Why Attackers Are Targeting Grocery Store Freezers - DTNS 5386

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2:46Dr Niki: This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 2nd. 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you important context and help each other understand

2:56Robb Dunewood: today dr nikki explains the science behind the ai that can turn your thoughts into pictures and why are hackers so help it on going after supermarket freezers this is the world we live in

3:06Dr Niki: brains reading brain reading ai and supermarket hacks i'm tom marrett and i'm rob dunnwood let's start with what you need to know with that big story another round of attacks another is not the first round of attacks on supermarket refrigeration systems took place Monday. These affected stores in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, and Sweden. Around 700 supermarkets in total. Among the chains affected were Carrefour, Spar, Super Value, and Ahold Delays. This is the second attack against refrigeration units in Europe. First came in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and Portugal and Spain back on October 11th.

3:48Dr Niki: There's also an investigation by the U.S. military into failures of food storage freezers across several of its facilities last week, but it's unclear if that's actually a hack or not. All the attacks in Europe are against equipment from Denmark's Danfoss. Usually, in case you follow this sort of thing closely, it's the AK-SM800 or 800A or SC-355 or the X-Web Pro refrigeration controllers. Now, this is interesting. I think it shed a little light on what's going on here. Finland's second largest grocer, Kesco, said that a couple of its smaller grocery stores were affected because they use equipment that is not part of Kesco's centralized safeguards.

4:33Dr Niki: Maybe it's too old or whatever. And an Estonian chain called Selver experienced a problem at its only store that was using one of the older Danfoss systems. And they said that issue was corrected within minutes. Danfoss believes the problems occurred in equipment that had not been patched or in legacy systems that can't be patched and had reached end of life and people were still using them anyway. Always a dangerous idea. U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, published an advisory on an authentication flaw in Danfoss's AKSM 800A system managers back in August. That's probably how the bad guys started to get the idea to go after these.

5:20Dr Niki: Two bugs were patched in later versions of firmware. And there's some reports indicating that maybe proper authentication or encryption was not in place that could have stopped them from being affected. Armist Labs issued a report in October indicating 73 % of organizations surveyed had at least one known exploited vulnerability in their building systems and 91 % of systems in the ones they surveyed anyway communicate over an insecure protocol so at root this is probably preventable Rob but this is a big deal for an industry that probably hasn't thought about cybersecurity as much as some

5:58Robb Dunewood: others so this is an indication that all companies all industry if you use electricity, chances are you are a tech company. Now we used to just think, well, if you're an insurance company, well, yeah, there's enough computers there. They're one. If you're a hospital or something like that, well, there's enough computers and people using it there that you think about it. But these are grocery stores. I don't want to call them mom and pop, but these are grocery stores where you don't think of the grocery store as being the IT company. But if they're using connected devices, if they're using things that are controlled by computers that manage their inventory.

6:34Robb Dunewood: I mean, it's literally managing the, you know, half the inventory in a grocery store needs to be kept cool. And these devices do that. And if they're connected to the internet, if you can, if they need firmware patches, if they need things to be done to them, you are now in essence, a tech company. And I think that this is just how all companies have to start looking at themselves. If you have connected systems, you have to start thinking that we can't just use the, it's still cool. Why would I get rid of this? Because it's no longer patchable. everything works in it but because you can't patch it any longer you really have no choice but to replace this you're living very dangerously when you're working on on hardware that can no longer receive firmware updates because it's just aged out of out of maintenance yeah and and i'll

7:17Dr Niki: tack on to that and if you can put the firmware update you might want to prioritize doing that you know and not put it off for another day uh when you can talk to somebody uh to to make it happen faster or whatever. You need to patch these things. Patching is universal now.

7:34Robb Dunewood: And here's the thing with a lot of these companies. My gut is that they're not even really thinking about that. They just bought a refrigerator and plugged it in and started using it. Yeah. They didn't think about, oh, some of these had default passwords, apparently. Yeah. We didn't think about, oh, we actually need to get the service program that comes with the tech that's going to come out every three months and make sure everything is good. It's like, like that any longer because there used to be a time when your refrigerator, if it worked, you called somebody when it didn't, you were probably fine.

8:03Robb Dunewood: Now it may be seeming like it's working just fine, but the computer that is doing all kinds of things that connected to the internet, it may be doing some nefarious things that can ruin your inventory if you let that thing warm up.

8:15Dr Niki: I'm running through a lot of the responses I expect people in the audience are having. One is why do they need to be connected? I will leave it to the people in the supermarket industry to write in and tell us exactly why, but it makes things easier. You don't have to send someone to the store to make adjustments. You can get maintenance alerts. There's all kinds of reasons to have it connected so you can do centralized management, makes things more efficient. However, if they're connected, you also need to make sure they're off the internet. And that's the second thing I imagine some people are saying is, well, why would anyone want to attack a freezer?

8:48Dr Niki: That's probably why they were able to get by without patching these for so long is that it wasn't a high priority target, but we have tools that have accelerated the ability for someone to, on a whim, say, huh, I wonder what I can hack out there. So these are either that, and that's kind of where I'm leaning as somebody was like, ooh, I can use an AI tool to find vulnerable devices and get in and mess with them. This will be fun. I'll watch the headlines, right? It's the, I would like to watch the world burn kind of mentality. That's what I think is slightly more likely. It could also be sabotage.

9:27Dr Niki: It could be a foreign agent, a foreign entity, or a foreign government that wants to sow economic havoc in your region, deciding this would be a way to do it. Destroy a bunch of food, make people nervous, make people upset. I think the end result is going to be whatever it is, it's going to make the things more secure and people be aware of the security responsibilities that they have with this stuff.

9:53Robb Dunewood: Yeah, people have to become much more security aware and then security secure because of this. But when you really think about it, this is a ginormous hack. When you really think about what is being affected, because they're targeting this at places that serve food to people. Most people don't grow their own food. They do not raise their own food. They go to the grocery store to get it. And if you disrupt that in any meaningful way, you I don't want to say that this civilization changing, but it's city changing. It can absolutely affect the city. It can affect, you know, you know, a municipality.

10:27Robb Dunewood: If all the grocery stores and, you know, in a 40 mile radius, all their freezers go bad simultaneously. That is a huge problem for just the you know, for that part of civilization. So this is a really big hack when you really think about what is being affected here. Yeah.

10:42Dr Niki: The good news is grocery stores run on very thin margins. So they're used to wastage and they know how to deal with it and recover pretty fast. The other good news is it seems like they have been able to get these freezers back into working order rather fast. There was not damage done to them. They just raised the temperature when people weren't looking. And a lot of cases they were caught, like the Estonian one that I mentioned. So it is probably going to be a good news story in the end because it seems like there's minimal negative effects other than these supermarket chains taking a hit. And some of the smaller ones, that'll be harder to deal with than the others.

11:19Dr Niki: But they will all be more secure now because they have been made aware of this.

11:23Robb Dunewood: Yeah, there may be some CISO roles open at grocery stores now that there were before.

11:28Dr Niki: There may be some CISOs leaving their roles and those roles will now be open for other CISOs.

11:33Robb Dunewood: Exactly. dts is made possible by you the listener thanks to dale mcahy matt zaglin jeff wilks and duff

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14:45Dr Niki: There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs.

14:48Robb Dunewood: Workplace tracking company ActiveTrack analyzed the work habits of 9 ,140 workers and 467 enterprises from April 1st, 2026 to September 25th, 2026. They found that workers who use some sort of AI worked 8.4 to 9.1 hours per day versus 7.6 hours per day for non-users. And if somebody had to work after hours, heavy users of AI more than 45 minutes per day, they spent more than 18 minutes longer after hours than those not using AI tools. Bloomberg notes that the separate study from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, found that employees often voluntarily took on extra work when AI tools made them more productive.

15:27Robb Dunewood: but then started to burn out as that became the new baseline expectation.

15:31Dr Niki: Yeah. The one thing I would like to see in this study, and maybe it's in a longer version of this that I didn't get a look at, but I would like to see them tease out, are these the people who work more anyway? I imagine it might be more likely that the people who are most active as workers, the most excited about their job are also the ones more likely to try out these tools, right? So there could be a correlation that's not causation here. However, I like that you included the Haas School of Business study because I think that's a big part of this is like, yes, like every other labor-saving device we've ever had, instead of actually using that time for recreation or relaxation, we always use that extra time to do more.

16:17Dr Niki: because at first we think it's awesome that we can do more. And then that becomes the norm and you're expected to do more. And that's what that part of the study bore out.

16:27Robb Dunewood: So Tom, there was a time back when I was in corporate America, you know, working in, you know, for some of the biggest software companies on the planet. One of the things that I regularly would do is that if we had a two to three year upgrade window on PCs for some of our engineers, I didn't necessarily just automatically put in, Hey, I need to go replace 120 laptops for, you know, when we hit that two year mark. But what I would do is that any engineer, once they got beyond and I'm no longer in the space, so I can tell the secret sauce. Now, any engineer that would ask for a new laptop that was over the two years, well, we just hadn't decided to upgrade them automatically yet.

17:02Robb Dunewood: I would just do it. And the reason was because I know that when they get their new hotness, they're going to spend more time on the new hotness, doing all the cool things that our software company did. it just it just made us more productive because i got this new i just got this new machine you know rob did me a solid by getting the machine that he was going to get anyway but he got it for me early so i'm going to put more time in into just working and it was something that you know i figured this out over the course of like a you know 20 year career but it just made sense if you know you're going to be getting it in a year and you can get it today and it makes that engineer happy just go ahead and do it because what you will gain by buying something you're going to buy any anyway a little early is that it probably didn't cost as much to buy it early and it probably gains you a bit of productivity because the engineer is now you know they have new hotness they want to go see how all their cool stuff works on this new piece of hardware this seems exactly the same thing here people that are using ai are kind of on the bleeding edge of it and it's like this is cool i can i can i can do all this work by by doing this so they actually are working more the person that's not using ai is like they figured out i i gotta be here eight hours i know what i do when my eight hours is up i'm out but the person that got the new toy they might stick around a little longer just because they want to see what the new toy can do and i think that's probably a

18:23Dr Niki: big part of what's happening here yeah and i and i don't think we should shortchange that second part of it is as soon as that person sets a a level of with this new tool i can now do this much that becomes the norm, right? That becomes like, okay, well, that's not the baseline. You know, Pat just made it so that everybody else has to do that much and anybody else that's not doing that much better start using these tools too. And then suddenly Pat's like, well, wait a minute, I was exceeding expectations and now suddenly I'm not anymore. And I think that's important to keep in mind here as well.

19:00Dr Niki: But yeah, these things never end up saving us time. We just find other ways to use that time.

19:06Robb Dunewood: Mm hmm. Yeah, we you're going to spend if you work an eight hour shift, if you if you're, you know, even if you sell it, if you're rough, if you work roughly eight hours a day, you're going to work roughly eight hours a day, there may be some things that will cut it down a little bit, but eventually you're going to get back to work in roughly eight, nine hours a day. We just always going to settle there no matter what you have to make you more productive. And you're right. If you're more productive, we'll just say, well, hey, we just need to change the baseline. Now everybody needs to be this productive.

19:33Robb Dunewood: We're going to give these tools to everyone. Everybody now has to do this. this is now the new norm. Yeah.

19:37Dr Niki: I like that story about the laptops. That's a good anecdote. Really. And it really is that thing that's like, yeah, when people get more power, they get excited to use it for things. Absolutely. Yeah. Ars Technica has a write-up of a$48, not$299, $48 smart display kit from Seed Studio. That's Seed with three E's. S-E-E-E-D. It was developed in collaboration with Terminal, which is T-R-M-N-L. Apparently, they gave all their E's to Seed. Seed Designs produces open source hardware. They do robotics and IoT devices. Terminal is an indie e-ink display designer and seller. So the idea here is the Seed Studio Kit was designed to be an always-on e-ink display that cycles through information you select, like your calendar, your weather, and news.

20:31Dr Niki: And people said, hey, can this plug into Terminal? And so they decided to do that. The two companies partnered in July 2025 to run Terminal firmware on a Xiao e-paper panel from Seed. And now you can get this display kit for 48 bucks. It is a very DIY thing. So you got three different ways you can set it up. The stock way is through Terminal's BYOD ecosystem, bring your own device system. You're bringing the Seed device in this particular case. that will connect you to trmnl.com for serving information. It includes a lot of plugins. You can plug in your Google Drive, your ChatGPT, all the way to the Ferengi rules of acquisition.

21:11Dr Niki: Can just refresh a new rule every time it comes up. And Terminal is free for 14 days and then costs you a$50 one-time fee to connect. You don't have to pay monthly. It's just$50 if you want to use that API from then on. All your data and stuff is still in whatever service you're connecting to. Terminal's just providing the API to connect to it. The second way you can do it, though, doesn't require you to pay. It's the SenseCraft Seed-platform. It's very similar to Terminal, but it's free. It is subject to mainland China's privacy policy because Seed is a Shenzhen company. It's also not specific to the e-ink platform the way Terminal is, so there'll be a lot of things in there that you won't be able to use.

21:56Dr Niki: There'll be a lot of Chinese language stuff. You'll have to look for the English stuff. So Terminal is a little tighter in like, it's going to be just the things you want for this particular product, but you don't have to use either of those. The third way you can use it is Home Assistant. I know we got a lot of Home Assistant fans out there. You can use Home Assistant and run your own Terminus container. Now that requires some Docker container knowledge to make it work. So that's not for everybody. But once you get it going, you can write your own plugins or use the ones from Terminal and you don't have to pay the fee.

22:26Dr Niki: The product itself is a dev board, the 7.5 inch monochrome e-paper display, an extension cable, FPC connector, 2000 milliamp hour battery, and Wi-Fi antenna. You need a case. You can order a case from them separately and pay for that. You can order a stand as well, but you can also 3D print your own. Again, this is a DIY sort of situation. So if you just want to order the parts for$48, put it together in your own case. There are actually two official designs available for printing and you can modify those to your heart's content as well. I know there's a lot of people looking at all these smart displays from Amazon and Apple and everybody else and saying, well, I don't want to share my data with them.

23:07Dr Niki: Guess what? You don't have to. You can just DIY it this way and it'll cost you a lot less.

23:12Robb Dunewood: DIY it. And I appreciate that they're keeping the the price way down because you're going to pay$47 trillion to get any type of RAM to go into the device that you're going to plug into the thing to actually make all this work. So, you know, there's, there's a balancing act there, but yeah, this is, you know, for, you know, for, for the end of 2026, this is relatively inexpensive tech that is cool to play around with. Like I said, you know, there's a good chance you might have something that control that, you know, that they control this that maybe you've had for a few years that already has the RAM in it that you need to do what you need to do.

23:44Robb Dunewood: and you don't have to mortgage your house to go buy new kit. Yeah.

23:48Dr Niki: And you don't have to buy extra RAM for this. If you buy it for$48, it does what it does. It's on the Zhao board. I don't know where they got their RAM. But actually, that makes me wonder if you just buy this just to take the RAM out.

24:01Robb Dunewood: People are buying it and melting it down for parts. Yeah.

24:03Dr Niki: But I don't think there's that much RAM in here because I don't think it's required. It's a very simple system that's just going to cycle through stuff for you. Like you want it to show the weather and your calendar appointments. This is not a smart display in the sense that you're not talking to it. You're not programming it. You're not interacting with it. But you are programming it. You're in charge of what shows up there, how often, and you can change it whenever you want. So, again, not for everybody because it does require maintenance and it does require that DIY spirit. But I know there are plenty of folks out there who have that.

24:35Dr Niki: And this might be worthwhile to take a look at. So good on Ars Technica for highlighting it. I think it's a cool project for people to take a look at.

24:42Robb Dunewood: Absolutely.

24:43Dr Niki: Well, folks, we do live streams almost every day. We do something called office hours. Rob and I are going to do one today where we just kind of hang out and chat about stuff informally. And then Friday, we do our big live stream, the big tech question of the week. So, yes, you get that in this feed if you're a subscriber. But if you want to watch it live, you can do that, too. Become a subscriber at YouTube.com slash Daily Tech News Show.

25:13This 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.

26:13Dr Niki: Now let's get to the quick headlines that are going to make us look and actually be a little smarter.

26:19Robb Dunewood: Raspberry Pi is raising the price of the 16 gigabyte variant of the Raspberry Pi 5 by$80 to a total of$385. The 16 gigabyte Raspberry Pi compute module 5 variants all go up$40 as well.

26:34Dr Niki: Yeah, there's where that RAM went. Linus Torvalds posted the first release, I'm sorry, Linus Torvalds posted the first release candidate for Linux kernel 7.4, noting it has almost 20 ,000 commits compared to the usual 15 ,000 or so. And that's because of AI. Torvalds wrote, I'm much happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than it's showing up mainly as extra fixes. So he's glad it's showing up now. He also noted that it is full of fixes for issues found by AI and more and more of the patches have been suggested by AI too, although they often get rewritten. Kind of tracks with some of the other things we've been seeing that AI is good at finding vulnerabilities and maybe helping you start to figure out how to patch it, but the end code probably needs a human touch still.

27:22Robb Dunewood: Absolutely. Chip maker Marvell has agreed to buy data center optics maker Lumentum combining two of the biggest component suppliers for modern data centers. NVIDIA is an investor in both companies.

27:34Dr Niki: I mean, that is a huge story in the tech financial sector, for sure. Rest of World has an article about two companies, Harundo and Lazarus, attempting to modify the weights in open weight models like DeepSeek and Qun to remove tendencies to favor a Chinese point of view. Maybe, you know, Chinese Communist Party standards for censorship, things like that. They've also found examples where it will deliver less secure code if it detects that the user is Western. And they're attempting to correct for that so you can still use these open-weight models and not have those concerns.

28:09Robb Dunewood: Ukraine and Russia both hacked each other's emergency alert systems to send false warnings. In response, Russia is temporarily allowing the use of data centers outside of Russia.

28:18Dr Niki: That's an interesting conundrum there for them. Binance began allowing withdrawals again on Sunday. This is following that attack we mentioned Friday that transferred about$6.3 billion worth of crypto out of the Binance exchange. Binance says it has covered more than 95 % of the stolen assets so far.

28:37Robb Dunewood: Wired discovered that more than 400 apps in the Apple and Google Play app stores from a single Chinese company claim to be mundane apps like Workout Coaches, but all included a web interface that could allow the generation of explicit emerging in violation of app store rules.

28:52Dr Niki: It's getting harder and harder to catch this stuff when it goes through App Store review. Meta built a prototype humanoid robot with China's Fourier robotics that runs on Nvidia Jetson Thor chips. Meta calls it Max. It does say this is for research and experimentation. They have no plans to sell a humanoid robot yet.

29:12Robb Dunewood: Apple said Apple intelligence features will arrive in China as part of iOS 27.3 in December. Siri writing tools and visual intelligence will use Alibaba's Quinn model. China will not get Siri AI or other more recent features.

29:26Dr Niki: Anthropic updated its S1 filing for its upcoming IPO. This is to add their Q3 revenue reports. They say revenue rose 12 times year over year last quarter from$1.4 billion to$17 billion. So the$17 billion in Q3 is equal to the$16.3 billion they reported in revenue for the entire first two quarters of the year combined.

29:46Robb Dunewood: I think Anthropic will be able to keep up 12x year over year growth indefinitely. Why not?

29:50Dr Niki: You know, the sky's the limit, right?

29:52Robb Dunewood: The Washington Post reports that SpaceX held talks with EcoStar about using Boost Mobile to launch a Starlink wireless service. That could mean a business deal or possibly buying Boost Mobile from EcoStar. The three major U.S. wireless carriers have reportedly declined to partner with SpaceX on the venture. And those are the essentials for today, but let's dive a little deeper, shall we? previously we talked about a new diffusion model created by researchers at the weisman institute that tries to guess what you're looking at by analyzing your brain scans dr nikki is here to tell us whether ai is going to take over our brains or not thank you for joining us dr nikki happy to be here i knew i read your mind tom and that's how i knew to be here today were you using

30:38Dr Niki: AI to see what I was thinking? Well, maybe. Can you use? Is that what's going on? I think this really freaked people out when we talked about it before. Like, oh my gosh, they just can like watch our brains now. Like what's going on with this thing? All right. So let's back up a little bit and start with brain scans. How do they work? So functional MRI or fMRI measures you can use to record. It is literally magnets. How do they work that we're telling you right now? Because it is a functional magnetic resonance image. You use them to take a picture of your brain with magnets. But I've done a segment about MRI before, so you got to go back and listen to that.

31:15Yeah, check that one out. But basically, with an fMRI, looking at the functional aspect, so it's like a live video of activity of the neurons in your brain during the scan, and basically what lights up based on different things like blood oxygen and so on. And a group of researchers at the Weisman Institute used publicly available data of volunteers who went in an fMRI and were shown a list of about 9 ,000 objects, pictures of objects, and to see what was happening in their brain while that was happening. And they used all that data to train an AI model that they called a brain decoder.

31:54Dr Niki: Okay. So I get that you can look at the brain activity in an fMRI, and then that would tell you what parts of the brain are active. What does the model then do with that information? So this model has two parts. One of them is predicting from the brain data, the brain scan, what the structure of the image is going to be. For example, where the colors are in the image. And the second part is predicting the content of the image. For example, there's a banana on a plate. And then they use a diffusion model to kind of clean up the pixels and create an accurate image representation. But that's only about half of the story.

32:32And I figured you know about diffusion models. So tell us when other instances when that's used in tech.

32:37Dr Niki: No, diffusion models are kind of basic science for the large language models that we have. They are the kinds of models that were getting most of the attention and development in the early to middle days of AI before the transformers came along. So I'm going to oversimplify and then upset researchers in the area by saying it this way. But it's a little bit like letting a model play off of each other. It's looking at, okay, well, if this is true and this is true, and then we can make associations based on that. It's a very simplistic way of looking at it. Right. Okay, so we get the diffusion model that says there's yellow and white, and then the other model says it's a banana and a plate, and then they merge those together and you get a yellow banana on a plate, right?

33:35Dr Niki: What's the other half of this story? All right, so that is a pretty good start, and other people have been working on that, but it's not nearly enough data to have a super accurate model. As we know, these types of models need a ton of data. So they developed this really interesting system, which I think happens a lot now with these AI types of things, where you can also do the reverse. So you predict what brain images would occur based on different images. And these are images that people have not looked at before. So this is called the encoder. So basically just the opposite. And by combining the brain decoder and the brain encoder, they made this loop where both tools were constantly improving each other.

34:15Dr Niki: Is there a good example of that? So imagine we have a picture of your face and then we apply to the encoder to estimate what someone's fMRI data is going to look like when they see a picture of your face. They're in awe and they're joyful, presumably. And then you use the decoder to recreate the image of your face based on the fMRI data. So kind of like when you go into Google Translate and you translate into Chinese and then back in English and hope that it's the same thing, but like way more sophisticated, basically. um and after a lot a lot of repetitive training the tool actually did become quite precise and the team only needed about one hour of fmri data for the tool to work pretty efficiently as compared to usually like 40 hours and if you've ever had an mri you know that it's it's not invasive but it's a bit stressful it's loud you have to sit in the machine and it's very expensive it's like a thousand dollars per hour so that's a big improvement it's claustrophobic and all of that Yes.

35:12Dr Niki: This makes sense to me too, which is like, let's predict what the brain should look like. Then let's analyze the brain and predict what the brain should be seeing. Now let's compare. How close did we get? If we didn't get close, we need to be trained some more. If we got real close, then yes, make those associations really solid. What have they found? So as you can imagine, when doing this, they've been able to compare what parts of the brain light up. and they've identified certain regions light up in relation to certain things like food. And that makes sense because our brain is kind of very deeply wired onto food, right, as an evolutionary response.

35:50And they're saying that they're trying to in the future develop it as a tool that could be really groundbreaking for patients who have locked in syndrome. So who are paralyzed, for example, and can't necessarily express themselves. And this could be a really good way to open up those possibilities. So I think it's very exciting and seems to be basically a pretty good positive use of AI models.

36:13Dr Niki: Yeah, that would be amazing if someone who is, you know, Johnny's got his gun locked in and then through this can express, you know, can think about things and then see them show up. That would be incredible. Obviously, the other side of it is everyone worried. So you just point this fMRI machine at my brain and you can see what I'm thinking. Like, obviously, an fMRI machine, very bulky, hard to point at someone. You need to put the person in it. Expensive. Are there any dangers to this, you know, getting smaller and easier to misuse? Believe me that if we could have a smaller MRI, we would have it.

36:51Turns out it just takes a lot of room to spin a giant magnet around someone's head. That being said, so right now, no, there's no dangers. And really it is reconstructing this specific set of images and it really is doing this like brainwave to images and back. And it's not right now close to being able to reconstruct random things that a person is thinking. However, the team stated it's also not that far away. But you still have to give your consent, climb into an MRI for like an hour. And also if anyone kind of used this data nefariously, that would be a gigantic HIPAA violation. So I think the practicalities are not there, but I guess you could force someone into an MRI and try and read their brain.

37:37It's a bit far-fetched.

37:39Dr Niki: Right. We'll hear from it when it happens. It's the first step down the road to someday, who knows how long from now, being able to better tell what's going on in someone's brain. Yeah, and actually I'm really excited to know more about that from the research perspective. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I would volunteer for the study because what if they're like, okay, visualize a dog. And then I accidentally visualize like something bad happened to the dog and then I feel bad. Oh, that's a good point. Right. Like, what is it going to unlock about your subconscious that maybe you just didn't want to know?

38:12Dr Niki: I'd do it. I'd be curious. I'd risk it. I, I'm definitely taking what you just said very seriously. and I'd want all the confidentiality that HIPAA provides. But yeah, I'd be curious how that works, especially because it's like, it's not going at this point to take any of my random thoughts and visualize them because it hasn't been trained on those. We'll see, but that's why I'm worried. Like, what if I have intrusive thoughts during the experiment? Right, but you were saying that it won't be able to make images. It won't be able to make any image, right? And you know what I noticed? They do provide a data set of like which images are reconstructed and there's one with a bird and the reconstruction is really bad.

38:53So they need an ornithologist to help them. There you go.

38:55Dr Niki: They need you. Call me. Call Dr. Nikki, make sure that you can not picture her intrusive thoughts and then we're off. Well, thank you, Dr. Nikki. Folks, if you would volunteer for this study or not, let us know, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. And I highly recommend this intrusive thought intrude into your brain right now. I am going to watch Technical Tea. I'm going to listen to technical tea with Dr. Nikki and Wen Tui Dao. How would they do that? Should they have that thought? Yes, we have a beautiful new website that Wen made and has all of our new episodes coming up and a calendar. It's technicaltea.show.

39:30We did a October Halloween episode that's about leeches and vampires and zombies, but not how you think. More like the science behind it. And also we really go off on a leech tangent. That's very fun. And then the November episode is about a day in our life. So like, what do I do all day as a research scientist? I'm not waiting for Tom to pick up the phone all day. Although I would love to. I'd rather do that. I wish. And what does Gwen do all day at her job in big tech? So we took some of the questions from Discord and made a fun episode about it. And go check it out.

40:03Dr Niki: Where do you go check it out? TechnicalTea.show. TechnicalTea.show. TechnicalTea.show. TechnicalTea.show. On everything. Easy for me to say. Thank you, Dr. Nikki. Thank you for having me. I will be in your thoughts, Tom. Intrusively. Yeah. So, Rob, would you get in that MRI machine?

40:25Robb Dunewood: I don't know that I'd get in that MRI machine, but I do envision a day in the foreseeable future within our lifetimes, Tom, to where this is going to be shrunk down to the size of the band on a nice fedora. So you can just literally wear a hat and the, you know, the technology, we get to the point where you just put on a nice hat and you can now just interface with computers around you. And then, you know, you just think we were, we were talking in the pre-show about how whisper sync, how cool I think it is. You can just talk to your computer and have a conversation with it and you get useful information back.

40:57Robb Dunewood: Now, you don't even need to talk to it. You just think about it and it knows what you want. That's not here today. I don't think that's here tomorrow, but I do see a future where that's coming.

41:04Dr Niki: proper privacy safeguards and i'm all for that yeah that can be incredibly useful like i said

41:09Robb Dunewood: if you put in a nice fedora um you know you're gonna wear it i know you gotta wear it well folks we in every episode of dt nestle some shared perspectives and today kevin from the home of the world series champion milwaukee brewers has some thoughts on why art craft feels so fast

41:25Dr Niki: yeah kevin wrote hi tom and scott i just listened to the weekend episode vibing to art i really enjoyed that listen. On the episode, Scott was giving a lot of credit for the application speed to Rust. Now, this might be partially true. Rust is a great language, but I would bet the major cause for the snappy performance is a fresh code base. No legacy formats, no weird snow leopard hooks, no Win95 support, etc, etc. They could probably accomplish the same with C++, but it's not as flashy or cool. Rust has been all the rage for several years now with major companies doing rewrites using Rust, Discord, GitHub, Cloudflare, Copilot, and now Photocraft, and reporting significant performance gains.

42:08Dr Niki: I've been doing software professionally for 30 years, and I love the opportunity to start with a fresh code base. The performance is typically top-notch. It's the bugs you have to worry about, and with AI writing the code, bugs happen a lot less frequently. Love the show, love your work, and I love it when Scott's around. Kevin from Milwaukee.

42:27Robb Dunewood: Kevin from Milwaukee is not wrong in my estimation. I think he's exactly right. When you don't have to support a bunch of legacy stuff and you can just do the new stuff with things that do less mistakes than humans do. It just gives you better outcomes, faster outcomes. So I think he's hitting the nail right on the head.

42:43Dr Niki: Tighter code, more efficient, fewer weird pathways for it to go down. That's a good call, Kevin. Thanks for sharing that insight with us.

42:52Robb Dunewood: Folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got insight into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com.

43:00Dr Niki: And big thanks again to Dr. Nicky, as well as Kevin 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. Become a patron. Join that big crowd of new patrons, folks. Be one of them. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

43:17Robb Dunewood: The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand.

43:23Dr Niki: Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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