Spy Rhymes with AI - DTNS 5373

0:00This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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3:28Huyen Tue Dao: This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 14th, 2026. We tell you what you need to know, give you important context and help each other. Please just understand. Well, today, what happens when they put a camera where you left your spy device? The most hilarious picture of a spy potentially ever on the Internet. Alleged. Alleged spy. Alleged. I am allegedly Tom Merritt. And I'm allegedly Winwood now. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Yeah, so thanks to CW for noting this one in our subreddit as well. The U.S. FBI has arrested a person named Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan, a Saudi national, for planting a surveillance device in an open AI executives only meeting room.

4:18Huyen Tue Dao: At least that is the allegation. U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California charged him with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications. Important point, not charged with espionage, only charged with using an electronic device to intercept oral communications. He could face up to five years in prison just for that if convicted, along with a$250 ,000 fine and some other stuff. OpenAI discovered the device during a security sweep on September 30th. Apparently it had only been there for a couple of days. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in the executive's only meeting room.

4:58Huyen Tue Dao: That's a meeting room that the person in question should not have had access to. OpenAI then placed a camera near where the device had been behind the television and caught the man looking behind the TV. It is probably the most entertaining picture of someone getting caught looking behind a TV that you have ever seen. uh the man was then arrested on friday october 9th uh the device is identified as a seed it's got three e's that's why you have to say it that way a seed zhao esp32 s3 sense it's a chinese thumb size development board don't read too much into it being chinese all these thumb size development boards are made in china uh it has a detachable camera sensor digital microphone and a small memory card and it was wrapped in toilet paper which was very confusing at first I thought he hid it in a toilet roll and was wondering why there was a toilet roll in the executive meeting room, but he had, he had just wrapped it.

5:55Huyen Tue Dao: So you couldn't tell immediately when you looked at it, what it was, uh, it could do advanced encryption, audio monitoring and transfer data in a way designed to avoid detection. Pretty typical stuff for this kind of device. You can get one on Amazon for about$24 toilet paper, not included. Uh, open AI did not identify the kind of device itself, but this was in the prosecutor's filing. Prosecutors also say they found a second encrypted recording device in Alphazan's bag. He left a bag in a printer room and it was confiscated. He went to Lost and Found to claim it. And they say they found a second device in there.

6:33Huyen Tue Dao: That second device had been customized to obfuscate anything stored on the device, such as potentially intercepted audio. Alphazan, if you're curious, like, okay, who is this guy, started working for OpenAI in July 2025, so been on the product team for just over a year, has been a legal permanent resident of the United States since September 2020, has a master's degree in data science from the University of California, Berkeley, and has a long working history. Interned at Microsoft and Akamai and SAP, worked as an engineer at Meta, at Reach Labs, was a founding engineer at a logistics company called Nash, And then, of course, July 2025 came over to OpenAI.

7:13Huyen Tue Dao: He's also listed as a partner on a Saudi-based investment firm named Raed, R-A-E-D, something that somebody who's an engineer who's become a founding partner of an engineering company might do. I don't think that necessarily is suspicious, but it shows you like this person who's been around the industry for a while. It didn't just pop up out of nowhere. Alphazan began querying internal productivity tools about meeting rooms and schedules sometime this summer. And prosecutors allege that between September 24th and September 30th, so right in the week leading up to the discovery of this device, a chat account associated with his spouse shows records of prompts about how to build a continuous audio recorder.

7:57Huyen Tue Dao: OpenAI says they have found no evidence that this person obtained model weights or source code or customer data or anything like that. Alphazan's lawyer said the allegations appear wholly out of character for him and kept pointing out that he didn't get anything. They're not saying any evidence that he got any trade secrets. They're only going after the spying. Detention hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse is set for October 19th. Fascinating. It really is. It's toilet paper, huh? Wrap it around. So if you happen to glance behind the TV, you wouldn't immediately see a hanging circuit board.

8:36Huyen Tue Dao: You'd just see something white. Yeah, maybe some toilet paper got stuck back there. I do think it's fascinating given that he does have a long history and with good companies, the hashtag bunny ears. But yeah, like a solid work history, permanent residence starting in September 2020. Obviously, this is all alleged, so this is just nasal gaving, pontificating, just kind of... Is this something... Navel gazing? Not navel gazing. Gazing. gazing at alleged navels i don't know although it would be nasal gazing nasal gazing to describe the photo of him when it was like oh yeah he's definitely there's a look of surprise that is kind of tragic yes it really is kind of kind of tragic like a like a oh and my toilet paper is gone been caught i've been caught i've been caught is what addiction this yeah i do you I mean, to kind of pick up on a point, I think you were you were headed towards this.

9:40Huyen Tue Dao: This does not appear to be a spy looking at a resume, right? You don't look at the resume and go, wow, it's a little shady. You know, he worked in Saudi Arabia until last year or, you know, he was working for a bunch of Chinese companies and then came nothing like that. This is a perfectly ordinary engineering resume. Yeah, resume. And I can only speculate on, you know, allegedly, if he did do these things, what the reason would be. And it kind of just makes me more think of just the general atmosphere in the industry. Obviously, we're in a time of it's difficult, right? Because it seems like AI companies are doing well, they're hiring.

10:16It's a very attractive place to work. And then, but of course, there's all that inherent competition. and all of the, just like the Sturm und Drang in general in the industry. I don't know if this is just something that foments this. And especially, again, he doesn't seem to be a professional corporate spy, at least given his history.

10:37Huyen Tue Dao: Maybe he's a sleeper agent. Maybe, but we don't. So, yeah, it's very odd to me. And this is pretty high profile because it is open AI, of course, and also just the unfortunate hilarity of how he got caught and that picture getting out. So I don't know, like, I guess it just makes me think, like, how prevalent do you think or are you aware of, like, this kind of espionage? It's pretty unusual, yeah. Yeah, okay. I mean, there was someone caught spying at Google in much less dramatic circumstances, I think, than this. It clearly shows that OpenAI is on the hunt for this, right? This device was not around for more than two days before a security sweep found it.

11:19Huyen Tue Dao: So they know that this is a possibility that people are going to come for them. When you're talking about the individual in question, there's all kinds of reasons. You know, there could be some other personal situation we're unaware of, or debts or something like that. You know, the question is, he's a Saudi national. Was it a Saudi government or a Saudi company? Or was he just someone unrelated to his nationality got, you know, hired by a competitor to be like, help us get something out? these meeting rooms were the kinds of place where they talk about product roadmaps and meet with government officials, you know, so it could be any of those.

11:54Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's like the thing that he didn't try to steal any data, didn't try to steal any code. It was, it seemed more that he was looking for more for strategic, like high level stuff. Yeah. Which is interesting. And again, like, I don't, I don't think, yeah, I, I guess kind of going by what I'm kind of the vibe that you're giving off is like, try not just, we can't really speculate on like who's behind him or what his motivations are, especially since his career does seem very conventional. It's just super, super interesting.

12:21Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. He might be innocent. Remember, that's why we go to court. We may find out there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, Your Honor. It doesn't look that way from the outside, but that's why you actually go to court and the lawyers are saying, this is out of character for him. Why would you think he would do this? He just happened to be looking behind the TV. There's all kinds of reasons they could give. If they find out this is the person who did it, or they find someone similar who did it, I'm fascinated to know the story, to know what led them to this. Because it does seem, not the corporate espionage or espionage in general is unusual, but the pieces of this situation, I'm fascinated to understand what were the levers that made this happen in this particular case.

13:09And I think that's maybe what I was trying to get at with just kind of the current environment with the way that these, you know, generative AI companies, these LM companies are working. And just the kind of, it feels like a fierce competition because everything seems kind of like on a level. And we have these like minutiae of all these benchmarks we keep kind of keep hearing about, about how this model is better than this model in this minute way. And all these different products that these companies are releasing to try to get us to invest, subscribe and pay money into and also support and evangelize their products.

13:37It feels like a very, there's a lot of frenzy. And I just imagine that this has that has to play into this is kind of like current, like state of the industry and the kind of like rabid, I don't know, activity that's going around, especially AI companies. So it just it just feels like if anything else, if there's anything else that somehow plays into how the story started, rather than being, I don't know, just a conventional big moneyers, again, corporate espionage, allegedly story.

14:06Huyen Tue Dao: Anthropic, Google, Alibaba, Tencent, the Chinese government, opposing political parties, like so many. It goes on and on. The number of potential beneficiaries of this information that you just can't look at it and say, oh, it's obviously this. I think that's what piques my interest is to find out, will we be able to find out who was behind it? All right. Well, we will keep tabs on the story if we find out. anything, but we are very lucky because hopefully some of you are continuously listening to our audio and possibly our video. With our permission. That's the relationship we have and we're very grateful.

14:47Oh gosh, I mean like hopefully not, but regardless, we are very happy for you to be listening to our audio right now again with our permission because DTNest is made possible by you, the listener. So thank you so much to Chris Zaragoza, Jim Hart, Alan K.R. and Capital Stadium XMPDX.

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16:55Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.

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18:25Huyen Tue Dao: There's more to talk about today. Let's get to the briefs. All right. Well, Epic Games announced a new Epic Games launcher for the POC in preview alongside versions for Mac and wait, is that PC? Yeah, it's PC. Oh my gosh. Sorry. I'll start that one. That's my fault. No, just keep going. You're good. All right. All right. Well, along. Okay. So the new Epic Games launcher for the PC in preview alongside versions for Mac and Linux 2. The new launcher brings better performance, voice chat across Fortnite, the Epic Games Store and the Epic Games app. There's a customizable top bar, collections, library, and views, and detailed read and write speeds during download.

19:05Epic is also bringing Easy Anti-Cheat and Fortnite to Linux soon. And Epic says they can bring Easy Anti-Cheat close to par with Windows by, quote, using existing Linux features, including signed kernel modules and secure boot with attestation.

19:24Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, there's a lot of people in the audience that just said, all I heard was Fortnite on Linux. Thank you. But yeah, basically a bunch of goodies for you Linux folks. Yeah, exactly. And the easy anti-cheat has been one of the problems because you can get it to work on Linux. It doesn't work as well. It has weaknesses. And that's one of the reasons Epic has been cautious on bringing Fortnite to Linux because you don't want people to use that as a vulnerability. And they think they've figured it out by just leveraging a bunch of what Linux does already as a way to get it on par, as you said, with Windows.

20:00Huyen Tue Dao: So yeah, it doesn't mean you've got it yet, Linux fans, but it does mean we are closer than ever. So that's good. Is Linux gaming in general, like I haven't really taken a pulse on Linux gaming. What is the state of Linux gaming in 2026? It's pretty good because of Steam Deck, because people are using these handhelds, not just the Steam Deck to play. And so I think that has wet a lot of the appetite of like, I want to use my favorite Linux-based handheld to play games without having to dual boot, without having to put an emulator on it, without having to have a translation layer, all of that stuff.

20:34Huyen Tue Dao: Because you can do it. You can run Fortnite on Linux. You just have to put it in a VM or something like that. But yeah, this would mean you wouldn't have to do that because they're going to bring it native and that's what people really want. Yes, for sure. Cut out the lag. Uh, have you ever wanted a Windows? Have you ever looked at the Windows footprint and just been like, that's so big, you know, I can do so much more with this. Yes. When I was a Windows person, absolutely. Yeah. Uh, well, I know a bunch of other people out there are throwing their hands in the air and saying, yes, please. Uh, tiny 11 builder has a desktop app preview that requires less knowledge of PowerShell to get that Windows down to size.

21:16Huyen Tue Dao: It's just an easier way to do it. Tiny 11 lets you create a compact Windows 11 ISO, stripping out bundled apps and select system components from 22H2, so four years ago, right up to 26H2, right up to now. You can do three build modes. Tiny 11 keeps Windows Update, Defender, and the recovery tool. That's kind of your standard, like, I just want it to be smaller, but I want it to have all the usual options. Tiny 11 core disables updates and Defender and removes the recovery environment in an irreversible way. This is when you're like, I know what I'm doing. I just want the smallest possible functional windows that I can get.

21:54Huyen Tue Dao: And then the other mode is a custom option where you just decide what you're going to keep and what you're not. And you should keep in mind, if you've not played around with these before, Tiny 11 ISOs are not supported by Microsoft. So once you're using this, you can't call up Microsoft support and say, hey, my Tiny11 ISO is doing something weird. They'll say, yeah, that's why you shouldn't have done that. So stick to test virtual machines only is the Tiny11 official advice. And if you're thinking you might be able to bypass hardware or license requirements, you won't. That's not what this, I mean, you could do it in other ways, but that's what not, Tiny11 isn't the way to get there.

22:35Oh man, me 10, I'm glad me 10 years ago didn't get my hands on this because this is exactly the kind of thing that I remember thinking about when I was like, you know, when I was still like in school and I had a Windows machine, I would stare very forlornly at it, be like, why is there so much stuff in here? Can I like, just not make this lighter, especially like someone who was doing a lot of like initial programming and like database stuff and all in the same machine. I'm like, oh gosh, help me. Uh, very fascinating. Um, but as you said, probably for, for folks that know what they're doing.

23:04Huyen Tue Dao: I spent a lot more time years ago playing around with Windows and VMs, doing dual boot Windows and therefore needed ISOs. And they were kind of inconvenient to work with, you know, because of their size. Now, granted, these days machines are bigger and stuff, but so is Windows. So being able to customize that if you're doing a lot of VM work or doing a lot of dual booting or just if you need if you are like I use Windows ISOs regularly and need to have options for them. Tiny 11, I think, is pretty fascinating. So I'm curious which people out there are most excited about this. Oh, gosh. Now I'm thinking I probably have a bunch of CDs with ISOs burned on them somewhere from from all of my college stuff back in the day.

23:50I'm sure that's a thing.

23:52Huyen Tue Dao: I definitely have them right here to my left. All right. Well, Wired has a review of Breville's new IQ toaster. Now that's I like the seeing organ on your face. I, sorry, E-Y-E and the letter Q, IQ. See what they did there? It uses optical sensors to scan your toast 10 times a second, only stopping the process once your toast has reached the level of toastiness that you desire. There are seven levels of toastiness on the Breville IQ, and there's even a button called a bit more if it comes up a shade short. There's a sourdough mode that stops toasting when the center is a little lighter than usual.

24:33That prevents the edges from burning. And in some markets, you may have a bagel or crumpet mode as well. It starts at$300, but Wired says it didn't necessarily toast better than a non-smart toaster.

24:47Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, that was the biggest disappointment in the Wired review. It was like, they go through all how this works. I'm like, oh, that's fascinating. And the green, like if you turn off the lights, you can see the green light sensors testing your toast regularly. I was fascinated with it until it was like, but it really didn't end up being that more even than a decent toaster, right? Okay. That's so sad. This is such, this is like the pinnacle of over-engineering something and that it is so cool. There's so much interesting tech in here And there's definitely something to the idea of having perfect toast every single time.

25:23But yes, it is the pinnacle of overengineering. And I kind of love it. I don't$300 love it.

25:28Huyen Tue Dao: I know. It's the same, right? Like, if someone wants to give it to me, I'll definitely play around with it. UK listeners, please let us know your feedback on crumpet mode, I assume. And of course, if you're someone who eats a lot of bagels, let us know as well. But oh my gosh, our feedback at dailytechnishow.com. Let us know. What is the baked good that you would like, you know, an IQ toaster for if there's something that is like difficult with a conventional, we call it conventional toaster. And Breville, come on. It is Breville. I think it's your algorithm. Like, you've got the sensors. They're obviously working.

26:03Huyen Tue Dao: Get it to toast evenly. Like, yeah. More user testing, more toasting. For more update to the IQ toaster could fix this, I suspect. All right. Well. Wasn't there. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I just made a connection. Wasn't there an old piece of software to make ISOs called toast? Was there? Googling, Googling, Googling, Googling, Googling. Because that would tie these both together so nicely. That would be fantastic. I know there's a point of sale system now. Yeah, there's toast, the point of sale. But oh, toast pro? Yeah. Yeah. I thought Rick remembered that. How to burn an ISO with toast from June 2009.

26:41Oh, all right then.

26:43Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, but the IQ won't make your Linux ISOs either. No, well, maybe if it fails as a toaster, maybe they could turn the IQ into looking at making the tiny 11 core small ISOs. Just pop CDs in there and make tiny 11 Windows ISOs. Oh, gosh. Oh, so maybe the laser. Anyway, that's not how those lasers work. Just like repurpose. Excellent. Well, if you have any other feedback, either for Breville or product ideas, or you just want to, again, tell us what baked goods you would like better toasted, you can do that and buy the socials, by the way. Buy the socials, by the way. At DTNS Show on X, Instagram, Threads, Blue Sky, and Mastodon.

27:24For TikTok and YouTube, you can find us at Daily Tech News Show.

27:33This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin.

28:08Amazon ads helped him grow.

28:10Huyen Tue Dao: I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

28:35Huyen Tue Dao: Do you want to be smarter? then you need to listen to these headlines. Well, I can guess it has a review of 8-bit. Oh my gosh. Is it 8-bit dough or 8-bit do's? 8-bit do? Let's go with that. 8-bit do's Ultimate 2C Bluetooth controller with hall effect sticks and triggers and extra bumper buttons. Extra buggy bumper buttons. Just regular bumper buttons, not buggy. Oh my gosh. Okay. Bumper buttons all for$30 and it's available now. You don't say. Google app. Google will now let people who create an app in AI studio, send it to the Google Play Store, which immediately had people howling until they read that it'll be hosted in your personal library available only to you.

29:22Huyen Tue Dao: That makes it easier to install your apps yourself. You don't have to export the APK and then sideload it and all that stuff. You can share them with a small group of family or friends. And Google doesn't say how small is small. But if you want to distribute it in the Google Play Store to the public, you'll need a developer account. And for now, you'll need to export that APK and import it. Although Google says that there is a pathway to do it from AI Studio direct to a developer account in the works, but that hasn't launched yet. That makes too much sense. Well, Siemens has signed on to sell Estonia's Skeleton Energy Systems to data center builders.

29:57Skeleton makes high power storage that reduces energy waste and evens out swings in power usage.

30:04Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. Anything that makes these more efficient is a win in my book. Thank you. Yes, it is. Google DeepMind at Google Cloud will offer up to 200 European researchers access to its most advanced science models, along with$3 million in computing credits total. It's not like one person gets$3 million, but still, it's a lot of computing credits. They want to just give access and fund research. Alpha Fold 3, Weather Next, Alpha Evolve, Alpha Earth Foundations, and Alpha Genome are all among the models that are part of this program. Access will run through European Union's RAISE platform. That's R-A-I-S-E.

30:44All right. Earth-shattering news for those of us that use Apple Music. Apple Music has changed its 13-year-old Apple Music logo. It has been red. Gasp in shock. It has been red with a white eighth note. It's now white with a black eighth note, and it's tilted slightly more to the left with a more oval bottom to the notes and a subtle drop shadow. And inside the app, the eighth note will be tinted blue. And people are angry. So angry. So angry.

31:15Huyen Tue Dao: And not angry for the reason I'll be angry, because it hasn't showed up for me yet. But when it does, I'll be like, where's the freaking icon? Why did they change the color? I can't find it. people are angry that this that the the design is bad and these are the kinds of fights that my design stupid eyes never i never understand i'm like why is this so passion inducing but it's why i'm not a designer so um same yeah it's um it's it's white with a black yeah and drop shadow i know drop shadow gets people's blood boiling sometimes so is it i mean it looks very musical. It's the black note on a white sheet, basically.

31:56I'm sorry. I'm also not a music person. So you can, you can just give us feedback.

32:01Huyen Tue Dao: I highly welcome the designer that's going to write to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and explain to me just why in detail. This is a horrible, horrible change. WhatsApp has added a feature called guest calling that lets you add a person to a call without them having to have a WhatsApp account. There's a lot of video calling apps that do this. WhatsApp is adding this as well. And if you're worried about misuse, guests cannot start a call. They cannot add other guests. And even after you send them the link to join the call, the host of the call has to manually add them to the call before they join.

32:40Huyen Tue Dao: So people can't just try to figure out the URL and pop in. All right. Well, given that scam, there's such a big problem on Android. Let's admit it. We've got some good news because Google announced new scam protections coming to Android and among them is scam detection, which analyzes chat messages and warns you of potential scams, which means it's expanding beyond Pixel devices and will come later this year. Automatic screen sharing privacy comes to all Android 15 or newer devices later this month. And that is hiding passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information when you take a screenshot.

33:13So there you go.

33:14Huyen Tue Dao: Those are good tweaks. Microsoft announced that Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro editions have reached end of support. Tiny 11 supports them, but not Microsoft. That basically means you no longer get the monthly security and non-security updates because you're supposed to be on a more recent version of Windows. However, if you're an enterprise or education edition user, you can continue to get mainstream support until October 12th next year, 2027. All right. Well, if you just happen to feel, I don't know, compelled to spend$2 ,000 on a first-generation foldable from Apple this Friday at 5 in the morning Pacific time, guess what?

33:55Apple would like to make it easier to take your money. So to that end, it has now launched get ready in the apple store app that lets you do everything but actually buy the duo including pre-authorizing your credit card then friday morning all you have to do is tap one button faster you know than the other thousands of other people who want to dump to 2g on the phone in order to get it on the first shipping day which is october 23rd amos and i both did this oh i'm kind of tempted even though i'm a good person but i love foldables okay it's not us i could be i

34:32Huyen Tue Dao: could be a two foldable person oh if i pull the trigger you could make it then you could make like a box i could make a square a square i could make a phone box a phone cross platform there you go it just becomes like a weird non-functioning um uh loud uh what is it what is it what are the what are these things called like loudspeaker or megaphone oh yeah into yeah let's say you make calls on your dual platform. Yeah. Multi-platform device. I have not been so excited about something silly since I, uh, when iPhone only ran on AT &T and I did a video on how to, how to get a Verizon iPhone and I taped a Verizon, uh, wifi box to the back of an iPhone.

35:13That works.

35:14Huyen Tue Dao: It did. Uh, the financial times shows the risk of bringing too much of the internet into one country drone strikes on three of Yandex's six data centers, and they only had six in Russia this past week, mean that people not only have trouble accessing their Yandex emails or their Yandex stored work files or their taxi bookings, but it has also affected a lot of other stuff that ran on Yandex infrastructure, like bus stop displays, locks on shared apartment courtyards reportedly not opening, and even more disconcerting, Yandex Pay showing people zero balances, despite Yandex Pay saying, no, no, your money's still there.

35:53Huyen Tue Dao: It's just an interface problem. I imagine people are not happy to hear that. The disruptions also affected services in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Belarus, which have extensive reliance on Yandex services as well. Oh, man. All right. Well, we end every episode of DTNS with some shared perspectives. Today, Ache H has had a revelation about software. Indeed. Ache writes, Hi, DTNS. I really enjoyed your recent discussion about software being dead. And I'd like to share a real life example that suggests it's more like the French say, a revenant. I'm 43. And I've dreamed of becoming a programmer since I first booted DOS on an old 386 with dual five and a quarter inch floppy drives when I was 10.

36:38Huyen Tue Dao: It was awesome. But life happened. And I became a customs compliance professional in Mexico instead. Very sad. For years, I've wanted to build software for a specific need in my industry. Before AI, I figured I'd need a programmer for at least two or three months, hire ongoing support. With AI, I vibe-coded a working beta in two days and published it the following week, including the deployment of my own licensing server. But AI did not do this alone. I guided every step, checked every module, and when it couldn't imagine a better approach, turns out I could. Simply saying, hey, I make me software for X is unrealistic.

37:17Huyen Tue Dao: But using AI as a coding tool, it will change the world. Let's hope for the better. So my dream of becoming a developer finally came true or did it? I mean, I didn't write a line of code. Oh, hell, let me have this one. Saludos desde Mexico. Ace. Ace, from this age, I think that's very fair to call yourself a developer. And I've mentioned several times in the show, sorry, Tom, I just have strong feelings. So, but yes, I do think that this is the wonderful part about generative AI. And I don't even want to call it vibe coding. I feel like vibe coding has like a connotation, which I would not attribute to what you did, which was to write software that you have the expertise and the knowledge and the experience and an idea of what you wanted and that you guided every step of the way.

38:11If I may say, this would be my platonic ideal of how this world, of how engineering goes. I absolutely understand the kind of gate that oftentimes programming can have. I have that same kind of envy with certain other kinds of programming that I'm not expert in, so I understand that. And I think, if anything, I'm very hardened by how you approached it. I will say that the thing that honestly worries me is the prevalence of this idea of you could just want, Like we call it a lot. It's been referred to a lot as just one shotting something. And again, we talked about that during our discussion. And I will say that I'm a little disheartened to see other engineers like other more professional coders like myself apply the same logic because I just don't think that's tenable.

38:56And it really it someone during this discussion brought up about how it seems like we're all turning into the Jetsons where George Jetson goes to work and just pushes some buttons. And I I have a problem with that a little bit of like abandoning the idea of our of abandoning our expertise, just try to one shot everything. And not only that, we're in a in a phase where if you go on LinkedIn or some other like hellscape site where everybody's trying to be an influencer, Or the trendy thing is to promote how one-shotting could be everything and how the rest of us are being overly cautious. And that's what bothers me because I think we all kind of get into these trends of like, well, that's the cool thing.

39:32And it kind of reminds me vaguely of cryptocurrency a little bit and kind of like the hype around that. This, to be fair, has a lot more values than that, in my opinion. But I would just say that I love that for you. I love your experience. And yes, like I would call you a developer for sure, especially since you had a vision, you worked with it, you cooperated with it. That's a hundred percent. That's I'm, I'm with you to Aceh, like developer.

39:57Huyen Tue Dao: I don't think you could get a better sign off than having Wednesday down give you the, the approval. Like, yes, you get to call yourself a developer. Uh, that, that's awesome. I love that. Uh, I, I think the key part is here is, is when he said I checked every model module and when it couldn't imagine a better approach, turns out I could, that's the key. to all of this is like, because to me, in some ways, it's very similar to like, well, we had object oriented code come along. And no one said, well, you're being lazy, you should write all those objects yourself, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And so if you do it the way Aceh is doing it here, I feel like that's kind of the next evolution of that, where it's like, you still have to be someone who understands how it's supposed to work.

40:38Absolutely.

40:39Huyen Tue Dao: But you don't have to know the assembly code, right? You don't have to know what's in every object, as long as it's working and reliable. Yeah, I mean, I think that's just it. We still need the expertise. It is how we will apply that expertise and also how people will acquire that expertise after us. But no, 100%, you have my heartfelt, you don't need my approval, but you have my heartfelt joy that you were able to accomplish this. And I guess just keep having the AI work for you, I guess, like keep working it the way you are. So nicely done. Yeah. All right. Well, what are you thinking about?

41:14Do you have any uplifting stories about how you've become your dream developer? Please don't become a toilet paper using a corporate spy. But if you have some other insights into any of these stories, we would love to hear it. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com.

41:30Huyen Tue Dao: Gracias, Aceh, for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks who keep us in business. We've had a couple of new patrons. Thank you. there is a discount going on. Don't tell anyone. Just, you know, go on the slide, patreon.com slash DTNS. The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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