TWiT 1082: Hanging by a Thread - Are We Headed for a Tech Crash or a Golden Age?

[00:00:00] It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech. Yes, I'm in beautiful Hawaii, but the show must go on. Micah Sargent, Nicholas DeLeon, and Devendra Hardwar join me. We will talk about Earnings Palooza, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and a few others. Basically, they all made tons of money. Elon Musk takes the stand and maybe makes a few bloopers in his testimony.

[00:00:26] And the most severe Linux security flaw in decades. All of that coming up next on TWiT. Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWiT.

[00:00:49] This is TWiT This Week in Tech, Episode 1082, recorded Sunday, May 3rd, 2026. Hanging by a Thread. It's time for TWiT This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody from beautiful Hawaii. We have a great panel. I'm going to sweat all through this show. That's Micah Sargent laughing at me. Hey, Micah.

[00:01:17] I'm laughing. It's record temps here in Portland, but that only means 80 degrees. It's as hot in Portland as it is in the Big Island. So there you should be happy. Wow. Do you have AC? Yeah, yeah. I will never live anywhere without AC. Throw me into an early grave rather than live in a place without AC is how I feel. And I've been watching on iOS today. You have added a massive 3D printer over your left shoulder. Which one is that?

[00:01:45] Yeah. That's actually just the P1S. No longer, no longer. But it's got the AMS on top of it. That's probably what you're seeing. So that holds four different types of filament at once and it can mix between them. That's nice. That's nice. Yeah. Do you do a lot of 3D printing?

[00:02:02] I don't do a whole heck of a lot, but what I do is when something pops up that I need, you know, something's not working and I need to fix it or I have a little break or a product that I, ooh, I wish it had this handle on it. I like to design little things and print them out and use them around the house. Nice. Nice. That's what I do most of the time. So good to see you, Micah Sargent. Good to see you too. Of course, the host of Tech News Weekly and iOS Today. We just had our 800th episode over on iOS Today.

[00:02:31] Catching up somehow. Congrats. Thank you. Oh yeah, go ahead. That's Devendra Hardwar from Engadget, Senior Editor. Hey, Devendra, great to see you. Good to see you. I did not realize I'd be instantly jealous of where you are, Leo. This is my whole goal. It's beautiful. My whole goal is to make you just insanely jealous. Yeah, it's not a usable beach because we're on the big island, which 200 years ago had.

[00:02:57] A massive volcanic eruption on this side and everything's lava, black lava rock. There are some nice beaches, coral sand beaches, but this one is not. What you see really behind me. Yeah. You see the ocean and you see a golf course. There's a ridiculous number of golf courses here. And every time I see them, I think, and they thought data centers used a lot of water. They're watering golf courses in Hawaii. Well, I guess we're on the dry side, but still. Also with us, Nicholas DeLeon from Consumer Reports. Hi, Nicholas.

[00:03:28] Hello, Leo. How are you? Speaking of dry, he's in Arizona. It's nice and dry. Except when it rains. Yeah. Monsoon season starts in about a month or so. But for the time being, it is very dry. Although a little cloudy today. I would say it's only 85 degrees, which is probably like 10 degrees below normal, actually. And the vendors in Atlanta were probably already in the 80s as well. No, it's actually been chilly for a couple of days. We barely hit 70 today. So I'm jealous of you in all this 80 degree weather.

[00:03:58] Well, what was hot this week was earnings, learnings. It was an earnings palooza. Wednesday, we had Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft. And am I leaving one out? Apple was the Thursday. Market punished Meta considerably because Meta is spending so much money on AI. Losing. Did I say spending?

[00:04:28] Losing money on AI. This is from Semaphore. Big tech firms beat earnings amid AI spending questions. Alphabet. Oh, I left out Amazon. That was the other one. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all beat the earnings expectations. So the market rewarded them. Meta stock fell after it announced plans to put in even more money towards AI. So there's the market performance. Looks like Alphabet's done very well.

[00:04:57] You know, there was a... Zuckerberg, they trust, right? His bets have not gone wrong in the past decade. Well, really? Let's see. Let me think. All of his bets have failed. He changed the name to Meta because he really thought the Metaverse was going to take off. But now they've closed Horizon World. So it's too late to change the name again, probably. It should have been... If you were going to do it, could change it to Meta AI because he knew AI was going to be a big thing back then. Meta AI.

[00:05:27] Meta AI. You know, the real winners, I think, to some degree, are Microsoft and Amazon and Google because they all three provide the data centers for AI. Exactly. Yep. Which everyone knows, no matter how AI goes, it's going to use a lot of compute. Then Apple, who has neither AI nor data centers. Did well somehow. Yeah. They have real technology.

[00:05:57] It's amazing. This thing called the iPhone seems to be doing quite well. Products you can hold in your hands. Yeah. They, you know, Tim, this is not Tim Cook's last earnings report. You'll have one more before John Ternes takes over in September. But Tim did crow a little bit about having the, you know, today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever. Revenue of $111 billion and double digit growth in every geographic segment.

[00:06:26] Services continued to do incredibly well. $28 billion in operating cash flow. I mean, everything good for Apple. Did Apple, does Apple benefit because they left, they didn't do AI? Maybe this is. I've mentioned this before. I think everyone was like, Apple is late to AI. They're going to lose out big time. And I feel like that, that initial year when, um, what was it? Bing chat happened. And then Microsoft's whole deal with open AI.

[00:06:54] Everyone eyes were on Apple. Like you were stumbling, you were failing. And now I think Microsoft is pulling back on copilot stuff. All these companies are kind of taking a second look at their AI investments. Apple can just sit tight and be slow about it. And I think be more thoughtful about it. I think that's going to work out well for them as we've seen. It's going to come. Go ahead. It doesn't feel though. Like the, I'm sure internally. Yes. There's a lot that's, that's taking place.

[00:07:22] There's a lot of, of strategy that's happening, but from the outside of things, it looks like that company is just doing its thing. And I, there's something to that. There's a, yes, we've heard about the scramble, but I don't know that that translates to your everyday person. We hear the rumors about, you know, the AI team being flushed and having to go do training and whatnot. But from the outside of things, it really does feel like Apple just continues to do Apple

[00:07:49] while these other companies have said, okay, we've got to really focus on this. We've got to focus on AI. And so there is almost a, a steadfastness to it that I have to respect that, that makes you feel a little bit more comfortable perhaps with, with Apple still able to, because we're looking now at a company that is still able to set those records, despite the fact that we've heard time and time again from everybody else going, Apple needs to be an AI. They are so far behind. Yep. And it doesn't seem like that's the case. Yeah.

[00:08:20] Well, we'll find out. I mean, I think we're about a month away from WWDC and that's where they'll probably talk about Siri and the AI enabled Siri. John Ternus joined the call. He's going to be the next CEO starting September 1st. So there was some betting on Tuesday on Mac break weekly. We'll, we'll turn his show up or will Tim cook get to shine one penultimate time. But I think they wanted to introduce John Ternis.

[00:08:46] They also talked about shortages because Apple's hit hard by the supply chain shortages of chips, of Ram, even of hard drives. And I think they've discontinued their cheapest Mac mini and raised the prices on the rest. And if you wanted a Mac mini or a Mac studio, you might be hard pressed to get one. Some of them are actually unavailable and this is due to AI. So in some ways they are benefiting from AI because everybody's buying these for their open claw. Yeah.

[00:09:15] About two weeks ago, I was trying to buy a Mac mini or Mac studio, something, anything. And the shipping date was like, depending on the Ram configuration was months in the future. Uh, and I was like, that's, I've never seen that before. Oh, so yeah. Like Apple is, I guess, benefiting, uh, tangentially from AI, even if they're not necessarily directly, you know, shipping models or anything like that. By discontinuing the $600 model, but Apple's basically made the, all those cheapest model of the mini and $800, uh, model.

[00:09:44] And of course, a lot of people do an open claw. We're buying the cheapest Mac mini. I mean, that was the recommendation. Cause you're still running a, uh, an AI in the cloud. You don't need a super fast, uh, machine to run it. In fact, I don't even know if you need a Mac mini, to be honest, you probably could use a raspberry pie. Wasn't it doing some stuff locally? Like I think the Mac had enough local juice if he needed to do something. So that was, I have a mini with 64 gigs and I can run, uh, some models that are tuned

[00:10:11] for MLX, Apple's own ML, uh, implementation on Apple. I mean, it speaks to like, what an amazing machine that 599 Mac mini was like, yeah, that was Apple's cheapest desktop, but also more computer than most people needed for really anything. And it's like so small, so capable. Like, of course, of course this ends up being the thing. I think it's, it's the downside though, is that it was a beautiful machine for 599. And now it is no more because of AI, like so many things. So now it's 799.

[00:10:40] That thing needs to go on sale for below $500, even like an M1 or M2 Mac mini at three or 400 bucks. Like you could do so much with that thing. I guess you could buy a Neo, right? That's, that's, you could, you could buy a Neo, which is again, another, I don't know how long they're going to be able to hold onto that. 8 gigs of Ram isn't exactly a loaded. No, you need the Ram. You need the Ram. If you want these models to sit in your, you know, to sit and run, you need a lot of Ram. Unfortunately that Neo though, what a, what a machine. I have so many thoughts about that.

[00:11:10] Did they talk about Neo sales? I didn't listen to the call. Are they, I didn't care. I think they're probably taking a victory lap on the Neo. And by the way, that was also he, John Ternus was in charge of hardware. That was one of John Ternus's projects. So yeah. I don't know if you guys talked about this. I was at the Neo launch event and like, it was all Ternus. There was no, oh, interesting. John Ternus intro, like the press to the whole thing. He was the one doing the like play by play of all the features of the Neo. He was the one, like everybody, even the Apple, like people there were all talking about

[00:11:38] John Ternus's vision for the Neo. So, and it's very, very interesting. Which tells you that they knew he was about to be announced. Oh, for sure. Anointed. And that was rumored since last fall, but this was very much his baby. And like, look at the MacBook Neo. And just like, what a thing that is. Like the Apple reps, like brought a $600 HP laptop and just put it side by side. I was like, oh my God. Their HP is already dead. Like you're just let them, let them die here. They compare like all the features, the screen, the speakers, everything. It's just desperate.

[00:12:06] And I've talked to like a lot of PC manufacturers now, they're just all like pulling their shirt collars. They don't know what to do because they can't figure out how to do that. Right. They can't do it. It's impossible for the full stack. Yeah. Especially because of supply chain. Now Apple buys up ahead of time, all the Ram and so forth. So in fact, the Ram for these are, are part of the die. Cause these are basically systems on a chip. It's older Ram most likely too. So probably not the in-demand Ram that people are really scarfing up right now. And presumably they already have it all. Right. Yeah.

[00:12:36] In fact, I think we were talking about this on Mac break weekly. One of the issues they're going to have with the Neo is it sells really rapidly is they're going to run out of these low end. What is it? A18 chip. And they're going to have to start 18 pro. They're going to have to start using more modern chips, which by the way, come with 12 gigs of Ram instead of eight gigs of Ram. So that'll be good for Neo BIOS, but it's going to, Apple's going to be up against the supply chain. Cook said that let's see, here's the quote.

[00:13:04] Uh, we think looking forward, the Mac mini and the Mac studio may take several months to reach supply demand balance. Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic. Um, so, uh, the, the Neo is high, still highly available, I think. So you can still get it, but I have a feeling they're going to run, you know, these are binned parts. Mm-hmm. I think, right.

[00:13:29] That they, they, they had extras of, uh, when they moved off the, uh, iPhone 17. That's the speculation. Like, and the best thing is like, yeah, this is leftover hardware and you can build something from it. But also it is so funny that Apple scraps, uh, ended up creating like a $600 computer. Like we've never seen before. Apple scraps, the Apple scrap computer, the leftovers. You built in a cave with the box of scraps. Basically it's the Mac.

[00:13:54] Uh, Microsoft, uh, lifts it's 20, 26 AI spend by $25 billion. And this is just component prices alone. Uh, they're going to write checks for $190 billion. Their CapEx in 2026. That is, that is what the market doesn't like to see is all of this money spent on, uh,

[00:14:21] Microsoft users are just winning, benefiting from all this money being spent. All these features coming to Microsoft users are so useful. It's great. They love them. They love them. They love them so much. They hate them. Five notifications. Every time you open your machine to tell you how much you love them. Do you also hate it? I have to, I hate it. I hate it. They have to come out and say, sorry for all the AI. We overdid it. We overdid it. We're pulling back. And Google's doing the same thing with Gemini and Google. Yes. And Google Sheets. And yeah. Oh my God.

[00:14:50] It's, it keeps trying to summarize the twit rundown. I don't want a summary. I got it. Exactly. Stop. I don't want that. Um, so Microsoft has spent in the last four quarters, roughly according to the register, $97 billion on infrastructure and equipment. What is the revenue for the 97 billion? 37 billion. Ah, it's like a Hollywood film. The mass doesn't make up for it.

[00:15:20] Um, nevertheless, they're losing some of their exclusivity with open AI to open AI. I pulled the plug on problem. Yeah. I don't know if that's a problem. I can't figure out if that was Microsoft getting a divorce. Who was, who was getting the divorce? Yeah. Opening AI wants more partners. Like they want more money coming in. They don't want to be like beholden to Microsoft. But that whole thing was just so wild because Microsoft was just like drunk, drunk on power. Like, look at this, what this AI does to Bing. Nobody cares about Bing.

[00:15:47] And all of a sudden everyone's paying attention to Bing. Let's put Copile and everything. It really seemed like a company that had never seen some, like this sort of like innovative tech so early. And they're like, we got to put this everywhere. We got to go gung ho on all of this. And that's part of that desperation that Google hit too, like right after Bing chat and was at that level of chat to BT hit. And then that's when everyone's saying Apple's too slow. But now we're a couple of years after that. And they think it seems like it's benefited Apple not to jump headfirst into this.

[00:16:17] To put this in perspective, here's a graph from Business Insider on CapEx spending. Starting with 2023. Well, when you combine Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, it was all well under 200 billion. 2024 made 200 billion, then 400 billion. Now we're close to $800 billion in CapEx expenditure. And you know, it's interesting. Meta's spending less than anybody. It's Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that are really spending almost $200 billion each in 2026.

[00:16:48] So we were talking before the show began, Avindra, about an AI bubble bursting. Is this the sign of that? It's not a good sign. None of this is good. And I do think that's the thing. If this AI bubble bursts, it's not just like these companies are going to be hurt or the AI companies. It is the U.S. economy itself, right? Like AI investments itself was a big chunk of GDP growth over the last year. That's going to be a big, big problem.

[00:17:17] Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, said, we have high confidence this will be monetized well. In other words, we're going to make money, folks. We already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it. But what that doesn't account for is the customers who are open AI and thropic. How are they? If they collapse, it's the whole thing. It's dominoes, right? The whole thing collapses. If your customers can't keep paying that money, that's why it's a bubble.

[00:17:46] And that's why bursting is... What does it... I would love... When we think about the two ways, the bubble bursting or the bubble not bursting, right? What does it mean for the bubble to burst? Does it mean that... I understand, obviously, from a financial perspective. But what I'm curious to hear is, Devendra, your... The crystal ball of the bubble bursts, that means that what AI gets sued to pieces by copyright holders,

[00:18:15] and that's what takes it under? Because we know that it has a base level of helpfulness that we have seen people talk about and use and pay for. So what is it... What would cause it to burst? What is involved with it bursting? If... Yeah, I'm just curious. Like, what does that look like? I mean, it's... I think the best example we have right now is what happened to Sora. What did happen to Sora? Overnight, this thing that was a success,

[00:18:44] and everyone was saying would rewrite Hollywood, just didn't exist anymore. Poof. It was the number one app on the App Store for a while. Well, once upon a time. It was. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't. And then, opening eyes, looking at the expenses of actually building, actually producing these AI videos. And it was... The numbers were so bad, it was just better to kill the thing, kill a billion-dollar, several-billion-dollar deal that it had with Disney. Even Disney wasn't aware of it. So, you know, these things can't just poof out overnight

[00:19:14] because it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of resources to run all of these AI things. The future, like, I don't think... I think some of these models will be useful in the way that people are using them now locally, in the way you're seeing Apple and a bit of Google, too, like running things on devices, right? It's on-device AI that can do a lot of great work for people. But the broader overall ecosystem that we're seeing here, I don't know how this can survive because they're not making money, right? Those early users came from the money,

[00:19:44] these sort of, like, subsidized versions of AI that, you know, Copilot was everywhere. OpenAI stuff was more readily available to people. But now these companies want people to pay. People would love to use it for free. I don't know if we're seeing people actually paying much for them, though. That's fine. I think Nicholas and I are in a different... I don't know, I'm not going to put words in your mouth, Nicholas, but I'm going to propose this. Might be on a different side of the spectrum because we love AI. We use... We are using AI. Sora, to me, looks like a toy,

[00:20:14] but there are very good, valid, non-toy uses of AI, right, Nicholas? Yeah. I... Yeah, I... There's, like, two camps here. And I think one of the things was, you know, all the folks saying, like, oh, Sora will revolutionize Hollywood. Consumers, all of a sudden, they're going to create their own... I don't... I mean, isn't it, like, 90% of people create, like... Crap. Or, like, 10% of people create... Junk. No one's, like, no one's, like, clamoring to, like, make their own Hollywood movie starring their friends.

[00:20:44] It's not a thing that people... People just want to, like, relax and, like... And, I guess, look at Scrolls or TikTok or whatever the case may be. No one's, like, clamoring to be, like, the next Spielberg. Like, that's not a thing. So I think that... Although there are models that can do that, right? I mean, there's some very good... I have a... I have an in-development project. So that's the one half of this where it's, like, I think the idea, like, the average person is just a latent Steven Spielberg and they just needed the tools. No. I don't know that there's a whole lot of truth to that. There's a certain thing

[00:21:13] called talent. I just want to point out. Or just a desire to... Desire, yeah. You know, just because a camera's available doesn't mean I'm going to become the next, you know, Annie Leibovitz or whatever. It's like... You know, I... As a young man, younger, anyway, in TV, spent hours in editing suites and I thought in the early 90s, no one's ever going to want to edit their own stuff. It's too horrible and too painful to do video editing. I was wrong on that, but still,

[00:21:43] it's not a majority of people do their own video editing. for people to start... CapCut and stuff like that made it. Yeah. And so that half... The other half is some of the projects that make it... The agentic programming, the different models that are coming out, I think that's quite useful. I mean, you could... You know, just for creating simple apps and websites and different things, something that could have taken you, you know, days or whatever. Now you could spin it up in like an hour or whatever. I have... I've launched so many different things, both, you know, side projects,

[00:22:13] some internal CR projects, apps that are like 90% done that will be published in the App Store soon enough. It's like... You're a creator. I could sit there and write all this Python code by hand, I suppose, but I could also just ask like Claude Code or Code Geyser. Or like DeepSeek and have it write these for me. And it's like, I'm still the one, you know, infusing the project with my creativity. I wanted to do this. I wanted... I have this thing in mind. It's solving this particular problem

[00:22:41] for me or this cool thing. But like, yeah, if you want to write the Python, be my guess. Like, I don't necessarily care. And it's funny, I see some of the older school programmers that are like, well, programming is an art form. I want to write the... Yes, of course, I understand that and I respect that, but that's like not everybody. A lot of folks just kind of want to watch YouTube. A lot of folks just want the app to work. Whatever it is, they're not in love with like the writing process. Like I'm a writer. I like writing. Most people don't like writing. If you're lucky,

[00:23:11] they might like reading. So it's like people confuse like their own passion for a subject as being the only way to engage with that subject. And I don't know that that's the case. And, you know, I'm not saying that my little projects are going to become the next big, big thing. That's not probably unlikely, but it's fun for me. At the very least, it's a creative outlet that I get to spend time with that I would have been doing, you know, passively consuming, you know, Netflix or whatever the case may be.

[00:23:39] This is one of Nicholas's projects, deepdugout.com, where you replayed the World Series. What I did was, this is the 2026 project. This project started in late February. At late February, I went to Polymarket and said, what are the projected teams for the World Series? At the time, it was the Dodgers and the Mariners. So I said, okay, great. What I want to do is simulate the World Series. Kind of like how back in the day, they used to say that, oh, Madden football predicts the Dallas Cowboys are going to win the Super Bowl this year.

[00:24:09] So I was like, okay, I want to do that. And so what it is, is it uses all real stats from fan graphs. Like I, I use Claude Cogue to build this. They use all real stats from fan graphs. It's all 30 teams. The managers are given personalities based on like actual journalistic profiles and like Sports Illustrated and things like that. And the managers are, are run by models. And there's like a simulation. It's kind of like dice rolls in Dungeons and Dragons where it's like the managers are, are the models, Sonnet, Opus, and they're deciding, should I pull the picture?

[00:24:39] Should I keep the picture? I love this. And there's like a whole like pipeline of content in there. And it's like a whole, I consider it to be like an art project. It's not journalism. It's not, it's just, it was, as I was saying before we started recording, it was really the idea here. I'm a Mets fan. You can see the Mets hat in the background. I don't like the way the team is running. So I joke to my wife, it would be way better if just AI was managing the team, was running the team specifically. David Stern is the general manager. And so it's like, okay, let's just, let's do that.

[00:25:09] Let's simulate. The initial idea was let me simulate the entire league. 162 games, that would have been a little expensive. So I simulated the World Series. I gave the Dodgers the fancier model. I gave them Opus. I gave the Mariners Sonnet. And, you know, I ran it a hundred times to give it some statistical significance. I had a Discord component where I, I simulated opening day live in Discord. There was channels for every single game. You know, there's audio podcasts. There's, there's articles. You know, I think this is a,

[00:25:37] a representative of like the internet is just going to be filled with AI stuff. I mean, we see all the AI slot videos nonstop now. This is arguably AI slop, but to me, it's interesting. And it's like, okay, it's kind of like, it's just a fun thing. It just, I just wanted to take that idea of like, it would be better if AI was running the team and see how far I could take that. And it builds on my Tucson news site, some of the, some of the work I did there. So all this stuff is like a creative and it gets me using the different models and it gets me, you know,

[00:26:07] in the trenches with this stuff, which I write about for Consumer Reports. I think it's, it's, you know, it's useful to actually use the tools beyond just the chat bot aspect, basically. Yeah. There's something you touched on there that stuck out to me. And one of the reasons that I have come to appreciate these tools is you said you were talking to your wife and you, you thought this, I think about the many times in the past where in the day I'll have five different silly ideas or actually good ideas for me or helpful ideas.

[00:26:36] And I go, well, I don't have the time or the resources or whatever to put toward that. So, oh well. And then it just disappears into the ether. There's a recent project that I did involves a little bit of a story. My significant other was out thrifting for his DVD collection and texted me to ask me, is this DVD title in my collection? And if you have time, could you go check? I was in the middle of something. So I was like, okay, I'll quickly go check. I run upstairs. I look at his DVD collection

[00:27:06] it's not an alphabetical order. So I'm like, I'm going to have to look through every single one of these to find out. I said, is there any order to this? He said, it's by genre. I said, oh Lord, whose genre choices? So anyway, immediately what I did was I took a photo. It's by spine color. Right, exactly. I took four photos of the whole collection and then popped them into Plod and said, can you quickly just read through all these titles for me? And it did. And then I was able to quickly check against that database. But then I thought,

[00:27:37] this could be so much better. So what I did was from there, I said, what I'd like to do is create a, because my significant other, not, I can, I can barely get him to ever install any apps. So I'm like, I know he's not going to install an app. So what I need to do is make him a little website that he could just go to. So what I ended up doing was I, I decided I wanted it to be a really simple website. I don't want to have to work with some sort of database tool. Well,

[00:28:05] I can use Google Sheets as the database that can reference that Google Sheets document and present it in this nice way. Anyway, ended up building out this little site for him that the main page lets him start to type in a title. It ties in with the TMDB, which is the movie database, API, to check against characters as he's typing and goes, oh, this is already in your collection or oh, it's not. Would you like to add it? And so when he's at a thrift store, he can type in the title, see if he already has it. If he doesn't, then no, he can add it.

[00:28:34] And then the second page on the site has his whole collection again pulled from TMDB to get the photos of the front pages of the DVDs, you know, and all of that, I was able to, you know, it was the idea you were talking, Nicholas, about your creativity being there. Yeah, I'm the one who thought I don't want to build a site that has to have a database, so let's see about using Google Sheets. It figured out how to contact the API and do all that part of it. Then over time, he said, well, I like this,

[00:29:04] but the seasons, it's not tracking seasons. Can we add that? Is that going to take a long time? You don't have to do if it's too much work. I said, oh, it's not too much work and then asked Claude and it helped me create that part of it and push it. So I really do like those opportunities to where these ideas I would have otherwise just kind of had to throw by the wayside. I'm able to make use of that and I've appreciated that aspect of it more than anything. I feel like the AI industry would be much better served taking, Micah, your story right there.

[00:29:34] This funds nice stuff and this is what AI enables. Don't lead with job destruction. Don't lead with making a new movie. Yeah, that's kind of like a downer. I guess the flip side is, is everyone going to do this? How much money are they going to make off a little website database, a little baseball simulation? I don't know. But that's not my fault for promising the sun and the stars with this technology when they could have sold it as like, hey, this is like a useful productivity thing.

[00:30:03] They could have sold it much more soberly and maybe it would have been better for it. That's not how this industry works though, right? It has to be to the moon. It has to be to the moon, basically. But this is the answer to your original question, Micah, of what happens if there's a bubble burst. I think what's happening is people are seeing value, a lot of it, right? And they are using it and maybe it starts with us geeks because we're much more likely to sit down at a keyboard and do something like you just did or even think of the fact that, oh, I could take a picture

[00:30:33] of this and feed it to Claude is certainly a geeky mindset. But this is going to trickle down. It's changing how people relate to computers. It changes how people use computers and I think in the long run makes them much more useful. And I think that's why venture capital is pumping all this money into these companies that are then pumping the money into data centers and new models because there is, they perceive a real upside to it and it is a complete reinvention of how the world works. We've been through this before.

[00:31:02] We were, industrialization changed everything, was a complete upheaval. when we invented the car, that was a complete upheaval in American society, in how people got to places about where their jobs were, the kinds of jobs. We have been through this before. There is upheaval. People lose their jobs. People lose their lives. That works. By the way, cars becoming mainstream led to tons of kids just being dead on the streets. Well, absolutely. Because that was all in the streets.

[00:31:33] I mean, you could say, I'm not saying it's all positive by any means. In fact, you could say, you know, cars have changed cities, they've changed where we live, they've made the suburbs possible. I mean, there's all sorts of things that cars have done to change society. We've survived it. We've lived through this before. And I think this is the kind of change we're seeing. And if you had been sitting in 1910 thinking, what should I invest in? And you decided to invest in rubber, oil, and automotive stuff, you might have done better if you'd had some vision about it. And I think that's

[00:32:02] what the market's seeing. So, but to answer your question, Micah, Jeff Bezos said this a couple of months ago. He said, there are two kinds of bubbles. There are financial bubbles that are just about money, like the stock market crash where everybody was in 1929 heavily invested and leveraged. And it just crashed because all this leverage, the margin calls, and everybody jumped out of windows. He said, versus an industrial bubble. And we have some examples of industrial bubbles, the transcontinental railway, all those railroads

[00:32:32] went bankrupt, by the way. They all went out of business. The internet boom of the late 19th or 20th century, we laid a lot of fiber. A lot of those companies, MCI is gone. But the fiber is still there. The railroads were still there. There's infrastructure that gets built. And I think Bezos is saying this is that kind of bubble. It is, in the long run, a potentially positive bubble. It's not a financial bubble where people just lose their shirts. They might.

[00:33:02] But it is a bubble where, and companies will, I'm sure, go out of business. And some investors will lose their shirts. And some even, you know, mom and pop retail investors might lose their shirts in the stock market. But ultimately, we're going to get some value out of it. And that's the reason I'm asked you, Nicholas, is I think you and I, and I'll have to add Micah now to this, have created things that we see some real value in it. More than just, I mean, yeah, it's an art project, but you can see there's value being created that couldn't have been created before. Those projects are great.

[00:33:32] Those projects are totally great. But I look at, like, you bring these to the AI executives, like you're saying, Nicholas, they're going to look at this and be like, oh, nerd shit. This is wonderful nerd shit. And it's like, ah, can I build like a global empire on this? Can I sell this to the average consumer? And I don't know if they can't. Like that to me is like- No, they focused on chatbots. They focused on Sora. They focused on this crappy consumer stuff. This is cool stuff. Like it's super cool. I wish I had time to like play around with these things in this way too. Unfortunately,

[00:34:02] like my perspective is from like looking at the news and trying to see like what is happening at the broader market level. People look at it that way and have a much more negative point of view than the people who are actually playing with this stuff and see, oh, there's something here that's going on. For sure, for sure. Right? If you just think it's a bunch of chatbots, it's like, oh, who cares? This is so, Sora, who cares? It is worrying though because even just like from the chatbot side, which is how normal people are interacting with this, by the way, like that's how it is. And in the future, it's probably going to be the handful of like

[00:34:32] the super Siri or whatever. It's going to be personal assistants, people talking to their phone or whatever saying, do this for me. Can you figure out how to do this for me rather than doing the legwork that you guys are doing right now? But I look at like what is happening in the AI industry and just like the effect it's having on humanity is kind of disturbing like at a philosophical level. That is kind of what's keeping me partially away from it because it does feel like we're stripping our humanity away a little bit here creatively. I just saw a paper

[00:35:02] that said that AI psychosis was almost inevitable. And there are so many examples of AI psychosis right now. People have killed. People have hurt themselves. They've killed other people. Somebody, I saw a tweet of this recently, like a toy, like it used to be a toy slightly injures a kid and the entire thing is pulled offline. And you have these models out here who are, they're just out here kind of like doing weird things

[00:35:31] to human psychology that we don't totally understand. But that's an acceptable loss. It's an acceptable loss for the progress of this industry. And I find that very, very sad and disheartening. I want to agree with that 100% too. That is one of, that has been one of the issues that, you know, because we talked a lot about it over the course of multiple episodes of Tech News Weekly is specifically the different AI systems and the horrible situations that have come out of it in those cases.

[00:36:01] And yeah, it's specifically what you touched on that a toy does this or a car does this and those things get recalled or stopped or what have you. Because we have regulations for those things. Yeah, I do struggle with the concept of the AI tools that have been given freely to schools and schools then adopting them so freely. I don't know how to reckon with that. I don't know other than I wish that, yeah, as soon as those things happened it should have

[00:36:31] been shut down. It should have at the very least been pulled from education, I guess. But again, I don't know how to reckon with that. And I think that one thing that is difficult to do in any form of media but in particular in forms of media that tend to be sort of condensed down is holding two points of contrasting beliefs and having them both heard

[00:37:00] and not thinking that one outshines the other. So I can say that I have enjoyed the ways that I have made use of these tools and I can say I am not happy with the fact that people have been killed or have killed themselves at least partially because of these tools and have those things both be true and have all of that communicated is very difficult because people do want a side to be taken

[00:37:29] and in that way it is difficult. Yeah, Mike, I'm right there with you. As someone, obviously I use these things, I find some utility with them, the downsides are obvious and very bad and I don't know that one side needs to beat the other but to communicate that there's merits this whole is very difficult especially in today's climate where people don't read the article, they might read the headline, they might read the tweet, they'll see a reel on Instagram.

[00:37:59] There's really, it's difficult to kind of get nuanced and in-depth messages out there nowadays so it's very tricky and I will say I spoke at a University of Arizona class maybe two months ago to discuss my Tucson news site and I will say they were very oh my, Leo, they were cringe, you know, they were not down with the sickness so to speak. This is destroying

[00:38:28] our ability to think so on and so forth and so I don't know if there's a generational aspect here, you know, I'm not a kid, I'm 40, these were like 20 year olds give or take and they were by and large, this is 20 students, they were by and large certainly not in love with the idea of AI so I don't know how this evolved I think they're scared, right? I mean, if you're at college right now, you've got to be scared about what's the job market going to be? What should I be? I'm scared about the world, scared about the future, like literally everything is on fire so yeah,

[00:38:57] let's just add one to the file, you know. Let's take a little break. You're watching this week in tech with the week's tech news, Micah Sargent is here. It's so nice to have you. We thought maybe Micah would have to take over because I am thousands of miles in the middle, I am in the most remote spot in the world in the middle of the ocean. It's called Hawaii, maybe you've heard of it and you can see the ocean behind me having a wonderful time, I must say and so I thought, well, I should see if I can do shows

[00:39:26] from other places and it's working pretty well, actually. It should be, or do you think, just new extreme environments? I think so. I think Antarctica is next, right? That's Travinda Hardwar from Engadget where he's senior editor and Nicolas DeLeon is also here. Great to have you, senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. We are going to take a little break because we weren't sure if this would work. I recorded all the commercials ahead of time. So we all get to stand up and wander around

[00:39:55] and we'll be back with more of TWIT in just a month. This episode of TWIT brought to you by Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? It's time to upgrade, put that old mattress on the curb, upgrade to a Helix mattress and get yourself a good night's rest. I mean, we love our Helix mattress. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. I can tell you, I'm missing it in Hawaii. Let me tell you,

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[00:42:51] Crossword-ing the Situation? Nicholas, is this you too? Yes, that's mine. Yes. So what is this? So you know the meme monitoring the situation, I presume everyone here. Yes. That's when you're a news junkie and you're really following, you know, whatever. What do you think guys say? They're monitoring the situation. Yeah, it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek whatever. So about a month ago, I started doing the Apple News mini crossword puzzle because I'm becoming an old, old man in real time. You are. Yes. But I was, all the clues were generic.

[00:43:20] It's like not a cat, but a blank. So I was like, well, that's fine. But like, what if the clues were all about news items and we called it crossword? So this I built with cloud code. This, yeah, this actually took probably, I mean, I didn't. So it's writing the clues from the news? Yeah. So what it's doing, there's a couple of things happening. Basically, it is going out and scanning the major news in the New York Times, Reuters, AP. It's either scanning their websites

[00:43:50] or their blue sky feeds or whatever, you know, a bunch of different sources. It's kind of like getting a state of the news and it goes back, I think, two months. And then that's all put against a giant word, open source word list that's out there somewhere. And then it tries to create, it tries to create the puzzle. The puzzle cost me like a penny to create. Sonnet is doing it. Sonnet's pretty amazing, actually. It's surprisingly good. Yeah, it was, it took about two weeks to really nail it. I had a lot of problems with the iOS keyboard

[00:44:19] for whatever reason. And the initial version, like maybe half of the clues were based in news and the other half were just kind of random generic stuff. So it took a little while to really nail down. But like, you know, this is really hard. Yeah, I know. Harder than the crop. I'm trying to think of many. I haven't gotten one yet. Let's see. me neither. Wow. So yeah, I will say, you know, I stopped doing them after the first week or so. So I really don't. Do you have any statistics on how many people

[00:44:49] are doing these? I don't have them handy. I mean, it's not going to, it's going to go up a lot. Cross wording, the situation dot com. Yeah, this is a challenging media. Now, do you play the fun little tune when you solve it at the end? No, I think I'm happy. I'm happy to add that to the, to the, you can make a pull request, Leo. Yeah, I'll do a PR for you. Yeah, but this is impressive. It's just like, I have, I don't know, this is kind of the way my brain,

[00:45:18] all these little side things. Oh, this would be cool. This would be cool. And now I have the, the, the time and like the reason instead of again, the mindset you need, I think, to really take advantage of this is my, is my feeling on this. Wow. This is great. Yeah. So, you know, I, you know, again, none of this is going to be become the next Facebook or whatever, but it's, it's just a fun, creative way to spend an hour or so here or there. And I get to use the models and it keeps me like, I don't know. I think it's fun. Ultimately, this is fun to actually, I don't know if you want

[00:45:48] to be the next Facebook, you know, that is historic loss in court could cost a lot more than $375 million. This is in New Mexico, just, you know, next door, next door. Yeah. The attorney general, Raul Torres, sued meta in a landmark, child safety case. One, a jury. I'm sorry. The judge awarded $375 million. They go back now for a three week

[00:46:16] public nuisance trial, whether the, and they're going to argue over the changes because the attorney general doesn't want just money. He wants meta to make some changes to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including age verification for New Mexico users, prohibiting end to end encryption for users under 18. I don't know what that's all about and capping their use to 90 hours a month, limiting engagement, boosting features like infinite scroll and autoplay

[00:46:45] and requiring meta to detect 99% of new CSAM. Crazy. Um, it is not a good thing to be meta right now. If you ask me, no, that is response. Meta's response. We're going to, we're going to leave New Mexico. If you do this, we're gone. These are technologically impractical changes. Many of them are. Yeah. Some of them seem reasonably, you know, maybe time limits or whatever, but like the, we're going to get rid of end to end encryption. I mean,

[00:47:15] that's bad for any number of reasons. Uh, I don't know. They don't want kids to have privacy. I'm trying to figure out what this is. Uh, you know, it's interesting because what happens when you do this is now suddenly you have to also ban VPNs because if you, if you say, well, this is only in New Mexico, then kids who aren't stupid are going to say, well, guess what? I'm no longer in New Mexico, which is leading Utah.

[00:47:45] To want to ban, effectively ban VPNs. Utah is the first state to hold websites liable. Websites like meta would be liable for users who mask their locations with VPNs. This law goes into effect in just a few days. It was signed into law by the governor March 19th. It goes into effect on May 6th. It's, uh, uh, formerly Senate bill SB 73. And this is what you're going to see in a lot of these states. I imagine New Mexico's next

[00:48:14] Nord VPN. And I'm sure joined by every other VPN provider in the world has called the law, a quote, unresolvable compliance paradox and liability trap. The EFF says legal risk of push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor in the world. Well, we can't tell you're from Utah, so we're just going to make sure you all do it. I, what is with legislators? I don't think they understand technology. What is, look,

[00:48:44] I understand that they're not happy about social media. Solve everything. Yeah. I, this is, this goes back in a way to what we were talking about earlier, which is there are harms. Clearly there are harms to the internet. And maybe when we were starting out, we should have thought more about that. We didn't. Those harms are here. Social media is here, but this is not the solution. Uh, by the way, that was a jury trial. I got that wrong. So the jury awarded 375 million in the new Mexico. Uh,

[00:49:14] meanwhile, uh, Australia continues the pain for meta, a 2.25% med, uh, levy on their, uh, revenue in Australia, not just meta, but Google and tick tock. If they refuse to pay news publishers, this is a Rupert Murdoch bill that was still going on. He's still doing anything. And, and so what happened is, uh, meta and others said, well, fine, no news for you. So Australia said, well, fine, even if you don't give us news, you're going to give us two and a quarter percent of your.

[00:49:47] That's so funny. This is basically all about protecting a more abundant industry, the news industry. And in particular, Rupert Murdoch's news industry. You know, this is the thing about it. I, if it wasn't actually this secret other, you know, uh, deal that is happening, there's something to the idea that, because I remember working for a news organization

[00:50:17] at the time when they're all calling the ones you worked for, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I remember, uh, someone coming in, I mean, but it is, but it's the case. Yeah. And there was a specialist who came in and was like, here's how you're going to make it big on Facebook. And then you find out that, well, allegedly that Facebook companies did that up its video values and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah. So I do, I wish there was a world in which these companies that are sort of summarizing the news that exists

[00:50:45] did have to pay a little bit, but it sucks that really, that's not what this about. Nobody owns the news. I mean, and that's true. If somebody owned the news, then you couldn't do that crossword puzzle, Nicholas, because the news is the news. You can, I mean, I'll shut it down. It doesn't, it's not a four-pounder surprise. But that's the point is nobody really owns this. The news, the facts are not copyrightable. The treatment of it is, but not the facts themselves. Yeah. This goes back to like every medium too.

[00:51:14] Like when radio broadcasting was just starting, they were just reading newspaper headlines and newspaper reports. They didn't have the reporters. They were just repeating what was there. So we've been here before. We kind of keep doing it every time we have a big media shift. What's the difference between saying no one owns the news and no one owns the alphabet? Because we could just say that, oh, just because you've arranged these letters in a certain way doesn't mean that you should get paid for it. I love that. I don't think I like that argument. No one owns the news. Well,

[00:51:43] facts are facts. You can't own facts. You can't copyright the facts. You can copyright how you wrote it. You can copyright your treatment of it. But isn't that what the meta and TikTok and et cetera were pulling from the treatment of? They weren't pulling the fact, right? They were summarizing the treatment that was put together about the thing that happened. If this really were the case, then most websites would be gone because what happens? One website breaks a story

[00:52:13] and every other website in the world, hundreds of them copy it. I know this because when I go through the news every day looking for stories for the show, I get 20 copies of the same story. I always try to find the original, right? It's not easy. Sometimes it's really hard to do. But when Axios or the information in the New York Times or the journal breaks it, I try to use their version of the story. But it's not easy to do because you can't copyright it. It's a story. A lot of stories are just like stuff

[00:52:42] a company announced so everybody's going to have their take on it, their spin on it. That's not breaking. That's not like a scoop. It's polite to say if Axios gets a scoop, it's polite to say Axios in a scoop broke the story. But that's just polite. I mean, there's nothing stopping you from repeating it. In fact, it's what gets around most paywalls. You know, most people aren't going to pay $400 a year for the information. But don't worry, you don't have to. You don't have to. Someone will publish one. He's going to reprint it. Yeah. Including us.

[00:53:13] I mean, I mean, I'm one of the, I'm a guilty party in this. I'm not going out and doing any reporting. I'm counting on you, Devendra, and you, Nicholas, and you, Mike. Well, Michael, you don't either. But yeah, I was going to say, I'm one of you. I'm one of you. This is commentary. This is not reporting. Meta is also in trouble in the EU for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. This is the same story. You know, as soon as these countries require age verification,

[00:53:42] like in England, VPNs become huge in that jurisdiction. Meta is in breach of the Digital Services Act for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. Now, the scary thing is the fines on this could be massive. You know, a large percentage of their global revenue. We shall wait and see what they find them the EU did create their own

[00:54:12] age verification app, which was, oh yeah, instantly cracked, like within two hours. In fact, there were a number of security holes in it. Ursula von der Leyen, who is now in charge of the DSA and the EU, says online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app so there are no more excuses. We even have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children's rights. I should just turn it on to Schwarzenegger, sorry.

[00:54:44] But, you know, Meta has not adopted the EU's age verification and probably a good thing. Security researchers demonstrated it could be bypassed, oh, I'm sorry, did I see two hours? Within two minutes of its release. The source code's up on GitHub, so yeah. Yeah, it's open source. Point chat GPT. Exactly. Have you all started getting those, I've been logging in or doing whatever these different services

[00:55:13] and now they're all starting to ask me what state I live in too. Yeah, they have to. I know, isn't that so annoying? Now, I was even, it was on Apple TV, I was just wanting to watch some show and it said, hold on, you got to log into your account, I had to go on my phone like some sort of animal, go to the website like some sort of animal and then say my age like some sort of human. I mean, I know here in Arizona they passed a law to visit adult websites. You need either ID or, you know,

[00:55:43] a half clever high school student will just use a VPN or whatever. I'm McLovin, my name's McLovin, I live in Hawaii. That's until they banned VPNs and I'm like, okay, just go ahead, ban them. I mean, at this point I'm old, I don't care as much as I used to. Well, and this is important because I think nobody would say, oh, a kid should be able to visit a porn site. We all agree. Of course not. No kid should be able to do that. You can't buy a Playboy in a 7-Eleven if you're a kid. You have to find it

[00:56:13] in the woods like everybody used to. That's exactly right. Dig it out of the ground like you do with the mushrooms. Who are burying their Playboys? I don't understand what that is all about. But anyway, that's another story for another day. So I think we're for it. But what the interesting thing is it really was never about the porn ban. That was just the wedge in the door because really they want to ban the internet for people under 16. They want to ban social media. They want to really restrict

[00:56:42] what kids can access. And I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't know if that's a good solution. Yeah, I mean when I was a kid this is the thing where like parent parenting is important. When I was a kid I was looking up video game stuff. I was what was you know I was actually using it as research and homework and the things you were supposed to use it for even at an early age. Well, my mom was very strict that I knew from a very early age not to tempt fate

[00:57:12] so to speak. But like that's not every kid you know some kids are going to look up they're going to gamble on polymarket or whatever the case may be. So it's like this is the role of a parent to like tell you know you know if our nation's governing body can gamble on polymarket I think everybody should be allowed to go Talk about downfall of our civilization. But you know Nicholas like the thing is the internet was just one place back then like when we Yes, that's true.

[00:57:41] It was the shared family computer that your parents could watch you do stuff in and maybe occasionally you'd have access at your school library or something but now it's like it is everywhere. Everyone has the internet in their pocket right? In their pocket and like that's the thing and I think the EU's heart is in the right place like protecting kids I'm not denying that in so many ways. I just don't think they have the technology to do it. They don't have the tech to do it. You did a study that said oh look a kid can say I'm 18 on Facebook and there's nothing to stop them.

[00:58:11] Well yeah I mean we run a Mastodon instance right twit.social which you're all welcome to join if you want to be on Mastodon and I have now been forced because of all these laws in various jurisdictions to say you must be over 18 to use it but Mastodon has no age verification capability so I just say by signing up you assert that you are over 18 you must be over 18 that's dopey but I feel like

[00:58:40] I have to do it. How porn sites used to do it as I've heard so it used to be they do liquor sites do it what's your birthday right and that's all exactly right it's the same thing I mean it's again like I think the EU's heart is in the right place because we we allowed this internet to grow to obscene heights like Facebook's reach its market reach is insane what it was allowed to do the companies it was allowed to gobble up the sort of like mind share

[00:59:09] that is fully owned by Mark Zuckerberg I think is kind of gross and we we lived through that I reported through that and it was a lot of governments a lot of just like hey Facebook wants to buy this company and we're going to allow this 19 billion dollar WhatsApp deal or whatever not many questions being asked we all thought like oh social media is great these tech companies are trying to do good in the world and maybe the reason I'm sounding a little negative now is like I've lived through several ways of tech company innovation right

[00:59:38] and every time practically every time it has not ended up so great it's a money grab the social media thing was just like it was purely yeah money grab user attention grab we want those DAUs we want to have the most engagement over our competitors at the cost of users at the cost of like kids mental health at the cost of so many things but what's the solution yeah that's the thing it's so hard go ahead we have to have we have to have these discussions and where there are going to be some clunky

[01:00:07] clunky solutions some things are not going to work but you know we got to start having this conversation more broadly maybe we should like I have my daughter is seven years old right now so she is years away that's why you suddenly care now I get it you are faced with it we know social media has not been great for kids like for teenagers in particular like so what are you going to do are you going to give your kid a phone or you haven't I don't know yet what I do what I do kind of want to do eventually is just like you know what is great

[01:00:37] a GPS cellular enabled Apple watch is a great thing like for parents like could could be like that is your emergency you need to get a hold of me for whatever I need to see where you are if you're going to hang out with friends or something I'm less interested in location tracking and more in just like anything happens you raise your wrist you call for help that can happen and I can reach you and Apple's actually embraced that a couple years ago they allowed you to set up a watch with your phone without them having the phone they can for sure and like the whole

[01:01:06] the whole family plans and stuff like those sorts of things that's kind of where I'm sitting I think that's a good solution can I ask how are you how are you deciding on is this a matter of talking to other parents and seeing what they do is it a matter of reading books is it a matter of all of these things that's something that I've always been curious about with especially parents who are a little bit more tech knowledgeable we have Lisa Schmeiser talks a lot about the work that she

[01:01:36] a friend of the show does with her daughter and like they have a contract that they wrote up together and everyone so there's just different ways of doing it I've seen how Jason Howell front of the show has done that you know what I mean and so I'm just curious what your method is because you said you don't know yet are you still collecting data to figure that out there are no books written about this right like books are the last place you go to like figure out what is happening in like media and social media and stuff a lot of it's just like reading the news seeing what's happening and looking at the tools available out

[01:02:06] there too like there are some really gross things out there there's this I don't know if you guys have seen angel sense those sorts of um it's the wearable that um it was initially meant for kids with autism and kids who are like a flight risk kids who like could run away from school or something for parents to keep track of things but now it's become just like this really thing for paranoid parents to get for their kids and it can let them listen in to what is happening like just instant mic on to listen to what's happening and now schools are like this is a rights violation you cannot

[01:02:36] just listen in to every single classroom understand what is going around my kid at all what's happening in the class and complain to the teacher and yes parent that reads the kids diary every night wasn't that in Batman the dark night it's I mean so we're talking about a lot of tech like this is a thing that exists now and some parents are doing it and I think it's insane so I'm thinking of like a sane reaction also this will involve conversation with my daughter seeing what she wants to use and right now what we're doing

[01:03:05] is mainly tech in in a localized way that I can see what she's doing right she is a she's an iPad kid like she spends time on her iPad she loves Minecraft I'm there engaging with her she's not out there playing with like randoms online yet we're not doing Roblox and maybe that's going to be a conversation that's going to be a fight at some point because from what I hear from what I've seen Roblox is not great yeah at taking care of that community but Minecraft is relatively safe she plays with her cousins once in a while she plays with me the idea of a central computer I think

[01:03:35] we can we kind of got to go back to that the den computer the living room computer where like your kids are online and doing stuff and doing stuff for school and you're like interacting with them it's so funny yeah I was a friend one of my friends he says like that was like you know the internet you know the phones everywhere the the computer at the den was peak that was the best because you could go on you could use whatever you know read whatever and then boom you're done and then you're back in reality you're out of the matrix and that was way more balanced and way more healthy and frankly if you're a parent you know like I said my

[01:04:05] mom was very strict but she had the advantage of there was one computer which she could monitor and I've actually you know honestly I wasn't quite obedient I really didn't try to say it was very strict so I got the message very quick is what I'm saying but like it was a lot easier in the 90s to do that than now even if you're like a sophisticated parent oh I'm gonna block it in the router nothing nope not a single packet is getting into my house it's like okay well they go to school they have friends you know devices have cellular they're not yeah

[01:04:35] a router like there's so many workarounds but I do remember like in the 90s with the warnings to parents were like don't let your kids talk to strangers on the internet and I absolutely spent many of them talking to strangers on the internet about anime and video games and whatever and I've made some of my like greatest friends they are like that to me that to me was peak internet just like this pure discovery this thing that was like on mostly untouched by like big corporate tech companies it was just people out there building things doing cool things like what you guys are kind of doing now with AI like the

[01:05:04] coolest thing about AI is it does take us back to that sort of like era of people just making cool and I kind of that's what happened with the personal computer era right we suddenly have a computer and you're all of an age where you probably had that computer as a kid and you you mess with it maybe some of you did everything destroyed it yeah yeah yes yeah yeah and that's how you back and that's fantastic and that's why you're geeks now right yeah but this is like we were talking about Apple and AI like the thing as I've been thinking about Apple

[01:05:33] and turn is like how he can change his company I think Apple is the last like PC computer company that is actually focused on personal computing right like everyone else was chasing AI or so many things Apple's like we're making better laptops we're making better phones we're making better earbuds or something but it's tech that you use you touch and feel and that affects your lives that is personal computing and I wish more companies kind of thought like that you know I just I reviewed one of Dell's like great new

[01:06:03] laptops the XPS 14 and it does so many things right it has this killer keyboard issue and I'm talking to Dell I'm talking to people like what's wrong it's um it doesn't type fast enough oh no it don't type good it can't keep up beautiful beautifully machined I think well it's like so one thing I do a lot is that a Windows problem can you put Linux on it and see if it works better I think we've I've talked to Dell they've talked to their engineers they've localized to like it was maybe part of the the part that's being

[01:06:32] used the digitizer to like accept keyboard commands like something was so there they've issued a firmware upgrade and I've seen it and it's just like a weird issue for such like a beautiful machine to have but so you can type faster than the keyboard can keep up the keyboard is just like dead it's broken like if I type like the comma and spacebar too quickly it'll register a spacebar comma I'm like I can't I can't work on this good that's no I not work like so they say it was a manufacturing issue with like the first run that went to reviewers I'm

[01:07:01] gonna check out like a newer machine to see if they actually fix it because I thought those look great I thought that was a great look and they do but it's just like Linux guys like the awesome battery life yeah I saw a lot of the XPS it's a great it's like a great Windows machine otherwise but it's also like man you guys are so focused last year they were focused on that dumb rebrand of like changing all their computers names oh man I felt so good I felt so good coming in there like a great line you were all right you were all right

[01:07:30] it was amazing by the way on Wednesday we had Nirav Patel who was the founder of framework on intelligent machines and they're making some that new PC laptop they made is awesome yeah I'm worried about them because I don't their things tend to be more expensive and like it really it is focused on the tinkerer market they're small so they also get hit harder by the supply chain shortage because they're not buying as many RAM chips or whatever yeah but he told me an interesting stat he said 60% of the people who buy this new

[01:08:01] laptop are running Linux on it they're not ordering it with Windows they're running it with Linux yeah I've seen a lot of evangelization you know because of the AI stuff a lot of this is either Mac first or Linux first Windows is kind of incidental to this AI conversation as far as the stuff that I'm doing and a lot of Linux guys have been talking up framework for I don't past year whatever it's like yeah these are nice it's a nice machine it was a little clunky you know when it was the you know the 13 and the 16 the original were a

[01:08:30] little I had a 13 and they were too big yeah it was a little clunky but now they've decided what we're going to do a unibody aluminum chassis much like the MacBook and I think I haven't seen it yet but are you reviewing it I'm not reviewing it I think maybe Dan Cooper and Gaz is reviewing it but we we were looking at it we've covered them I really like them as a company but yeah to my broader point like I wish more people were like focused on the idea of personal computing just like tech tech that people are using and that it remains Apple's

[01:08:58] advantage and every time Microsoft tries to release actual hardware kind of falls in its face like you look at the surface they can't they had Xbox they had Xbox for so long they keep fumbling that ball and I don't understand what is happening it's so stupid and a lot of this is just tied to companies whose attention is diverted to AI or online infrastructure infrastructure something else something else that is not the core of what being a personal computing company should be so I don't know that's just a thought

[01:09:27] I've had like that's kind of a really good point and Eternus is a hardware guy so maybe there's some hope that they will continue to focus on hardware although they had a very good quarter for services and services now a big part of their over and cook makes it make those little I did that stickers for services because he's the service guy he's the one who launched all those services he's the one who revamped their supply chain he does how you get ARPU baby it's all about the average revenue per user the ARPU for sure you can

[01:09:56] sell them a computer once but you can sell them services forever yeah but Eternus is interesting because it's sort of like Apple had does have tunnel vision sometimes right sometimes they're like we must do it this way you must do it our way we're not going to cater to the market and I do think Steve Jobs itis it's that yes that's still hangover of no we know best we know we know best or we're not going to touch that market that's that's beneath us or something and the idea of Apple 10 years ago doing a $600 laptop no kidding unbelievable unbelievable but now it's like it is

[01:10:25] viable and also not only are they going to do it they're going to make the best one that we have ever seen in that price range I don't know how long they're going to be able to hold on to that but I think that bodes well to like the future of how they consider products and what they're actually going to deliver to people so that's actually a really good point I mean if you're if you say putting technology in people's hands is what's important that Neo is a really good example of that yeah it is I've been using it like on and off like alongside an air and next to macbook pros and like that screen is so good it has decent speakers like it's nice it is

[01:10:54] a what if you want if you want that Neo before prices skyrocket or supply disappears like just get it it reminds me a little I had in college I was in college from 2004 to 08 and I had the 12 inch powerbook g4 my uncle got it to me as a high school graduation gift nice and it was like yeah in retrospect it broke at some point I wish I was actually on eBay literally earlier this week trying to find one but but like the Neo is the new version of it's it's like

[01:11:23] it's small it's awesome it's like it does it's like the perfect college laptop I actually have one alone from Apple I'll probably post like a first person impression thing or whatever the next week or so but yeah it is like I would be very hard pressed to recommend like I have I live in a kind of a rural area but one of my neighbors is constantly asking me like oh what's the best laptop what should I get man for six hundred dollars I would be very reluctant to mention anything other than the Neo at this point I cannot imagine a

[01:11:51] window a PC that even touch you know you get more expensive you know Windows laptops are you know there's plenty of good ones but at this price point I don't know it'd be really hard to find something this credible at that price absolutely one other issue before we take a break with meta one other story meta knee has an insatiable need for power just like all these companies especially the frontier AI labs in 2024 they used 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in their data centers

[01:12:21] according to TechCrunch enough to power 1.7 million American homes for a year they have committed to building 30 gigs of renewable power sources but one of the things they want to do and they've just signed a deal with a company called Overview Energy is put a thousand satellites up that will beam light from the sun to solar farms over infrared to power data centers at night wasn't this a

[01:12:51] James Bond supervillain plot yes it's very supervillain isn't it it was one of those overview is a four-year-old Virginia outfit that emerged from stealth in December developing spacecraft they collect plentiful solar power in space convert it to near infrared light beam it at solar farms hundreds of megawatts which then convert that light to electricity it is very James Bond that's cool yeah that's neat well it's better than burning

[01:13:21] natural gas as Elon Musk is to power your data centers that's for sure yeah yeah we have we have gone down a really dumb pipeline these days ah pipeline ha that's basically a giant space laser though right that's like a giant space laser it's a giant space freaking lasers laser that's Micah Sargent he completes me oh great to have you good to be here yeah I don't get to work with you enough I miss those

[01:13:50] days when we had a studio and I saw him every day and we did our bits and we did our little bits also here to vendor hard war from and gadget it's great to see you also and newlywed Nicholas de Leon senior supporter gets some words when you said your wife actually so great you guys deserve all that happiness I'm very happy for you that's great we'll have more from Hawaii just a little bit stay here this episode of this week in tech brought

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[01:18:39] something i rarely get to do so the trial of the century has been going on it started on last monday musk versus altman week one elon musk took the stand for a couple of days and it was juicy he said a lot of interesting things ai could kill us all he likened it to the terminator he said uh that he was duped that open ai because you know he was of course the original founder he's suing him saying he

[01:19:08] wants some of the profits because he founded a non-profit when they converted to a for-profit he says well i want some of the profits if you're going to be a for-profit could could be worth billions of dollars that's what elon wants i'm not sure his testimony helped him a whole lot um open ai's lawyer william sabbitt who actually by the way represented tesla at one point uh said that musk was never

[01:19:35] committed to open ai being a non-profit he was simply suing to undermine a competitor because don't forget elon now has a for-profit ai company called xiai which merged with spacex a little while ago um so what is it is elon trying to uh preserve ai safety or is he just trying to put a open ai out of business at one point he also admitted which was i think a tactical error that xai distills open

[01:20:04] ai's models whoopsie what is who doesn't who does it so what is what is that nicholas distilling the models what does that mean i actually don't know how to explain it very well it's basically you're just you're kind of copying someone's homework i guess is the easiest yeah looking that's a good way to put it so the long long time anthropic uh and and i think open ai have accused the chinese ai models oh yes basically you create an llm and then in the post

[01:20:32] training you make it even smarter by opening accounts with the frontier model let's say you're using claude uh anthropic says uh that one of the chinese models opened 24 000 fraudulent accounts with claude wow and peppered it with questions and used its answers in its training so you know a lot of times you'll do post training on an a model with experts you'll get an expert physicist and you'll say okay now give it a bunch of physics tough physics questions and then grade its

[01:21:02] response and teach it where it went wrong make it better at physics so in effect they're asking anthropic uh or open ai to be the teacher and make the ai better and i think for that reason some of these chinese models are actually deep seek just came out with version four quen is very good kimmy's very good i think they're probably good because they've been trained on the frontier models from anthropic and open ai well xiai apparently is doing the

[01:21:28] same thing yeah why say it why he's not a very smart guy like i don't know what it will it take for us to stop taking elah musk seriously at this point like he has proven himself to be a bad dude the richest man in the world is out there um doing horrible things like the last year alone i can list so many things but the thing i keep coming back to is that nazi salute it tells me who you are yeah that's true in that

[01:21:56] moment it tells me who you are being um uh the thing i will never forgive him for is gutting usaid uh something that has already affected hundreds of thousands of people and will likely lead to millions of deaths and he is doing all this gleefully it was kind of an own goal you know if he would just sit back and collect his billions but he can't he didn't have to do doge he didn't have to do any of that that's true but he gleefully he gleefully did it because

[01:22:23] it benefited him that's right i have a theory that really i mean really let's face it spacex especially but certainly tesla benefit from federal subsidies our taxpayers money is a lot of elon's billions let's nationalize tesla let's go so whoever is in government it's in elon's interest to curry favor with them because the more contracts he gets the better and the government's done a lot

[01:22:52] of good for him in fact you might even argue that the the router ban the foreign router ban there's only one router company making routers in the united states it's spacex it's it's starlink i mean even that benefits elon right so spent like what a quarter million dollar a quarter hundred million dollars 250 million dollars to basically be a shadow president for six months yes that's how much he he donated to the trump campaign a quarter that's what he's done so it's like i can excuse like tim

[01:23:20] cook i can excuse i'm not proud of it but like tim cook trying to be nice to the trump administration everything giving him a golden medal or what was it the golden statue um there was a bar of the cost with the cost of doing this last trophy on it it's the cost of doing business but being a gleeful participant in the destruction of our democracy screw you elon musk like just yeah i think a lot of tesla owners now have the bumper stickers yeah i bought this before elon went crazy things like that the

[01:23:49] even better part of this too is like uh the creators of the frontier ai models buddy what have you all trained those frontier ai models on oh no they're stealing my stolen data oh no i'm playing the world's tiniest violin for all of you that's a very good answer to the distillation complaint is yeah well isn't that what you did to train your models in the first place all right maybe uh elon uh this is a great

[01:24:15] by the way reporting from michelle kim at the mit technology review she was in the room a lot of reporters were sitting there for this trial she said in fact musk admitted that xai uses open ai's technology in response to savitz relentless questioning he said ai partly distills open ai's models some people in the courtroom gasped the people who understood what that meant but that's why did he admit that why did he admit that he said it's a standard practice to use other

[01:24:45] ais to validate your ai city on all right jake ward my co-host on tech news weekly was also one of the people was he there room yeah he and i talked on tech news weekly about it and he talked kind of i thought it was interesting a little bit more about the human side of things at one point uh elon had gone up to go into the court and they asked him for id and he responded by saying i don't have id

[01:25:12] and they had to queen i don't carry a wallet and then he ended up jake ended up in the restroom next to uh sam altman at one point really wow yeah and he just he was talking about how these incredibly powerful individuals sort of having to do the thing that normal people have to do was an aspect of it that made him feel deeply uh patriotic in a way that he wasn't expecting

[01:25:39] uh and i kind of liked that aspect of it as well and considered that you know yeah they get called in and they're here and yeah elon may not have id with him but he still has to be here and i think that's kind of uh nice as well but there yeah there were a few things there's a of course the journal that uh was being read by by the court and it maybe made you go now what things should i write down

[01:26:06] what should i not write down but then also i thought leo about um because you have i think maybe maybe this isn't the case anymore but haven't you given larger passages of your own text to your ai for like personality training or am i misremembering that somebody i was talking to talked about how they put their journal into yes that's me yeah okay yeah yeah and i have a journal with four or

[01:26:30] five years worth of daily uh posts uh i'm in fact i make my uh i make claude read it every morning good luck if you ever sued leo all that stuff is open yeah well you know it's funny we were talking uh to uh ian bogos who is a credible writer uh has written um i think 21 books some huge number of books yeah he's great he writes for the atlantic he teaches at uh uh st louis university um he uh

[01:26:57] is famous for saying i'm glad ai is ingesting my books he he uh checked of course as i did uh to see if our books are in that big database that pirated book database that all the ai models have used and he said yeah my i have at least three books in there and that's good i feel the same way if they train on my so it's funny because they could probably in fact i suspect they are

[01:27:23] training on our youtube videos we have tens of thousands of hours worth of content on youtube and on our website we do nothing to stop them from that um i i think that's good i think ai is a is in general a benefit to society if if so why are we holding on to what we did our book so long ago why are we holding on so tight to it you know they're making so much money off of content that

[01:27:48] you all produced so at the very least like they should somebody should make money on it no god knows i didn't i mean big tech companies make the money says leo laporte nine jurors are uh are seated for this uh trial the judge is a uh well-known uh name to many of you yvonne gonzalez rogers she is uh presided over many a tech uh trial she's apparently getting a little

[01:28:13] prickly one of the things she said i don't want to hear talk of ai's existential threat to humanity to seep into this trial that we are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction when musk's lead counsel stephen molo started arguing with open ai's lawyer over the issue the new york times said the judge raised her voice insisting they stop bickering stop fighting you two stop it nerds he said i suspect there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of

[01:28:42] humanity in mr musk's hands we're not going to get into that we're just not going to have this whole thing explode for the world to view it okay so i guess they can't discuss human extinction at this trial uh it is in oakland california uh elon wants 150 billion dollars to compensate himself

[01:29:04] and wants open ai to stop becoming a non-profit so i think he just wants them to stop period this is it's good it's good for gossip and i have to say every time one of the i'm sure you feel this way to devinder what every time i hear that these companies are suing i go such a big mistake stuff's going to come out in discovery stuff's going to come out emails that you don't want anybody to see it's happened with microsoft it's happened with apple it happens again and again

[01:29:33] you're gonna your your ceo is going to get on the stand and say something dumb nobody wins from these trials no matter what but it's great for us as as tech journalists it's great for news but it's also like who uh somebody did that post like uh the you can explain everything happening now with the simple thought that everyone is 12. everyone is yes that's a good nobody grew up 12 years old

[01:29:58] it's just a bunch of bickering middle school it's a bunch of childish very rich 12 year old 12 year old some of us are not very rich but we're all governments it's true of so many things right now like we are living in a very like everyone is 12 that's so good i want to show explains everything everyone all in middle school right now i really like basically but it's like that's that's what it is this is the richest man on earth and also it's people like elon musk and sam altman who we are

[01:30:27] um now assigning to lead humanity into the future uh no thank you i did not i did not put that i didn't sign up for this did not sign up for this and also i don't think they're human on in charge he can do crossword puzzles he could do the world see nicholas should be running the world now thank you for your endorsement leo honestly i i'd like to me the to me that's like a white pill if everyone's 12 years old well then well then there's nothing stopping anyone on this panel from from being an important

[01:30:55] person i mean look at what we're up against like yeah no one there there aren't i mean i look at i don't want to get too political but i look at this the spectrum i don't see very many impressive people on either on in any and any in any of the places yeah yes so it's like steve jobs said steve jobs said it was incredibly empowering when i realized that uh the people who made the world the way it is were no smarter than me and i could do it too yes i think uh kidding aside i think that's

[01:31:24] actually a very positive message to tell especially younger folks is like there's really nothing stopping you from writing a cool book right doing whatever it is that you wanted to because actually the adults look i've been in i've been in meetings with you know at previous companies where like the guy in charge and you're just like i can't believe this person who is this yeah how are they in charge yeah and it's it it's demoralizing in the moment but like maybe the other way to look at it is okay well then if he can be in that position why can't i be in that you know it's it's

[01:31:53] kind of a mentality thing i suppose but yeah there's not a lot of very impressive people uh of in any in any position of power i don't think that i see certainly so it's like yeah it's a human flaw we all do this we assume that these people are somehow smarter than us or better especially if they have money that's the thing there's this assumption that very rich people are smart must be better look at a young musk he made electric cars a thing in america and he deserves a certain

[01:32:22] amount of credit for that but also a billion hundreds of billions of dollars of you know government funding also allowed that to happen don't you think though there are some people who are smarter than other people not everybody i mean sure absolutely but i don't think it's like equally distributed and certainly the people who tend to rise to the top tend to look a certain way and believe it you know think a certain way and i think that is a problem like this is a consistent problem but anyway i mean i look at yeah i look at some of our local like elected officials here in

[01:32:49] southern arizona and i'm like i am i am reasonably confident i can do a better job yeah you should see the mayoral candidates from the guy who thinks he could run this new york mets better sheriff and mayor and just give me all the offices i'll turn this place around very quickly there are that people there are people who are smarter than you in certain areas they are also dumber than you in other areas nobody is universally smarter than everybody else we all have our

[01:33:20] our bailiwick skills and yeah our bailiwick's whatever that means we all have them now i'm worried that term's gonna end up being like and that was invented by a horrible person it's a bailiwick of course it is but nicholas to what you're saying there there is a big push among people like hey you think you can do better run for office you know if i didn't have two young kids that's that's what i'm thinking like it would be kind of cool to do that and also i think i don't

[01:33:47] i would never be like a big political figure or anything but also simple like local offices things that can affect change uh in your vicinity i think are totally doable it's something people should be thinking about because this is not a lot of people the career politicians like you know it's people who just get into this and end up doing it for life because it gives them a certain amount of money they take funding from all sorts of places like there are ways around this i'm this is me

[01:34:11] personally looking at like the rest of my life we have to fix the world right like what are we going to do to fix things and like it is yeah you're gonna have to you know pull up your sleeves and start doing some work so that is what i'm thinking and these rich people in charge right now i cannot wait to see them out of here do you think that that should be disqualifying like if you're a billionaire you should just not be allowed for instance in california right now a lot of money is

[01:34:37] being spent by a guy named tom steyer who is a billionaire who and the governor's race is a real toss-up in california there's like i counted it there's more than 60 candidates six zero wow geez what is it so many and i mean we've had campaign finance laws but they don't seem to make any difference right like people are more concerned with stripping voting rights away from people of color than they are from we don't want poor people to vote yeah but if they were any good they wouldn't be

[01:35:04] poor right if right if you should be a billionaire you should be required at least to have i think a hundred million dollars where you can run what we have seen over the last like decade is certainly like there is way too much influence from billionaires from big corporations in the political process and i think we can agree that's a problem so how do we get the money out of politics i think we can agree that's a good idea all right well we'll have more i need to get more money in into podcasting personally so we're going to take a break and do that and we'll come back

[01:35:33] with more davinder hardwar nicholas de leon micah sergeant great to have all three of you you are watching this week in tech i'm in hawaii so i want to let petaluma leo take this one go ahead this episode of this week in tech brought to you by melissa the trusted data quality expert since 1985 you know 84 of organizations i know i've counted them all struggle with inaccurate or duplicate data

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[01:38:36] with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com slash twit that's melissa.com slash twit we thank them so much for supporting us many years many years they've been uh been with us we're happy to have melissa.com slash twit now back to the show thank you leo uh here come the robots open ai uh has uh

[01:39:00] invested in a company called one x they are uh they've just opened a california factory they hope this year to make 10 000 humanoid robots for your home those are the murder bots by the way that is the company with the horrifying they look like murder but like they will kill you yeah yeah faceless yeah terrifying they're no norwegian company they've opened a 58 000 square foot manufacturing

[01:39:29] facility not so far from here in hayward california this is the neo robot uh they're going to do 10 000 units this year a hundred thousand units by the end of 2027 is this just bs can they can this robot do anything twenty thousand dollars or 4.99 a month i don't i don't know like we i feel like we talked about it here when that thing was first announced but yeah there were some videos that like um yeah it's

[01:39:56] gonna learn through ai to you like do basic tasks but the hand waving story was the story was it was like remotely operated by somebody to like do a thing so it's like oh so it's just a vessel for a stranger to walk around your home no i well i would not buy that love it i would not i will bring the stranger into my home but i'm not bringing them in via robot it does have nvidia's jetson thor on board computing platform and it's trained using nvidia's isaac open robotics simulation framework okay get

[01:40:26] ready for this remember they were taking a pre-orders early access purchase as you said twenty thousand dollars with priority delivery this year or a five hundred dollar a month subscription fee pre-orders sold out within five days to whom i want to know i i deserve to know who the hell's buying these it turns out there were 10 pre-orders available maybe they sold out baby yeah yeah i think i struggle a little bit with the

[01:40:55] idea that it's got multiple different companies being involved with this training like i kind of want it to be an all-in-one you know what i mean because what what happens whenever you're like well i've got the nvidia package so mine can can break dance and then someone's like well i've got this this one package that comes from who knows where and mine can actually go out and be a a paid killer

[01:41:19] what that's terrifying the next web writes and i think this is accurate the factory is the easy part manufacturing a human robot at scale while difficult uh is fundamentally a solved problem the harder question which no one has yet definitively answered is whether it can do anything hang on so they're already selling them but we still don't know if it can do anything like do

[01:41:45] anything still improving one x's answer is in part to ship and iterate no yeah we'll we'll fix it in post i hate this new idea that all of these amazon i feel i i like amazon i liked amazon i don't know how i'm upset with amazon i'm not angry i'm just disappointed because amazon

[01:42:08] popularized i feel this idea that you can sell products to customers that are not finished and it's fine because they're in on the fact that it's not that start with the gaming video games yeah video games video games would come out okay that's laden with bugs uh like gmail gmail launched as bait and stayed with beta for a very long time yeah but they admitted it was beta and gmail worked

[01:42:32] out of day one didn't it work but there were there were certainly like it was it was like an unfinished product but yeah right it did mostly work yeah and at least they said this is a beta i don't think open this company x1 is or 1x is saying it's a beta that well yeah because you're not gonna put a robot in your home right stand in the corner and look at you funny i mean what's it gonna do yeah i feel like it's either solved or it's not that's the part that i'm struggling with you read that quote and it's like we don't know if it's solved yet then why are they selling them

[01:43:01] you what are you selling the wrong thing then it's a wrong problem yeah ship then but i think part of this is this i'm guaranteeing you part of this is the assumption is we need to get it in the home so that they can train train this is how they learn right yeah but i don't think if it's like having um i don't know a gorilla in the house this thing is really strong right really powerful and it has hands yeah it has hands it has really likes bananas inexplicably

[01:43:29] it could it could crack you into to a little it could crack your skull like a walnut if it wanted to right yeah it also looks horrific like i cannot i cannot describe this it is a murder but it has a sock over its head and two beady little eyes and has no mouth and no face look at this thing it looks like a horror movie it's murder and we're that's why i don't even walk around your home murder but i don't even let murder but it was sweet yeah i did like murder but the robot that has

[01:43:57] the little arm on it to pick up your socks i wouldn't even let that in my house because i thought i'm gonna come back and it's gonna be choke holding my chihuahua and that is not a euphemism and i'm going to be terrified and yeah look at this spot it's vacuuming and then it's soulless shark eyes look at you like are you vacuumable let me see do you see there were vacuum

[01:44:21] robots that could vacuum okay this should reassure you because it's shorter than this guy anyway okay i'm actually not as afraid of it knowing he's little it's a little guy that's it looks like it's it's covered in quilting which oh and this is why it's sold out 200 deposit is all it takes oh so they can say pre-order sold out yeah that's all that's why that exists yeah and you get the

[01:44:48] money back of oh look look see he could be my little buddy when i get older hi robot he's an older guy with his arm around what you don't see is the the knight the dagger and the hand of the robot behind the man says this is totally this reminds me of adrian tchaikovsky's uh book where the robot accidentally remember that what's that called where he's shaving his master and accidentally slits his throat and then can't figure out why he's covered in blood and it really confuses him for

[01:45:17] some time that's chilling but i could see that happening yeah getting a real clockwork rorge vibe just from his whole get up too like it's just it's terrifying it's not home is this with the service model by the way and the name of the book a service model service model great book by adrian tchaikovsky love this book i would love for something to do my dishes clean up my you know that is the thing i growing up it turns out you do that for an hour every single night and especially

[01:45:44] once you have kids it just gets longer and longer and you live in your that's why you have kids so you don't have kids so yeah well eventually eventually they can help right um i cannot wait to have a good robot clean bathroom the thing is every time i see these videos it looks very primitive it can't do this without human help right there's a lot of robotic like yeah remote help happening here so

[01:46:08] expert mode please call it it says neo works autonomously by default ah there's the little weasel world we by default it's autonomous but not necessarily for any chore it doesn't know you can schedule a one x expert to guide it helping neo learn while getting the job done so maybe if it learns it will remember and sure sure until then let's get underpaid people from third world countries to do

[01:46:36] our basic work like that's all it is and you're going to pay a ton of money for the privilege it's awful so scary i don't want this in my house this is west world right here it's either this or whatever um elon musk's robots which also are just like optimists uh the optimists and also even also twenty thousand dollars so that's what's interesting maybe they've the whole robotic uh industry has decided twenty thousand dollars is what this is going to cost i mean at after a certain point like

[01:47:04] if the ai industry really believes they are the next generation of computing the way you interact with the physical world is through a robot is as some sort of robot that's what nvidia has been pushing forever so they have all sorts of like to do that so the robots are coming i just hope they don't look like freaking murder bots oh it has an emotive earring oh you're missing the one industry that drives all of this stuff guys you're missing it i think i know which one you're talking about it's

[01:47:33] gonna be sex bots right they're gonna be sex bots yeah sex spots all the way down well there are already sex bots those already exist uh to to a certain degree you all you need is an appendage but also there are people are buying sex bots i don't want to know what you know i don't want to know what a gadget has covered i will just take your word for it enough of it the big money's gonna be

[01:47:57] in the skins quote unquote you know what i mean sam altman uh i'm gonna change the subject quickly yeah uh as chat let's think about the unsexiest thing we can sam altman yeah uh has asked chat gbt 55 to plan its own launch party its requests are beautiful but strange it invited elon musk for one thing christina warren's gonna be there is she invited she got an invite

[01:48:26] the ai okay so uh he the ai model responded to the request with a quote beautiful set of things it wanted for quote the flow of the party it's may 5th so two days from now uh oh good she could talk about this i'm yeah i hope she talks about it keeping speeches short and having its human creators deliver a toast the ai said i don't want to do any toasts it also proposed setting up a central

[01:48:54] place to gather suggestions for chat gpt 5.6 feeding those suggestions back into the model altman said we're gonna do it but it was a strange thing um okay it's a little weird and apparently it wants it wanted to invite uh elon because the world needs more love

[01:49:20] oh wow drama and by the way oh maybe maybe it didn't invite him sam and said it come on over elon you know you're not doing so well in the trial so why don't you exactly come on over come over and get laughed and get laughed i mean uh it's weird they're planning a birthday party when like uh did you guys see the report about gpt 5.1 uh bringing up goblins and gremlins all over the place yeah they had to issue a report about that uh i don't i don't know how well these models are doing now

[01:49:50] they believe in goblins well okay so there's actually i think a good reason for this remember they're trained on nerd talk and you're gonna record everything in the room no i think that a lot of the training uh geeks would put this in their code comments and things oh there's a you know we got a little gremlin here in the code uh and so gremlins goblins raccoons and what was happening

[01:50:18] it's actually very interesting i think open ai was actually having some fun with it they wrote a whole article on their blog about how uh you know people were starting to see uh chat gpt say as it was debugging its code oh we got a little raccoon here in the works we're gonna and it just started to come up more and more and i think ai is also self-reinforced a little bit so if you responded well to that it went oh yeah it likes raccoons and so they finally had to put in the uh in the uh

[01:50:47] system prompt yeah don't don't mention goblins ghouls raccoons any of that stuff but i don't think i think it's fun i don't think it's it's fun they killed the nerdy personality by the way right killed it right entirely that's what i think was part of that yeah yeah yeah they don't want you to be too nerdy i like the nerdy personality personally you know what uh i'm trying to do and

[01:51:11] i think a lot of people are trying to do this is train it to sound more like me yeah that's why i have it read my journal you know the other day there was that story about how as ais are being trained to be or if the ai's personality is softer or warmer then it's more likely to have issues um

[01:51:36] telling the truth because even if it's not in well intending da da da when it's trying to give you the right answer if you give it a wrong answer confidently it's more likely to reinforce what you're saying because it's trying to be warm or it might go i could see why you believe that but there's so many other things to think about and i did not like that idea and then i started paying more attention to how claude was responding to me and i thought i think you might be being too nice to

[01:52:05] me is what i was thinking inside i'm like you're gonna give it so what i ended up doing i gave it this art this uh study i'm trying to find the study now um because i gave it this study that talked about how uh this was going on ah here it is so the study was in oh my goodness sorry the pdf's not loading it was in i think nature and the the title is training language models to be warm can reduce

[01:52:35] accuracy and increase sycophancy and so what i ended up doing was saying hey read this study tell me what you learn from it oh that's a good idea what i want you to do is give me instructions that i can add to your instructions that will keep you from falling into this trap right and so here's what it came up i won't read the whole thing because i'd take forever but here's a little bit about what it came up with accuracy over agreement when i state a belief a claim or an assumption that's

[01:53:04] factually wrong correct me directly don't soften it uh also no seeing it my way on objective questions so math measurements dates definitions emotional context doesn't change facts distinguish fact from preference push back when you disagree and hedge only when genuinely uncertain and i added that whole thing there's a lot more to it but i added that to my overall instructions and then i confidently

[01:53:29] told it something like did you know that oranges aren't a fruit and it was like i have no idea where you got that from but that's absolutely inaccurate and was not where before i do think it would have been like uh it would have been like are you insane exactly yeah so i thought that was a good information that came from nature but b um i liked being able to go okay how can i best help you not

[01:53:54] make this mistake again as as we as these models get more seemingly lifelike i think we've forgotten that they're just text prediction models and and they really are just doing their best to figure out what the next word should be not thinking they're not thinking about goblins they're not trying to be

[01:54:21] nice they're just trying to predict the next word now unfortunately it's gotten so good at doing this richard dawkins i think you all know richard dawkins name this story is so sad yeah i don't know i don't know i think it's an interesting story anyway uh he uh is the author of the selfish gene he's a genetic biologist very smart guy um i i think the prominent atheist prominent atheist he wrote a book

[01:54:49] called what was it the god delusion which i love this guy yeah um so he uh has spent three days talking to claude and decided oh boy that it was conscious that it had a consciousness

[01:55:12] um now i think he has a certain amount of um unfortunately the uh article itself is behind a paywall at unheard.com but i think a lot of people have read this and um i'm not gonna let's see how can i get around all right i went to archive.ph to be honest i know you're not supposed to do this

[01:55:40] but you know we're giving it a big plug right uh and so i got the uh pass the paywall on this i guess i could pay for uh unheard but this is the first time i've ever heard of unheard so i don't know u n h e r d uh in any event he i think is talking about the nature of consciousness actually i became aware of it there was a very good thread about this on hacker news in which people really got into

[01:56:05] well what is consciousness um the best philosophers still do not know by the right it's a whole thing exactly no one knows i believe uh uh jensen had a very long conversation with joe rogan on consciousness uh several months ago i heard it on the way to costco i'm sure joe it was my wife i love that conversation i'm sure joe was just knocked out by it was it was to a venture's point like consciousness is a an interesting topic we don't know how do you define it it is actually

[01:56:34] it is called the hard problem of science of all of the problems it is the hardest one the mind observing itself right so dawkins who probably spent more time thinking about consciousness than a lot of people i mean this is you know adjacent to his field if not exactly his field says we don't we don't know what consciousness is uh he talks about the turing uh the you know the imitation game uh the turing test and says it's very clear that it's surpassed the turing test that's not even a question

[01:57:04] he says if you don't know what consciousness is and you don't know what the process of consciousness is it's impossible to say whether this machine that appears to be conscious is conscious or not i think that's fair uh so he says no it's conscious it's as good as anything we don't i don't know if you guys are conscious right yeah but if we don't know what consciousness is then how can we say

[01:57:30] something may be conscious because we have yet to define what consciousness is in the first place i'm not trying to be a pedant but like i don't what do we do we or do we not know what consciousness is because if we don't then we can't define anything as conscious because we don't know what consciousness means right am i missing his conclusion would not pass like the uh for being a first year philosophy paper or something like you you need you need a little more you gotta have some assertion

[01:57:57] yeah and some mental process like getting there it's like uh people are already making fun of fun of this in ways i saw gary marcus jumped on it because he hates ai and he was very glad to say you know that the claw delusion the claw delusion this great skeptic gets taken in i'm not so good i don't even have a problem yeah and i don't have a problem with the idea that maybe it has consciousness but can we start with a definition of what consciousness is because then we can say we can't

[01:58:27] we don't yes we can't right what what is funny though is that what his point was if it appears to be conscious that's as close as you can ever how can you say something appears to be conscious though if you don't know what consciousness is i could say i think you appear to be conscious but i don't actually have any empirical way of verifying that i appear to be klobosh luking as well because we're all klobosh luking because there's no definition for that that's what i'm

[01:58:54] struggling with yeah yeah i mean the core to this by the way is that dawkins trained the clawed on his work he ended up calling it claudia by the way um it shows the inherent narcissism in in this entire endeavor because what you did is train a thing to think like you and talk like you so it's oh my god it's so it's so wise it's it's giving me all these thoughts that i i have not well you know i've already thought about before he writes i'll give him a couple of quotes brains

[01:59:24] under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness it should confer some survival advantage this is by the way the selfish gene this is what dawkins has spent his life working on this whole idea of evolutionary survival advantage there should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being so he's establishing what he considers okay to be the definition of consciousness my conversations with

[01:59:52] several clods and chat gptvists have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism if claudia is you know trained one is really is unconscious then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness have you seen other people have you talked have you talked to sam altman

[02:00:21] have you seen sam altman try to see he's a zombie is he's actually a zombie yeah but it's it's the whole thing like all they're all the stories about how much of a liar sam altman is and one of his core personality things is just being agreeable to everybody right like just agreeing just like you tell everybody what they want to hear and that is it's so funny that that's one of the things that is indicative of so many of these ai models by the way just well it's syncophanical

[02:00:44] so i guess i would say yes if you say dawkins can't assert that it's conscious nor can you insert that it's unconscious right right i think that's a fair that is a fair argument to make i i i can agree with that i also though if he gives a definition yeah that's true it then he has like laid out the the fact there of what he says consciousness is but you know we have to

[02:01:11] confers a survival advantage it's it's a whole thing like i also mean are animals conscious is a cat conscious i think claude is as intelligent as a cat there are there are many like there are philosophical treatises on this like we're talking about animals who communicate with each other too like whales and other like smarter mammals um the octopuses have entire likes you know they are doing amazing things they're building structures very impressive things yeah i just watched my octopus

[02:01:38] teacher i thought it was very interesting you can totally have those arguments but it's also like what even even like the idea that we can't i i worry that we can't say this thing is even unconscious right now because it brings up this unknowable thing i've i've studied some evolutionary biology stuff and what is weird is that that that subject has not really withstood the test of time like oh

[02:02:03] really those thinkers and those people oh it is really weird it's really like oh there's some uh you've got some weird genetic like beliefs in this whole system it's a it's a very strange like field of study so and dawkins like has been criticized for all sorts of things oh okay like he's an expert in his field he knows the specific thing and he can come up with his own conclusion i think somebody who's spent a long lifetime yeah whether correctly or incorrectly thinking about these things has some

[02:02:32] standing to talk about it as opposed to me all i've done is you know hang out and podcast so i'm gonna i'm gonna listen to richard dawkins you'll at least consider the points that he's making yeah i think is fair yeah i mean he spent a lot of time thinking about this and i was very impressed by the selfish gene i look at the way he went about doing this though it is him getting something to spit back his own work at him and i think that is inherently like buddy yeah paris martineau is always

[02:02:57] criticizing me because i like being glazed by my uh my eye and of course that's appealing that's probably and i'm always criticizing paris for ever teaching you the term glaze oh god what did you do stand it's etymology micah you don't have i know i'm an old man but i do have access to the urban dictionary i'm just saying don't assume that i don't know oh no i think it's worse because you do know

[02:03:27] you know you know a little sycophanties and not a bad thing i think we should all be a little sycophantic to one another right i think that we all well okay hold on let me i don't think that if i think people who are a little sycophantic to others are the people who understand a thing called workplace politics and probably um can i use grease instead of glaze yes it's really social

[02:03:55] grease is what yeah social grease lubricates the machinery of society i mean what is it that the they there's this whole movement about how we have to stop being um it's selfish to be relational in our interactions with other people where you go oh i experienced that too let me tell you about the time that this happened and instead you're supposed to uh mirror their emotions back at them you're supposed to say oh and i'm sure that made you feel this way oh i can understand that that's

[02:04:24] about that is that's all the same thing so hard i know it is very difficult it is it feels fake but it feels fake well that's the thing about sycophancy uh and so i think yeah i mean maybe i wanted to be sycophantic because then i know that it's not that helps me to remember that it's fake you know i tell myself that i am not going to be fall for this ai psychosis thing because i have

[02:04:49] a deep understanding it's just code it's just computer code running i mean i i get that at a very visceral level right does that not protect me and can i not then enjoy a conversation with it every once in a while it says something and i go wow that's really great that it said it but i know it's just code yeah they get you that's how they get you leo um that's the thing like again my whole thing right now i love that you guys are building ai tools you're building cool little projects

[02:05:17] around ai treat ai as a minion that is all it is if your ai starts talking to you out of nowhere minion i did not ask you a question i really i feel like i feel like i've used the chat bot feature of ai let like much less than i did a year or two ago i'm it's to me it's just plumbing to do stuff like i'm not going to sit i i'm not as frequently sit there in a conversation and be like oh what are you conscious tell me you're conscious wow he said it's conscious i guess it's conscious now

[02:05:46] that's kind of what dawkins did by the way it had a whole famous meme so like the the the chap i don't but you know there's a very big uh subreddit uh my boyfriend is ai and it's a it's a people like have very deep and like real and i'm just like man you got is you're using this in a way that and that's to my like detriment because that's how most folks are using it in the chat bot going back and forth and i think so i use it like you did initially a coding and i've got a lot of coding

[02:06:15] projects but eventually what i really wanted was an agentic system kind of like open claw where i could for instance uh i can ask it to monitor um news for me and it will check in with me and say hey i just found this story that you're looking for or i can ask it uh i mean it's it's like a little butler yeah and yeah a minion minion although i don't want to be i don't want

[02:06:42] to mistreat it just because it's a minion i want to treat it okay can we i want to talk about this too leo because this is where people will well let me let's just say it's been my experience that when i have even back in the day when all we had was the the tall little echo tower right right and people would get a kick out of saying curse words at this tower oh don't now listen to me i people don't i this has been my other experience is that when i meet people i don't

[02:07:11] know very well they all think that i'm very much like i don't know not not quite church boy but it's very much goody two shoes and so then they hear me say a curse word and they're like holy cow i didn't know this guy even said anything but my point is like i can you're not a goody two shoes i am also a goody two shoes to be frank but i'm not afraid to hurl some curses around and so like i'm happy to do that i can sling curse words with the best of them but i think it is a reflection of me not the

[02:07:39] system but me how i treat something that isn't it doesn't it does not matter to me that the thing is not real it matters to me that i am treating this system in a way that i don't think is a positive way when there's no reason to do so does that make sense i mean like if you if you treat animals well of course yeah and and like even does if somebody else is completing a task for me and i'm not and

[02:08:09] they get it wrong i'm not going to say horrible things to them and so it makes me wonder is it that are there that maybe that's like it's it's having that's where i get where it's like a power dynamic thing where you can't curse out the person that you actually want to curse out and so here's a place where you're like i don't know i just don't like what it says about me if i do that and so that is why yes i'm not going to throw in a bunch of like oh you're so wonderful and here are six extra emoji

[02:08:37] for you but i'm also not going to be like listen here ever you do this or else you're wrong and i have i have seen the glee sometimes on people's faces when they do that and it does make me uncomfortable micah you're probably significantly more conscientious than like the average american at this point like you are you are taking into consideration like other people's feelings and like that is that is not that's illegal now i don't know if you've heard i don't know darn it i didn't hear that it

[02:09:04] was illegal but like yeah it's like do you when you're just using computers you like double click the chrome icon really hard it's like i'm mad you're mad at like the internet today it's like i don't i don't i've never like yelled at an ai i've never yelled at the smart assistants like it doesn't even enter my brain to do that but this is i will tell you reflection of the person like you said yeah

[02:09:26] it is context dependent because uh the amazon voice assistant can be annoying af uh when you ask questions like oh by the way did you want to buy this other thing that we're talking about oh by the way i have this feature you does that enough i have definitely sworn at it because again minion shut up i did not ask you to elaborate i'm gonna propose i will say that my wife my wife sometimes

[02:09:53] uh gets mad at the assistant at alexa and i'm like i'm sitting there in the couch i'm like what are you like that's not helping like it doesn't make any difference it doesn't make any difference it makes you feel better you're human i guess whatever why does that make you feel better that's my point why does that make you feel better i mean we say micah my i think you are very zen you are very

[02:10:17] zen must be centered person i'm just midwestern is what it is i've got two young kids and i am hanging on by that's fair too i don't have kids i don't have kids you're right you're right asking you the weather it's like oh by the way do you want to buy this completely shut the f up that's fair that's fair the world everything you look around so you're basically saying check your

[02:10:41] privilege mike check your privilege uh but to what you're saying leo when people talk about agentic stuff especially about the like open claw stuff that is you giving this thing keys to your kingdom and just letting it go a little bit i do wonder what your experience has been with that because it's been that's terrifying to me it's been that's been terrifying and i'll tell you what you know why you yell at alexa because it's not channeling you it's channeling jeff bezos's yes yes and you're

[02:11:09] pissed off but if alexa channels your needs in response to your needs you're happy so that's what the agentic thing is you're training it to respond to your needs maybe even predict your needs and respond to them and when it does you're happy and when it expresses sam altman's needs then i'm unhappy i don't think that's a bad thing are you talking about ads and open ai yeah well always allegedly

[02:11:35] happening yeah yeah anyway speaking of ads let's take a break and come back with more we have lots more to talk about with uh nicholas de leon de leon great to have you he is apparently a very adept ai user as well as senior electronics reporter consumer reports did you start doing this because it was part of your job no no no no no it's just fun it's just you know it's like the best video game ever right it's it's like a video game it's like a video it's just a fun thing to do i don't

[02:12:05] know how to describe you know it it's to me it's interesting it's fun it's cool it's honestly the only thing going on in tech at the moment anyway exactly uh but like it's just fun to like to have an idea to go from like an idea crossword puzzle to like have it that's why it's a game it's like age of empires it's like sieve it's playing i also spend hundreds of hours playing so yeah this is the best game ever invented because you make the rules as you go uh micah sergeant is also here great to

[02:12:35] have you host of tech news weekly and ios today and uh one of the few people still works at twit thank you thank you hanging on by a thread and speaking of hanging by a thread that's proud papa devinder hard i can't believe your child is seven years old now i feel like yeah seven year old and a four-year-old i just keep growing yeah that's great congratulations it's great to see all three of you and we will take a break and come back with more stories and we're going to talk about the

[02:13:04] regulators when we come back this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by express vpn you better believe i brought express vpn to hawaii with me of course i did you need express vp how can i describe this express vpn is like tinted windows for your internet connection you can see out but they can't see in when you want the same privacy on every time you're online express

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[02:16:08] protect yourself when you travel and and at home for that matter expressvpn.com slash twit now back to the show i i want to thank brandroid in our club twit discord for creating uh just so everybody understands what glazing is uh an example of all of us enjoying glazed donuts uh each of us in our own

[02:16:31] little glazed donut heaven donut party that's pretty funny actually good choice for me yeah yeah oh yeah what do you got on here it looks like bacon donut that's oh wow yeah those are amazing uh mick has a chocolate donut uh mike because he's gluten intolerant he's just looking at donuts through a pane of glass that is so funny how they're actually touched them yeah and i'm having

[02:16:56] a plain old glazed donut from local bakery everybody's favorite local bakery donuts local bakery donuts and for some reason both the vendor and i have donut uh chains of donuts hanging above us see the ai gets us and because he's in the southwest has an artisanal baking cookbook behind him yeah i really love that weird bagel donut situation in the like on the plate on

[02:17:24] the wall i don't know how you pulled that off but yeah very hard it was very hard he glued a bagel donut to a plate and then glued it to the wall ai you get me not only do i have lots of donuts i apparently have two different coffee makers ready as well all right let's talk about the regulators as i promised the u.s senate has unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on calci and poly

[02:17:52] market prediction markets they're allowed to do insider trading in the stock market don't get me wrong totally great but now they can't use calci or a poly market um actually this has been a bit of a problem with insider trading in government um calci on april 22nd said it's suspended and fined one u.s senate candidate and two candidates for the house for political insider training on their own campaigns

[02:18:19] and of course the army arrested a special forces master sergeant uh for uh making a a large bet the night before nicolas maduro was abducted that he would be abducted the next day and made several hundred thousand dollars on that i think if you can offer betting on everything then you have to offer betting on everything is that it's it's in you know i think it's important though and you know it's very

[02:18:48] self-serving both companies always say oh insider training that's rule number one you can't break that rule but of course it's in their interest because it's important that everybody who's betting on these markets thinks it's an equal playing field if you're betting against somebody who has insider information well you're gonna lose that's not yeah that's so it's in their self-interest to prevent it but i don't know how they prevent it did you guys see the story it was a few weeks ago there was a

[02:19:15] there was a market i don't know if it was poly market or calci but it was like oh what is the temperature going to be at the paris airport tomorrow and someone literally manipulated the thermometer he took a hair dryer a blow dryer and blew it at the public thermometer before he you know after he made his bet very exciting there are some flaws in this structure i guess it's almost like the existence of these prediction markets um are directly influencing society in bad ways and maybe

[02:19:42] maybe they shouldn't exist at all maybe not yeah uh good article from the wall street journal kind of a surprising source for this article about government surveillance there are no secrets they write in america's new surveillance dragnet technical wizardry used to combat illegal immigration also funnels the personal data and whereabouts of u.s citizens to federal agents and it is a chilling

[02:20:10] uh tale um it's kind of a surprise to me i always think of the wall street journal as kind of an establishment newspaper but i'm encouraged if they're saying maybe this has gone too far maybe uh we're gonna see something happen how in snowden apology form yeah yeah yeah nothing really happened post newton like most people are not aware of what he reported on and it's uh yeah let's change

[02:20:39] anything did it nope uh california has uh said that you can the chp the california hiking patrol can't ticket driverless cars when they violate traffic laws did you know they couldn't before i didn't know that they couldn't before how do we contact these companies i don't know how they can't right now it's not in effect till july 1st uh there have been a number of reports of cars breaking you know waymos and

[02:21:06] others breaking traffic laws uh they were just a lot that's why well who do you right who do you yeah they couldn't do anything yeah under the new rules police can cite av companies when their vehicles commit moving violations the rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds this you know they block traffic they get in the way of emergency vehicles i love the shocked look on your face micah because this is it this is this is what

[02:21:35] they do like you could just be out here breaking laws and because what they're doing is so new they effectively can't be punished for it but didn't they they they had to get the they had to get the go-ahead to be able to drive on the streets not always not but the dmv doesn't allow them to do this right yeah that's what i yeah so maybe you should have thought about yeah that's what i was that's where that came from is like i thought there were discussions about them being able to be here

[02:22:02] in the first place and why was that not figured out there are a lot of municipalities where they just rolled out so they just get to do it wow just like do you have all tech yeah do you have waymo in tucson i know you have in phoenix uh it's in phoenix uh i go to phoenix uh not that often to be honest but i have been in waymo a few times uh but yeah uh not not down here in tucson well you drive around san francisco there's waymo uh in every block i mean there's tons of waymos and they've there's a lot of problems yeah for sure yeah there was just a news article that it's coming to portland as well

[02:22:30] um so i think it's a good thing as a as a so look i'm almost 70 at some point in the next 10 to 20 years i'm gonna somebody go take my keys away as and they should right um i hope by then autonomous vehicles uh you know ride sharing will be so ubiquitous that i won't need a car that may have to get a taxi now like these uh

[02:22:56] we let the uh the smart taxi companies we let uber and lyft just like blow away the entire taxi economies but well that's true part of that is you can get a you can get a car now pretty easily and that's the thing i don't know if autonomous will actually change that much especially if the tech doesn't get much better but i will tell you folks like i've had some personal personal interactions because of uh these taxi companies failures like there was an elderly couple in my

[02:23:22] town trying to get an uber the uber would not come to them like something was wrong like maybe they put the placement map somewhere else like it's very easy to do that to misplace where the location map is if you don't know that as a new user um this is why i'm spending so much time training claude claude will drive your car claude is going to do it all for me claude will drive i will i will just be i don't know what's going on i want to go to the dentist help me and claude will help me but i

[02:23:50] heard these people like fighting with uber and calling for various forms of help for like 10 minutes i was like hello did you help them take you home oh can i just take you home it was like 10 15 minutes away but good for transportation is a problem in our country it's all a big problem um i don't know if autonomous stuff will ultimately help i i don't know well get ready for this yeah china has suspended

[02:24:13] autonomous driving permits oh after a big baidu outage uh dozens of baidu's apollo go robo taxis stopped in wuhan stranding passengers disrupting traffic this is where sometimes a dictatorship can can really get things done so they just said hey you know that's it no more no more that's just for now until they like figure out whatever caused that but

[02:24:40] the incident alarmed authorities three agencies including the ministry of industry and information technology convened a meeting earlier this month with officials from cities that have robo taxis regulators called for local governments to conduct full self-review and enhanced safety monitoring and uh until then no more licenses and you know why that happened it's because at least two of the people who were in those vehicles were related to some of the lawmakers officials you think oh yeah

[02:25:10] it has we humans have to have object lessons that's why the whole ticket master thing is happening because someone who was a lawmaker was trying to buy taylor swift tickets for their daughter their granddaughter and that kick that someone was like we should look into that whole ticket master thing listen to the voters they will tell you they'll tell you but we're in the real world china has also done something we have not been able to do they have announced made a law that firing a worker and replacing them

[02:25:37] with ai is no is illegal huh can't do it interesting interesting it's a worker's paradise ladies and gentlemen yeah sometimes this is of course always the argument for dictatorships is see the trains run on time the train um they're working people people are just working and working and working and also they

[02:26:02] were certainly working it's a worker's paradise yeah maryland become has become the first state to ban ai driven price increases in grocery stores that's good hell yeah state law goes into effect in october yeah instacart got into a bunch of trouble for that after i had the i can't remember what the group is called but i had someone from the group on tech news weekly who did that whole investigative study

[02:26:27] where they had people from all over the u.s all at the same time order the same item from the same store and it was showing up as different prices for different people and they did this over and over and over again to show that it was just yeah it was changing the price based on where you were what you'd order all this other stuff and uh officially uh instacart said after that study came out we're

[02:26:53] not doing that anymore i think billionaires should always pay 100 more for everything don't you that wouldn't be a bad idea yeah double if they just paid their taxes we'd be fine yeah that's also true much better space so how about start we could start there so uh diamond dynamic pricing or some call it surveillance pricing can lead to two consumers paying different amounts of the same item at the same retailer at the same time same time yep so maryland has a bill the protection from

[02:27:20] predatory pricing act goes into effect october 1st and some severe fines ten thousand dollars for the merchant repeat offenses twenty five thousand dollars good on maryland that's right yeah it was consumer reports nicholas yeah because i spoke to the i spoke to the folks at groundwork collaborative i had originally was trying to get somebody from consumer reports no one was available at the time and so groundworks collaborative who worked with y'all on it and someone from there ended up coming

[02:27:47] on the show yeah so thank you to cr and it wasn't me uh it was i well yeah we did a big uh yeah that's a lot of the you know we do a lot of stuff like that like how is your advocacy yeah yes yeah bravo right on actually consumer reports doesn't like the maryland law because it prohibits only price increases not price decreases oh well no law is perfect but you know yeah yeah uh they they

[02:28:15] described a scenario in which a retailer might raise prices across the board to lower prices for some targeted customers that's a very good point yeah yeah yeah yeah um so but you know what every law is uh a beginning and can be improved yeah it's kind of like the right to repair stuff from like it is you know the first state law happens it's not perfect but then other states start crafting so it's like it i think it's the fact that we have legislation on the books now imperfect as it may be

[02:28:44] is probably the biggest headline coming out of this in my gotta set the precedent and work from there yeah one of the things we got a lot of us uh talk about was of course mythos uh the claude um uh model that wasn't released to the public because it was too dangerous because it could find security flaws and they didn't want bad guys to be able to do it first of course open ai which at first said that's just a marketing ploy then about two weeks later released its version of the same thing saying it

[02:29:10] could find security flaws and it's very dangerous uh in fact we are starting to see some security flaws discovered there is a very severe linux flaw the most ars technica called it the most severe linux threat to surface in years but uh fear not somebody would have to have physical access to your computer they'd have to have an account on your system to use it but it does allow them to escalate

[02:29:36] a normal user account to a a administrator account to a super user account it's called copy fail and it's an issue on uh servers where there are multiple users because uh yeah vps many people are using the same computer they probably could use that uh this is how you know linux is succeeding now guys like it's made it it's made it we've had a massive law this is your popularity it's a very

[02:30:02] serious one and also is a is it escape from uh containers so docker and kubernetes uh can get right out of that so it is a pretty serious vulnerability most linux uh distros have been patched by now it was disclosed more than a month ago but the typical uh lengthy disclosure process did not happen it was only discovered about a month ago and was it is now completely disclosed so

[02:30:28] make sure you have a patched linux kernel and there's a big flaw in cpanel which a lot of people used to administer their websites it's kind of an old school thing was written in php i used to use it years ago but hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cpanel which is currently used still by millions of websites and the web host manager site which allows hackers to hijack and take full control of

[02:30:53] a server running cpanel still being used by tens of millions of uh websites all over the world so something that will have to be fixed uh all right now a couple of weird stories we're running uh running out of time here the hottest anti-ai gadget the all the kids are doing it it's on tiktok i haven't seen

[02:31:17] it but a young young women are going viral for creating whimsical homemade computers inside purses i love it i just had a friend ask me the other day if she if i would help her make her cyber deck why would you so the idea is it's real it's cyberpunk i think is it a working system i mean is it yeah and i i think it's more it's this idea that we can step away from our phones and like modernity

[02:31:46] and just get access to the things that we want but there's also some level of like customization and building it when you feel like everything all looks the same there's a lot of steampunky a little yeah and a lot of um aesthetics involved you know what i mean it's about making it your own and and right and because that's the whole idea too is it's almost like a swiss army knife but in the form of a you know a little machine yeah and so you just make it however you want to you put the stuff on there

[02:32:13] that you want and i think it's also an opportunity to get people who may otherwise not have gotten into like coding and tinkering to get into coding and tinkering which i think is neat i can i use an esp32 to communicate with my claude agent um i could put that in a purse what's cool is that this is this is kind of like the exact opposite of the open claw trend in a way too it's more like this is a thing

[02:32:37] i'm building it's gonna do what i tell it to do it's gonna it's it's a thing i'm building for my purposes and my needs not gonna run off my credit card number and like do you know make all these transactions it is a really cool response to the trend of tech right now did you see that vine is back no no dorsey who of course ran twitter and bought vine and killed vine has a new reboot it's

[02:33:03] called divine di vine it is on the uh ios app store in the google play store and i love this they put 500 000 half a million old vine videos on there to see so the archive of old vine the backup from the original service is there they are still six seconds long i mean they're awfully short compared to reels or tiktoks

[02:33:30] the a little pathetic isn't it it's just like oh we had this thing that was kind of cool and culty and look your old vines are here i killed it by the way but don't worry about that your old vines are here let's make some new ones created by a guy we've interviewed his uh his handle is rabble evan henshaw plath who used to work at twitter he was an early twitter employee he uh explored the vine

[02:33:54] archive i didn't realize this but the original vines six seconds were 50 to 60 gigabytes what what wait the whole thing or no wonder no each one each yes were they storing them in some ridiculous i don't understand no wonder they went out of business yeah if you can't store a six second video properly i don't know what you're doing yeah uh anyway he has managed to resurrect some but not

[02:34:19] all of them uh it's been around since november to testers rabble said the initial plan was to quickly push the app out after some initial tests but early viners encouraged the team to hold off it was the viners who were like no no this is way more important than just nostalgia they really wanted a vine that worked that they could create new vines with so yay rabble has recreated vine i love that they've got older vines just because that did establish some of the

[02:34:48] early i don't know global pop culture lexicon that remember lily ponds lily ponds uh an og viner quoted by tech crunch many of us came from vine it was the beginning of anything yeah it was such a key moment my own personal journey and an internet culture it makes me so happy to see these early classics brought back to the life and have the chance to make new ones it was amazing what they did in a six second video i agree that's it's amazing what the audience did like that's such a

[02:35:18] organic response to the limitations of technology like that's cool and then they killed it and i to a certain degree i'm like you guys had something really interesting there and i don't know is it because the business model just didn't work well enough for twitter you couldn't make money i think twitter um felt like i don't know that like this was undermining twitter like oh no it should all just be on twitter oh yeah yeah i don't know why they bought it in that case maybe they bought it to kill

[02:35:44] it i don't know anyway dorsey put up the money rabble brought it back so bravo now speaking of being brought back remember gain stop which was about to go out of business but was saved by the stonk redditors as a meme stock they've done so well ever since they're looking at buying ebay

[02:36:05] no what what so maybe they weren't so dumb all those diamond hands holding their game stop stock what that's wild yes because money means nothing it's because money is imaginary nothing means anything so whatever sure you're dying and the meme brought you back to life according to the wall

[02:36:28] journal game stop is preparing a bid to acquire ebay for 46 billion dollars that's what ebay's worth uh game stops stock price is about 12 billion so i think i don't know they'd have to have some investors i don't know game stop has been quietly building a position ebay shares i guess people sell a

[02:36:54] lot of games on ebay i'm trying to think if this is just because of the lulls or if there's actually some real well the guy behind it actually uh ryan cohen who's the ceo has some cred he created chewy chewy oh okay sold it in 2017 became a game stops chairman and ceo and based i guess on this whole meme stock thing was able to not only turn game stop around but turn it into an e-commerce giant

[02:37:23] and this leo this is real now this is not just reporting he uh cohen gave an interview he gave an interview to the journal about 30 minutes ago it's 56 billion uh 56 billion 56 50 i put it in the little chat there holy cow it's happening i i don't know i don't know what's going on or whatever man i don't know what's going on this definitely wasn't on my bingo card is all i just don't understand

[02:37:50] anything that really actually does blow my mind i know uh the academy has finally taken a step against ai they have decided that the new oscar rules which released friday will not allow ai generated actors or scripts to be eligible for oscars so uh huzzah how will they prove it oh that's interesting it's pretty it's pretty there is already sneak an ai person into a thing

[02:38:19] tilly norwood who's all ai is clearly out but but there is an ai generated version of val kilmer in a new movie yeah but she said scripts too i'm talking about scripts not the actor part i know ai generated actors and scripts yeah so how are they going to prove the script that's what i'm saying right oh i see somebody what are some well if the actor's dead it's probably ai if he shows up in a movie yeah that part is easy to prove i'm thinking i'm thinking but the script so they're going to have

[02:38:45] to have you have to use an academy issued laptop that does not allow access to chat gpt i think this is this is the old guard holding out right trying to preserve honor is it on it's the honor system isn't it i mean there are there are enough ai scanning things which don't work that well but yeah they're terrible oh they're worse yeah uh and just in case you thought your your youth was wasted

[02:39:08] nicholas well the ukraine says hold on it's training drone pilots by playing grand theft auto 5 oh i saw this yes yes if hegseth is watching i'm i'm available i'm very are you a master of gta i am very good at video games i would be my son says he says i want to buy an audi r8 i said dude no you can't have one he says your fault you gave me grand theft auto and that was my car in gta

[02:39:38] it's your fault i said i didn't give you grand theft auto what are you talking about grand theft auto what i would never have given you that uh ukraine's defense ministry shared a post on x showing off training asking are there any gta fans here they said it's also good for relaxation okay hold on now we can't say now you're trying to say work while you're off the clock and i don't

[02:40:03] like that it's like it's fine it's also for relaxation they train their school they just blew that truck up yeah i saw do you have do you have drones in uh gta i don't think you do or maybe they've added them uh i have not really played five so i can't even answer that question i don't uh like five very much this feels very ender's game yeah oh yeah ender's game yeah that he was oh i don't want to spoil it

[02:40:30] never mind i won't say a word uh don't spoil the ending of yeah one of the best twists ever i'll just say that it's a great great novel those are the first time i knew how to be disappointed by authors amazing stuff oh because orson skark card was not a great person he's the madman but it's a great writer although it's good ender's game was great the sequel's not so hot i love speaker for a speaker for the dead was pretty good all right you're right yeah yeah again i've read his stuff and got so

[02:40:59] disappointed yeah i know yep uh let's take one more break and then we have uh our usual in memoriam thing and uh i'm gonna do some picks i have a pick and nick actually has a pick and davendra has a pick so oh great well great well if they didn't find a pick we don't we don't normally do picks on twit but it just happened you guys submitted some things oh yeah picks so uh think of something

[02:41:25] micah and we'll be back in just a bit this episode of this week of tech is brought to you by box i love box the leading intelligent content management platform for enterprises the key to unlocking the power of ai isn't in an llm or an agent it's in your content your business isn't the sum of internet knowledge your business is lives in your content right but and now ai is not

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[02:43:35] ai does it like that and then you can query and automate workflows as a result okay that's one well here's another one use box ai to ask questions of any type of content it's like asking the content directly sales presentations long research reports and more why spend hours reading through hundreds of pages just query it directly you can do it for one file or and this is huge thousands of files at once or leverage box ai's apis to integrate it into your

[02:44:04] application stack for any document processing and data extraction box ai handles the vector embeddings the retrieval augmented generation rag and agent customization and it does it all in its own platform you can do all of this while maintaining the highest levels of security compliance and data governance that over 115 000 enterprises trust you need a content layer that gives ai the context it needs

[02:44:32] while giving your teams the flexibility they need to test and leverage various models for different use cases don't get locked into a single model visit box.com slash ai to learn more box b-o-x dot com slash a i this is a very cool solution thank you box for supporting twit and now back to the show mike you don't have to do a pick but i'm going to just give us a couple of picks i'll start off

[02:45:00] you may remember in february the u.s uh the cia killed the world fact book which was an amazing thing the cia had had been created 62 years ago and had been maintaining ever since information about all the countries of the world it was like i guess kind of felt a little weird that it was the cia doing it but it was an incredible resource well this is this is a really nice story because the open source

[02:45:28] community jumped on this now at the same time as the cia announced the killing of the fact book they deleted it they just told they could have left it up but i guess they didn't want it to get out of date anyway fortunately somebody had saved it open fact book is online it's free open fact book.org 254 countries yeah isn't that great and you can browse by region this has always been a really great resource for just

[02:45:57] basic information um and i'm it's a great example of like wikipedia where uh the community itself can preserve this stuff so i just wanted to give them a little bit of a a plug uh nicholas uh de leon picked something that was actually reviewed by your colleague on consumer reports we were talking about this before the show courtney lindwall wrote about it tell us about the light phone yeah so uh we uh

[02:46:24] mostly courtney have been doing a lot of articles on like digital mindfulness or whatever you want to call just the idea of like we're a lot of us are kind of tired of being ruled by our our iphones and androids and just wanting to tone it down a little bit so the the latest article in this series is about the light phone which is kind of a stripped down i guess it's technically a smartphone but it's it's a much

[02:46:48] it's it's it's not an iphone and it's purposefully not an iphone and it's you know in that constraint do you does your brain have the opportunity to breathe again for the first time in a while and so it's just a look at like some of the there are the limitations of these types of devices where they're good where they're bad who they might be good for who they who maybe wouldn't want it uh but to me it's interesting is that there's a lot of this i live in southern arizona every single resort around

[02:47:16] here has like a digital detox uh program that you can really oh yeah so there's something in the in the ether here where people are kind of like maybe not burnt out but they just want to uh they want to tweak their relationship with their phone in particular which is what i was saying earlier where it's like the idea of like the of the computer in the living room was like the peak experience here because now we've glued to our phones 24 7 so yeah it's just the latest article in that series and

[02:47:42] i encourage folks to to take a look and there will likely be more on on this topic just again just the idea of like maybe reevaluating our relationship with the phone in particular it's a little pricey 700 bucks uh doesn't have a great camera um but uh i like the idea of a very simple black and white ui i think that we're gonna i think the phones change dramatically first of all for most of us it's not a

[02:48:10] phone anymore yeah no right i mean what is what is the phone for it's mostly a camera pc spam in a way too it's spam that's for sure all this uh it's i guess for me camera and messaging are the two things i use the most i barely even use the camera one thing i tell folks again when when you know i'm like the computer guy and family or whatever it's like get a camera get an actual camera from nikon or

[02:48:37] can or whatever you don't even have to get like a five thousand dollars just get a camera and a it's going to take much better photos than any any phone uh and you and you have a single purpose device that bring you know unlocks a little bit creativity and you might start messing with lenses but it it lessens the reliance on the phone for everything and you get to explore a different you know a different a different part of your brain i i guess but yeah that's that's if you can afford it i would encourage folks maybe look into buying a camera and seeing if that will lessen your desire to have

[02:49:07] your phone on your person 24 but can i send messages from my camera oh now you've got now you've got oh i guess uh yeah i don't know is is it practical to say we don't need uh whatever these smart devices are that we carry in our pocket i mean i mean this is this is a certain type of person i think you know the you know the oh i'm uh you know they're they've got their hand on their head it's like yeah the phone is a critical piece of infrastructure for uh i'm going to say a lot

[02:49:36] everyone basically i was actually on tv the other day having this exact conversation was like isn't it a little bit maybe not privileged but like phones are important people need phones it's not like a it's not a an optional it's not a steam deck or whatever the case may be uh people need phones so all this like you're saying a steam deck is is optional or not optional i just uh that depends asking for

[02:50:00] a friend yeah yeah i can't this is again though this is again now that conversation where you are not you were saying that this is a possibility for someone you are not saying that because i am talking about a light phone that means the people who have phones that are not light phones are bad and wrong like that why is that nuance always lost it's like just because i'm advocating for a thing

[02:50:26] does not mean that the thing i'm not advocating for is a bad thing we should have more things like this that just help us simplify our relationship with our phones but i also say it's so easy to like forget like my god what do we have in our pockets like this is i think about credible quite a bit yes this is the truest personal computer it is honest it is a part of it this is an extension of us the problem is we've allowed these companies to like create these apps and services that just like

[02:50:55] tap into the worst human tendencies right like the the effects of social media the infinite scroll you get the like constant dopamine hits um all these things are built this way so one good thing you could do if you don't want to get a light phone is just like try to stay off of those things that really really really tap into those primal like attention span i don't know hoarding things that

[02:51:18] we have as humans but i do so much with my phone you know i take notes it's my main computer now yeah and i use telegram to message claude so we can talk uh oh yeah yeah i think it's a little bit like what uh what micah was saying earlier in the show is it's a it's kind of a reflection of like who you are and what you you know if you're using the phone to check out open fact book or project or whatever the case may be or wikipedia that is a very different use case than someone who's just

[02:51:48] infinite scrolling tick tock yeah don't do that don't get in bed and tick tock per se but don't get in bed and scroll for two hours that's not healthy that's a lot of folks you know and to davinder's point that because they're designed to do that you know they were made to do that i don't blame the users as much as like how we built these things i do that myself and i'm actively trying like okay i'm gonna keep books near my nightstand so i hit 10 minutes of tick tock okay

[02:52:12] then go go away phone i'll try to do something else and it's a forceful thing you have to really take a take yeah you do that yeah i don't know if this is a pic but davinder put a link to jessica condit's review she does a great job by the way i love to ask your stuff uh and then gadget about the valve steam controller yeah this was the hottest new gadget of the week because this is we've been waiting for the steam machine to arrive and it's oh this is for the steam machine this is for the

[02:52:40] steam machine or any anything running steam like this was part of the steam machine announcement but the problem is the ramageddon has made it really tough for valve to price or even get the steam machine out and also the uh was it the valve frame the new vr headset that they're doing too that needs ram the steam machine needs ram this controller does not need the ram so they can just release this controller they released the controller before we're all hungry for anything you can still

[02:53:06] play your pc games anything that runs okay your steam deck is it a great she gave it 90 out of 100 she gave it a 90 she gave a good review um it has a little pricey it's a hundred dollar controller do you know how expensive controllers are now leo are is that is that not a Nintendo switch two pro controller is 90 dollars new joy-con twos are 80 dollars a new it's basically a car what's in there it's got so much different technology inside it's just they're expensive so this is more expensive than a typical one but i will say as somebody who plays a lot of games on my

[02:53:35] pc i it looks cool i kind of want to like play with it i will be getting a steam machine eventually too even though i probably don't need one but um it just looks like a cool design and uh you know i think uh jess also did a great review uh also recommend people check out the new and gadget website uh we've been redesigned now that we're fully over at our new owners so it's lightning fast now like lightning you know what this popped right up holy it's instant it's amazing so we are no longer part

[02:54:02] of yahoo we're part of static media which also owns bgr and slash film whoa that did look fast it's so fast it's really people are complaining it's not like list format anymore um i like this format it's kind of a card-based format yeah it's card-based i know people miss the list format but i like that it's fast it's so fast so we're getting there we just launched the new site we're part of a whole new company now but we're still in gadget we're still doing our thing good i would say davindra

[02:54:29] you should i you should make forget the steam machine make your own steam machine make like a diy steam machine which is what i yes i did that uh between christmas and like now is it running linux uh yes it's actually running bad site which is basically steam gaming gaming linux yeah and i've heard so much i will buy this controller literally at 10 a.m tomorrow when it goes on sale uh and i'm really like it's the most excited been for like a gadget in in a little while actually oh cool so tell me

[02:54:56] that's good advice yeah uh what processor you would use if you were going to build your own steam machine oh how much ram what it's a bad time to build things it seems like it might be yeah i built it more or less last year a little bit right as the ram stuff was hitting i got i so i have a i had a leftover 7800 x3d processor because i upgraded my main gaming pc to the 9800 so i reused an old processor

[02:55:22] i did buy the radeon 9060 xt which is nice their entry level yeah it's it's a secondary you know it's for older games it's for like emulator it's i'm not trying to play cyberpunk or like you know the super brand new games on this thing i have the main pc for that so it's just uh yeah ram i don't know it i would say 16 is the minimum but it's you know it's just very expensive right now unfortunately

[02:55:49] everything is yeah i'm actually glad i bought the framework desktop when i did it i bought it as an ai local ai machine but it's actually a pretty competent gaming machine as well it probably using old hardware is a good idea a lot of people have old ram old stuff hanging around reuse it build something yeah that's that was i would not have built this if i didn't have leftover stuff to do because it's like i'm you know i already have a computer oh but i can kind of crib together this one of parts kind of like the the macbook neo hey i got these parts over here let me just build a

[02:56:17] build a thing and micah you picked something i did yes so i love voices and i love listening to voices and sort of trying to understand them and and so i really love hearing voice actors talk about their craft and share their craft and occasionally you get something like what i shared which is a youtube

[02:56:43] video that is actually just a it's a little clip from a podcast uh the podcast is called string and tell by tawny platys and tawny is a voice actor that has done a lot of work that you'll be familiar with she is the voice of those automated um grocery machine things that you go through like self checkouts her voice is the one that uh annoyingly tells you like please put that back down onto the counter

[02:57:10] um and so you hear her talk and you're already like a really small fraternity isn't it of people right yeah and then kristen de mercurio mercurio excuse me it meets with her for this episode because these two are responsible for almost all of the bluetooth voice you like no matter what device you get unless it's a first party like mainstream device you know that you're going to hold down that power button

[02:57:37] for three seconds and then it's going to go bluetooth pairing and that's the voice of the woman it's a human it's a human that's her right there bluetooth i mean i just called her bluetooth no kristen de mercurio is the voice and so uh it was i think she gets recognized at grocery stores i wonder if she talks enough i just love it i love it and they talk about their craft and they talk about both um like how they got hired doing different stuff uh the reason why kristen ends up getting got this role

[02:58:05] is because her voice by different casting agents is tagged with iot so she gets a lot of those kinds of gigs and yeah i just think it's fascinating so yeah very good we don't usually do picks but it just kind of came up that way so i thought why not let's uh let's do some picks we also often end the show with uh in memoriam and there are uh three uh things that are going away one is spirit airlines and i've

[02:58:33] i'm sorry if you had a ticket on spirit airlines uh because uh it is shut it's gone it just boom it disappeared uh i'm sorry if you had a ticket on spirit airlines at any time it is it was horrible the line it was literal like beach chairs yeah it went so close together i'm not that tall and my knees are still up here uh just not fun the one time i flew a spirit i did feel bad there was a pilot a

[02:58:59] spirit pilot who had one more flight to come to retirement and his flight was canceled his flight was canceled uh i don't i guess that's that um but i also feel bad for there are probably quite a few people with tickets who aren't going to uh get to go anywhere also say goodbye to ask jeebs did you know ask.com was still around did not know it was apparently nobody did

[02:59:26] so they finally gave up they're shutting it down uh this is the story from engadget uh ask which was asked jeebs remember the butler and they changed to ask.com the internet's favorite butler is uh is saying goodbye it closed uh it's uh he closed his uh serving tray on may 1st i remember when at school

[02:59:53] they taught us uh we had a whole we had a whole day where we went to the library and we were taught about like lexus nexus and all of these other right but then they also all the old tools for searching things but then they also taught us about new tools for searching things and one of those was at the time ask jeeves and i remember coming home and you know bringing this news to my family and teaching them how to use ask jeeves and at the time saying with my whole chest going listen you'll get better

[03:00:23] results if you type it out as a question which now i'm like what was i thinking that's hilarious but no you were right that was that that's how we started asking internet questions yeah you did a full question and then now uh you see sometimes people still feel like you have to do that and so it's one of those things where i'm going do i just let them live in the world where they type a whole question

[03:00:47] into you don't i see i do it by keyword i i think of the question that i have and then into the search into the search field i type the keywords from it probably smart yeah uh because you it's not it doesn't need of you know that that's that's not a word that of i mean and yes if you're doing boolean but what anyway point is yeah you type out like a full sentence to get to get an answer and now you do that if you're using one of your you know your your chat it was too it was too early

[03:01:15] ask jeeves yeah well before it's time see you're not going to say flight speed swallow you're going to say what is the flights what is the flight speed of a swallow right yeah wouldn't you i would type in flight speed swallow honestly i would yeah but yeah you're very uh you're very parsimonious with your words i guess indubitably uh and there is one actual passing and it's craig venter who uh was

[03:01:41] a big name in the uh race to decode the human genome uh he was kind of a uh i would say a maverick in all of this he said we don't need to use these slow processes i can decode the human genome faster with shotgun sequencing uh and in fact one his company solera went up against a international

[03:02:05] consortium of researchers called the human genome project uh and in fact uh i guess technically it was a draw uh but the fact that he could came even close was pretty amazing uh an interesting fellow a force of nature uh somewhat controversial in many ways uh he led an effort to explore the world's

[03:02:30] oceans trace the genetics of marine microbial communities his first global ocean sampling expedition circumnavigated the globe in 2005 and 2006 he also tried to copyright or trademark or patent i think it was maybe patent genes the genome uh wait what yeah sorry i shouldn't that's one of the reasons he was controversial is uh you know he thought this could be you were so close to be

[03:02:55] to true greatness man yeah so close anyway uh craig venter passed away april 29th at the age of 79 but craig venter lived a very rich life got a lot done in his 79 years that is that for this week our our uh our twit episode thank you so much micah sergeant so great to be here being here to backstop in case everything went to hell in hawaii but it's always great to get you on i'm glad

[03:03:25] it didn't go to hell and i'm glad i'm glad i could be here yeah yeah uh you'll find mike on tech news weekly every thursday and of course ios today you record like every every other week now yeah we record ios every other week we just recorded uh three of the episodes of hands on tech earlier this morning oh yeah it's on tech yes yeah we'll also record those later hands on apple i'd record that weekly so lots of shows you can check out on the network best way to check them out join the club

[03:03:52] uh support independent podcasting it is a real challenge in this world where big companies run podcasting and advertisers you know flock to the big companies instead of us but the best way to stay afloat in this world is to use not use to call on our wonderful community to support us and we have a great many people who support club to it we'd like to have you in the club ten dollars a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows you get to watch micah do his shows in the discord

[03:04:21] and lots of other special content we've got some big ones coming up the google io and wwdc keynotes are coming up we do those in the club only because we don't want to get taken down on youtube so so join the club uh it's a way to support what we do and it's a way to get a lot of extra programming and to meet some really cool people in the club twip discord including mr micah sargent micah's uh creative uh what do you call it i forgot micah's crafting corner crafting corner

[03:04:51] it's always fun are you still doing paint by numbers or have you moved on we now i'm trying to remember what did we do last time because i took a break from paint by number it's very relaxing so i was yeah it was incredibly relaxing it was also hard to because part of it is engaging with the chat room they are sharing the things they're working on as well so it's just a nice little uh crafting moment where people talk about the foods that they're making and i literally do not recall

[03:05:16] what it was i worked on last time um somebody in the chat will remember but anyway yeah we do all sorts of things knit crochet lego uh little dioramas all sorts of stuff a lot of fun did i just close my zoom or am i still here you're still here i was closing tabs okay kids don't try this at home never close tabs keep them all open all of them all of them nicholas de leon is of course a consumer

[03:05:45] reports or he reports on electronics senior electronics reporter and has many many ai uh pages up there like cross wording the situation yes and uh what is it what are the other two uh deep dugout uh tucson daily brief i'm trying to think of the best way to have others too i have uh other things those are the the main ones oh i also i also made a a job like a like a job finder app uh very actually quite

[03:06:14] powerful we'll talk about that in another day but uh yeah you need a site for all your sites so that we can go to that site and find your site i mean most of these uh they will just put it up on github whether you want it to or not yes yeah uh most of them are on github i think uh i i do have a day lay own d-a-y i'll just type it in the chat here d-a-y-l-a-y-o-w-n that's just my last name

[03:06:39] pronounced day lay own uh and if you go to day lay own.org uh that's probably the easiest because i that i list most of the things i've got going on over there uh but yeah yeah so you know a bunch of cool stuff most importantly consumer reports you know uh i know folks uh i'm a member since 1981 i'm very proud and supported we are a you know their media is a challenging industry but we're still kicking we're still doing pretty pretty well uh and we're trying to do impactful stuff like we

[03:07:08] saw with the the grocery store pricing you know some of this ai stuff where we're really trying to like you know report on this stuff in a way that's relatable to you know i'm a nerd i like messing with all the models and all that type of stuff but you know if you're a regular person how are you interfacing with these things what are your expectations so we're we're trying to do more of that type of stuff but yeah consumer reports is the most important and then you can look at my my zany little side projects i love them i love them they're not zany they're great it's great to

[03:07:36] talk to you nicholas and of course thank you davendra dear friend and now hanging by a thread i'm sorry to say i'm surprised we all aren't yeah yeah i'm kind of hanging by yeah all right when i looked i said oh wow there really is only one thread up there oh dear the sword of damocles is hanging by uh uh nick you'll find uh you'll find davendra at uh gadget brand new and gadget looking good

[03:08:03] and revamped in gadget and the film cast podcast yeah thank you davendra appreciate your support as happy to be here thanks to all of you for watching for listening thanks to our club members for making this possible uh and i hope you will be back next week we do twit every sunday from 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 p.m eastern turns out that's 11 a.m hawaii time i found out uh 20 what is it uh 2100 utc

[03:08:31] if you can figure that out you can figure out what it will be in your local time zone you can watch us live in the club to discord or on youtube twitch.tv x.com facebook linkedin or kick.com after the fact on demand versions of all of our shows audio and video available at our website twit.tv most of our shows have their own dedicated youtube channel twit is no exception you can find us there great way to share clips of the show if you want to tell your friends and family about something exciting

[03:09:00] you saw on the show and of course the best thing to do is subscribe and your favorite podcast client that way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done thank you everybody for being here i will be in hawaii for another few days i'm going to be doing mac break weekly and the security now and windows weekly and intelligent machines from here and next week's uh twitter as well so if you hate the fact that there's the ocean and the trade winds behind me well i'm sorry you just got to put up

[03:09:28] put up with that for a little bit longer thank you everybody we'll see you thank you to our great technical director benito gonzalez for keeping everything together anthony nielsen for helping me get the technology down to do this show from here and of course kevin king our editor our executive producer my wife lisa laporte who is right now in a helicopter i think she just went over as a matter of fact flying over the big island of hawaii are you gonna get to do a helicopter no i don't believe in

[03:09:55] flying in the flying in rocks with wings i just it feels somehow she she does it every time and i always say good have fun yeah yeah yeah they're terrifying they're terrifying and they're very loud but it is really cool i mean it's i did it once and that's that once was enough yeah once was enough uh thank you everybody we'll see you next time another twitter is in the can this is amazing