marmalade Scandal.

[00:00:55] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Let me introduce our esteemed panel this week from CNET, ladies and gentlemen, Abrar Alheedi. She's senior technology reporter there. And we finally figured it out because it always seemed like you were on Tech News Weekly and then on TWiT the following Sunday. Yeah. And we wanted to separate it, but Benita said, well, we let them choose what day and everybody who's on Tech News Weekly figures, well, I'm going to have a Tech News, a TWiT week. Yeah, why not?

[00:01:23] So why not do it all at once? So you're getting it out of the way, I guess. Yes, no. What are you talking about? I'm just teasing you. Great to see you, Abrar. It's nice to see you. Ian Thompson is also here. Professor Thompson. Because look at his library. It's just jam packed with goodies. Oh, this is just a couple of bookcases. We've got another five in the house. Oh, I love it. I love it. You save your books.

[00:01:49] Yeah. I mean, I had to give up half my library when I moved over here and it broke my heart. But I took a very simple rule. If I could get it on an e-book, then I'd do that. Something which I've regretted because they've started changing e-books. Or if I hadn't read it in five years, then it went to the charity shop or to the bookshop or whatever. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Also here, joining us from Paris, former NATO nation. Wait, no. No, you're still in NATO. It's not us. It's you.

[00:02:18] It's us. You're the almost former NATO nation. It's not you. It's me. Patrick Pajot, not patrick.com. Staying up late for us. I appreciate it. Thank you. Happy to. I appreciate this week, which was the launch of Artemis to the integrity capsule is now on its way there. This is a NASA thing built in unity, actually, which is kind of cool on its way to the moon.

[00:02:45] It's actually closer to the moon by far. It's only fifty four thousand miles away from the moon. It's almost a quarter of a million miles from the Earth. And what's what's cool is that they have now seen a part of the moon you don't normally see part of the dark side of the moon. Ah, so that's far side of the moon. They call it the dark side. They do. And then I start singing the Mulan song in my head.

[00:03:10] Yeah, it's not dark to the moon. It's only dark. Yeah. Far side is a much better way of saying it, isn't it? Ian? It's it's sorry. This is it's one. It's the mound of regular that I will die on because it's one of those things. I was speaking to a NASA engineer and I used the dark side of the moon phrase. He's like, look, before we go any further, it's far side. It's never dark. It's the same amount of sunshine as any other part of the moon.

[00:03:34] That's right. But actually, I'm glad that they got that shot because you can see clearly that there is no secret military base on the far side of the moon, as Adam Curry used to insist.

[00:03:45] Well, Arthur C. Clarke had a wonderful story about this because he spoke with the Apollo Apollo eight astronauts who are the first humans to actually see it. And they'd just been to sea 2001 before the flight. And one of the astronauts said, look, we did consider radioing back to NASA saying that we'd seen a large black monolith sitting out. But we decided we'd never fly again if we did that.

[00:04:10] That's awesome. The shot is actually interesting. The orbital dynamics of the whole thing is interesting. The moon is moving in its orbit towards a rendezvous point. You see, it's right now it's kind of far off towards a rendezvous point with Orion, which will then slingshot around it. So it's kind of an amazing target practice thing. It's almost like they do math before they send out the capsule.

[00:04:34] Yeah, it's funny because I've heard interviews with various NASA spokespeople. NASA has started using, I'm sorry to say, you know, camera ready people instead of engineers. Yeah, I really hate it. And they talk like this. And I saw a CNN anchor said, well, explain the orbital dynamics. And the poor woman said, well, no, I can't. Oh, no. But, but, but, you know, you saw that movie with the people in the on the big blackboard. That's how they do it.

[00:05:06] So anyway, that was a that was a nice thing. There is a couple of real time Orion trackers. I was just showing you NASA's. There's one kind of third party from issinfo.net that is also showing the rendezvous and some beautiful shots, by the way, of the moon. I'm sorry, the Earth from Orion with the sun behind the Earth, some really gorgeous shots.

[00:05:35] So they brought their iPhones up. I was gonna say it's a great, great iPhone ad. They also, I'm sad to say, brought Microsoft Surface tablets. Oh, yeah. And just take a wild guess. What app do you think they had trouble with? With both versions of it. Yeah, Outlook. So NASA had to reinstall Outlook remotely.

[00:06:02] Because it's not, are we sure it's not because they have like special equipment or some kind of weird network? It is, no, it is weird. You know, because they're going to space and like, yeah, it's, it's the, it's not like if they had another app or program, they would be certain it would have worked perfectly. I mean, I don't know why I'm doing Microsoft. Oh, you're being so kind. I know. There is a chance to slam. Some of us, yeah.

[00:06:27] So, uh, Artemis flight director, uh, Judd Freeling said that, quote, this is not uncommon. We have this on station all the time. You know, sometimes Outlook has issues getting configured, especially when you don't have a network that's directly connected. Of course, Orion is not connected to the internet, obviously. It's a quarter of a million miles away. So essentially we just had to reload his files on Outlook to get it working.

[00:06:51] But it might, you know, you might then say, well, why did they send them out with Surface tablets and Outlook if they had these problems at home? Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, you know, it's, oh, sorry. It's easily fixable probably, you know, it's not, and it's probably not mission critical. Like they're not going to get, uh, flight path instructions throughout. No. Oh my God. I hope not.

[00:07:15] So it seems like, but still, I mean, it is a very bad ad for, or, you know, it continues the, the image of Microsoft and, and Outlook and all of everything they do. And it is simultaneously a fantastic ad for Apple and the iPhone because they have iPhones there. They did, but also the iPhones are, are modified so that they can't really do much except take pictures. They're not sending text messages.

[00:07:39] But still, it's like, what are you going to take? You know, you're going to take those devices that are compact and that have everything you need. Um, and you're not going to build your own phone or, or, and it's easier to get an iPhone than an actual camera. Although I'm sure they have those too, but I'm surprised they're using consumer tech. I love it that our, uh, well, no, it's good. And I think it's part of, you know, this is the SLS, which was, uh, cleverly contrived by Congress to be made in all 50 states.

[00:08:10] So this is probably something that doesn't happen in France. I hope it doesn't happen in France. Uh, so that every state would get its little piece of the, uh, the puzzle, which of course made it hideously over cost and inefficient. And I imagine there's also that kind of corporate back sheesh where, well, we got to give Microsoft a little something, something an Apple, something, something.

[00:08:30] Um, yeah, it does. It does. Can we, can we, it is, I mean, you talked about it last week, but it is amazing that for this once I'm going to use a, we like humanity, uh, is going back to space. It doesn't matter. It's the U S let's just, on this one, it's not just the U S it's everyone. Um, and we're going back to, to, to, not just to space, but to the moon and it's working.

[00:08:57] And NASA is managing under, uh, you know, um, what's the name of the new director who everyone has doubts about. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually been in space, which is kind of amazing, you know, kind of cool. He ended up being confirmed and, uh, he rejiggered a few things and it seems like it might actually be happening now. Of course there's, you know, this base on the moon thing, which China and the U S are going to have, but at this point, let's just be amazed.

[00:09:24] I actually, no, it is. I don't get me wrong. I celebrate this. I think this is very cool. We watched the launch on Wednesday on intelligent machines. I think it's super, I completely with you, even though I also know in my heart, it's just a silly exercise that we don't need to spend the money to go to the moon. We're never going to go to Mars. Cause that is just impossible. It, but it makes, it's not impossible.

[00:09:51] No, but, and there is a value to that. Uh, and also the kind of research you need to do does, you know, in the case of the, uh, moon rays, they trickle down to, uh, technologies that we're using every day. And it, you know, I got hook and we got Velcro, we got Tang, for example, and we got Fisher space pens. So, and I, I tried to show the, the launch. Well, I did show the launch to my kids. They're eight and five.

[00:10:17] That's exciting. Um, it was really exciting to me and they were like, oh, okay. I mean, it's a rocket going to space. We see that all the time. And I had, because not just because it's happened before, but there's just so much fake imagery everywhere. I'm, I'm not talking about the AI. I'm talking about movies and, you know, CGI and fantastical things and every, and they weren't getting the reaction.

[00:10:43] I was hoping they weren't amazed and you know, um, so, I mean, hopefully when they actually walk on the moon in a few years, it will have more of an impact, but I was kind of a little bit disappointed that kids today, they have, you know, fantasy and science fiction up the wazoo. And they don't understand that the real, uh, people going to the moon is actually amazing. Well, one kid did, did you see the CNN interview with the kid who's now become a meme?

[00:11:10] Uh, he turned up to the launch and he got his NASA hat on and the CNN journalist said, you know, so why are you so excited about this? And he just looked at him and went, we're going to the effing moon. I gotta say, I want to meet that kid. That's exactly it. What do you mean? We're going to the moon.

[00:11:31] Uh, I love it. You know, I don't know if any of you are old enough to remember, uh, the last time I was in high school, the last time people went to the moon and I'm old. I literally went, yeah, 1972. I, I literally wet myself when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, but I was only 14 days old at the time. I remember my dad getting me up, uh, to, to watch that.

[00:12:01] And I will never forget that it was very moving and very exciting. Yeah. And it was a global event, which we kind of need these days, a place, a chance for us to all to celebrate something as humanity as opposed to. And it also gave us a great headline from the guardian when the toilet malfunctioned. Um, and the headline was relief for astronauts as Artemis two toilet repaired. And I just thought the headline writer there was sitting with a huge grin on their face. Just like, yes. Now I read something this morning.

[00:12:30] They're smelling something burning in the toilet. So that's not good. Oh, I don't know. The sacrifice is being made for the same time. You know what? They can pee in the suit. Honestly, they're okay. They'll be all right. Um, and, and now that outlook's looking, they can write home about it. So I think they get spam emails like hot women in your area.

[00:12:52] It's like, as long as we're piling on Microsoft, I do have to show this one blog post from a guy named Dave Bannerman. Um, how many products does Microsoft have named copilot? We know there's a few, right? It turns out there's 75 different Microsoft copilots. And even this count is, is down.

[00:13:19] He says, since I published this, I've received emails from, there are two more missing gaming copilot and Microsoft dragon copilot. So now the total is 80. It's like, I guess all the good names are taken. I don't know. There are a lot of copilots copilot and Viva insights copilot and Shareport copilot and planner copilot and one note company and on and on and on and on. It's like taking a page out of Google's book.

[00:13:48] Like, let's just name things like a bunch of random things. Google's naming is terrible. Yeah. It's all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good. Well, the thing that makes it weird is that the name is not just copilot. It's like something with copilot at the, at the end of the name, which, you know, I can understand. It's like Nadella getting an all hands meeting and going like, we're gonna go big on AI and our AI is copilot.

[00:14:13] So go do things, make AI, integrate AI in your products and call it copilot because we have to have a big AI strategy. And yeah, there's no, like, there's not even time to decide on an actual brand strategy. It's just Apple being like three years late might have time to have developed a strategy. Well, they're just gonna use Siri. They already got a name.

[00:14:41] So actually I think this is a little bit of a problem for Microsoft. They've actually retrenched a little bit because people don't want copilots shoved in their faces. And it's giving, you know, I'm an AI fan, by the way, I'm a huge accelerationist, but it's getting, giving AI a bad name. I mean, very similar to once again, bring up Google Gemini being in everything. You're like, why is Gemini summarizing my two-long email? Oh, they're doing the same thing, aren't they? Yeah. It's not necessary. There's that little, little glowy Gemini button all over.

[00:15:10] Begging you to use it. Yeah. It is more aggravating in, in Windows though. I have to admit because having the copilot button in like notepad and paint. Yeah. It's crazy. It does feel like it's been crammed in places that you really don't need it to be. Yeah. Even though it might be useful in, you know, notepad. It could be useful, like it's text related stuff, but it feels bad.

[00:15:38] It feels like it's being shoved in your face. So I think there's a, at least a communications issue there because most people, myself included, don't know what it's for. We, I don't, I have no idea what to use it for. I just see the button and I get annoyed. See it and ignore it. Yeah. Basically. I ignore Gemini too. So I'm an equal ignorist opportunity. I did find a good use for Gemini the other day.

[00:16:07] Um, if anyone ever like needs to do any type of video editing and you have like a, like an interview, it'll, if you ask when somebody said something in that video and you need to pull like a sound bite, it'll tell you exactly when they said it and write off the quote. So if you're ever using that in drive, that's like my one thing where I'm like, I don't have to dig for that quote or that sound bite. Um, so that's kind of nice. If you ever, I think that's maybe a little bit of the plan is if you just find one thing, they want you to find that one thing that's useful and then you will go, Oh, and maybe

[00:16:35] expand your horizons there. Google did do, uh, one good thing in AI this week. They released a, a very compact version of Gemma, which is their smaller version of Gemini. It's mini, mini, mini Gemini. Maybe Gemini. Yeah. And they released it as open weights and, uh, they also released it with the Apache license,

[00:16:59] which, uh, a lot of people are very excited about saying, Hey, I think that's going to make it possible for us to use this in new and exciting ways. So, um, uh, for instance, corporations, which are hesitant to use other licenses, Apache is such a forgiving license that, uh, they're more likely to use it. So, uh, praise to Google for, cause I believe in the long run, you know, we don't want to

[00:17:27] be forced to use these corporate models, these models from the, you know, the big AI companies, this, the so-called, uh, hyperscalers. Google's one of them, uh, if it means they lock in AI. And I think a lot of us are really hoping that open AI, open weight AI with, with relaxed licenses, something we can even run on our own machines, which Gemma is small enough to do. Um, that's our hope for the future. Then, then it will be a much more egalitarian future with AI. You'll get to do it, use it the way you want it.

[00:17:58] Um, so I will give Google some credit for doing that. This is a, uh, from all, I tried it a little bit. Uh, there is a version for the Macintosh, which is nice that you can use using that, the Apple's native, uh, MLX, um, extensions instead of NVIDIA's CUDA. Another good thing. So competition is a good thing in any of these spaces. So we'll cover that more on our AI show, intelligent machines. It's kind of an inside baseball story, but I did want to give them some credit. Thank you for doing that, Google. That's the right thing. Let's take a little break.

[00:18:28] And when we come back, Patrick had some thoughts about the big tobacco moment for social media. That's what some people are calling it. We talked about it last week with Kathy Gellis. You heard it. And Patrick said, steam was coming out of his ears. So we're going to give Patrick his, his, uh, chance to rebut, uh, that whole story. I think it's very interesting. And of course it is an ongoing story in the tech. And of course, it's a great, uh, the tech community. So we will cover it.

[00:18:57] Patrick Beja here, not patrick.com. Uh, long time tech podcaster and, uh, and worked in the industry too. You worked at Blizzard. And so you definitely have on the gaming side of things, but yeah, that counts. I finally got a Nintendo switch too. And I'm, I have to say, I'm loving it. It's really, really just before the price hike. That was my motivation. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, Abrar Alheedi here from CNET. Always a pleasure to have you on, Abrar. Likewise. And Ian Thompson.

[00:19:26] And you know, I, I want to say there's a trend here. None of you are blurring your background. Oh yeah. That's a first. I would never think to do that on any show. Yeah. I don't like Ian used to do it. Patrick might've done it from time to time. No, I don't, I don't like it. It feels like. I think we're turning against it. Yeah. I did it. And people were just like, can you please turn that off? And you're like, okay. I like to read the book titles. I like to see the T you know, I'm we're nosy. Yeah.

[00:19:54] Is it just me or when you're out on a walk, it's at night and you see a window that's lit up and you can see. Always look in. You look in, right? Yeah. Why do you not have curtains? I'm going to look, obviously. I have to see what's on the TV. You know, I have to see what's on the TV. I'm not looking. Yes. I'm not looking for a compromising material. I want to see what's on the TV. What kind of TV they have. How do you decorate? What kind of lamps. Yeah. What kind of furniture. We're not, we're it's human. Yeah. I'm taking notes. Like I'm like, oh, that's a great design. Yes. It's real life interest. I'm not a peeping Tom.

[00:20:25] We are interested in other human beings. I fully agree. Good. Thank you. I will always validate that. Yeah. I don't feel guilty anymore. Never. I always felt a little weird about it, but it's like, you can't, you can't. You can't not. And yeah, I'm always interested. What are they watching? Yeah. Yeah. Because everybody nowadays has a massive TV in their window. Right. Well, it's a fireplace. Maybe there's a cat. Somebody reading a book. No, no, no. Giant screen.

[00:20:53] Well, no, as you drive into San Francisco over the, over the Bay Bridge, they've got all those skyscrapers on the right hand side and one on the left. And yeah, people don't shut their curtains and you just kind of like, oh, okay. You've got the exercise bike by the window. That's a nice design choice. There's a thought. That plant is gorgeous. Yeah. Okay. Folks, we're looking at you. We'll have more in just a moment with our fabulous panel. Our show today brought to you by Thinkst Canary. It is the best invention ever.

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[00:24:38] Well, we talked about it last week. There were two big court decisions against social media. The state of New Mexico with a big multi-hundred million dollar fine against Meta. And then in Los Angeles, a young woman sued saying, I started using Instagram at the age of six, or YouTube at the age of six, Instagram at the age of nine. It caused severe mental health problems. The case in LA was interesting because they went after Meta.

[00:25:08] By the way, Snapchat and TikTok were also named in the suit, settled out before the case went to jury, went to trial. But YouTube and Meta fought the case and lost. It was really a product defect case. The claim from the plaintiff was these products were poorly designed, encouraging me, addicting me. And as a result, they're liable.

[00:25:38] It wasn't a big, it was only a few million dollar penalty. The jury said we didn't, the point was we wanted them to fix it. We weren't trying to hurt them. We were trying to get them to fix it. And of course, we're all waiting now for the other shoe to drop because there are literally, literally thousands of other cases like this that will now proceed forward with this as, it's not a precedent. The technical term, I guess, is bellwether, but they will certainly be brought up in future cases.

[00:26:06] Now, Kathy Gallus argued against the decision last week saying, and I agree, saying it's a threat. But Patrick, you said you didn't like that idea. Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly understand. And, you know, Kathy, unfortunately, she's not here. So I will fully acknowledge she understands all of this a lot better than me and the legal aspects of it. But I do have a feeling that, first of all, I need to say as a preamble, I'm not against big tech.

[00:26:36] Like I love a lot of the things that, you know, the Magnificent Seven and others do. So this is not like Patrick is French and hates everything tech related.

[00:26:48] But it does feel to me like there's a knee jerk reaction to this, to this judgment, to this trial, which involves Section 230 and general fear that if you try to condemn or decide that these companies have been doing this, and they're doing something wrong, then all of a sudden it's an attack on Section 230.

[00:27:16] And really, they should be protected because if not, then all of a sudden moderation is not possible anymore. And I strongly disagree with that interpretation because Section 230 indeed protects, you know, website publishers for moderation purposes. But this is not that. Yeah, I agree with you. It should not be a get out of jail free card. Exactly.

[00:27:47] Because if you go the way that Section 230 protects everything, including this, which is not again moderation, like you're not removing a certain piece of content from your... No, you designed your sites to be super attractive. Exactly. But Patrick, it does give us, it does give other super attractive products like this fine podcast. It doesn't put them at risk also.

[00:28:13] I mean, I don't understand why they haven't gone after, for instance, DraftKings, the online gambling. Talk about designing a product that's addictive and showing... Well, I mean, it's gambling. It's gambling. So to begin with, there's an issue.

[00:28:27] But if it is proven slash decided by a jury, which is how we set societal norms, by the way, especially in a country that is governed by common law and not by like up on high government deciding how things are done, like it is mostly in France. If you don't allow for juries to say, well, this product was designed a certain way.

[00:28:56] And by the way, discovery showed that studies did put into the hands of Zuckerberg and other executives, these companies. Yeah, they knew that there was a serious risk, not just anecdotal, but a serious risk that these products were designed in a way that would affect their users' mental health, especially young users, especially young women, young girls.

[00:29:22] And so, if you say, well, okay, fine, whatever, but section 230, so you can't change the product. This is the algorithm, the way the apps have infinite scrolling. And when they design these products, they are far removed from a website publisher who moderates comments or blog posts. They design the way the algorithm is going to serve the content to you.

[00:29:50] I feel like this goes not one, but two or three steps beyond just moderating one or two pieces of content. This is a product that is designed a specific way. And if we can't find that this product is designed in a way that is detrimental to society, then what are we doing? Like, if we can't find that it's a problem the way it's designed, then they have no incentive to design it differently.

[00:30:20] Now, if the argument is, oh no, this is not a product that is intentionally designed to be addictive. And just to make it clear, I'm fully ready to admit that maybe they didn't realize the effect would be so bad in the beginning, because they were just making a good product that would encourage people to come back and to spend time on the app and to hopefully have a good time using their product.

[00:30:47] I understand. But now we're like 10, 15 years removed from that time. And we're looking at and seeing the results on people, on society. And I think we need to be allowed to look at these things and say, all right, you know what? This is having an effect we didn't anticipate and it's an issue and we should maybe change the way it works.

[00:31:11] And I don't, first of all, I think the legal proceedings is how you should do that. And second, and there's going to be, you know, appeals and all of this. It's not settled now. And second of all, I honestly don't see how Section 230 should protect the product design. No, and I don't think people are saying that. I think, but there is some fear that it would undermine Section 230, which I think you agree. We all agree. And we need. Absolutely. I don't think it's a Section 230 issue.

[00:31:40] I think Section 230 should be sacred. Section 230 protects these companies against what its users post and gives them the right to moderate it, the right to delete it. And this is, was really about a product defect. And I thought that was smart of the plaintiff's attorneys to focus it as a defective product. I don't understand why. I mean, you could also do this about alcohol. You could for sure. See, this is the thing. Well, it is.

[00:32:06] The connection between social media and mental illness is not a proven connection by any means. It is. But you could definitely say that about alcohol. You could definitely say it about a gambling. Those are demonstrably addictive products. Why are we letting that happen? I mean, it seems to me. Much more so than social media. It does seem to me like there's a growing consensus that social media has some effect on its users, especially younger users.

[00:32:35] And people should, we should continue to investigate. Yeah. And I don't mind even laws against young people using it. I don't know. What do you guys think? Abrar, what do you think? I think, I think you're right in terms of laws against young people using it. It's, it's tricky to implement that. I think that's the problem. There's no good way to do that. Yeah. It's, I'm very curious kind of observing how Australia is handling that and how more nations continue to potentially do the same, but in the U S at least kind of feels like it's that the ship has sailed and young people are already on this thing. How do you pull them away from it?

[00:33:05] Maybe you get the next generation to not, you know, beyond these platforms. That's where you start. But it's really hard to get a teenager away from a platform where they've built so many connections and they are potentially addicted to it.

[00:33:16] Um, I think it, it, it, it can be addictive for children and for adults. Children is really where there can be very detrimental effects, but even as adults, you know, like it's so hard. I try to set screen time limits for Instagram an hour a day. And I blow past them almost every single day. And I'm like, I'm not even enjoying being on this app. Like it's, it's crazy.

[00:33:38] It's addictive. We know it's addictive. A hundred percent. So, but I, yeah, I just don't know what, what the answer is in terms of allowing people to have the free will to be on something if they want to be on it. That's kind of, I mean, I, I'm not a libertarian, but I feel like that there should be some responsibility on the user. Yeah. Absolutely. If you're having a problem with it, it's kind of on you to stop using it.

[00:34:00] Look at this. Faux-free bars and restaurants are on the rise across the U S yeah, I'm wrong. People are recognizing that. Yeah. We don't really want this to be the way we live. I don't think we should go to laws immediately as you know, we don't have to, I think the very important thing that's happening now and not just with this case in court, but in general, in, in the entire world, kind of, as we're realizing what's happening is a change of perception and a change of societal.

[00:34:30] We don't have to be a natural view on these things. You know, everyone knows sugar is not great for you. We don't have laws against consuming sugar. We have, you know, in France, for example, we have great things like labels on, on, uh, uh, food items on processed foods with, with like a score from A to F and how good this thing is compared to the one next that that's great. But we don't have laws that said you, you, that say you don't have to eat sugar.

[00:34:57] But we all know, like, because society has put an emphasis on this, that maybe you shouldn't abuse it. And that's not the look, the outlook we have on social media right now, because we didn't know. And it doesn't, you know, I think that's part of it either, but we've come around.

[00:36:16] cigarettes we don't ban alcohol we don't ban gambling in most cases every state now has a lottery so there's state sanctioned gambling as addictive as it is my fear is that this is going to be used it already is being used to ban social media for young people without acknowledging that there is value to social media as well right all of the examples you just gave are also banned

[00:36:41] for young people so you know young people is one thing okay you're right okay that's a good and I don't think we need to necessarily maybe we need to I just feel that this is gonna products are designed but expand into a huge anti-tech movement where we do in fact say we got to get these companies out of our lives I think we should be very aware of this but we also shouldn't as an overreaction to that possibility decide that there is nothing that can be done and these companies

[00:37:11] can just design the products the way they you know there's an example I like to give because I lived through it video games in the 80s and 90s when Mortal Kombat was released it created an outrage and everyone was like oh video games are bad for kids and like we shouldn't and us as kids were like no video games are awesome and they're all trying to to to to to outlaw and to ban video

[00:37:38] games and ah but look in the end video games stayed and this was moral panic and blah blah blah it wasn't I just realized this recently actually that is the reason that the um you know Peggy and uh and oh my god what's the rating system for video games in the US um oh um the name escapes yes that is when they were created the the SRB thank you Benito the SRB was created and it's it's not banning games but

[00:38:06] it's just putting a label on I'm okay with that are inappropriate for certain ages to inform the parents and that is an important societal reaction to these things because you know I have to point out that it was the same kind of pseudo sciency opinion that well it's just everybody can tell that video games are bad for you and are going to make you violent everybody can tell that social media and spending too much time on your phone is bad for you without any scientific background backing and

[00:38:35] there's some people were saying that there's a lot of people there's Jonathan Haidt saying that and there are a lot of people saying that now about social and there isn't any real science saying that any more than there was about video games but because I think there's more and more studies I think there's more and more maybe we're not there yet and maybe we should I'm not you know objecting to uh I'm not saying we should do all of this now I'm just subjecting to the idea that it's

[00:39:02] impossible and that we shouldn't no no I agree with you you know we can do something about it I agree and I just don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater there's real value to it too me neither I think especially with a platform like YouTube like I you know we talk a lot about meta and Instagram and how terrible it is YouTube is there's oh it's incredible I watch it every morning right I learn like there's educational content there's a I learned so much from YouTube I love it do as well YouTube all the time yeah and there's a reason there's a YouTube kids like they're they're

[00:39:30] things that are trying to be done not but they're also terrible things on there so that's a really tricky example of like the breadth of content that you could access to completely remove access to YouTube I think is detrimental I think that is a bridge too far they did that in Australia I think that middle ground I know that that really blew my mind I was like taking away Instagram as well I think that YouTube is oh I think I think YouTube you can't be logged in to YouTube

[00:39:54] um but you can still share for example videos on Discord or WhatsApp with your friends right I think you can still in Australia you're talking about I believe so yes yes I'm talking about Australia because how would you see that video well you're just not logged in you're allowed to use it without you can watch are you sure it's not blocked or you just can't have an account no you can't have an account I think that's that's that's not the restriction that's meaningless well you have to see

[00:40:21] all the ads no because the algorithm is the issue there because they're worried about how that and you know maybe I'm just going to throw something random here maybe we don't need the infinite scroll feed maybe we don't need it maybe I agree but should the courts be deciding that maybe yes that's the whole point maybe there's no one else they have no way the social media companies are going to get

[00:40:46] rid of it so you know it's like what other choice is there and there should be scientific consensus behind it before we there is none Leo and it's very paternalistic to say well you people just can't be trusted with an algorithmic feed so a bar no algorithmic freed for you it's very paternalistic there is also the potential that this backfires I mean do you remember in the 80s when I think it was

[00:41:10] Al Gore's wife yes behind the thing to to put you know parental advisory stickers on albums those albums they wanted to put a chip on your tv yeah I didn't say algorithmic field uh feed Leo I said the infinite scrolling thing because that's been named a few times as a cause and you're saying there's no science I don't think that's true I think there is you know a a growing corpus of scientific

[00:41:40] studies that show that it does affect uh there's not a consensus yet but I don't think it's a very hard thing to prove and uh I think the problem is it seems right but it's an impossible thing to prove because human beings are very complex and what are you going to do you're going to have a control how do you have a control group well you get the algorithmic feed you don't and let's watch for 20 years and see if you go crazy yes that no how is that that's not gonna happen why not because you

[00:42:08] can't this is this is why nutritional science is messed up it's very hard to do this kind of in vitro test in vivo testing with humans I mean maybe we're taking the comparison too far but if you're saying your nutritional science is difficult there are still things you can take away from you know because you can measure stuff but how do you measure this this uh well you know I got depressed because I was spending a lot of time on Instagram I think you're belittling uh a whole field of science that

[00:42:36] is you know psychology and and and I think you should look at the results I think experts in the field are in agreement that there is no scientific basis for this I don't think that's the case all right we'll have to just take a break I'll try to find a couple of studies that I've seen go oh you can cherry pick but uh but you know when Jonathan Heights book came out uh there was uh and I'll find the article a very respected person who's studied this for years this is her field who said no there's

[00:43:06] no consensus on this at all that this is something that people feel is right makes sense but see I always think when science makes sense that and you say well that just seems sensible that's when you're in trouble that's when you're so are you saying there's no issue and we should change nothing no I think it's okay to change things and I think there are ways to do it I think there's a great risk because of people's antipathy to technology and that's what I want to defend uh there's a great risk

[00:43:34] that we will overdo it and that we will do real harm I think that the long-term evidence in Australia is going to be that real harm happened that there's a whole bunch of marginalized kids who have no social who now are you know completely cut off from the support groups that they had there are many examples of things like this and outside the cities where you know distance is such a big issue in Australia you know and I still have access to youtube they have access to discord they have access to

[00:44:02] whatsapp and they have access to all of these sites without being logged in I don't think there's that being but that was that an intentional thing well we want to make sure that they have something or is it we just forgot to make that no I think it's impossible you'd need to block youtube in the country if you want but you know it's still as part of the is also the argument against it and it's a huge violation of privacy because age verification has no way of being you know you can't do that in a

[00:44:29] private fashion in a secure private that's true it's another it's another issue but I I will admit that it's true yeah um and you're right you know you have consistently every time you're on have argued this and I and I I respect your position I think your position is actually completely sensible and logical I just think it's very we have it's a challenge to solve this and I agree with you and I think we shouldn't go too far and there is a danger of going too far it's just that we are you know

[00:44:58] among friends here this is a safe space and we can't admit don't tell the other ones don't tell the legislators uh but maybe there are some things we could change I don't have tick tock I don't have Instagram on my phone I have taken all of that stuff off I don't have Facebook on my phone yeah uh the only reason I have x still on my phone is because it is the last place where I can really get up-to-date AI news and so what I do is there x now thank goodness has a filter where you can say I

[00:45:23] only want to see AI news or I only want to go to blue sky and talk about AI you will get shouted I have an account on all these things but I don't use any of them they're all taken off my phone because I spent too much time on them I will say one last thing uh there's a report called the world happiness report happiness report um that's done every year that ranks countries on many different uh you know criteria uh that decides which is the happiest country in the world that should be easy

[00:45:52] to measure shouldn't I'm sure we're not yeah well it's it relies on things like uh unemployment benefits and uh wages and social security all of those things Finland number one consistently for years but there is a section about but do you agree with that is it is it a happy place it's really interesting because they have a high alcoholism and suicide rate yes well that's due to certain things that

[00:46:16] happen but it is the happiest place on earth it's happy in the sense that uh well Finns are weird okay not but you know if you take those criteria you know uh you're not gonna die if you get sick you're not gonna uh be thrown out of your house if you lose your job these kinds of things yes but there is a section about um social media and the really interesting thing if you're talking about science you can go

[00:46:41] check it out the really interesting thing is that they're saying um social media seems to affect people's uh uh enjoyment in general if you consume too much of it but if you consume uh like an hour a day which is not ridiculous you are better off than if you consume none of it oh that's interesting

[00:47:05] interesting and there are some social media that actually improve your uh well-being you too the ones that connect you to people you don't know like you know x uh reels like the the ones that are heavily algorithmic are worse than whatsapp okay that's understandable you talk to people you know and facebook facebook is actually because they put the emphasis on people from your family and from i

[00:47:33] don't really use facebook but i was very surprised because of course i'm like ah meta zuckerbergs hang him from a tree bring out the guillotine of course i'm exaggerating that's not what i say but you see facebook there and you have to think okay i understand the logic behind it maybe there's some something so that report is saying some social media specifically some uh apps can uh make you

[00:47:59] happier and i'll stop monopolizing wait can i present a quick counter argument to that i actually don't like seeing people i know on social media because when i compare my life to them and i'm like oh they're doing better than i am but if it's somebody i don't know then i'm like oh they made me laugh but it's all subjective right it's all like what do you enjoy seeing tiktok is an entertainment it's like tv it's like watching tv it's like entertainment so it makes i watch a lot of tiktok it's fantastic it's so creative and you know i really don't want to give the impression that i'm anti there's so much

[00:48:28] cool stuff like i watch theoretical physics videos on youtube all the time i watch tiktok way too much like i love it i'm just yeah you know i was watch the the chess chess uh candidates tournament is going on right now you're never going to see coverage of this on espn but youtube has excellent coverage coverage of it this is this is the road to the world championship the winner of this gets to take on the world champion it's very important people play chess but it's a very narrow slice of

[00:48:58] the population but it's well covered on youtube because you only need that narrow slice to succeed on youtube that's a blessing you know and i can i'm sure there's a million little narrow niches like that that youtube serves beautifully and god bless it uh i think that more than makes up for any negative you know radicalization caused by youtube and things like that humans are problematic we're

[00:49:24] never going to keep humans from going bad no they will go bad the thing that bothers me with that argument is that then you you're this direct next step is well then we do nothing yeah we can't touch it about that well i don't say you can't touch it if people decide as a group that they want to touch it that's fine but i think that there's a risk and i think uh some of that risk is some is also some of the

[00:49:51] smaller non-giant companies who can't defend themselves in court who are also now threatened because of this decision and that's another story for another day because we have to move on thank you patrick for asking i apologize to bring this up but i feel one more time no it's an it's it is a very important discussions maybe one of the most important discussions in tech right now uh frankly the only uh person i talk to on instant messaging is my ai assistant and he's great he's my close

[00:50:20] personal friend never let you go so glad you got a male one but yeah he has a nice british accent and i call him jeeves and he's he calls me sir and puts a little butler hat on his messages actually it's a top hat i don't know it's what what is a butler hat i don't know ask jeeves has been reborn okay no as soon as i said well i'd like to call you jesus oh pg

[00:50:43] woodhouse i love him it is a very smart ai even though it's from china um we're going to take a little break come back with more there is a lot more to talk about patrick bejah thank you for bringing that up i appreciate it not patrick.com sorry no i appreciate it i appreciate it uh i think it's a very important uh topic uh abral heaty always great to have you from cnet and uh ian thompson uh where where's your writing these days i know you're doing the letter

[00:51:10] to uh yeah i'm doing well we've actually after some potential copyright problems with bbc we're calling it view from the valley now no kidding they they want even though how long has it been since alistair cook wrote his i know i know but unfortunately it's the anniversary of his death so people got a bit twitchy um i do i did love it and i loved his you know i i used to listen to it every you know every week and just sit there with the with the radio beside me and listening in bed it was marvelous

[00:51:37] and it was a homage to him rather than trying to steal this thunder but yeah i'm doing a lot of work for the stack at the moment and pc pro and various other titles and there's always corporate writing to pay them my pay the mortgage so yes the view from the valley is at tech finitive that's right yes yes we should we should give you a plug for that techfinitive.com yes headline this time don't call it a war but you know uh yeah what is it it's a uh it's a military operation

[00:52:05] apparently that way they don't have to go to congress sure it looks like a war boy yeah pretty much yes sure it looks like i'll just drop it there uh more to come in just a bit but first a word from our fine sponsor this episode of this week in tech brought to you by rippling brand new sponsor welcome rippling to uh to the family one of the hardest things about running a startup and you don't have to

[00:52:31] ask me because i know this for a fact back when we started up it's easy to get distracted by i would call them low leverage tasks tasks you have to do but don't have a huge payoff like payroll you got to do it in fact i it was when i accidentally forgot to pay people that i really heard about this onboarding new employees right hardware setup these are all things that have to

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[00:53:49] biggest in the world like cursor and clay and sierra trust rippling to scale fast without adding additional ops and hr headcount so founders can keep building so if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can and focus on what really matters like your product right or your customers you need rippling right now venture-backed startups can get six months of rippling startup stack for free head to

[00:54:15] rippling.com twit and sign up today that's r-i-p-p-l-i-n-g dot com slash twit to sign up for six months free today focus on what you're building and leave the rest to rippling rippling dot com slash twit so glad to have them uh helping us out here at this week in tech big story in the ai world

[00:54:40] uh this week claude codes source code leaked everybody you know messing with that trying to duplicate cloud code which is one of the hottest right now ai coding vibe coding tools is one i use love it and then following that anthropic really got the open claw movement on their backs saying you can't

[00:55:04] use your subscription for anything but claude code and the claude app you can't use third-party apps essentially saying open claw can't use claude you've got a the subscription you've got to use your api tokens and this has pissed off people of course open clause creator peter steinberger works for open ai he's been jumping on this uh i want to i i want to defend uh anthropic the the creators of

[00:55:34] claude i understand why they did this uh a lot of us who use claude we're saying claude is not so smart in the last few weeks and it's because so many people are using their subscriptions and using so many tokens for their agents that are running day and night doing silly stupid things and uh and and really kind of nerfing claude uh code so i honestly think anthropic was right to do this

[00:56:02] immediately people noticed yeah claude's working a lot better this went into effect uh actually uh that april 4th which was yesterday right yeah at noon east at noon pacific and immediately people were started reporting hey claude's working a lot better uh there were i think they've got they've got a perfect right to do it the put the free party is over yeah of course they do but yeah that's really the the lesson of this i mean i don't want to get into the back and forth and everything

[00:56:30] but the lesson of it is we've been kind of much as the internet in the early days of course we run it we're speed running this internet uh life cycle with ai uh what was free is not and it it wasn't tenable and then people were using it so much with a subscription because the subscription was close to unlimited use that anthropic had to do something about it yeah because the issue is that the idea would be that the subscription you would use for

[00:56:59] it's not the same for occasional like when you're in front of the computer or maybe you set off one agent to do something from time to time but with open claw it's running all the time so it is an over consumption of these tokens on for a company that just like all the other uh ai companies is not making a lot of money i mean they're making money but they're losing money on all of this right so it's

[00:57:25] completely understandable and it's not like they're saying you can't use it ever you just have your api key and pay for what you have to pay for what you use exactly yeah i also uh i think that it's also which is and this is a good thing going to move people towards uh local models opens model weight models less expensive models i uh i've been experimenting with a chinese model it's about a third the cost of a

[00:57:52] claude um max subscription and it's been it's doing very well possibly because they trained it on claude that's what anthropic says uh but it does a very good job uh i think this is good i think this is this is going to stimulate people moving in other directions um so i'm not uh anyway it's a big story i don't know if there's that much to say about it but how about jemma can you can you run you can run

[00:58:17] open claw on on jemma you certainly could it's not here's the problem there's nothing as good as opus 4.6 there really isn't that claude model is so good claude code is so good although we have learned from the open the the leak of claude source code that it has all sorts of bizarre things built into it uh some of which are you know designed to screw you up and make it cost more for you um i don't know if that's

[00:58:42] on purpose or a vibe coded bug um people have been complaining about uh bud usage all week and i think this kind of fixed it so anyway you know i maybe this impacts me more than others because i use claude code all the time but i have i've been playing with a chinese model and it works quite well i tried gemma yeah it's good it's not not great it's good there's nothing like opus unfortunately what do you think of

[00:59:12] the um the leaked uh the thing from the the code that uh shows they're developing a technique to basically give claude infinite memory this is the biggest problem in my mind right now with all ai is uh that it every time you start a new session it starts from scratch it doesn't remember anything

[00:59:37] you did before and and it's like yeah it's like memento it doesn't remember anything but just like memento uh you can have your agent uh make post-it notes write down its uh memories and i've been doing that there are a lot of systems uh around everybody's trying to solve this uh problem and that worked out for for the dude in memento right i don't remember how did it end did it end well not well not well okay he kind of misunderstood what was happening well that's the thing because it

[01:00:07] that's he hallucinated the situation that's exactly what happens so you create all these markdown files and then claude when it starts up has to kind of get a get these shorthand versions of what happened before so that's what they're developing essentially they're having your ai because of course people know i guess mostly but uh the reason you have to start from scratch is that every time you add a

[01:00:30] question the ai the lm has to go through your whole thread to get back to and predict the the the next answer it's going to give so at some point the context window is full or it's using a little bit too too much too many tokens for to give you a one uh one answer so if you can summarize everything you've ever told the uh assistant into something that fits into the context window then it can remember

[01:00:59] everything but how does that work like at some point you can't compress it anymore right it feels like it would hallucinate things or what what did they call it i think there was a research paper on that where it was catastrophic memory loss or or some term like that um it can't remember oh sorry it can't remember everything you've ever said right even with its i have said it has dreams dream programs that

[01:01:27] it does at night to consolidate its memory actually that was one of the things you saw in the claude uh code um yeah the league that's what i'm that's what i said yeah it had it had this thing where a dream at night and try to consolidate its memories people are trying to solve it and there are you know i have a memory system uh that works pretty well uh claude seems to know who i am every time i show up it's a balancing act but uh yeah it's an interesting issue open ai of course has announced that what one of the

[01:01:56] ways it's going to solve this this cash crunch is well first of all they just raised 122 million billion with a b dollars this week the most the biggest raise in history i mean there's there's nothing to compare to it uh and uh i guess they don't need to go public if they can get venture capitalists to keep pouring money into it uh the uber model yes yeah but well there's an upside in there like a pony and

[01:02:21] there's an upside in there somewhere um uh i a lot of people wondering how long this can go on with open ai and they in fact said well we're going to cut we're going to close down the sora app we're going to focus except i don't know how long that lasted because they just bought a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars but low hundreds of millions okay well what is that 200 probably this is a this is a podcast that last year

[01:02:48] had revenue of five million dollars okay so let's see that's two i don't know what is that 200 million that's 40 times a beta that's all seems like a lot uh plus of course there's the issue of well if they're owned by open ai are all those companies gonna still buy ads those ads that they were buying this is the

[01:03:13] tbpn podcast which is essentially uh cnbc for the uh nerd bros the ai bros the tech bros and that was how it was uh pitched it's daily it's for four or five hours every day 70 000 viewers we have more people listening to this show every week than that um we have more revenue than that i don't i don't know where

[01:03:37] it was sam all i'm saying is sam yeah because sam has appeared on many times he loved it yeah right so what what are they going to do with it that's completely like do they want to do they want the you know permission to train on it do they want like what's that but it's public what's the point they don't need to buy us they don't need to buy tbpn i don't understand either and they say they're

[01:04:00] going to have editorial uh independence and they're going to stay in los angeles which is only an hour away from sam allman but okay i think they just want a media channel right they just want a media channel why anyway that's a scary precedent i don't know if we want more media owned by yeah it's bad yeah podcasting is the last bastion of kind of independent non-corporate yeah yeah absolutely stuff news

[01:04:28] yeah that's do you wear ray-ban glasses a bar i don't i'm not a huge um like champion of smart glasses i love people who are really into it but i'm like i wear my boring contacts and i'm good to go like i don't need to see things as i'm walking around would it help that they now uh are making special versions for people with prescription lenses i think that definitely helps them for sure um i know people who are like if i could get my prescription lenses on something like that that's

[01:04:58] great there are times where i'm like it would be nice to be hands-free and recording video um and they're new models that look a little less uh dorky dorky yeah that's a good word do i look like a dork to you no i think this is this is very fitting i like this that's great i do the best right mine are the black black ones you know they're great air pods or you know earbuds yes they're temple based and they sound fantastic because i don't like putting things in my ears

[01:05:24] so that is really nice the other thing too is with like metaray bands and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools so i really value them for that reason that's a good point yeah if you're blind or low vision this could take a picture and you can say what am i looking at right now i could tell you what that can you read me that label yep and even though meta's ai uh is not the top of the line at this point uh i think potentially this is a good form factor at some

[01:05:51] point it's a lot better than the other stuff that we've the other you know heads up stuff that we've seen yeah so they sell them with just the speakers no i don't think so because that sounds good i'd like those yeah but the camera is a big part of it because you can but it's also what people find offensive about the speakers hey meta take a picture so you see the light comes on you know yeah it got your peace sign hey man take a video

[01:06:21] that's good we're kind of heading into glasshole territory though here because you know it's well i don't know there was that what do you mean ian what are you talking about talking to the uh i like it no i mean you saw the report about um it's capturing all kinds of stuff that really shouldn't be captured like people having sex or going to the loo uh a friend of mine actually went to a hotel where the um check-in staff were wearing them and he was like can you take that

[01:06:50] off because i don't want you looking at my credit card when you're you know signing me in the uh so there are still privacy stuff to to be dealt with i think it's a great form factor it really suits a lot of people um yeah get prescription lenses in there to open it up they'll be at all the uh slr luxotica you know which is everybody uh luxotica are possibly the biggest unacknowledged monopoly out there they own yeah they bought everybody up make billions out of

[01:07:18] selling basically pieces of plastic you know it's a remarkable business model must be phenomenal on these i mean these are seven or eight hundred dollars uh then you have to get the lenses for another seven or eight hundred dollars i mean it's crazy yeah the form factor is definitely um something that is has huge potential for the next evolution of computing devices because obviously

[01:07:44] if you're gonna use ai a lot if you're gonna if you're gonna make a chat bot your computer human interface if you're gonna replace uh keyboard and mouse or touch screen by a chat bot then all of a sudden you don't need the slab of glass and and plastic that is your smart smartphone you don't need your keyboard and your mouse so what are you left with a kind of ai pin that you can pin on you

[01:08:12] something or yeah glasses something you put on your face and the the glasses obviously have the advantage that you potentially have a screen or you know you have uh something you can see and very good uh access to your voice and to your ears to you know give you feedback i have for years seen this is the holy grail i've worn all of the little you know the pins and the bracelets and the things that record everything

[01:08:41] and i've had people yell at me for doing that but my my desire especially as i get older is to have something that is kind of recording my life ingesting it in an ai so that i can query i can get information i can have a dialogue with the ai without uh you know running over to my computer or opening up my phone i right now i could talk to my ai on telegram and i do that but i think having a ubiqui i want to be

[01:09:08] able to talk to my ai i want it in the air i want it to be there at all times is that nuts am i nuts no no i don't think so nutty she says backing off slowly no uh too crazy so then are that do you think so the glasses aren't enough for you is what you're saying you know they are enough yeah but they have to connect i can't i know meta is not enough i i have

[01:09:36] to connect it to my own if i see this is that open claw thing if and i don't think open clause is is all all that but the idea of an agent this is the yeah this is the year of the agentic ai where you have an ai that has kind of a memory of you and knows about you and knows about your life and that you could talk to and you can query we're moving moving towards that all along right i mean siri and you know talking to an ai and it's more than asking what's the weather going to be like but saying

[01:10:05] what's my calendar look like yeah um what's the last time i called my mom i think i should probably call her stuff like that yeah i think would be well that's the ultimate it is the ultimate form of computing yes it absolutely i think you tend which is why yeah which is why when we imagined compute you the ultimate computers a few years ago or a few decades ago it was you know how and uh whatever

[01:10:30] other version of that it was it's something that can render services and is accessible kind of in the ether you speak to it it replies uh i think you're not at all crazy for for what i feel like this this is what we really want with ai yeah leo how do you feel about um like google's in development smart classes do you have any yeah or is that too limited in terms of no i think it's a google

[01:10:57] products yeah uh i would prefer it wasn't i mean maybe apple would be the only big tech company i would trust with this and i'm sure they're working on something absolutely i know they are yeah um honestly though what i really want is a non-platformed device that i can hook up to my own i bought a machine to run ai locally i want to be able to do this all for privacy reasons and for control reasons uh and for

[01:11:25] because it's i want to be as personal as possible i don't want to be google's idea or apple's idea or his idea of what this should be i want it to be how i want it so i want to run it on my own systems so really i just need an interface device that i can hook up to my own systems basically and that naturally becomes the glasses i think and it's glasses yeah it could be an ear like you know from her but the glasses and this is why the camera is important it's yeah it sees what you see what you

[01:11:53] exactly yeah well then you can potentially show you stuff right yeah that's right neil stevenson had a very interesting blog post this week where he was saying i was wrong about glasses because he was a big proponent for glasses he says nobody wants to put something on their face yeah he's not wrong but he's talking more about vr helmets right isn't he yeah that and and also the uh the social aspect of it isn't in that if somebody is using a phone you can clearly see they're using a phone if someone's

[01:12:21] using the glasses even with a little light and i remember when the original google glass came out some people were deliberately covering up that light that showed that they were being you know that the recording function was on which honestly i'm not a violent person but it would slap the damn things off their face if i saw that yeah well that's that's what worries me especially i go down to san francisco that you might come over and bop me yeah but you guys are thinking too short term like in

[01:12:46] we're gonna get used to a decade everyone has them you just assume uh you know if they if they become as ubiquitous as smartphones then you assume everyone has them i feel like even at this point yeah even taking a walk around the block you're like how many people's ring cameras on my eye you know what i mean like the way most recording me as i'm crossing so you know what i mean like there's all these things but can i point out something it does seem like an invasion of privacy but it's it's a double-edged

[01:13:13] sword i don't think we would have known what happened to alex preddy or renee good if it weren't for the ubiquitous smartphone camera it keeps everybody honest including law enforcement and i i don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing yeah well i think there's an argument to be made that yes you have you know beneficial aspects to it public is in public i don't think you should come in my house

[01:13:37] yeah i agree with that yeah but you're exposed yeah you could be captured by anything at any moment yeah already honestly a lot of cities have like cameras everywhere oh yeah yeah anyway we have automated license plate readers now pretty much everywhere alp is and it turns out that is the real surveillance tool because when you're driving around you have a unique identification number on your back and these every intersection these cameras are picking it up they know exactly where you

[01:14:07] are and what you're doing i do think we need to be careful about like how far we take it if i'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit uh when you everyone has a phone you can pull out your phone when something happens it is a little bit different from everyone is being filmed all the time you know totally no and there need to be very strong safeguards i mean we've seen time and time again we had the story a couple of weeks ago about the poor grandma who was taken to south dakota because

[01:14:35] of a misidentification with face recognition lost four months of her life lost her home and uh with no apology from law enforcement who fingered her based on bad face recognition yeah that was appalling and that that is not the first time that's happened but i think that was mainly down to police laziness it basically said that's why we need regulations right no no i agree i mean it's just like they said oh well the facial recognition is as if they'd gone into a bank accounts

[01:15:03] for just five minutes they would have seen it was rubbish they could she had that perfect alibi yeah she was not in the state she was thousands of miles away the fact that she was arrested and put in jail for four months is a tragedy to begin with but the biggest issue is that you know i don't know if she can sue or if she even but her life was ruined because she couldn't pay her debts and she

[01:15:28] lost her house as you said and like that's even like mistakes will happen like it's terrible but kind of but when you realize that the the state or government should be liable to help her out like this is a this is a brand of mistake that's been happening more often though is that no one checks the ai work no one checks the ais work ever right that's a very good point but of course of course and that's a huge issue well let's take a break because i have some good examples it's in our uh

[01:15:56] military section coming up great there's a reason that the acronym foobar was made up in the military uh and snafu uh we have a wonderful panel a.n thompson's great to see you my friend always a pleasure did you have a mustache or is that is that a mandela i i grew a mustache during lockdown and i kept it for about six months i got so sick of having to strain tea out of it every time i took

[01:16:24] a mouthful it was four straining tea and also it's just itchy and so much trouble i kind of wish i'd grown a beard at the same time but that's just not going to happen so yeah i wish i had a beard but i don't want to grow it that's the problem it's great to see you ian uh brah al-hiti great to see you as always senior technology reporter at cnet i think you never had a beard or a mustache just for no

[01:16:48] well how disappointing uh so movember really it isn't that meaningful for you no okay i'm just checking um what are you working on uh these days what am i working on these days you know i don't even remember anymore um it's just a blur it's a blur honest to god i'm like what did i work on did you go to ifa did you cover that or uh for mobile world congress i'm sorry mobile world yes i did go to mobile world congress it was very fun but then i had to review the iphone 17e and then the samsung

[01:17:16] galaxy s 26 ultra so then i had to take a week off before you're exhausted yeah yeah but it was good it was a good run it was a fun time yeah do you does it get busy again in june we've got google io and wwdc right exactly starting may june it'll start to pick up again so this is the time where i'm like i can write all the things i want to write that i don't have time for the rest of the year so i'm gonna try my best to do that so glad to see you and of course a bar also is a regular on tech news

[01:17:42] weekly with mike sergeant we're just on on wednesday always and of course the great patrick beja who's you've been on our show for it must be decades at this point i think the first time was was it pod media what was it new media expo media expo really way back when i think so holy 2000

[01:18:05] seven maybe that's gotta be that's really early i i remember i got on in a car with mark spagnuolo and nicole spagnuolo the oh yeah whisperer the wood i still have this beautiful cabinet that he made for me and they drove me to well their house but also uh on the way we went from blizzcon to the cottage back oh i think so it has been that long and uh so that was the second time i

[01:18:33] think i was four pages four pages of appearances uh with me going way way look at this way way way way back holy cow i could find the first one let me go oh that's gonna be embarrassing no no no embarrassment everybody had a let's see you were first on 2009 episode 213 that's later than oh maybe it

[01:18:58] wasn't on the show when i went to yeah um you were on with john c devorak john graham cumming who was a cto uh at cloudflare for many years and david poague who's in the news again with his new book i was on the show with all of these incredible people amazing and you don't remember a word of it um i'll ask my uh ai agent to summarize it next time that is fantastic oh and you can tell how old

[01:19:26] this is because these story links were at delicious.com and there was a friend feed conversation for this episode oh good lord holy moly and the cheering apology that really was a while ago yeah that's why coming was on yeah he he good for him john graham cumming got the british government to apologize to alan turing uh a little too late but yeah yeah well it matters you know he's he's now on the 50 pound notes so you know yeah he's not gonna be replaced

[01:19:56] by a possum or something well yeah they're talking about replacing them with wild animals but you know so it goes oh they'll always be in england that's all i can say hello let's keep it silly yeah our show today brought to you by my mattress oh man nothing silly about a good night's sleep it's kind of vital i mean and honestly we spend more than a third of our life on that mattress right

[01:20:22] how are you planning for spring cleaning you know maybe this would be a good time to clean out the old and upgrade to a helix mattress for an extra specially good night's rest and i can tell you we did this i don't know if it was spring maybe it was spring of last year yeah i think it might have been man we love our helix mattress we realized our mattress was i think it was seven or eight years old you're supposed to replace it between six and ten years they mattresses wear out they start to bow they don't

[01:20:50] work as well with the helix mattress no more night sweats no back pain no motion transfer and i gotta tell you you you have many choices in mattresses but please don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality questionable materials and they pack it in a box they stick it on a container chip six months sitting next to the fuel barrels it is not it is not the mattress you want rest assured

[01:21:16] your helix mattress no no it's assembled packaged and shipped from arizona and it's shipped and made after you place your order it's made to order so it is fresh and brand new and you're gonna love it now let me suggest you do what we did when you go to helixsleep.com slash twit take the helix sleep quiz because everybody's got different mattress preferences but also different sleeping styles this

[01:21:44] will match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preference and your sleep needs and it really works helix actually did a study the wesper sleep study they measured participants sleep performance after they did what we did which is switching their old mattress to a helix mattress and i have to say this exactly matches my own experience 82 percent of participants saw an increase in their deep

[01:22:08] sleep cycle 82 and that deep sleep cycle is the most important part of sleep it may only be half an hour to an hour a night but that's when your brain is cleared out you know the spinal fluid comes up and washes out all the old brain stuff not only did participants sleep better they slept more on average 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night that's a huge increase participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep

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[01:23:29] for your tax refund get yourself a nice new mattress helixsleep.com slash twit thank them so much for their support of this week in tech actually david poge was on mac break weekly last tuesday to celebrate apple's 50th anniversary which is april 1st and he's got that book apple the first 50 years which is a amazing book really really amazing it was so cool to hear hear him again after you know he

[01:23:58] can you believe the scene since 2009 you've been on our shows that's nice that's nice patrick you know 20 years from now abra i'll be saying the same thing i hope so i look forward to it i love it let's see after 16 years and eight billion dollars the military's new i'll put that in air quotes gps software still doesn't work space force last year right before the fourth of july took ownership

[01:24:27] of a new gps navigation system the next gen operational control system or oscx was designed for command and control of the militaries they have their own gps 30 gps satellites it was specifically designed to be jam resistant that's been a big problem during the ukrainian war and i imagine now in

[01:24:49] iran gps 3 which started launching in 2018 these new satellites two master control stations upgrades to ground monitoring but the company that made it former the former raytheon now known as rtx was paid 3.7 well wait a minute i take it back the contract was for 3.7 billion dollars

[01:25:13] was supposed to be done 10 years ago uh the official cost now twice that 7.6 billion dollars and it still doesn't work the gao the government accounting office uh found that the ocx program was undermined by poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development problems situation normal all

[01:25:41] messed up nothing to say about that i just thought i'd pass along this was a little concerning apparently according to fast company the pentagon for its high energy laser weapons uses xbox controllers it's not funny and i think they should use playstation controllers myself but okay no i mean it's you it's used in submarines as well because the old submarine controllers used to cost an

[01:26:08] arm and a leg and they just decided let's use xbox and the kids who are using them actually you know are used to using them and are quite adept at doing so but on the gps thing i just would like to put a shout out to the land of my birth uh this week in great in the uk they tested out quantum navigation systems which are based on fluctuations you know with it within in within movement and are totally unjammable so i think the us military has done what it sometimes does and spent an enormous

[01:26:38] amount of money on software that on a technology system which is already outdated completely redundant and outdated what a surprise i know it happens in military spending like yeah this is one example i'm sure which is why we should uh give them the one and a half trillion dollars that's in president trump's new budget one and a half trillion dollars is that more than before 40 percent more

[01:27:05] goodness and they also for the war they want another 200 billion after they have a trillion more than trillion dollar budget already i have to file my taxes and this is not encouraging like well we can't afford health care for everybody you know that's that's out of the question no it's ridiculous the interesting thing is that every country around the world or at the very least

[01:27:28] uh around russia has had to increase uh military spending everyone in europe is increasing military spending yeah and uh i thought that you know i'd say that without any uh political i don't know preference or whatever um my understanding was that trump wanted to decrease the intervention of

[01:27:55] the us and i'm not even talking about iran why does the military need more money is oh well that's why we have other things with our fish to fry inside and outside the country they're also spending on some really odd stuff like you know m1 abraham's tanks and if the war in ukraine has told us anything it's tanks tanks on the battlefield are toast you know it's like if you can knock them out with a two thousand dollar drone

[01:28:19] then you know spending a million bucks plus on the tank is just makes no sense whatsoever iran's iran's missile blitz has taken out two data centers uh aws data centers in bahrain and dubai amazon is declaring a hard down status for multiple zones in the middle east

[01:28:44] and google is also in in the firing line according to the uh iranian republican guard uh if this goes on and they start hitting uh energy centers within iran iran has said yeah okay dentists said data centers and power systems are fair game then and that's going to make things really interesting um because a lot of people are going to get severely inconvenienced by this put it that way and a lot of tech people who are supporting trump at the moment are going to be like hang on let's just

[01:29:12] ease this up a bit and iranian hackers who are actually quite good um are also going to war this from the financial times tehran's cyber operatives have sought to sow fear and extract intelligence in a series of attacks on israel and uh the us chris krebs who i like quite a bit former head of cisa the cyber security and information security agency he of course was fired and is now being prosecuted by trump

[01:29:40] for having the temerity to say the 2020 election was the most secure election in our history says the iranians are throwing everything they have at this it's all hands on deck if cyber operators are breathing the thing will be on their keyboards oh that's bad news and of course meanwhile the president wants to uh take according to the register a battle axe to cisa and slash

[01:30:08] 770 70 70 7 million dollars from its budget this is the this is the most successful u.s agency in terms of protecting us against cyber risks and yet uh while we're giving the military another half trillion we want to cut nearly a billion of cisa spending i mean this is leo you and i were both at rsac this year and i don't know if you saw the they had four heads of the nsa on a on a panel wow and it was

[01:30:38] fascinating because they were saying this is we need to be spending more on this than we've ever spent before because this is where our adversaries are going um and the ability to take down systems you know we've demonstrated in venezuela and iran but the rest of the world is also ready and prepared and cutting set over 700 million from cisa's budget seems ridiculous well it's certainly poorly timed

[01:31:05] you know the the fact that iran hackers are getting ready to do things is not surprising um any administration that would prepare for a military conflict um with any nation of that ilk would be prepared for this and i think these days especially right this is how war is waged yeah

[01:31:28] absolutely um so the really concerning thing here is that it doesn't seem again i'm trying to not be i'm i don't like trump uh but i'm trying to look at this objectively there doesn't seem to be um a coherent a cohesive strategy or preparedness i think this goes beyond politics this is not political dogma this is not a battle between the right and the left republicans and democrats this is just nonsense

[01:31:54] this is just poor policy period right yeah no i mean it's it's something that the that might run uh we lost you we lost your audio did your cat knock here no no it's just uh sure the sure you know volume thing is a pain in the backside um no the um this is something that mike rogers said in the

[01:32:17] panel was he was asked will the next war be primarily about missiles about boots on the ground or about cyber and he was like well all obviously but cyber is going to be a much more important role role in this going forward um and you know there's no way we could ignore this because anyone we're going to be going up against won't ignore it so you know you've got to be prepared to call it the boy scouts which is

[01:32:44] like the military but the military has heavy artillery and they have a better salute yeah um meanwhile we talk about something dumb yeah please um you're very smart things start saying i'm continuing to say dumb things um you're all very concerned about this i'm going to be like the agitator who's being annoying um you're all very concerned about all of this and hackers and cisa

[01:33:13] being cut and all of this if they're at some point in the next five to ten years or 20 years there's going to be an issue with taiwan right china and there's going to be an issue with china how many chinese made routers do you want in the us when that happens or would you rather through a long

[01:33:36] and painful process i'm really working for the trump administration decisions there through a long painful process to start a situation where routers are uh made in the us and your uh country has more control over them of course i'm referencing the fact that uh routers made in the

[01:34:00] in china have been banned uh in the u.s not just china routers made outside anywhere but the us have been banned even french routers are banned oh that's that okay that we have so many routers um well no but i don't think you see where i'm going there i don't think we have a lot of american we don't have any the only one that i know of that's made in america is is guess what elon musk's starlink

[01:34:28] that's the only router in the us at this point but you need to start somewhere well we should start get going fast by the way this doesn't eliminate any router you've already purchased you can continue to use it yeah uh you all know how long routers stay in operation i mean some of these things are 20 years old i was when i was at rsac uh i went over to the ubiquity booth because i thought i really liked it this had just gone down uh the fcc's ban and i went over to the ubiquity booth i said well

[01:34:56] um does this impact you and they said we're not talking to the press uh oh it was a good sign yeah go away i've been surprised by uh what i think is not insignificant amount of american manufacturing uh in the tech sector happening since trump is has been forcing it um and maybe i'm you know being i don't know if that's true pr of apple and whoever apple says oh

[01:35:23] yeah we're gonna make everything here and they've got one factory that makes it not everything but there are there are cpus coming out of are made in that us factory are made in china they import the parts and they assemble them in the us yeah what happened over the last two decades is we have exported our manufacturer especially high-tech gear oh i've read apple in china i've i know all about this yeah it's a great book and it's i've read one book so i'm an expert well but i think it wasn't just

[01:35:52] apple this was this is the story of all the tech sector yeah china became our and and this was by the way chinese government policy this was they were very aggressive about supporting this they wanted this business and they became the the manufacturer for the world and the us was uh supporting this as well on the governmental level because they thought oh china is going to open up and

[01:36:17] capitalism will do to china what it did to you know other countries and but okay that's happened but if you want to bring back manufacturing in the us i remember uh who was it steve jobs who was talking to obama who was like those jobs are gone they're never coming back um and it does seem like you do have

[01:36:39] more cpus uh coming out of american factories now building tsmc sounds like crazy yeah um and like high-end cpus like what is it three two nanometers uh coming soon and of course they they are being sent to china for assembly so it doesn't you know at this point i think some of that is i'm trying to play devil's advocate you know some of that is in response to the fact that there is some concern about china

[01:37:07] invading taiwan and uh so we may lose in fact uh tsmc which is a taiwanese company we may well i mean there was a paper in the national war college uh which there was their most read paper i think of 2018 that said that in the event of war with china the taiwanese are going to destroy their chip fabs and if they don't we will you know it's yeah we can't let them have them yeah yeah i'm sure they're

[01:37:33] rigged with c4 everywhere like they they can't let have the the chinese have them i'm sure again i'm an expert i've read one book and i am certain they're they're rigged with c4 well and you know you have a point i mean the routers are how we all connect to the internet the number one router in america 40 of all routers in america are made by one company a chinese company called tp link uh for years wire cutter recommended it as the best router that that carried a lot of weight a

[01:38:03] lot of people have tp link routers they're made in china i guess firmware updates come from the company in china and in theory a firmware update could be injected that was malware and yeah there'd be a lot of i mean that would certainly be a vulnerability i mean i'm curious what the rest of the panel thinks about this if china did start in you know in making moves to invade taiwan

[01:38:28] and the chinese responded by shutting down for example atm network networks in the us or power networks or water networks would the american public really give that much for monkeys about taiwan when they've got so many problems on their own plate i personally think this is what the chinese will be banking on well and in fact if you really want to leverage your hacking ability you would do what china has done with salt typhoon you would invade our telecommunications networks you would invade our

[01:38:56] power grid my personal home router is not the first thing you're gonna hack i mean yeah maybe you will it might be a little bit farther down the list though uh and i don't know if we've done a whole lot the tele the tele the u.s telecommunications companies have said yeah we can't do anything about salt typhoon we would have to rip and replace everything the phone network would be down for a few days while we did that they say so they're not doing anything about it so but meanwhile we've got to

[01:39:24] bear the brunt now the good news is our audience is smart and i bet you a third of you have already made your own routers you could do it with a raspberry pi you could do it with an old computer you could do it with a knuck it's simple enough you could turn practically any computer into a router there's open source linux distributions that are designed to be routers there's some very good ones

[01:39:49] like pf sense uh it is a simple thing to do and if you search online here's one article from noah bailey how to turn anything into a router you can't turn a potato into a router maybe you can i don't know oligrid is that you yeah yeah uh oh okay oh oh we've lost he and he hasn't no he hasn't muted his i'm sorry i have heard somebody moving around in the house my wife is supposed to be out at the

[01:40:18] moment so is it you need to do we need to arm you here uh no no this is a second amendment house but even so i just heard people moving around so i have like i have a stick with a big brass knob on it that i could bop a burglar with but it's next to the front door which probably means i'm more likely to get bopped than they are i'm thinking yeah right lisa won't let me have a gun she says what are you going to do with a gun well i'm appointed a bad guy she said they're going to

[01:40:48] take the gun and shoot you you don't this is not a good idea on the other hand you can unrab it with a nice rifle and rabbit is terrifically expensive over here which i just don't understand nobody wants and they're everywhere rabbit what do you you must be british i'm based on rabbit use rabbit for bubble and squeak or something one of your weird british rabbit and bacon stew i mean come on we support me

[01:41:13] on this yes yes no i will like there are very few things i will support a british person uh uh when good see you haven't got over but rabbits can be eaten this is easter and you're talking about i know that's what i'm talking about rabbits and chocolate everybody knows an easter yeet ham okay come on oh my god cassoulet is one of my favorite dishes and i know that often has rabbit rabbit in it so

[01:41:42] there you go yeah but leo for your break-ins at least hopefully they don't happen but you'll have your meta ray bands on and then i will while i get bopped yes i'll have a ring we'll know who bopped you that's i have yeah you'll be like meta but film film film this call the police call the police we have so many cameras around the house that if we will have a complete record of them coming and going

[01:42:05] oh they will come in through the the cat door maybe they won't ring the door like the cat does okay all right let's take a little break while you go out and buy a old computer to make your new router out of i think this is you know they talk about victory gardens people planting gardens there's all sorts of things people do in times of of strife and and warm but for us geeks building our own router

[01:42:32] sounds like a good project it's not hard you can do it yeah it's cool you can you know i used to think that we were the my parents generation was the last one that would need their children's help to do tech things um it's the other way around it's yeah because what's happening what's happened with tech for us is what was happening with like car mechanics for our parents generation i don't know how a car

[01:43:00] works i really don't care and the kids today are the same with with computers and stuff so i don't know how many people are going to build their router build your own router probably kids start learning okay when china invades taiwan you're gonna glad you know how to make your own router bake your own router it'll be too late though right because they won't have access to the internet anymore

[01:43:25] oh yeah that's true that's the first thing they do your router is irrelevant not if we you know only make and buy american-made routers okay we're gonna have victory gardens for routers but patrick when okay let are we ramping up the big router manufacturer is there any margin even in routers is there any they did the same thing with drones by the way you can't buy foreign-made drones in

[01:43:52] the united states yeah but people don't need drones you need routers yeah that's true um well i mean i don't know i don't know that it's even you know being voted in or put in place in good faith like maybe they just want to get elon musk's routers to you know sell 300 everybody should have stuff i don't know but you know there are things like for example um something something you might not know about

[01:44:18] um europe is now kind of wary of uh visa and mastercard we are switching over our payment systems from visa and mastercard to uh american express oh wait a minute no uh among others well france has cb which is carte bleu which is another name for uh and and we've had it it's kind of like the you know our our aircraft carriers and our uh nuclear plants we've had it forever and everyone was like

[01:44:47] what do you need cb for most people didn't even know what it was and like people in the government were like don't you know we just trust us at some point at some point that yeah we're gonna need it so let's just have it is that what's happening is visa mastercard are going away and they're not going away but cb is actually it's actually on every single credit card that we have it has to have cb

[01:45:12] uh so it's kind of so it's a you know it's a secondary financial transaction and now yes it's a payment system that is handled by french uh entities and now you can uh select on your like apple pay for example you always could select either cb or visa on you know payments on uh internet services and stuff like that i never knew what it was i never knew the difference now i do but even on apple pay you can select for your credit card if you're going to go through visa or mastercard or

[01:45:42] whatever or cb and so if at some point not even you know visa decides they don't like the french but like the government the u.s government says visa is an american company american payment system you cannot you know uh do business with the french because they stink well we can just switch over to cb and we're fine cheese eaters yes and so i like this because for a long time europe's been getting more and

[01:46:10] more like america like it's not you know it's no different anymore you got the mcdonald's you got your kentucky fried chicken so it's going back let's make europe weird again i think this is good i think this is good to be honest they don't have coca-cola they have africola it's so weird we have like all kinds of cola we have like braise cola in britain we have like all kinds of i would much rather

[01:46:36] juice yeah i would much rather we just you know traded with everyone and it's a better world where we are cooperating about all of this uh and didn't have to increase military spending everywhere it would be because at some point we're gonna someone is going to want to do something with it but it'd be nice as a bumper sticker said if schools had all the funding we need and the military had to have bake sales yeah i mean uh patrick is minitel still operational just talking about backups they gave

[01:47:06] no i i don't think i think somebody brought me a mini terminal by the way i wish i still had it oh minitel was amazing it like it brought communicate i i we have to explain what it is now the french government want to place your phone books with a digital tool and this is before there was aol i mean this is way way back it was like in the mid 80s and it wasn't just a phone book it actually had the

[01:47:33] infrastructure for uh like online services it was inspired by what was happening on bbs's and stuff like that and they had great a great design idea like design not just the device but the entire service at the french uh post and telecom company at the time and so they designed this terminal which had kind of an integrated keyboard and a screen and would connect through you know low uh speed modem

[01:48:01] to your network it would use up your phone line just like modems did at the time it was video text was the interface yeah yeah and and so you would uh connect to there were different phone numbers there were different models one of them had a like collapsible uh um uh keyboard and you would connect to different services there were different numbers which had different kinds of prices and then you

[01:48:28] would log into a you would connect to a specific service uh there was a lot of chat uh services happening some of them you know uh uh not for children did everyone have one it was just like in every home many many people yeah it was it was a very widely successful like it was imagine 80 what was it 84 it started 85 maybe

[01:48:51] around that time the first man tell was at 82 it says yeah um i'm sure it got popular a little bit later than that but but it was like predates prodigy i mean this was like prodigy but it was uh everybody had it was really amazing and of course it was like the the young people like us which would get our you know make our parents crazy because we'd use it was very expensive you know to connect uh and it would

[01:49:15] use up the phone line and it was like a place to meet people who would like watch the same anime that we did or play video games it was amazing so the people who learned how to type on this thing did they get all mad when we switched to qwerty no no france still has a zerti that's the french yeah we still have a

[01:49:43] zerti yeah yeah that's the french keyboard i know it looks weird doesn't it i mean uh uh you were at um mobile world congress which used to be 3gsm down in in can and the press room was equipped with french keyboard and everyone other than french journalists got in there and was just like oh that's all

[01:50:08] there's like five letters there are the w erty it was a z yeah but you're still having to look down and do like finger finger finger finger yeah the rest is more normal yeah and the the worst part of that is that a lot of uh video games don't account for french keyboards so you launch the game and it's still qwerty but zqsd now yes exactly crazy and the numbers are upside down too oh yeah one two three

[01:50:35] four five six nine oh fascinating it's like a phone it's like a phone on this one yeah i think maybe that was only the minute that maybe the the number pad is but i think every computer should still have an envoi keyboard but it was it was really cool like it was very french or like in the way that it was a very top-down uh national company thinking up how can we bring this technology to the masses uh at a

[01:51:04] time that it wasn't i mean i know i used the phone line but it was kind of like the phone it was a bbs essentially yeah and and you had like uh numbers that you would call that were very expensive like a couple of bucks per minute uh and especially the the like my generation remembers the ads for certain services um that were on those very expensive uh numbers you would call and there were like it was

[01:51:32] organized like forums from back then where you had like users who would become uh moderators and administrators and like it was there it was a whole thing it was there were at the end of the 90s nine million minitel terminals 25 000 minitel services but then the internet came along right and it was kind of superseded that you didn't need it anymore as of this article which was on the in

[01:51:56] the independent in 2012 so it's 15 years ago there were still 800 000 old people in french france using their minitel because they didn't like computers yeah i think it's been shut down since by now it's gone but of course the when the internet uh started showing up of course you know we were like all into the internet immediately we have the internet at home but um you don't need it yeah but it was like so

[01:52:24] in the 90s like i got on the internet quite early because i had it at university but uh in the 90s i would say 97 90. what really happened was that in the early 2000s i think it was a company called free which was a mobile uh sorry a uh internet service company uh phone operator actually got their service which was actually free you would connect to the internet it was a you know uh isp that was free

[01:52:52] and it turned into a huge huge company that is now mobile operator and isp and everything and that really popularized it well we're getting a little tour of uh french culture on twitter it's nice to have you patrick appreciate it thank you our show this uh this hour brought to you by melissa the trusted data quality expert since 1985 spring is here i love spring it's the season for

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[01:56:05] have you uh are any of you baseball fans boy am i bringing this yes yes patrick i have been to a baseball match once oh yeah i've been to one but that's all you do you are the wrong group for this one uh so i was very confused they've changed something in baseball this year that is very interesting uh you know of course uh video replays have come to other sports do you have it in the soccer is there a

[01:56:35] backup for the referees for in soccer i know in football we have that the we have it in the uk for football yes yeah um or soccer in baseball one of the biggest judgment calls there's a lot umpires have a lot of you know leeway in the game is that balls and strikes getting that ball in a very narrow zone across the plate makes it a strike outside of that zone as a ball i'm not going to explain the rules of baseball to you that would take

[01:57:02] i think i think we know what you know you get that you get the idea okay what's the name yeah well if throws the ball in an area and then you have to bet yeah you got it yeah and of course the umpire sitting there behind the plates and judging whether that ball did that are not often wrong it's a source of a lot of you know discussions on the baseball field well now they're using for the first time

[01:57:24] this season computer measurement spotters but there are real limits on how you can use it the batter if the batter disagrees with the call the umpire gave he can tap his helmet and that is a signal that he doesn't he thinks he thinks that that's called strike wasn't a strike and then they go to the video

[01:57:47] call uh machine and they challenge it now if they get the challenge wrong you know there's consequences and stuff yeah that was that was a strike uh right within the thing um they call it the automated ball strike system or abs and uh it is it is really interesting because how it's changed you know

[01:58:13] the game a little bit but you can't use it too much you have to use it uh very judiciously why don't they just use this on every pitch though why isn't this on just every pitch because well that's right you know in tennis it's on every foul line call right well yes but that went badly wrong at wimbledon when the first introduced it because it kept on getting things wrong well and also some line judges were just like i don't care what the computer says i say it was out so you know it's right you've got

[01:58:41] to deal with the human thing i do like the idea of a human being able to say actually i don't think that's right i i think there is the drama is part of the experience and i mean the drama of it adds drama to the game when you go well no that's not i think you know if the thing happens and then that's part of the criticism in in uh soccer in football i think but right if like you score a

[01:59:07] goal everyone's happy everyone's running around and but then no wait okay wait we have to check with the video that's bad it really slows the game wait okay okay you can be happy now yeah i know that's very annoying how no this baseball i think they're right they say you teams can have unlimited challenges but the you only get to be wrong twice and then you can't do any more challenges for the rest of the game so that's like a good that's a good way to do it so you don't have this

[01:59:34] infinite tapping formula one could do with something like this because the stewards decisions over the last couple of years have been absolutely terrible yeah no see he and i are formula one fans and we are also going through a drought because there were two races scheduled for the month of april one in bahrain and one in saudi arabia canceled yeah yeah place to have a lot of people gathered in one spot yeah no

[02:00:02] no but through a drought till may what do you think of the new rules uh ian are you enjoying i can't say politely but uh sorry i can say politely you're a traditionalist are you where i think they're bloody level oh i really yeah because you're seeing racing you're seeing well no you're there's some problems i understand you know formula one is foot to the floor racing not going slow to recharge your battery

[02:00:27] and then get a mario kart boost at the end of it you know ollie behrman nearly slammed into the back of another car at the last race yeah that was because he was traveling 50 miles an hour faster than the car in front because he used his magic mushroom boost and you know that sounds interesting that sounds interesting all of a sudden and there's going to be a banana but what's happening it's going to be great i can't wait it's going to well max verstappen has officially been asked apparently to

[02:00:55] stop referring it to as mario mushroom mode um but they're going to have to make some changes before miami because it's dangerous on the track that's the real problem yeah um but also speed are not good you know it's it's formula one it's car racing it's supposed to be foot to the floor balls to the wall and get out there as fast as you possibly can not super i mean the formula one association

[02:01:18] made a huge mistake when they put out on social media um kimmy's fastest lap from the last race and apparently oh the camera died while he was recharging his battery but it was just like well we've just checked his feed and it definitely didn't so you know sorry i'm formula one nuts so yeah i shouldn't have brought it up how do you feel about baseball though uh cricket on steroids

[02:01:45] colorado uh lawmakers uh are uh uh have a passed a right to repair a landmark right to repair law in fact many states are now working on right to repair but um um there is uh tech companies are not too happy about this which is strange you would think they would like the notion of right to repair you would think you would think yeah you won't buy a new one

[02:02:14] though you won't buy a new one though yeah yeah i mean there's a new bill in colorado the exempt critical infrastructure from right to repair bill which would modify the right to repair uh bill which was passed two years ago and went into effect january of this year uh cisco and ibm support this exemption uh and by the way cisco makes routers as well as uh other equipment

[02:02:42] they cite cyber security concerns saying that giving people access to tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad guys to use those methods for nefarious means well i interviewed corey doctor about this and he was like they're saying any router is therefore national security piece because it could possibly be used by the military uh i'm presuming ibm has the

[02:03:07] same same example and you know it's rubbish if it's a specific router used exclusively for national security you could kind of see a point but this is blatant lobbying against a very good bill indeed and it's basically big tech who you're i think you're right they just want you to have to go to them and give them an exorbitant amount of money yeah it seems like right to repair is you know one of those

[02:03:33] ideas and concepts and laws that are difficult to oppose with a straight face oh yeah yeah and agree more yes guys and i think the lawyers are being paid very very much to it sounds like one of the most american things to be able to fix your own stuff yeah it's fundamental so you own it you should be able to fix it it also kind of runs counter to like the whole sustainable sustainability measure that companies always talk about they spend at least 10 minutes of every keynote talking about

[02:04:02] how sustainable they are and yet you you can't easily repair the device that you've bought i don't know it's it's just i mean even when apple introduced their repair kits they were phenomenally difficult to use very expensive and it's also a security risk i think cnet's covered this but also other publications at one point farmers in the us were downloading ukrainian control software they had

[02:04:26] to right yeah so they could do their harvesters which is just bonkers you know it's like just for one sensor going out which measures the height of the combine harvester they had to wait for a week or so for somebody to turn up and fix it which a crop harvesting time is is catastrophic in some regards so it makes perfect sense that people should be able to repair their own kit but there's money to be made and this is america so let's stall this as long as possible yeah i think there is like

[02:04:56] maybe you could go from the default being you can't repair stuff to the default being you can and then you can apply for or you have cases where it's important to not be able to you know to not let the user repair themselves maybe there are cases that can be made but right now it's the opposite and i think that's or it's a free-for-all and i think that's not to the benefit of society no no i mean it's um

[02:05:26] it's kind of like with cars if you've got one of these plugs that the data ports for your cars i bought one online and it's really interesting going in there and just seeing what's going on in your engine i'm not going to suggest that i would even try to repair it because i know i'd brick our car in a second but it's it's nice to be able to talk with the mechanic and say yeah we've got this fault this fault this fault gets everything done so much faster uh let's take one last break and then

[02:05:51] uh a a potpourri a grab bag of stories that i couldn't figure out how to put them under a single heading how about that ian thompson abrara heety patrick beja great to have all three of you great to have you watching especially our club members thank you for your support we appreciate it makes a big difference if you're not a club member and you don't want ads there's an easy way to do it go to twit.tv slash club twit join the club get ad free versions of all our shows plus access to the

[02:06:18] discord and all the special programming we do uh in the club to discord like this friday our ai user group we have some really good stuff going on in that ai user group people in the club who are using ai in very interesting ways very smart people if you're interested we would love to see you this friday for our ai user group and if you're not a member of the club join twit.tv slash club twit this episode

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[02:08:06] four extra months expressvpn.com twit like i'm excited about this you know i use starlink because it's really was the only option in fact uh i just got a little mini i'm hoping i can use on our vacation coming up well amazon's got a competing service named after me which i make makes me really want to use it's called leo okay it's not named after me it stands for low earth orbit i think but anyway

[02:08:34] uh the leo service amazon's apparently thinking about buying global star to enhance their satellite uh service and starting uh in a couple of years they're gonna be putting it on delta's uh airplanes you know starlink is used on a lot of airlines right right now but i it'll be i will actually try to fly delta to uh to use it now it's not till 2028 500 delta aircraft um be very interesting to see if

[02:09:02] amazon can create a competitor for starlink that would be good for everybody to keep the prices down competition is always good yeah plus also delta is now apparently introducing live flat seats and economy which is just like no i think it's united oh that's united they've got a little but you know what the picture they showed well it's three very short people one of the club things we do is with travel guru johnny jet and he's actually seen it and we looked

[02:09:30] at the picture and the thing is it you know how wide a three seat across economy well wide enough yeah if you thought you could lie down across that then and you can then you're in luck because what they're going to do is have a little fold out thing that makes the seat you know about the sobriety did you go to the event did you see it no i didn't go to the event but i am uh united as the plane that i i was flying or the uh the airline that i was would you pay extra because you have to

[02:09:57] buy the whole row for this you have to buy the whole row which makes me wonder how expensive would it be but was it three seats or was it four seats i'm feeling in my mind i thought it was four but i could be wrong because i can definitely lie down on a four seat and i've done four seat i could like when i get lucky yeah and there nobody's sitting next to me i had one on an international flight that's fantastic i don't want to know about you getting lucky in an airport but that's another good sleep very well let's see let's see this but is this it looks like three seats here's from johnny jets and you see they have

[02:10:27] a little thing that folds up but then the picture of people in it it's a little deceptive because well the mom is all curled up and the child fits very nicely right it is three seats so that's that's different yeah yeah that's not great and i you know it says it's it's for families traveling with small children solo short solo travelers but this is the one that gets me couples who want the

[02:10:51] value of you know i was couples really here's johnny jet attempting and he's not a he's 510 staying yeah yeah i don't know if you need that much space kind of going in that direction you just need more leg room really plus you're going to get your toes clipped off when the cart comes down yeah yeah but yeah my biggest question is the cost because you've just uh two other people can't buy tickets and so how much are you gonna have to foot from that bill um to make that work but yeah

[02:11:21] you know what they're getting a lot of attention for it it's nice to see them yeah it's a good option yeah and for families absolutely but to the um starlink point i know that united and other airlines have added you know it's pretty good it's a lot better i've used i used starlink on a hawaiian airlines flight and it was great but i my favorite thing about flying is the fact that nobody can access me and i can't access anybody so i'm kind of torn where i'm like do i really want to be on the

[02:11:45] grid all the time if only it were true now yeah no so otherwise united has terrible wi-fi if there's no starlink so i'm kind of like i got used to it i'm like oh okay i can't talk to anybody it's great i don't want to give elon my money but yeah it works right it works yeah other airlines already do this extra seats thing where you can buy out your row and it really like the philippine airlines does it i know that because i fly from the philippines and you can buy out the whole row for

[02:12:13] i think it's an extra i think it's three hundred dollars okay for an international flight that's pretty good yeah now you see i remember traveling on french railways and doing a euro rail pass in the 80s i don't know if they still do this patrick but it used to be that the seats in where you had six seats in an economy class carriage they could actually fold into one and you get a full lie down bed and that was amazing but you're really sleeping in public aren't you well yeah but on the other

[02:12:39] hand when you're penniless student going around in europe i guess compared to a hotel room there's a marvelous train that goes from paris on a big loop and gets you back leaves about midnight gets back about 6 a.m i've just saved myself a hotel cost for the price of a train ticket i always take red eye flights too so i love the idea of being able to sleep on public transportation yeah yeah yes it's i can't sleep on planes but yeah i know it's i for some reason and i think it's terror

[02:13:06] i fall asleep as we're taking off every time that's the worst time to fall asleep it's the best time it's so relaxed it's soothing when you're taxiing and then you just doze yes so it's not just me oh no sorry a lot of like a bra you look in other people's windows you fall asleep when we take off in planes exactly i did a year as i did a year as the editor of an aviation it magazine and it's the worst time to fall asleep because 85 percent of accidents occur in the first three minutes and the last

[02:13:34] wouldn't you rather be asleep when that happens no i'd rather have my shoes on and to be ready to run run to the nearest emergency exit you know they always know when there's been an airplane accident because the shoes rain out of the sky you lose your shoes it's the first thing you lose oh did you know that no no i didn't see that on lost so i don't know the very first watch closely they're all getting off the plane are you sure it's not just that people took off their shoes so the shoes

[02:14:03] fly out but the people who do have their shoes are ready to run like we should investigate do the exit we need to investigate you're supposed to take your shoes off before you jump on the thing though you're supposed to take your shoes off before you are you're supposed to take your shoes off because you don't want to puncture you get people who get yeah but oh heels and puncture the i will never forget the first trip i took with my publisher and i was just wearing standard running shoes or trainers as we call them and i sort of i've been i was going to be sitting next to this

[02:14:29] guy for 14 hours on a flight to jakarta and he took one look at my shoes and he went big mistake in you always wear leather on an aircraft because those things will stick to your feet if you've got to run through journey burning jet fuel oh my god oh for goodness sake this guy's planning man he's thinking ahead yeah oh my god but that's those are terrible for burning jet fuel so great what kind of disaster mentality is that it sounds like a pleasure to sit next to

[02:14:58] for oh he was a very unusual person i'll put it that way uh congratulations uh to uh uh gil brassard which sounds like a french name to me uh ibm scientist who great chap yes he figured out a way to create current well he was looking for a way to create currency that could not be forged

[02:15:21] decided to use quantum physics uh actually i'm sorry gil brassard was a physicist who was swimming in a pool thinking about this when a guy named charles bennett a physicist from ibm research swam up and came up with this notion of using quantum computing this is a long time ago before quantum

[02:15:47] computing really was it even in a twinkle in the eye this is in 1979 anyway bennett has now won the turing award the uh 2025 am turing award the nobel prize of computer science along with gil brassard who is a actually french canadian professor at the university de montreal a one million dollar prize like the nobel prize first time the turing award has recognized quantum research

[02:16:16] so i don't know is that like cryptocurrency what is this for what's this about no i don't know uh the idea he pitched as they swam would eventually become the only practical method for sharing encryption keys with security guaranteed not by mathematical complexity but by the laws of physics itself this is according to ibm i don't know what it means it's it's over it's beyond over

[02:16:44] my head i mean brissard was also editor of the journal of cryptography and he'd say i've seen him speak at a conference and he's really good oh okay all right um in 1973 uh bennett wrote a paper that showed that computation could in principle be carried out reversibly run forward then backward without any net energy cost i don't know what that means either anyway congratulations i mean we have to we have to

[02:17:13] report it i don't know what it means we have to report it new york times says there is now something called chromebook remorse tech backlash at schools extending beyond phones uh to the fact that all these kids have laptops and they're watching youtube and playing games on them even though they're chromebooks digital distractions that the school gave you uh they they talk about a kansas middle school that asked

[02:17:42] all 480 students to return their chromebooks their school keeps the laptops in carts parked in classrooms children take notes by hand and the laptops are only pulled out when there are specific activities things from the teacher i feel like this comes back to like the that problem of how much do you have to keep things away from people um or how much do you allow them to use these tools that have become indispensable everything should be kept away from kids in middle school they're just there's no

[02:18:12] there's no good actually school lunches everything yeah right food fight right everything nothing nothing they should not be allowed anything i i think it was a a good thing to try and it was very natural you know there's tech and we're gonna make things remember one laptop per child remember when we said that one laptop per child uh was it specifically for education purposes or was it so that kids were okay

[02:18:39] um but i mean i mean it's it's a natural idea to think you're gonna do things and you're gonna get them used to computers and maybe one laptop per child was before smartphones so it was like you need to know how to use those tools that's a good point it was before smartphones yeah um but also when you notice there are issues here and there and these things don't work as well as we thought they would for this context

[02:19:05] then we walk it back a little bit it's fine um yeah i mean google originally pushed chromebooks as the perfect school tool because they were really easy to administer pretty pretty secure because they got those security chip in there and there were no games for them at the time uh well obviously the latter point has changed and they are still very easy to administer but there's been a lot of interesting research that children who or anyone in fact who's learning something if you actually

[02:19:35] physically write it down it stays in the memory a lot longer than if you just type it into a keyboard or look it up on the internet yeah that makes sense i felt that even in college like you know even as i was taking notes on my laptop it was like i feel like i'm not retaining information the same way that i did when i was in middle and high school taking notes by hand yeah i feel that now i don't remember anything what what were we talking about like just now i don't i don't know you should be writing this

[02:19:59] down patrick clearly with with a pen and paper yeah definitely should i've i've completely eliminated my brain from the equation now i use obsidian when i'm seeing an article i obsidian clip it to my obsidian notebook i have my agent distill it put a make a wiki with all the details and the summaries and i never look at it so it's it's perfect i i have a complete knowledge system that i never have to touch

[02:20:24] knowledge and so i never have to be worried about knowledge i can just ignore it finally sad story remember zombo.com no to be honest no idea what it is oh i'm so sad must be an american thing i am so sad uh so it was a early website that was just kind of flash and it just god i don't know how

[02:20:52] to describe it it was a joke it was a zombo.com when anything is possible zombo.com and it would just go on and on and on and dancing around well it got this i know jammer b you're right how can anybody forget zombo.com anyway the the domain got hacked and uh uh hacked or sold hacked and then the hackers

[02:21:18] didn't do anything with it so it reverted and this guy bought it on go daddy he's got a message on the new zombo.com welcome new management uh this domain was purchased openly on go daddy we come in peace and with the wallet we'd like to purchase the right to the former site's content to help revive the infinite until then everything here is new and unique i don't know what's going on with this

[02:21:44] way farah oh oh you know what good thank you jammer b has a thank you youtube a video on youtube this so for those of you who don't know this is the great zombo.com that once was welcome to zombo this is good lord

[02:22:12] this is now you may say who cares that this guy i can totally see how this would be a great like this is in the ear like the year of the hamster dance right now peanut butter jelly time oh badger badger badger badger badger badger it was in that era i don't know it's just sad to me that i'm sorry for your loss

[02:22:47] i like it no but i can i can i can see how it would be it was it was early internet cultures as it was a more innocent time you know it's it was a time of goat sea and various other things go see i don't mind if we don't ever see that again oh god no it's burned into my brain i'm sad to say um so anyway if you were the original creator of zombo.com please contact the new owners let's bring zombo.com back

[02:23:17] the unattainable is unknown at zombo.com i feel like this was a uniquely american experience because when i saw it i can't believe none of you know about zombo.com when i i looked at it when the link was on the list and i was just like what on earth is this and then i guess it's the same thing as if an an american watched badger badger badger or you know various other things that was international

[02:23:40] a purely cultural moment but everyone knows badger badger badger really well oh yeah yeah mushroom mushroom i did love the one they did for the european cup i think in 94 it was like football football do you think we we are so fragmented now and the internet is so ubiquitous that we will no longer have those kind of communal moments where everybody knows badger badger badger or

[02:24:10] the black dress blue i mean memes have taken that over surely yeah yeah but they're fragmented like yeah it depends on whether you're on tick tock or whether you're on you know even then there's different parts of tick tock people always exactly i mean some of them transcend right some of them every now and then but it's getting rarer in the same way that we don't all watch the same tv shows anymore or watch the same movies anymore um so it becomes hard we all find things

[02:24:37] we're more interested in but we have a harder time finding people to talk to about those things yeah that's true that's maybe maybe it's because everyone's on the internet and before it was still kind of a smaller community yeah yes yes it was kind of cool to know about these things with your in group and then yeah you know what i noticed shows right go ahead sorry patrick oh sorry i was like you were saying jokingly and it was a simpler time i think there's some of it as well like we have

[02:25:07] less uh i don't know naivety or tolerance for just fun stupid little things now like now it's it's listen you're you tell yourself or your mind tells you we have real problems like we have everything is life and death now yes yeah but the other thing that is yes and whenever somebody posts anything there's always going to be all these really bitter negative people in the comments so that's the other problem

[02:25:36] is like they make false problems about things that don't actually matter where like somebody can't even post a home renovation without being dragged on instagram everybody's so miserable where it's like why can we not just have whimsy and joy and laugh about things anymore that's true you know i i heard it's it's a little bit more uh local version of what you're saying but uh i was watching

[02:25:59] a video of alana pierce who's a video game content creator she used to work at santa monica which is a sony-owned studio that made god of war among other things um and she was talking about something about an old god of war movie and she mentioned um that some people were expressing a specific opinion about that controversy-ish topic and she said you know i've quit twitter uh for like a couple of years

[02:26:28] and there are some things that some people tell me that are issues or problems and i have never heard anyone express that opinion ever like it's not a real opinion yeah it is a twitter thing yeah and people go on twitter and get really mad and think that it represents anything but if you're not specifically on twitter it is not a real problem you know and it really spoke to me because i've been in that

[02:26:57] like mail it's a twitter thing you just wouldn't understand yes yeah i mean we've had the same problem this week with the great marmalade scandal in the uk um tell me more is patrick yeah i'm interested in well i mean it's basically well i'm glad we finally got to the most important story of the day thank god well i mean a story went out at the start of the week that um the uk was going to have to

[02:27:23] change the name of marmalade to citrus marmalade in order to comply with eu regulations no and well it came from reform uk which is our up and coming and hopefully dying political party and it turned out to be complete bollocks uh this is from the bbc yeah i know marmalades may need to be relabeled under post brexit food deal i mean paddington would not approve nevertheless that's the first person i thought of yeah yeah i mean when you actually look into the details of it it just says you have to qualify

[02:27:52] what type of marmalade it is now 90 of the marmalade sold in the uk called orange marmalade but it's elite and france and germany all have their own marmalades and they generally call themselves citrus but this is a completely manufactured scandal which is coming back to our earlier point out for no good reason whatsoever and you know sometimes tim berners lee must have wanted to cut

[02:28:20] his fingers off watching some of this stuff apparently in italy and spain sometimes they make their marmalada or marmalata with figs shockingly enough so it's important that you understand if it's made of bitter seville oranges that it is orange marmalade so so wait the whole thing was that there was some regulation that said you have to say what's in the thing that's what the international issue was

[02:28:48] like you have to say what's inside the bucket we need to be distinguished as a separate type of product will have to be sold using the new legal name citrus marmalade i feel like if it's orange which you could tell like i don't know i feel like yeah you say orange marmalade or fig marmalade isn't this isn't the the the subtext of this this is why we left the eu oh that's the subtext right yes yeah

[02:29:13] absolutely you see these nutty eu people making us don't get me started on brexit i mean i can rant for this on this for hours but you know greatest act of self-harm and whatever but you know it's just it it comes back to the the whole you know outrage is the thing that sells and marmalade is a very british thing and it's got a lot of coverage and then it turns out four days later that or two a couple

[02:29:41] of days later it really wasn't a big thing at all and i i do i regret what the internet has become with these kind of things you know it's just or rather what social media and then leading into the internet has become and i hope we can get better in the future well i'm just glad that you brought this up at the end of the show because now i have a name for the show the great british marmalade i would click on that approved yeah wouldn't you want to when you want to hear that show a thousand

[02:30:10] percent and i like to get those names from the last part of the show to force you to listen to an entire two and a half hours just to find out what the hell they're talking about it's like putting milk at the back of the grocery store you got to work your way through to get there it's through the gift shop yeah a bra you get it you get it see we're on a wavelength i'm telling you all the time keep peeping peeping through people's windows you know

[02:30:35] you'll find a bra is great work at cnet where she's a senior technology reporter and of course here on tech news weekly and whenever we can get her on twitter too thank you so much for being here thank you i appreciate you yep absolutely uh ian thompson of course uh you must subscribe to what do you call it the view from the valley yeah a view from the valley yes on techfinity if if i go to techfinity.com i should be able to find it there yes yeah yes absolutely it's um i mean okay my my name

[02:31:03] is spelt uh rather oddly but you view from the valley will always get you there that's a little easier yes i a i n t h o m s o n yes a scottish spelling extra i but no p is how i always remember it oh yeah but i never spells a i in english and in french yes yes it's although we get lane a lot over here and i've never met them i could be an l it could be an l it doesn't we don't know i i miss serif um

[02:31:32] um you know i know you need serifs you need something yeah you need something thank you ian great to see you it was fun and patrick beijas thank you for being the contrarian that you are sometimes and it's always appreciated i try my best i am glad to make things spicy staying up late he no less you'll find his french and english podcast he's brought back the affiliates club at not patrick.com

[02:31:58] and le rendezvous tech if you like the french stuff thank you patrick great to see you thanks since 2009 i was going to actually ian figure out when your first show was i think it was 2010 but i'd have to check let's see it's fantastic uh i looked like the picture doesn't you know well we were audio i think in the um maybe in the early i know patrick's first show was audio only oh right now i came up to

[02:32:24] the studio for the first time but um how do you spell your name again i a i n thank you leo just me that's it lane that's it uh let me see if i can oh look at you young young man you holy oh wow really need to change that picture holy no no no don't change the thing there are 11 pages of

[02:32:51] ian oh nice holy cow and that first one was a tech news tonight uh from 2014. oh 24 as late as that right yeah so uh patrick wins the prize for this okay yeah your first twitter appearance was uh 493 on january 18th 2015 and that was video you were there with uh up in the street up in the brick house yeah yeah that was

[02:33:20] uh looks like veronica belmont and uh oh that other guy looks so familiar is that ben thompson it is ben thompson yeah it's serenity calwell and ben thompson yeah and some strange guy in a hat thank you so much you guys it's great to have you we do twit every sunday afternoon two to five pacific five to eight eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live as we stream the show uh youtube twitch

[02:33:46] x.com facebook linkedin and kick and of course if you're in the club you get behind the velvet rope access in the club twit discord after the fact get the shows at twit.tv or wherever you get your podcasts there's a youtube channel too dedicated to the video there's audio and video of every show please subscribe though we'd love to have you back on a regular basis and now as i have been saying for

[02:34:10] 20 long years thanks for joining us we'll see you next time another twit is in the can bye bye hey there it's leo laporte host of so many shows on the twit network thinking about advertising in 2026 we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech each featuring authentic post-read ads delivered

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