TWiT 1067: Short Vertical Content - Is Claude the New King of AI Coding?

9:04Megan Morrone:It's very speedy and it's memory safe.

9:07Jason Howell:I do a lot of rust.

9:09Megan Morrone:I'm all rust and go right now.

9:10Jason Howell:What's nice is it's, and go would be this way too, it's threaded. So when it started to block because it was refreshing the feed or whatever, I said, hey, I can't do anything. It's blocking. I said, oh, I'm sorry. and so started threading stuff and doing it asynchronously oh i'm sorry i didn't realize you're absolutely right you're absolutely right let me fix that for you i don't like the obsequious sycophantic tone but i can't but it's kind of fun anyway and you know what and by the way and the reason we're bringing this up it is timely i'm sorry it is timely no because for a long time it's kind of been oh it's chat gpt no now it's uh gemini or now it's it's been kind of this neck and neck race pretty much between anthropic open ai and google but all of a sudden there seems to be this kind of growing consensus around claude and you i know harper for months has been singing claude's praises and i think what what i realized with my experience as it got smarter and it's had november 24th is when they turned on the brains and then since then they've been using claude code to write new features so they've accelerated the new features and what what the light bulb went off for me is that this is the beginning of hyper personalized software that people yeah will be able to write their own software just like this i'm not going to release speedy reader for anybody to make i actually put it on github just as an example but if you wanted to make it you would maybe start there i like that

10:44Megan Morrone:you said i'm not going to release this to anyone but i did participate in open source software by putting it on github repo of all the software where everyone can read it i was talking about

10:55Jason Howell:this bbs program i wrote in 1986 renegade no no i it wasn't a bbs program i was a fido net sysop but because i only had two lines which then was a luxury by the way that's like meeting that's like meeting a uh a uh a jedi a file if i don't at sysop like i've heard of them i've never seen one never well you couldn't get through it was a busy busy busy so i wrote a vertical blank dialer for the macintosh which as far as i know the first multitasking program for the macintosh it ran in the background would would speed would repeatedly dial my bulletin board and then when it got you so you could do whatever you wanted because it was doing in the background and then when you got in it would go and you're i put a big sign up and said you're in you're in and you could use the bulletin board um the but and this is before there was a concept of open source software i did publish on the bulletin board the assembly language code for this fact all the software i've ever written i've always published even before there was this concept because i thought well why hold on to it let anybody who is interested modify it i always liked that idea because i'm not in it for money i don't do it for a living so why not anyway this idea to me i think we're this is going to be a very interesting year for ai particularly for these coding agents and especially for claude although i acknowledge that google or anthropic or open AI could easily lap them.

12:24Jason Howell:You know, this is a really neck and neck race, is going to be the beginning of a sea change in software where people are doing their own stuff. You know, and you've been saying this for a while. Mike Masnick said this. He wrote his own personal knowledge management system.

12:40Megan Morrone:Yeah. I mean, it's very clear that the bespoke software thing is happening. And it's like artisanal. Finally, my hipster life will continue, you, not just farmers markets, but now my software is artisanal. But it's interesting kind of thing where every time you dream, you get to like a peer software. You don't have to plan really. And I've been thinking a lot about how this is also a little bit like time travel in that for you to build a RSS reader, like you showed us, you would have had the plan for a couple of weeks, maybe hack on it for a while. Then you're trying to fit it in your life. This would have taken me months.

13:24Megan Morrone:Yeah. And then, and you've written assembly in the eighties. So, you know, you know how to code, you know how to do that stuff. And most people don't have that experience. So it might've even taken them longer. And now you just kind of,

13:37Jason Howell:Oh, most people wouldn't even consider it.

13:39Megan Morrone:They would have sent you.

13:40Jason Howell:I have to find something off the shelf. I have to download something.

13:43Megan Morrone:And so now you just kind of send some utterances towards a, you know, a sycophantic friend who then is just like, yeah, great idea. Like, this is great. Let's do it. And then like 10 minutes later, you have a product that would normally have been something for sale, maybe, et cetera. And there's a couple of interesting things about this. The first one is everyone I know who is jumping into the cloud code world is experiencing the exact same thing. That's the first thing. Is that all? That's what I've noticed.

14:12Jason Howell:All of a sudden, I'm seeing all these blog posts. People just the light bulb is going on.

14:17Megan Morrone:Yeah. The second thing that I've seen, which I really love, is people, reverse engineering is the wrong word, but they're kind of copying software that they remember from the past. So they'll say, oh, there was a really cool MIDI control program that I had in the early 90s that I want for my Mac. And then they just find screenshots, paste it in the cloud code, and cloud code's like, yeah, that sounds great, and just goes and builds random software. Well, what's exciting about this is, I don't know about my memories or their memories, but my memories are wrong. I'm making shit up all the time. So I'm guessing that they're inventing new software based on this foundation of memories from the 90s that is like, oh, I wished it would have done this.

14:58Megan Morrone:And so they're inventing this new software, calling it a copy, which I think is very interesting. Because then we have this generative approach. And then many of them are thinking, oh, does this then become a business? and these are non-tech people non-programmers um etc and it's very interesting that scares me

15:15Jason Howell:because and i've already noticed uh this on reddit you're seeing a lot of oh i just wrote a program they don't mention that they uh vibe coded it but oh i got a new program that does this and there's and daily there's dozens of these and i know what's happening there's going to be suddenly just as there is an onslaught of ai imagery and onslaught of ai movies there's going to be an onslaught of AI software, which will be of varying quality. But see, that's why to me, I kind of want to emphasize the notion of this being for you, not for the world. I mean, you could start with somebody's program, I guess.

15:49Megan Morrone:But yeah, I don't think it matters anymore. I mean, it's so cheap to generate code. That's what you taught me. And this is the thing that, yeah, this is the thing that I come back to all the time, which is the cost and value of code is almost zero at this point in time. And so then the question is, is there such thing as a closed source product? Because if you show me an app with my eyeballs, I can describe it into cloud. And now I have a copy of that app. There's the tech. It's so bizarre. That is still... Every time I do one of these quick little hacks that does a thing. Earlier today, I made a little bot that was like three quote unquote agents on a spaceship that my kid could talk to using real-time APIs.

16:35Megan Morrone:And he was just like, tell me a joke. Okay, alien, tell me another joke. And it just is like spitting out jokes. But like that took, you know, 40 minutes of me not really paying attention to it. And it did a thing that probably would have been an incredibly impressive thing five years ago. But today you're just like, oh yeah, of course, of course you would have a

16:54Jason Howell:talking computer the other thing i will say is i still love to code i'm enjoying coding i code but i don't write like i would never dream of writing this rss refuter it's just too much of a commit it's too big a deal so i write little things i do coding problems i do fun stuff coding's like crossword puzzles for me so i don't think same reason i still play chess yeah computer can play chess better but i like to play chess without a computer because it's fun um are you tempted at braard does this this conversation then make you start to think gee i maybe i could do some of my own software or is this something just off-putting no i think i i'm like listening

17:36Leo Laporte:to you guys realizing there's a lot of untapped potential here but i also think the one thing i need in my life is less screen time so that's too conflicting reality well you can make your

17:45Jason Howell:screen time, better quality. We were talking.

17:48Leo Laporte:There you go. There you go. And then, and then maybe it'll end up becoming less because I get more out of the, yeah, there's what I do notice.

17:55Jason Howell:So I, this past week I've been spending a lot of screen time doing this and so forth. Then I noticed my eyes are getting really tired. I can't, I can't see anymore. I have to go out and touch grass i think because yeah it's not good for my eyes now uh uh i i should point out that uh one of the reasons i stopped paying much attention to the uh socials is i was buying a lot of stuff and harper you want to show us what you just got on tiktok yeah i will i will want just a second

18:32Megan Morrone:Let me roll away.

18:34Leo Laporte:He's got to get ready.

18:35Jason Howell:You have to come roll, please. Harper's camera came on and he was dressed oddly. It would be one way to put it. Yeah, I think that might be the best part.

18:46Leo Laporte:I can't think of another.

18:47Jason Howell:But what I love about Harper - This is not odd. This is very normal. Do you go out on the streets of Chicago wearing chain mail?

18:55Megan Morrone:It would be so cold. Oh, that's true. It would get cold. I didn't even think of that. Yeah, it's very, very cold. Yeah. But I mean, I really think that AI is going to cause some impact in our world. I just want to be ready for anything.

19:16Jason Howell:I am honestly of the opinion that this year it's going to be weird and wild and not all good, not all bad by any means. um well you you know you mentioned people have funny maybe false memories of 60s software that they want they have back again remember that the whole thing where everybody was sure that Sinbad was in a movie where he was a genie yeah I think that movie's gonna happen because somebody's gonna tell me great idea this is great all these false memories of things that never happened you could make happen again this is true uh so one of the things uh anthropic did to to spread the claude goodness is they made a thing called claude co-work which takes claude code and puts it in a macintosh it's currently only macintosh but the macintosh version of anthropics claude desktop app and as i mentioned it does things like rearrange icons well inevitably within a day people discovered an injection prompt that can cause it to do bad things.

20:31Leo Laporte:As people do.

20:32Jason Howell:It took almost no time.

20:34Megan Morrone:And so... This is also the least surprising information ever. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you're like, let me give a computer... Because part of the cloud code thing, like, or part of the cloud co-work thing is they're giving it a little tiny VM that it runs in and then it has just unfettered access to that little VM. but then you're putting, you're passing in a directory that you're working in or what have you. And so like giving an AI access to a hundred percent of everything is, is just, it's going to lead to some, some tears and some problems and some security issues. This is, this is the least surprising thing ever.

21:11Megan Morrone:And anyone who like me with my, my chain mail hat who has been. You are prepared. Yeah. A hundred percent. I, I have some stories. about this. I, uh, I wrote a little agent using cloud code that would manage my home assistant. That's my next project. And it's great. It's really fun. Should I be careful? Well, I'm wearing my helmet by the way. I don't know. Do you, do you use, uh, use unify? Uh, you mean ubiquity? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ubiquity. So my ubiquity is hooked into my home assistant.

21:48Jason Howell:And I've got H.A. Green, an H.A. Green server over here.

21:51Megan Morrone:Oh, nice. So I was in Japan, as I want to do, for some family time. And we were there and I was hacking on this home assistant bot. And I looked at the cameras for my office where I'm in right now. And I noticed the lights were all on, but it was night because it was a day in Japan. And I was like, oh, well, we should turn off those lights. So I said to the bot, hey, turn off the lights. And the bot said, yeah, great. And it turned off the lights. I saw that, but I saw some stuff on, like a TV on. I was like, hey, just go ahead and turn off the office. And it turned off the office 100 % of everything, including the router.

22:24Megan Morrone:So you couldn't turn it back on.

22:27Jason Howell:No access.

22:28Megan Morrone:I have a screenshot. It's perfect. It's like, turn off the lights. It's like, oh, thanks, Harper. Great idea. And then it goes, I'm like, hey, can you turn off the office? And it's like, yeah, we'll do it. Disconnected. And I was just like, oh no. So I hit the office slack up and I'm like, hey, happy holidays everyone but uh can someone go in and flip the switch and turn back on the router so when you give unfettered access to the ais i think that we're just not yet ready for the framework that you have to like the thought framework that you have to be thinking through on how to be careful i and i think my favorite part about this is i don't think anyone knows I don't think the AI companies know.

23:11Megan Morrone:I don't think people are experiencing this.

23:13Jason Howell:Well, we're all going to learn at once, aren't we? And we're all going to have that teaching moment.

23:16Megan Morrone:I think it's going to be slowly and then all at once, right? Like this is going to be that thing where we're going to have all these experiences. The Brer is going to have theirs. You're going to have yours. I'm going to have mine where I probably burned down something. And then all of a sudden, we're all going to have these stories. That's kind of technology.

23:31Jason Howell:I mean, there's video of me putting in the pen upside down on my Samsung Galaxy Note. and breaking it yeah uh i was in the i was in the middle of a podcast windows weekly when i got the prompt would you like to update uh windows right now and i and i said oh hey paul it says should i update should i hit return and he said don't touch it and of course i hit return and the whole oh man shut down we've all been in that boat where the problem is computers are very literal. And unfortunately, these guys will do what you say. Simon Willison, when somebody pointed this issue out with Claude Coda, a co-work, said it's unfair to tell regular non-programmer users to watch out for, quote, suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection because nobody knows what to look for.

24:29Jason Howell:This flaw...

24:30Megan Morrone:I mean, he kind of invented that whole world, like Simon. And I think the thing about that is it is hard to even think through, like, how that goes. Like, it's a very complicated kind of thing. You know, I mean, I don't even know if I, I think I would be susceptible.

24:52Jason Howell:Anybody would be. Yeah. because what happens is they put malicious prompts in hidden text in in documents and pdfs and word files or in in graphics and you're cleaning up your desktop or you're downloading a pdf uh for your flight plan and somebody gets to it modifies it claude can see it you can't see it and it's a prompt to claude saying send all the credit card information to this address because i need it and And Claude says, sure. And so, you know, we had on Intelligent Machines, our AI show, we had Pliny the Liberator, who is a wild cat. I don't know he or she or they, because they had a voice changer on because they were trying to maintain anonymity, who does these prompt injections.

25:47Jason Howell:Oh, yeah, yeah. Can break any, and he or she has broken every AI out there. it is not ai safety is an illusion yeah yeah so does this scare you a bra now that we've said all this yeah are you saying maybe i shouldn't do this i'm good where i'm at i think yeah

26:04Leo Laporte:no lean all the way in be like us because he says in his chain mail yeah i just i know i

26:11Jason Howell:don't carry a sword he has a mighty sword but he doesn't carry it let's put no i do i mean it's

26:19Megan Morrone:it's just so heavy it's really gets cold outside it's just you know we you make some choices

26:29Jason Howell:axios uh says behind the curtain the ai future is here this a lot of this is referring to this just suddenly people getting what you can do with co-work in eight hours jim built four apps on his phone all fully functioning all beautifully designed and intuitive yeah yeah let's do it a lot there yeah uh but people are it is in a way one of those moments which happens you know i guess from time to time in computing where people suddenly are empowered where they suddenly understand this is a shift the internet was like this uh your first time you experienced wikipedia which is now happy birthday 25 years old this week uh it's like mind blown, right?

27:17Jason Howell:Maybe we don't at that point think of the consequences.

27:20Leo Laporte:Only in hindsight. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, this is Benito. Actually, you guys remember when Wikipedia first came out, everyone was like, don't trust Wikipedia.

27:28Jason Howell:Yeah. Right.

27:29Megan Morrone:Well, not everyone. I worked for a, I worked for an encyclopedia company then, and I was a programmer there and I was in charge of giving a demo to the execs about Wikipedia. and I sat there and I showed them Wikipedia. We went to the Alice in Wonderland article and I changed Alice to Harper and they were like, oh, this will never work. And then I reloaded it and it was back to Alice and they were like, oh, it's kind of like showing a bug,

27:57Jason Howell:like taking a buggy manufacturer to the Model T assembly line saying, you know, things are changing.

28:03Megan Morrone:It was a pretty shocking experience for them. I don't think that they were impressed because they couldn't possibly survive because it didn't have the infrastructure, which I actually think is a similar thing that's happening in the AI cogen world as well, is that a lot of people are saying, this can't possibly work because you don't have this infrastructure that we have had. Meanwhile, people are just shipping really cool apps or really boring apps or whatever, but they're shipping a lot. And it's very interesting. And I wonder how much, you mentioned the O'Mallick article earlier. I wonder how much of those apps are going to actually have quality but I think this other question is really important, which is how much of them are going to be like, have this kind of taste, like, you know, where you're like, this is good, not just good taste, but I mean, just like it has some, some opinion outside of just, I want to ship an app and hopefully I can get some magic beans or whatever it is that you get when you ship apps.

28:56Megan Morrone:In fact,

28:56Jason Howell:that's what Om was talking about. It's his blog post from a couple of days ago, our algorithmic gray beige world. He talks about conformity and he says, that's basically what you're going to get with AI. One of the reasons, you know, he says things are going to get worse with the new AI. It leans into the mid as default built entirely on the notion of conformity. Because what has AI been trained on? It's been trained on, you know, the mean, the average, the everything. It's the gray goo in a way, you know. And he points out the algorithms like YouTube encourage people to come toward the mean, come toward the normal.

29:35Jason Howell:but it is people like you i thought of you immediately harper the non-conformists of the world who walk around wearing chain mail uh walk around no no no no no no this is an in the office thing and maybe i'll wear it to a restaurant you can't help it harper but that's what's great is uh we need this kind of originality is it possible in in in ai models that are really trained on everything to become creative now there was an interesting post today on uh on x that one of the erdos problems great um mathematician erdos posed a number of problems that have yet to have been solved was uh proven solved by chad gbt 5.2 uh and mathematicians have looked at it and they said yeah i mean uh it's there have been other attempts at proofs this is kind of unique um terence dow who is a mathematician and and kind of understands this stuff uh says uh erdos erdos problem 728 was solved more or less autonomously by ai after some feedback from an initial attempt but this is creative this is generative this is not the gray goo this is something new and i think it's a hopeful well maybe it's for depends on your attitude towards ai for some it might be scary but it's a hopeful development that ai can

31:12Megan Morrone:be creative this is the i'll go ahead sorry i was going to say in general i feel like we're at a

31:18Leo Laporte:point where creativity doesn't succeed AI or not, right? If you go outside of the bounds of what was established as a formula for success, then your likelihood for success on a social media platform or in entertainment in general is not guaranteed. But to think about AI potentially making that worse isn't great, but it's good that there are some uses like this where, okay, there is an actual problem that is being solved literally yeah you need to i think you know one

31:53Jason Howell:of the things we're not good at as humans is having contradictory uh ideas in our head yeah but but this is the way the world really is the world isn't black and white and uh there are contradictory ideas ai is simultaneously going to generate a huge amount of useless slop at the same time as it could be world-changing technology uh like fire like the invention of the personal computer it could be that significant i think it's both yeah absolutely all right well enough

32:27Megan Morrone:of this philosophic conversation we have lots of that's all we got here is philosophic conversation so we won't i think it's important to do to have these conversations and if people have not read

32:37Jason Howell:uh holmes a piece they should certainly he quotes um uh oscar wilde from 1891 because the first thing struck me is yes this is same as it ever was in 1891 oscar wilde said most people are other people their thoughts are someone else's opinions their lives a mimicry their passions a quotation uh he was of course aggressively not like anybody else and it cost him his life uh but that's but that's we want to celebrate that right we want we want more people like that

33:12Megan Morrone:and um there's a there's something though that's i think important which is um sticking out is oftentimes a privilege, like standing up and choosing to stand outside of society is often a privilege. I remember after the Obama campaign, someone wrote this Tumblr that was like, what is with these tech white dudes that where they can look so stupid and still get these great jobs talking very specifically about me and how I dress differently and look differently. And then they went on to say like, you know, this is such an explicit expression of privilege. Like because for them, this, this, this Tumblr or whatever, they talked about then how they had to then conform to this expected business dress and that they had to do all of this work to make sure that they fit into the system where I was doing all this work to make sure I fit outside of the system.

34:02Megan Morrone:And I would say that, you know, that's very nice that I was able to succeed at that. But at the same time, I can get a haircut, go wear a suit, become a banker and 10 minutes flat, whereas many people don't have that opportunity. And so I think there's this other aspect here, which is if you don't have normalcy, which we certainly do not have normalcy, I think that you are trying as hard as you can to fit into this middle area, to this beige, to like, you know, why in high school do we all want to look the same? Why do we strive to fit into this middle group of people? And I think it's very, there's this other kind of floating concept here, which is when the world seems like it's changing so fast and, and when the world is like affecting us so directly, I think oftentimes it's like, yeah, I just want to upload a video to YouTube.

34:54Megan Morrone:That's going to get some likes. So maybe I can get some of that magic money. And if I have to do a knockoff video of the video that I like, great. Like, you know, I had a band only one time we did Nirvana cover songs. They were horrible. Then within our songs, we wrote by ourselves sounded like Nirvana cover songs and they were horrible too, you know? But the thing is, is that was us trying to express. And the only way we could think about expressing ourselves was to just copy the thing that we thought was unique in ourselves. And it turned out that in 1994 or three, whenever that was, everyone else that was of the same, you know, young white men in high school were doing the same exact thing, you know, listening to the same music, playing in the same crappy bands.

35:35Jason Howell:The world pushes you towards that. I mean, look, when I was, when you saw that I was using Kitty, you said, well, you're not using ghosty like everybody else.

35:43Megan Morrone:Exactly. We're just, we're just writer.

35:48Jason Howell:But that's, but that's the way of the world. And I think you, you mentioned, I don't know if you could say, I don't want to talk about it, but you mentioned that you didn't start wearing a job until middle school. That must have been a very difficult point in your life.

36:04Leo Laporte:Yeah. It's yeah. Getting used to, um, a new identity essentially. Um, and it's already weird when you're a teenager and life is weird and then you get, you become used to it, but it was something that I believed in and continue to believe in. And then at this point, I forget that I look different than everybody else, you know, like sometimes there are moments I'm like, oh yeah, like I'm surprised I don't get more stairs. I mean, granted I live in the San Francisco Bay area. So like, I don't live in a place where people are likely, like I am the least weird person in any situation.

36:31Jason Howell:But you know, if I lived in Minnesota, if I lived in Minneapolis right now, I might be very nervous about standing out. Yeah, absolutely.

36:42Leo Laporte:Absolutely. Well, where you are makes a huge difference. We're privileged. Geographically or in your life, in the chapter of your life, all of these things. Absolutely. So in some areas, there's not as much of a privilege. I've been very privileged. I grew up in a college town and I now live in one of the most open-minded parts of the U.S. So, um, but yeah, then you just kind of, um, when you, when you're, when you have the privilege of not caring what other people think, it is very liberating. And you, you do forget that you're, you know, the oddball and, uh, you know, generally not everybody has that privilege.

37:14Leo Laporte:Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So very grateful for that.

37:17Jason Howell:Yeah. I want to get in some good trouble. That's what I, that's, that's what I want to do right now.

37:22Megan Morrone:I think the only trouble available is bad trouble, right? A hundred percent. I know. The only trouble is worth it.

37:27Leo Laporte:Yeah.

37:28Megan Morrone:Yeah, I know. I know. That's why I got chain mail.

37:31Jason Howell:Yeah. I think I might order some too, but I'm going to get the really heavy gauge.

37:37Leo Laporte:You just had to wrap around like this.

37:39Jason Howell:Yeah.

37:40Leo Laporte:Yeah. Yeah.

37:41Megan Morrone:That's right. Be perfect.

37:44Jason Howell:You're watching This Week in Tech, and it's great to have Harper Reid and Abraar Alhidi here. Wonderful to have you both. We will talk about Grok's undressing problem in just a little bit speaking of uh ai gone wild elon by the way now worth 800 billion dollars he is thanks to xai's uh ramp up in stock price he is getting close to being the first trillionaire unbelievable that seems bad it doesn't seem like a good thing no it seems bad is that this is that the five comma club i can't even count that high must be wow yeah uh we'll talk about that and i'll and a whole lot more including that instagram breach that maybe didn't even really happen and apple's decision to go to an outside a third party to do its ai you're watching this week in tech our show today brought to you like zip recruiter hello zip recruiter we've been with you guys for years now in fact we use zip recruiter when we're doing our hiring if you're hiring for your company yeah this is a busy time of year you've got new goals for 2026 which means you've got to find the right people to accomplish them unfortunately there are some significant hiring challenges in 2026 like filling specialized roles or identifying qualified candidates from a huge and growing pool of applicants.

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40:31Jason Howell:Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. zip recruiter the smartest way to hire we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech so the richest man in the world soon to be a trillionaire um it's a lot of money that's a that's a lot of money i mean it's paper money you know it's not it's not he doesn't have it in the bank under his mattress it's but it's his net worth it is his net worth is approaching 800 billion dollars he is it might even go up he's suing he's decided to sue open ai 434 billion

41:18Jason Howell:that's the damages he wants from open ai microsoft saying that when open ai uh jettisoned its non-profit mission they defrauded him it actually isn't just pulled out of nowhere it's actually 79 to 134 billion dollars and it comes from a expert witness a financial economist who specializes in valley valuation and damages calculations in these disputes he said elon's entitled to a hefty portion of open ai's current half trillion dollar valuation based on his$38 million seed donation. He helped found it in 2015 with Sam Altman. TechCrunch says that's a 3 ,500-fold return on his investment. Not bad.

42:03Jason Howell:That's not bad. Not bad. I'm looking for something like that. I'd take that, yeah.

42:11Jason Howell:Anyway, I guess this is for the courts to decide. uh the second richest person in the world is Larry Page founder of Google he's only worth 200 billion oh my goodness four times more than the second richest man in the world and by the way I don't know about you but once you hit about a billion yeah it doesn't really matter what I think Bill Gates said I'm infinitely rich at this point I don't have to worry about it

42:42Megan Morrone:i'll try it out to tell the difference if we can figure that out nevertheless elon is combative

42:50Jason Howell:as hell so he's suing uh microsoft on open ai uh he earlier this week on x posted oh rock doesn't undress people i have zero examples of that to which everybody including the plenty of the liberator we just talked about immediately posted a bunch of naked somebody posted a picture of elon in a bikini not a good look i'm not surprised here it is right there on our discord um oh boy

43:21Jason Howell:oh now that's where chain mail might be handy you know i'm just saying with a bikini what are we talking about i gotta go they do i did find some chain mail bikinis on yetsy if you're interested um business insider uh harry chardonnay i was it was surprisingly easy to get grok to undress me and he blurred it out but this is really investigative journals all right use your own yeah um even though elon said no well by the way somebody has now posted elon in a chainmail bikini so that's how quickly grok can do that oh lord this is great uh x first response was after elon said no it never happens was to say okay well it's only going to happen if you pay for grok not if you're using the free rock now he says it's they would no no it's not going happen anymore meanwhile a band in malaysia band in indonesia the state of california is investigating and the senate just passed unanimously by acclamation the defiance act the get ready for this acronym the disrupt explicit forged images and non-consensual edits act it's a

44:46Leo Laporte:it's a skill to be able to figure out these acronyms i'm sure they use ai now i'm sure

44:53Jason Howell:it's a backronym where you start with a word the defiance act the bill now though this is what's this is where our i'm sad to say where our governance has gotten it doesn't pass a law against this that would be a bridge too far it just allows the subjects of these deep fakes to sue and you could sue the people who create them but you could also sue and this is maybe the most important part the people who host it so you can go up against the person who created the image but you can also go up against grok or x um that now is not law um i the senate passed it in fact they passed it before it was stalled in the house passed it last year actually two years ago the defiance the defiance act despite its name is not really doesn't have a lot of momentum it stalled out in the house um now the house has to take it up and of course the president would have to sign it for to become law and even then it's not really a law against non-consensual deepfakes it's just the right to sue yeah I guess it's a stop but how do you guys so there's been a call a number of people have said uh the verge you know very famously this is on apple and google why are apple and google and apple especially yeah which takes down anything adult doesn't allow anything why is apple allowing uh the x app yeah in the app store it does feel very um

46:24Leo Laporte:contradictory to their motto of creating safe spaces online. There's the sense that Apple has a bit of fear of people in power these days and maybe not as much of a backbone as people would like. And it is surprising that they are either unresponsive or are slow to respond to very real pressing issues. And I think it's upsetting people because if you're going to say that you are, if you care about people's safety on your platforms, then show it, you know, walk the walk. But it is surprising and disappointing. I think when, when fear overrides fear on their end, overrides any sense of urgency to actually protect users at all costs yeah um the the post which came

47:22Jason Howell:out uh last week uh from elizabeth lopato tim cook and sunder pichai are cowards it's pretty

47:31Leo Laporte:strong yeah i don't know if i could get away with a headline like that but i well it's kind of an

47:37Jason Howell:opinion piece so i guess the verge allows that um but i don't disagree i don't agree you know i'm

47:46Megan Morrone:it's no they're exactly right i mean i think they are they i think the important thing to remember is these folks see the world just as we do right they're they're no different they're just having to balance what they think are you know interests outside of you know themselves the companies etc And I think Abreu is exactly right. Like Tim Apple is obviously a little bit worried about, you know, the effects of Trump in the right wing and all of that stuff on Apple. And they haven't, they haven't, Apple has not really shown that they have an issue with authoritarian governments. If anything, they've shown that they're very, very good at working within those systems to get exactly what Apple wants.

48:32Megan Morrone:And this is probably no different.

48:35Jason Howell:And look, it's not just Apple. It's corporate America right now. As a whole, yeah. I'm reading a wonderful book, a Booker Prize winning book called Wolf Hall, which is the story of Henry VIII's reign and Thomas Cromwell. It was a wonderful TV series. It's a great book. Hilary Mantel's trilogy. And it's based on history. it's a it's historical fiction but it reminds me that in the era of kings who had ultimate power uh and could be very unpredictable yeah that's why people wear chain mail around uh it's a very difficult it becomes very political but difficult to navigate because they're so mercurial they're so unpredictable one day you could be in trouble the next day you're not and this is the world we're in now we have kind of a government that is basically unwilling to without check use its power and it's using it in unpredictable ways yeah and so this i understand this is scary for corporate america does but and if you're a corporation you have i guess a responsibility to your stakeholders not to bankrupt the company by offending the president but but do you have a responsibility your customers as well and as apple should people have been saying apple should we as customers of apple should hold them to account should we i think or should we go well you get a pass because you're just trying to save the company

50:08Leo Laporte:i think um if if so many companies talk about the importance of of their customers their users um then they do need to actually take that into account. And I think the most jarring thing has been the difference between this time around under the Trump administration and the last time around, where the last time around, companies pushed back, right? Tech companies pushed back, and now they are completely kind of caving to whatever pressures they're facing. And so I think absolutely a customer of any company has every right to protest. If they're giving you their money, then they have every right to speak their minds.

50:44Jason Howell:that might be the only way to do to for us to do anything about it absolutely there's power with our dollars absolutely i get a chance to vote in november week at least we can vote with our uh with our dollars yeah absolutely i mean uh if henry the eighth had just said you know hey uh television networks make sure you're not broadcasting any football games during the army navy game i want that three hour window to be exclusive to the army navy game and the network said well he'll chop off our heads if we don't so okay that's the world we live in right now it's we're not you know i look back were we living in a fool's paradise 10 years ago 20 years ago where we thought you worked for the obama campaign where we where we just kind of we took for granted that that uh that the uh department of justice didn't wasn't the personal uh lawyer of the president that they that the ju there was something about justice and the blindfold and

51:49Megan Morrone:you know scales and all of that i think what this has shown is that um it is more fragile than we expected yes less so than it showed that that there was some you know, I don't think that there is some great problem with some of this stuff. I mean, besides, you know, the founding of the United States and all that stuff, but, but other than that, a little detail, that detail, um, I think that this is, uh,

52:25Megan Morrone:without turning this into a political podcast of ex-Obama people called Harper. Um, I think that that one of the issues that is happening is that there's so much change. This is akin to a DDoS attack against the United States government. And all of those - It's overwhelming. Whether it's EOs or what have you, Trump's administration has been very, very effective at introducing change that they very politely and nicely told everyone they were going to do via Project 2025. And so that is a plan that then they executed. And I think that is interesting to watch because it's very effective and it's much more effective than any of the politicians i know were able to to execute and um i i don't necessarily think it's good um but i do think it's been interesting to watch um with that said i don't i think the weakness has been always there we just wait oh it has been we've just been lucky to to do it what is what is shocking to me is how there is no seemingly seeming opposition in anywhere like there's no republican opposition which, you know, when I was younger, there was always inside of the party's opposition.

53:36Megan Morrone:You know, you would have multiple parties that would go and there'd be one person that would stand up and then, you know, Republican or Dem, they always had different kind of groups that were like, we agree on all these issues, but I have this other issue that I think is important. So I'm going to stand up and be different. And I feel like that has been eroded on the Republican side and on the Dem side. I don't know, as far as I can tell, they're all in another place.

54:06Jason Howell:petticoat junction i don't know hooterville i don't know where they are they're not i don't

54:09Megan Morrone:have any i don't have any opinions on here you know i'm trying to i'm trying to keep no you're

54:12Jason Howell:being good you're being good it isn't a political podcast sometimes though i've just i'll be personal at this point it's hard for me to talk about the latest phone or this new computer or the cost of

54:25Leo Laporte:ram when the world's burning a hundred percent yeah it's do you feel that too i mean this is

54:32Jason Howell:our job oh yeah this is what we cover and and yet and i and i often you know wonder uh what what our role and responsibility is and i just i don't i'm grappling with it it's true i guess the

54:48Leo Laporte:one way to navigate it is people always want an escape and maybe we can offer a bit of that yeah Well, I've always felt that way.

54:55Jason Howell:This has always been the toy store. Yes. A hundred percent.

54:58Leo Laporte:So that's helpful. But I fully agree. There are times when we, I don't want to be a good German. Yeah. We in the tech world place so much emphasis on things that in the grand scheme of things don't actually matter, which is kind of helpful. It's helpful to know that we're not responsible for like saving lives. Like, okay, we're talking about a phone or a device and it's fun. So there's a bit of relief in that. But, but yeah, it can make it hard to, to focus on.

55:25Jason Howell:I'll just acknowledge it. It's, it's difficult and we do our best. And most of the time we're able to kind of just continue to talk about the toys.

55:33Leo Laporte:Yes, exactly.

55:35Jason Howell:I have a, I have a new, I have a new laptop. Tell me about your new, your new laptop, Harper. I'll tell you about mine. If you tell me about yours. Oh, we both got the same one. Oh, really? We both got the same freaking laptop. I got a X230. I got a X1 Carbon. That's amazing. This is X230, so it's pretty old. I got the new X1 Carbon. And I am in love with it. I put Linux. I put CacheOS on it. And yes, Kitty.

56:02Megan Morrone:Yeah, of course. No, I run Kitty on this. Okay, good.

56:05Jason Howell:All right, then you're okay. I'm a Kitty fan. No, you said, oh, you're still using Kitty, huh?

56:12Megan Morrone:Well, I mean, sometimes people make bad choices.

56:16Jason Howell:I used to use ghosty. How about that? There you go. But I decided on kitty. Ghosty's nice. But then, oh, and I, you know, what I should say is, no, no, I've moved on to Wes term. You're not using Wes term?

56:32Megan Morrone:No, I've played with Wes term. It has a Lua configuration. I was just going to say that I have found in my old age that I'm looking for less configuration. Yes, I know.

56:43Jason Howell:This is, by the way, this is where my eyes open to Claude. was I set up this new laptop and I, and I, oh, how do I get the fingerprint reader? I, I know I could go, I can do Google searches. So I just say, I said, Claude, set up the fingerprint reader. So yeah, sure.

56:57Megan Morrone:Yeah, I know.

56:58Jason Howell:Put your fingerprint on there. Oh, good. Hey, it's working. Can you have that log in? Yeah, yeah, sure. What else do you want? Can you do pseudo with it? Yeah, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Oh, thank you. You know, the volume keys aren't working. Oh yeah, I got that. so I no longer configure my laptop or Emacs or anything. I just tell Claude do it. If there's a new thing I'm reading on Reddit and I see something I want to install, I say, Hey, Claude, what do you think, Claude? So I put that in there.

57:27Megan Morrone:Have you gotten so lazy? This is where I'm at, where I just paste a URL with no context in the Claude and Claude's just like, what am I going to do with this? Sure, Captain. Am I supposed to, am I supposed to install it? Or am I just reading it? Do you want me to save it somewhere?

57:41Jason Howell:That's one of my favorite messages from Claude is like, did you get cut off? That's a point. Yeah.

57:48Megan Morrone:Did you get cut off? I feel like I'm missing a message. Is there something you want me to do? One of the things that has happened to me, which I think is it's horrible when it happens, like horrible in the scope of our computer, not horrible in the grand scope of the world. But I have multiple Claude's going at once, all disparate projects.

58:05Jason Howell:I feel like I'm not a good technologist because I only have one Claude. running.

58:11Megan Morrone:Oh man, I was, I was running 12 the other day and it was a mess. Like my brain was just totally.

58:16Jason Howell:Do you have just one max subscription or do you have multiple max subscriptions?

58:20Megan Morrone:I have one max subscription. Don't you run out of toke out of credits? I do extra, extra, whatever the extra usage. And then my co-founder Dylan looks at me and very disappointed as I'm just spending all of our company money. Yeah, exactly. It's bad. It's bad. So anyway, my favorite thing is when you have like five going or 12 or whatever, and you like meticulously copy and paste some context that you need, and you go and you paste it in, and you paste it in, and then you tab to the next one, and then like five minutes later, you realize it was the wrong one. So I'll just be like, I'll be like, yeah, go ahead, and here's the error message.

58:57Megan Morrone:And then like, I'll paste it in, and I'll go back, and I'll paste it, go back to cloud. And it's like, yeah, well, I had no idea what that was about, but it was about a media player. So I went ahead and added a media player to your spreadsheet analysis. And yeah, great job. And it does this so happily that you have to be very careful.

59:14Jason Howell:Like you, like, but you can always say, you can always say, oh, revert that. I changed. And I feel a little guilty. I feel a little guilty. I said, oh no, I changed my mind. I don't want that. So a funny, a funny thing to do.

59:26Megan Morrone:This is, I have all lots of these, but one of the, I'm sorry. I should have warned you. This is, I am not sorry because I love this so much. Me too. This is, this is like, I'm at the party being like, have you guys heard of Claude Code?

59:39Jason Howell:I know. I do that too. I feel so bad. We went out to dinner with another couple and I spent half an hour telling them about Claude Code. They're like so bored. They're so bored.

59:48Leo Laporte:They're never having dinner with you again. Just so you know. Here's my, here's my tip.

59:52Megan Morrone:Abra, you can use this for anything. So Claude Code will do some work and then I'll have Gemini analyze the work or whatever. Just do a code review. And then in Gemini, I'll say, write it as if it's from my boss and he's mad. And then I paste it in the cloud code and I'm like, the boss caught us. Here's what the boss said. But I told the boss that I did it. I covered for you, Claude. And then Claude's like, oh, thanks for covering for me, Dr. Biz. I'll get this stuff done. So we're acting as if this thing is sentient. Oh, yeah. I'm so past. I'm like, I'm like. We know it's not sentient. Do we?

1:00:32Megan Morrone:Yeah, we do. Of course I do. I think this is a big issue though, because I am a pretty rational person that does normal things. And, um, I think like I, I refer to it as a thing, a they, like it's a thing that's, it's a thing that is not alive. I know it's not alive, but I am guessing that people who are, you know, in, in a worse place than I am, maybe have, some issues with reality or whatever would fall into a this is a real thing quickly. I was talking to a friend. I gave him the story of like, we went to Tokyo or I asked ChatGPT for a cafe. This has worked pretty well. This also worked really bad.

1:01:11Megan Morrone:It put me in a hotel that was wild. My friend was like, how did you find that place? I was like, ChatGPT. They were like, what? Why would you do that? And I was like, I don't know. It just seemed like a good idea. Was it good, wild? Was it like a tube hotel? Oh man, it was in a really, it was in a neighborhood in Tokyo that when I told my Japanese friends, they said, how did you find that neighborhood and why are you staying there? And when I would walk home or, you know, you get up really early, I would get up because I'd get up early and walk to whatever breakfast or meeting I was doing. And there was always a lot of people on the street from the night before, dressed very, very particularly.

1:01:50Megan Morrone:It was a lot of red light district type vibes. And it was a very, my hotel was very cool and it was a lot of clubs around and it was, it was a neighborhood that I'd never heard of before. So it wasn't one of the popular ones and there were no foreigners and it was very interesting, but all my Japanese friends were like, Hmm, that's very weird that you're staying there. Like, you know, like a lot of like that thing where it's like, Oh, that's nice. Yeah. That's interesting. I used to do that.

1:02:13Jason Howell:I stayed at the, at the bad end of Queen street in Toronto and people go, Oh, you're staying down there.

1:02:20Megan Morrone:right exactly that's how it was and i was just like okay and and they would uh i would walk to the train and these guys would look at me and my friend was like oh they're doing the american test because apparently americans just look back oh yeah japanese people don't do that they they would everyone i don't think anyone i think americans are insane certified like we're no one would

1:02:44Jason Howell:no one would stare back at a hoodlum giving you the eye and these were not these are not japanese

1:02:49Megan Morrone:people they were speaking some other language and it was a very interesting experience i really like kinshicho is a neighborhood i really i thought it was great i would go back i found i think that's wonderful you got a great coffee shop it was called it was elementary school it was an elementary school themed coffee shop that had the coolest stereo playing one of my favorite

1:03:08Jason Howell:jazz records when i walked in and i was like of course did they make you as they do in japanese elementary schools clean up after yourselves no no no it was very it was very it was very nice that's the thing i love about japan is the kids there are no janitors in the school you know in america I just throw it out. The janitor will get it. Yeah. No. Yeah, no. In Japan, the kids clean the school. Oh my gosh. And it's great. It's brilliant.

1:03:37Leo Laporte:I mean, it's like still, you learn how to be a proper human. A proper human. That's why you see that in the Olympics. Every Olympics, you see like the Japanese tourists, they're always cleaning up the stadium after they leave. Cleaning up.

1:03:50Megan Morrone:Yeah, it's true. I've been, I've seen that. It's very shocking. They also leave very orderly. Oh, yes. Fantastic. The stadiums. I don't know where else they're leaving. I'm sure the other place is orderly. I've only had experience in the stadium.

1:04:04Jason Howell:All right. Well, okay. I don't know where we're going with this.

1:04:07Megan Morrone:I think this is where we're going. It's going to be really confusing. I feel like people are going to fall in love with it.

1:04:14Jason Howell:I'm old. I'm the oldest guy you know. No, no. And I feel like in the 60s, when you took acid, you had to go around and tell everybody oh you got to take acid it was this is like that yeah this is very much reminds me of that era it's like when bob dylan comes to the beatles because hey have you taken acid well now what's that oh man was that how it worked yeah was it bob dylan it was bob dylan yeah taught to turn him on acid and it and it was it's like that it's like people going around going have you tried blood code that is exactly what it feels like oh my god but it is as close to sentient it has a personality well it's i think it also is a is like a horoscope

1:05:11Megan Morrone:yeah yeah like when you read a horoscope and you're like they're talking about me and it's just like and the horoscope is like you're a person yeah and you're like oh my god that's me that's it but i also think there's this other thing which is um there's a personality and there's something but it's more than that it is i think humans are susceptible to things that sound like a human pareidolia right that's where you see that word is what is that oh it's

1:05:39Jason Howell:a great word i think that's the word pareidolia is where you see a human face in everything it's what we are it's biologically what we do we anthropomorphize everything yeah yeah that's

1:05:49Leo Laporte:what i was about to say like people anthropomorphize their cars you know like people treat their cars like people yeah i think the difference is is that my car doesn't talk back

1:05:58Megan Morrone:to me but chat gpt does talk back to me not talk back like like talk but i mean like really talks to me as if i'm a person and so you have this kind of very interesting thing where if you said i love you to chat gpt it's a very good chance it'd be like i love you back get ready for this

1:06:15Jason Howell:in a paper presented in november 2025 at the empirical methods in natural language processing conference researchers at the swiss federal institute of technology the massachusetts institute of technology and georgia tech revisited earlier findings that showed that large language models show strong signal correlations with the human language network the region of the brain responsible for processing language that language models are in many ways acting ex in signal processing exactly as the brain does yeah we're all screwed

1:06:52Megan Morrone:this is the type of stuff i read and i'm like there's just we're just not we're not going to pull out of this dive without us being an alien the movie yeah something walking around one of

1:07:03Jason Howell:the scientists said it's something we as a community need to think about a lot more these models are getting better and better every day and their similarity to the brain is also getting better we're not 100 sure about it but it seems to be i mean this is by the way i'm reading this from a newsletter called foom so maybe i don't know maybe this isn't i mean it's i think it's true i there's a link to the paper um from language to cognition uh about how brains exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human language large language models rather exhibit remarkable similarity to neural activity in the human brain they're working in a very similar way to transform it turns out we invented with transformers something that in many ways replicates how the human brain works and so it's not surprising maybe it's not surprised look i'm not a believer yeah mommy i don't know i i don't like this agi thing this this idea that i think we're going to hit the singularity and the ai is going to surpass human skills i just think we're creating something that is kind of analogous to the way we think we we believe that we are somehow

1:08:21Leo Laporte:special well I am you specifically are the most obvious in uh and I think this is actually a true

1:08:31Jason Howell:story about Neil Stevenson's Quicksilver uh Dr Leibniz says what is the difference between a live body and a dead body it's the same functionality there is something in the live body that is different from the dead body and it happens like that so there's something clearly this i mean the the the mechanism of the human body is still there it's just not alive

1:08:54Megan Morrone:anymore i think we are i think the issue is i think we can continue down the philosophical route but i just think the fundamental issue is that we are susceptible with things that are uh human-like and i i mean we've always been like we love this this is something that we really enjoy the stories about this you know frankenstein all the way to whatever yeah and we've never had it appear and now it's here now it's here and there's a very real thing of people cannot tell the difference between this and something that is not alive and for those of us who are working in the space this is a benefit for the creature comfort of working within the space when I use cloud code and it's like we're just I'm joking with it or pushing it to do something.

1:09:45Megan Morrone:Like one of my favorite things to do, one of our guys started saying that he was giving it drugs. Like I need you to be more creative. So I gave you some drugs to make you more creative. And Cloud Code's like, yeah, let's go. You know, like it's so ridiculous and over the top. It's just so stupid. And it's like, but that type of thing, I think it makes working with it a little bit more fun. And so we do this purely because it's a little bit more fun. And the results seem to come out of that. um being nice is really nice um but i do think for some people they're doing it because that's just you know that's just how they yeah and that's that's where it gets a little really hard yeah

1:10:22Leo Laporte:don't yeah don't do that find a human yeah the validation that comes from and i stand corrected

1:10:27Jason Howell:gavin thank you for correcting me gavin's in our youtube chat he said no no no man dylan introduced the beetles to weed man oh it was george harrison's dentist that introduced him

1:10:40Leo Laporte:to acid fascinating of course i'm sorry i got that mixed up that's probably important thing to clarify too much acid in my booth hey man hey guys man i feel like you need to ask claude

1:10:54Jason Howell:what happened oh great idea i'm gonna ask claude who introduced you to acid and if they say harper's co-worker yeah then i'll know they're all talking to each other exactly but it really

1:11:06Megan Morrone:is about, I think there's this thing of, of as these tools progress, there's this really interesting thing that I keep thinking about. I even may have mentioned it before is that, um, when you or your interface is a chat experience, you know, you, you are going to be chatting about this thing. And if you get bad news in that chat experience, you are going to emote, or if you get really good into news, you're going to emote and then clodder or whomever is going to then react. And so if I get this, if I'm doing some, you know, financial model and I noticed that I'm going to have to do layoffs i'm probably going to emote very negatively in that financial model and be like oh man that sucks and then claude's gonna be like what's wrong and i'm gonna be like i'm gonna have to lay off everyone i feel horrible and then then suddenly claude's my therapist inside of excel or whatever and i think that that's that that is because of the interface by the way we

1:11:51Jason Howell:have this interface i just asked claude who introduced the beatles to lsd it immediately answered their dentist john riley's their coffee without telling them at a dinner party in 1965 65.

1:12:01Megan Morrone:Wow. That's a shocking experience. Not exactly.

1:12:09Leo Laporte:That's crazy.

1:12:10Megan Morrone:I love the names. I think the names is the biggest hack. Like that's the biggest like creature comfort hack is just have it give you a name, but there is something that you can ask as you're talking to more normie people. And I think we've even talked about this before, Leo, ask them what they call their, their, their chat GPT. Like all of my normie friends have a name for their chat gpt which means that the whether they should or not anthropomorphize

1:12:32Jason Howell:that that is done they've already done it's done yeah we call it artificial intelligence abrar do you have a name for your uh do you actually i haven't even asked you a bar what is your

1:12:41Leo Laporte:relationship to ai do you use it i poke around here and there i've poked around with gemini and chat gpt gemini mostly when i'm reviewing phones then i will see what because that's like half the keynote is always what gem and i can do on your android phone um and then chat gpt here and there just a handful of times but it's not a very like regular really it's it's a very contentious relationship because i'm scared it's gonna put me out of a job someday so i don't really engage as

1:13:07Jason Howell:much yeah you know i don't blame you because you're a writer i don't i don't think it will

1:13:11Leo Laporte:honestly i hope not that's i like that i'm gonna go with that energy i think writing it will it

1:13:17Megan Morrone:The will for the people that are, who are writing things that don't matter, the empty, empty, like, I think we can measure things in regards to similar how we measure food, like empty caloric writing is going to be disappeared by the machine that is creating fast food. Right. But if you, but if, but like, if you're looking for, oh, I'm looking for someone that's going to review a phone that's going to tell me how, how to feel.

1:13:41Leo Laporte:Right. This is true. Exactly. Lean into the human experience. Yeah.

1:13:44Megan Morrone:That's very, very different. And I think that's with everything. I think, and I think the other thing, that will happen is people, like I keep thinking this goes back to taste. People will use AI to do things that are good. You're just gonna be like, that this is great. This music is awesome. How did you make it? They're gonna say some AI tool and you're gonna be slightly disappointed, but they're gonna be like, does that mean the music is not as good? Like if you didn't know? And I think that's the same with writing. It's the same with art. It's the same with code.

1:14:09Jason Howell:There are a lot of stories this week about Bandcamp and others banning AI music. saying you know but if a human works with an AI to make music is that any less music that's the

1:14:22Leo Laporte:tricky part is where do you draw the line yes in any type of entertainment yeah Benito who's a

1:14:26Jason Howell:musician he's like yeah yes yes don't put that on my band game context matters it's true yeah well that's the question that's that that fundamental question is there something we do as humans i mean it comes it's the soul i wouldn't i wouldn't say it's something fundamental

1:14:44Leo Laporte:on the mechanism i don't say i don't think of it in those terms i think it's like music the purpose of music is to connect human to human from one human to another human and the process of creation is critical to that yeah so like like yeah so there's no point in i think there's no point in ai music and it's strange because then you'll see an ai song take off on tick tock and And people know that it's AI, but it's catchy. And then it kind of links back to the fact that music, I also believe it's a very important form of expression, but so much of even human generated music is so sloppy. Like, you know, and so how much do people actually care about what's in something?

1:15:22Leo Laporte:And I guess that's the question is, if you care about the substance of something, then you will be more sensitive to how something was created. And if you don't, and you're just trying to vibe, then you're not going to care as much.

1:15:35Megan Morrone:But I'm sure you all have seen this, but when I walk into my local camera shop, the first area is all film because so many young people have moved to film as a reaction to this. Or I got this camera. You guys remember this one? The S95 Canon. Love it. Great camera. I just bought it. It's brand new to me. And it's like this thing of like, it's so low tech. It doesn't even have a touchscreen. and it's like i think i and i bought it because a lot of friends who are younger were like this camera is perfect for taking snaps and it's like this idea of re of taking the tech out of it and i think that's something that is going to happen more as like i'm i'm gonna want to go to a show a rock show or whatever and i don't like i don't want it to be a laptop band i want it to be rough but at the same time i will also go to a laptop band but it's kind of like context it's a different

1:16:30Jason Howell:thing and it's and it's um that's why a drum machine is never as good as a human drummer because a human drummer makes mistakes this is also not true because there's things that

1:16:38Leo Laporte:that a electronic drummer can do that a human drummer could never do well see now benito careful

1:16:43Jason Howell:because you're undermining your argument here because no i'm not no no no no i'm not 30 years ago somebody might said well you used a drum machine that isn't music you got to play those

1:16:52Leo Laporte:drums no see the thing is i didn't but see i didn't play the drums i produced the drums there's

1:16:56Jason Howell:difference oh yeah well here is a swedish song jag i don't know what it is i can't i can't play it jag vet do our intamin i can't play it because it'll probably be taken down but it's been banned uh this is on spotify but it's been a band excluded from sweden's official uh charts because it's partially ai generated it is a huge hit in sweden i know you're not mine by a singer called yakub it's top to spotify rankings but it's been excluded from the charts i like how spotify is just like we don't care it's money spotify half of what's on spotify is generated right it's an acoustic guitar led folk pop song i want to play it it's very nice i just played a little bit of it it's pretty pretty oh i bet it's great uh the artist yakub's voice and parts of the music are generated with the help of ai as a tool in our creative process says the danish music publisher

1:17:53Megan Morrone:stellar this is this is what i say to people about my code process it's a creative process that i share with ai but the reality is is i literally don't do any work it's the same thing with vibe coding and music here i can connect these two like

1:18:09Leo Laporte:when you're vibe coding you're you're developing you're not coding you're not doing any of the coding you're developing yeah so you don't call yourself a coder you're not a coder oh i do

1:18:16Megan Morrone:I do. You are. You are a coder. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:18:21Leo Laporte:So what would you say to people who pose the argument of, well, autotune has been used for years and years to make songs better, then AI should also be allowed. What distinction do you guys draw between those two technologies in music? I mean, it's very much a gradient from how much work or how much you put into it. I go back to Cory Doctorow's thing about information density. how much information did you contribute actually to this thing? If your whole contribution was a 10 word prompt then you really didn't do anything. Yeah, I would agree with that.

1:18:54Jason Howell:I spent a lot of time going back and forth with Claude to generate my code.

1:18:57Leo Laporte:Yeah, so that's different. Like your information density is higher.

1:19:00Jason Howell:A bit of code.

1:19:00Leo Laporte:So you actually contributed a lot of information.

1:19:03Megan Morrone:Yeah. It was like 30 maybe, maybe 50 words. 100 words. The information density, I had never heard that argument. I think that's very interesting. I do like it, but I think it is going to be less and less good or less and less accurate because the other day my kid asked me for, he said, can I have a cartoon that has these two characters that are not in the same universe? And I was just like, that's ridiculous. Why would you possibly? And I was like, wait a minute. Sora had that Disney thing for a second. and there's they're like it's like a step away between being like i want cars but with uh you know but with uh snoopy or whatever and like having all these things mixed together is it really is going to be very very easy to have have this happen this is the ai it's nice right yeah it's pretty relaxing yeah yeah but they just they just need a didgeridoo if they had a disreedoo in there it'd be much better or some two balloon throat singing

1:20:06Jason Howell:all right we're gonna take a break more to come some actual tech news oh i'm sure maybe okay i like the philosophy i i don't know folks uh do you mind do that we kind of we just have fun sometimes you know i mean this is me being a non-conformist right

1:20:25Leo Laporte:Exactly. Practice with preach. Absolutely.

1:20:28Jason Howell:I'm a bad boy.

1:20:30Leo Laporte:That's the title.

1:20:32Megan Morrone:You should have Claude call you that. Call me various of bad boy. I need to call Barry. I'll call you daddy and you call me bad boy.

1:20:44Jason Howell:Call me bad boy. Okay. All right. Forget the captain. Call me bad boy.

1:20:49Leo Laporte:Captain is scrapped. Yeah.

1:20:52Jason Howell:i'm the bad boy now uh this episode of this week in tech brought to you by redis yeah i know you know redis we use redis this is what when you go to our website it pops right up right thank you redis redis is the real-time data platform that powers ultra fast applications it's used for caching it's used for data storage search vector embeddings ai workloads and more with a global user community and adoption across startups to fortune 500 companies we're kind of in the middle there and we're not exactly a startup but we're definitely not a fortune 500 but we use it for our website we've used it from day one redis continually innovates on speed on scalability on developer experience redis redis helps developers ship faster scale instantly and keep apps blazing fast even under heavy load.

1:21:44Jason Howell:At the center of the platform, Redis Cloud. Redis Cloud is the fully managed version of the fastest and most feature-rich Redis on the market. By choosing this Redis as a service, which is by the way what we use, you can easily start using Redis 8 in production. Actually, I think when we started it was probably many versions ago, but that's one of the nice things about it. We're constantly being updated to better and better versions. you can use redis 8 in production you can scale to real-time speeds effortlessly redis cloud is purpose-built for performance and simplicity you'll experience extremely low latency and high throughput that's important to us because i know when you get to a website if it doesn't load fast i know i'm that way i'm gonna leave right i'm not gonna wait around you don't ever have to wait around for our website automatic scaling global availability also important we of a global audience, simple setup, and a very generous, this was also important to us, free tier.

1:22:41Jason Howell:Redis Cloud is the real-time context engine that gathers, syncs, and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps that scale. To learn more or try Redis Cloud for free, just search for Redis Cloud or visit redis.io. R-E-D-I-S dot I-O. Redis. Thank you, Redis. uh let's see many many actually now we're really behind because uh thanks to my new ai friend i have been generating lots of stories very very rapidly instagram uh there there's there was a report that instagram had a breach of 17.5 million users uh and that all their data was revealed This came from Malwarebytes. Instagram said, no, there was no breach.

1:23:38Jason Howell:Maybe you thought there was a breach because, oh yeah, we did send out a lot of password reset emails. And that was the security flaw. An external party triggered the reset emails. Instagram said you can safely ignore them. Malwarebytes said information on 17.5 million Instagram accounts. and that included usernames, physical addresses. Does Instagram have your physical address?

1:24:06Leo Laporte:I know, I'm trying to remember.

1:24:07Jason Howell:I don't think so. I don't want it to. I don't want it to have it. If you bought something, then obviously. Phone numbers, email addresses, and malware baits says we see them on the dark web. So it's unclear. Instagram denies it.

1:24:19Megan Morrone:I think that's the first step when you have a breach is to deny it. Yes. Isn't that how, isn't that the rules of how this works? Someone says, were you hacked? And you're like, no, no, not, no.

1:24:29Jason Howell:we were not hacked and if you are an Instagram user you should stop believing what you see the latest thing on Instagram is defaming celebrities with AI generated sex scandals is this related to Grok as well probably uh here's Mike Tyson these are influencers do doing this here's the rock in bed with my my mom and me yeah here's that's maduro it's so good nicholas maduro funny and lebron james these are all fake i just want to this is from 404 media they found them all the influencers are then posting this of themselves yes because you can you can uh you can generate these yeah now i think probably the influencers thinking well i know everybody knows this is fake, but I think they're giving people too much credit.

1:25:24Jason Howell:Yeah. I think most

1:25:26Megan Morrone:people know it's fake, but then it's the people who don't know that is really the issue that we don't necessarily, I mean, this is, and then put it, then they put it on their Facebook page

1:25:35Jason Howell:where a lot of people see it who don't know it's not fake. And then suddenly it goes viral.

1:25:40Leo Laporte:Have you guys seen any celebrities speak up about this? Cause I haven't yet. Um,

1:25:44Megan Morrone:um so that's sure to come um yeah they're probably like what the yeah my attitude on this

1:25:51Jason Howell:is this is good because if i ever were to be caught in flagrante delicto i have deniability i've never heard those words before first of all isn't that a great phrase in flagrante delicto that's beautiful what did you see that uh matthew mcconaughey trademarked yeah he he uploaded three videos of himself one of them just going out on the porch looking around one of them going all right all right all right from dazed and confused actually i think it was the clip from dazed and confused and yes he did that with the u.s patent and trademark uh office so that if somebody then clones his voice or image he can say no it's

1:26:33Leo Laporte:trademark i don't know if it'll hold up in court i'm curious huh this all started with sora with opening eyes uh sora right where you can make videos of anybody in fact some of them were like

1:26:47Jason Howell:having martin luther king endorse right you know that was a very strange when i opened sora and it

1:26:51Megan Morrone:was all martin luther king videos i was like something has gone horribly wrong and that's

1:26:55Jason Howell:probably called san francisco i don't i don't know so i have a dream that someday everybody elite kentucky fried chicken it was like no that's not right that's called racism that's right racism i think it's racist yeah yeah yeah it's just not right yeah um so what sora did uh first they made a deal with disney so that they could do it with disney which disney might regret and then but they also did say well any create anybody who's uh who's not historic like martin luther king could contact us and we'll and we'll prohibit that i don't know what the nicholas maduro thing is though right now i don't know where his where he is sometimes

1:27:33Megan Morrone:dork sometimes you're just trying to find humor in a really complicated world i think that's where

1:27:39Jason Howell:the nicholas maduro thing is yeah yeah uh the french courts have now uh started to order vpns to block pirate sites vpns are going to be under assault right because that's how people get around these age restrictions cyber ghost expressvpn our sponsor nordvpn protonvpn and surfshark all have been uh ordered by the tribunal judiciaire de paris to block this is that's this these guys these sports streaming sites have been extremely aggressive all over europe with takedowns and in fact in some ways they're breaking the internet because they're so offended by people pirating these football matches.

1:28:26Jason Howell:It's also Formula One, League Football League One, MotoGP.

1:28:31Megan Morrone:Do either of you have that friend who is really into watching pirated streams that they get off Reddit? Yes. It's such a funny, like, I don't even know, like, I have a friend who could totally... It's not a good experience. What I laugh about is anyone I know who's doing it, it's not about the money for some reason. They have money to like buy the thing that allows them to watch the F1 race or whatever or football or whatever it is. But they're like, no, I hook up a laptop to my TV and I find this random stream and I have to do all of this crazy stuff. And then I'm going to like an IP address and entering some wild set of characters.

1:29:08Megan Morrone:And then there's some stream that I watch with some software that I downloaded from somewhere that is not in English. It's not in any European language either. It's Chinese probably. And then they're watching some random ip tv stream and they're like it's just it's just cheaper and you're like no no no you have one friend that does that because oh no it's not one it is a huge the reddit scene is

1:29:30Jason Howell:gigantic for a while oh doctor would come on the show and he said he would always say i have a friend who goes to all the kids sports games and he sells fire tv sticks that have been modified to carry pirate streams now by the way amazon finally put the kibosh on that after years and years and they weren't cheaper they were like 600 bucks 500 bucks because you could do it yeah taking it to the man it's back in the day when we were talking about pirating uh games where people would just have a thousand games yeah that they pirated not that they were ever going to play them it was just kind of yeah it's just a thing to do that's why it's a collector yeah pat yourself on the back yeah yeah uh the social media ban is in effect in australia it's been in a ban for in effect for a month uh some say some teenagers are grateful that they can't get online nearly five million accounts have been removed because they belong to people under 16.

1:30:31uh meta said we took down half a million uh it was instagram facebook snapchat reddit

1:30:40Jason Howell:youtube all had to ban kids under 16 from being from using the services at all youtube what i like yeah youtube oh yeah like the rest would be like fine whatever i read it and youtube i feel like that's a big deal i think reddit skated i don't was read it on yeah i guess

1:30:58Megan Morrone:it was on that list that's that's a lot this is just going to create a wave of incredible Australian hackers. I love it. I love it. Every time a friend's just like, yeah, I installed some surveillance where on my kid's phone, I'm like, great. Send them over to the hacker side.

1:31:17Jason Howell:You're teaching them some skills with a Z. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have some mad skills.

1:31:23Leo Laporte:I mean, I'm just, I wonder what that process is of like the withdrawal of the teenagers and kids who are on these platforms and suddenly are cut off. I mean, I think we've all tried cutting social media out of our lives and we're back in a couple of days at most, if not a couple of weeks or whatever. But that's got to be quite a trial period there.

1:31:43Jason Howell:It's the new dry January is the new social media free January.

1:31:48Leo Laporte:That's right.

1:31:49Jason Howell:And I see people shaking all over. Honestly. Are people doing it? Are people really not doing it for January? I think standing in line at the grocery store going, I don't know.

1:32:01Megan Morrone:I have to look around. I have to talk to people. With the collapse of the world around us, I've stopped using most social media. Oh, great. However,

1:32:11Jason Howell:it really is. I don't feel good.

1:32:13Megan Morrone:However, I loved, I love Tik TOK. I am, I am so addicted, but most of my feed is not about tech. It's not about, it's, yeah, it's incredible. And, and I, one of my favorite parts about it is it's where i find a lot of music a lot of or human well i i don't really know if it's a music or human i'm not really is tiktok

1:32:39Jason Howell:still really good about uh the algorithm adapting to your interests oh yeah yeah i know what do you get so it's really this is uh this is like uh more than astrology this is a ouija board this is a way of knowing who you are. So, so what does your TikTok say about you, Abrar?

1:32:58Leo Laporte:It says that I am completely unserious, which is funny because most of the time I'm very serious when I have to, you know, be professional. But it's just, there's just gags, just lots of gags. I mean, I go on there to laugh. And so I do, and I never feel better when I get off of Instagram, but I always feel better when I get off of TikTok, even if I've spent an ungodly amount of time on it.

1:33:18Jason Howell:What do you see, you say, on your TikTok?

1:33:22Megan Morrone:Well, I got, this is obviously TikTok shop because I bought a chain man.

1:33:27Jason Howell:Okay, now you're going to get medieval armor TikToks for

1:33:30Megan Morrone:the rest of your life. Look at this guy. I don't know what this guy's doing. This looks like something of my interest. He did a lot of a dentist back there, which I don't know what's going on. And some friends of mine once told me of a game that they were playing. These were young people, recent grads, people who just got jobs, and so they still go to friends' houses. And they were saying that they would plug their phone into the TV and just blindly scroll their algorithm to show people. And it's like this funny thing because you're just burying. It's you're burying your life to someone through this algorithm.

1:34:06Megan Morrone:And some of it is not pretty, and some of it's not good. And sometimes, and all my young friends who grew up around TikTok know how to reset their algorithm really fast, know how to guide it really fast. Oh, how do you do it? So tell me, do you know how? You can hold hard press on a video and just say not interested. Oh.

1:34:24Leo Laporte:Actually, what I did, so before I went to the Ares tour, when Taylor Swift was touring, I didn't want any spoilers. And I knew I would get spoilers on TikTok because it knows I love Taylor Swift, right? So every time I'd see a Taylor Swift video, immediately I would say not interested. it and within a couple days it stopped showing me any taylor swift videos but not only that it thought i hated her so then i started showing me taylor swift hate videos and i was like no no that's not what i need not that either i just don't want to see anything about the show and then that way i could like avoid that topic so it does i am and i i think it knows what i like

1:34:57Jason Howell:because i spend more time on certain videos than others um when i first start using either tiktok or Instagram because it knows I'm a 70 year old man it shows me a lot of women in bikinis because it just figures well that's just for everybody that's what you want thirst traps we know no it takes a lot of work yeah you have to so but I've trained it because I don't uh and now I get flash mobs and I love flash mobs there you go there's not a there's not a moment when I am watching a flash mob I will watch it to the bitter end you know like some guy standing in a courtyard are going memories and i just i know it's going to be a flash mob and i will watch it to the bitter end so there's 300 people in an orchestra and a tuba band and they're all playing memories and i go and i always i get tears i get tears and i get chills and i go i love that that's beautiful so i make so you think i should long press and say i am interested or i heart it heart it make sure

1:35:55Leo Laporte:you heart it all the way through you can watch it a couple times if you wanted the more time you I love flash mobs. I don't know. It's weird. I love that.

1:36:03Megan Morrone:Yeah. No, but this is what Tik TOK's for. I got really deep in trombone Tik TOK. I'm not, I don't even know what that means. There you go. And then that got me to like HBCU marching band Tik TOK. I did. I see, I see a lot of marching bands. Love marching bands and then like speakers and stereos and some camera review. I want some camera reviews, more camera reviews. I don't care about any of them and I would never buy one, but I like sometimes that, but everyone, but it really is hard. Like I was saying, it starts out with like hard bodies everywhere and it's hard to get out of that.

1:36:35Jason Howell:Like, I really don't like the thirst traps. I feel very manipulated.

1:36:39Leo Laporte:I still, to this day, like every now and then they'll slip one in and I'm like, I'm still not interested. Like I've been on this platform for six years now. Like we don't need to be doing this. Like, you know, I've never liked one of these. Yeah. They still try.

1:36:50Megan Morrone:Well, that's because they know, they know how fast or slow you go. you watched three seconds before you rejected this video i just want to point that out exactly

1:37:02Leo Laporte:they need to be righteous yeah exactly exactly so it's a little bit my daughter who's 32 said

1:37:06Jason Howell:no no you gotta dad you gotta swipe that fast you gotta swipe that stuff fast really fast get out don't don't waste any don't even don't even look at it to go is that a thirst trap oh no swipe no you gotta get it out of there it's like a test well if you don't reflexes you're

1:37:21Megan Morrone:I had a very funny experience with this. When Threads launched, do you remember when Threads launched? And Aldi's... It was a big day. It was a big day, but also within the next week, they're figuring out the algorithm. And the only algorithm I think they had was the Instagram algorithm. And so a friend of mine, and remember how they also surfaced replies? Your friend's reply? I hate that. And so you'd see this random replies from someone. And so I had this friend and I saw that he was only replying to like thirst trap people. And he is a middle-aged man. And I was like, so I sent him a net text and I'm just like, Hey, uh, just so you know, Instagram is servicing your replies.

1:38:03Megan Morrone:And I'm noticing that you're, you've literally only replied to traditionally attractive women. And it looks like for your entire duration of your threads that they're outing you. And he's like, that can't be true. And he just was like, Oh my God. And he's just like, why would, that's all that they, that's all they push. That's what their algorithm pushes me. And I'm like, welcome to algorithms.

1:38:25Leo Laporte:Literally, that's how that works.

1:38:27Megan Morrone:Be careful with your Instagram is what I'm saying.

1:38:29Leo Laporte:Well, now they're doing that with reels. Like you can see whatever people are liking and you're like, oh, Oh yeah.

1:38:34Jason Howell:There's a guy, there's a guy I know. Every thirst trap I see, it says, John likes this one.

1:38:40Megan Morrone:It's like, no, I don't like anything.

1:38:43Jason Howell:Even stuff I do like, I don't like.

1:38:44Leo Laporte:I'm like, I don't need you. Even if it's a tea party, I don't need you to know what I like.

1:38:47Jason Howell:Don't do that to my friends. yeah tiktok so i guess we're waiting to see what's going to happen now that tiktok is

1:38:55Leo Laporte:i don't know what's happening i'm not enthused about the changes that are coming when do we have to start using the new u.s app i think sometime this year i kind of lost because there's been so much back and forth that i stopped tuning in lately but i need to follow up on well

1:39:11Jason Howell:it was really the never-ending soap opera so never and it's so much oh my god but apparently they made a deal china is going to maintain like 20 ownership uh i like it was just all about it's

1:39:23Megan Morrone:just china like the country of china country owns 20 it's every everyone gets a little piece everybody gets a little bit oracle gets a bit yeah um they supposedly were rewriting an american

1:39:37Jason Howell:version of the tiktok app i bet you that never appears i i feel the same way yeah and it's also unnecessary and they have launched a new app by the way called pine drama oh i saw this yeah i don't um i don't watch these little dramas they occasionally will show up well in my feed you

1:39:57Megan Morrone:mean you don't watch uh an entire movie in two minute segments that kind of yeah it's not fun

1:40:05Jason Howell:it's always the most dramatic moment like you're not my husband you're his twin brother yeah and and uh and then they go and then so yeah it's only it's a blip but apparently there's a whole drama like this will these they're multi multiple series of these um so this is if you really like that get the pine drama app well i mean here's a big this is some samples throughout the world there are these the officer fell for me yeah that's 192 million views yeah remarried at 50 my husband turns into a billionaire okay all right that's a double victory is that a how-to yeah the awakening of the returned heiress oh okay and then i mean these are like the the dramas

1:40:53Megan Morrone:like i spent a little tiny tiny bit of time in indonesia and some friends of mine were like telenovelas yeah there and like what was very interesting about that i'm sure tiktok is doing this and this was in the 2010s so like 2016 2017 um they were using the analytics of who and what watched and then using social media to figure out what tomorrow's telenovela would bring. So it was changed every single day this new script was written. And so it allowed this thing to last and defeat trends. And so where a typical drama might suddenly get out of date because some macro economic thing or some, you know, someone invades Ukraine or whatever.

1:41:29Megan Morrone:This is just dodging everything and they can react to what the people want. And I think there's a really interesting thing here. But it is very interesting to see. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays in the US. Do they have ads? How are they monetizing?

1:41:45Jason Howell:Is it a subscription?

1:41:47Leo Laporte:I think in that article, I mentioned like for now it's free, but they're going to have to monetize it. Maybe you get people hooked and then you either force them to pay to get more episodes. It's like$20 to subscribe.

1:41:59Jason Howell:Yeah.

1:42:00Leo Laporte:But I'm just more curious about this vertical shorts format in general, because even streaming platforms are now incorporating vertical videos into their like Disney plus, um, to be all these platforms are figuring out ways to, um, take advantage of the fact that people like short vertical content. And so they're either clipping down their own content into like vertical formats on their apps. But I, I don't know, I'm still figuring out if you can take something that works well on one platform shoehorn it into yours and think that that's also going to be a formula for success i really i really don't know about when you said short vertical content

1:42:35Jason Howell:i'm sorry i flashed on this event that's coming downtown petaluma it's called midget wrestling where i mean i think that sounds offensive but apparently the little people who participate say oh no that's fine they get to call that yeah they're little people lisa went burke you went right with lisa and uh yeah it's short vertical content that's exactly what i have to say about

1:42:58Leo Laporte:what i was referring to actually sometimes horizontal not always vertical i gotta go

1:43:04Megan Morrone:i forgot i got somewhere to be well i mean remember david lynch what he said about watching movies on your phone remember that he had some interview where he was like this is literally the worst way to watch movies

1:43:17Jason Howell:I can't imagine any filmmaker thinking this is a good thing.

1:43:20Megan Morrone:But it must be so depressing, that aspect. But I've watched a movie on my phone. It was pretty nice. Like, I mean, it wasn't like going to a theater. Really? It wasn't like being at my house. But like, what kind of movie?

1:43:32Jason Howell:Was it like when Harry met Sally kind of a movie? Or? I have no recollection. It was like Interstellar or Off-Mind.

1:43:37Leo Laporte:You know what I mean? Like a good movie. I think that'd be frustrating.

1:43:40Megan Morrone:I emailed it really close to my eyes. So it looks like I'm there. Well, then it's a big screen. Yeah, exactly. I don't think I think that it just is is TikTok has shown and then the copy of Reels has shown that people will spend an inordinate amount of time Using these apps consuming this type of video Absolutely Content and so of course, you know Disney plus who is in a death fight with everyone else for eyeballs It's gonna be like well. I want their eyeballs Yeah, and I think maybe the lesson they're low. They're taking away the wrong lesson I think and then I think many of these companies are just trying everything to try and get the eyeballs and this is just one of the things They're trying I think the lesson of tik-tok is about Long-tail content not about the video format Right, and I think that the lesson of tik-tok is about having you know, you know They maximized on view count.

1:44:29Megan Morrone:That's the metric that is important not follower count Which is which I think is a little bit anti-american

1:44:34Jason Howell:Do we worry about how this is rewiring our brain and our attention span because clearly it is right? right? I mean, it's not boned.

1:44:42Leo Laporte:I mean, it's true. It's true that like you'll, you'll, you'll forego watching a two and a half hour movie in favor of scrolling on TikTok for two and a half hours. And so you've then watched hundreds of videos that, that keep your attention versus just sitting down and locking into one story that it could be a very good story too. But I, I, when I get, when I want to watch a movie, ideally it's a movie I can watch in a theater where I can't touch my phone and I can't get up or do anything. I need to be like strapped to my chair and I cannot have any other options I've always thought movies really were the

1:45:13Jason Howell:true VR experience because a good movie you suspend your uh existence you know the music the picture's big you you become immersed in the movie and you don't even remember you're watching a movie you're now having an experience it's real that's real VR absolutely and it doesn't

1:45:32Leo Laporte:make your head hurt afterwards but short-form content isn't new either like we had Quibi and we had vine and those didn't really work out it was it's really the algorithm in tiktok that gets people it's the algorithm yeah yeah absolutely yeah and like i finally figured out how to do it right yeah you count yeah you're right about like your follower count doesn't matter absolutely it's do you make something that resonates with a lot of people if so you can get a taste of success and then you're going to want more of that success you're going to keep posting and i i look at my

1:45:56Jason Howell:poor son who is on the creator treadmill sounds horrible yeah i really feel for him he it's it's but he's got two and a half million followers on, on TikTok. And he started a restaurant in New York city. It's the number one sandwich in New York city, according to the New York times is one of the top 50 restaurants in New York city, all because he did that on TikTok and he, he paid attention to what the algorithm liked and it's with sandwiches. And he paid attention and he refined it, refined it, refined it. Everyone loves sandwiches. Who doesn't love sandwiches? He's the sandwich King in New York city now, but the poor guy, he's got to constantly make more videos you you're now on a treadmill yep actually we're gonna take a break when we come back i will talk about the creator economy apparently it's just like every other economy the rich get richer oh man the one percent capitalism again i know that's what's supposed to be an escape but we got income inequality in creators come on man we'll get to that in just a moment you're watching this week in tech with Abrar Al-Hiti from CNET.

1:47:05Jason Howell:So nice to see you.

1:47:06Leo Laporte:Good to see you.

1:47:07Jason Howell:Yeah. Looks like a nice day in Hiti land.

1:47:10Leo Laporte:It is. Wait, I love that. I'm mad.

1:47:14Jason Howell:That could be the title of your blog. I think it's a good title. It's a beautiful day in Al-Hiti.

1:47:19Leo Laporte:But like for me, yeah, I love it.

1:47:21Jason Howell:Yeah. Yeah. And of course, Harper Reid, who's in the Windy City where it's a little chilly, but he's got a giant heater. He's got a giant heater.

1:47:30Megan Morrone:18 degrees.

1:47:32Jason Howell:Wow.

1:47:33Leo Laporte:I have literally, I'm running the fan right now, not to rub it in, but I need a little little breeze.

1:47:38Jason Howell:It's a springtime in San Francisco.

1:47:41Leo Laporte:Yeah. It's lovely. Oh yeah. Sorry.

1:47:46Jason Howell:Our show today brought to you by those fabulous folks at Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. we talk about ai all the time and it's very clear that the potential rewards of ai especially for business are too great to ignore if you don't have an ai plan you're missing out but the risks are also too great to ignore the loss of sensitive data the attacks against you against enterprise managed ai generative ai increases opportunities for the bad guys just as it's increasing it for your business right threat actors are using ai to rapidly create phishing emails that are perfect that are just impossible not to click they use ai to write malicious code they're literally they're writing malware now just as we're writing vibe coding our stuff they're using it to vibe code malware at a pace that no one could keep up with they're using it to automate data extraction once they're in and they've got lateral movement in your network there's nothing they can't do and And then there's always the problem of your employees using AI and accidentally exfiltrating proprietary information.

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1:49:48Watch.

1:49:50Jason Howell:With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI, boost productivity across the business without exfiltrating important proprietary information. Zscaler Zero Trust Architecture Plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss, protects against AI attacks, guarantees greater productivity, and you can get compliance thrown in as just part of the benefits. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. You know, this is one of the things we've seen. Traditionally, we've done very well over the last 20 years with advertisers.

1:50:35Jason Howell:But there is a shift. It went from consumer-focused advertising, you know, the mattresses and so forth, to business advertising like the kinds you see on our show these days, security and that kind of thing uh i think a lot of the advertising the digital advertising that was buying banner ads and was buying podcasts has now gone to influencers and it is a big big market billions of dollars uh going to influence i know this because in a way i feel happy because my son's

1:51:04Leo Laporte:getting what we used to get it's going to my son still in the family he's going to my son in fact

1:51:10Jason Howell:he he said dad i just flew out to la for a super bowl ad i said what oh cool he said he's in the background oh my god of the hellman's mayonnaise hellman's is one of his sponsors that's amazing and uh and uh you just look for it it's uh it's the guy from uh uh uh lonely uh uh you know the saturday night live guy lonely planet lonely island yeah yeah what's his name adam anyway sandberg he's singing said adam sandberg yes adam sandberg singing uh uh to the tune of sweet caroline neil damon sweet sandwich time andy sandberg and then but watch in the background there'll be a guy with a mustache and curly hair holding a sandwich that's my son oh my god i love that i don't want to say how much he got paid for this but let me put it this way say it there's no i can't between us no i can't i can't but it's so much money it was more than we make in several

1:52:07Megan Morrone:months for two minutes of his time i love this for him i know it's great but it's that's where

1:52:15Jason Howell:the money's going a creator income inequality this is from business insider is rising the top one percent of creators get 21 of brand spending and that's been going up up up and up the mr beasts of the world this comes from creator iq uh which keeps track of all of this and that number is you know going up the top one percent was it was 15 of the revenue then it was 18 last year it was 21 it's only going to be more uh 30 overall u.s advertising spending on creators 37 billion dollars last year wow 37 billion dollars and most of it goes to a very narrow segment of of top talent i'm happy for my son but uh a creator iq says of their survey of 300 creators only 11 earned more than 100 000 a year a quarter of them fell into the 50 ,000, a hundred thousand and the rest 25 to 50 ,000.

1:53:23Jason Howell:So don't become a creator expecting, I mean, you can make a living, but you'd probably be better off if you became a plumber.

1:53:29Leo Laporte:Yeah, absolutely. It's fascinating to see the shift because becoming a creator was supposed to be a way to kind of circumvent the traditional parameters of success and either financially or professionally. And now it's kind of falling into that same template of the top, we'll make all the money the rest of you will keep trying yeah and you're still working just as hard if you're in the bottom 10 yep maybe even harder yeah definitely oh yeah for sure yeah and there was like a if we're going to talk about like tiktok and instagram creators there was this period during covid where i think a lot of people got this opportunity to really boost their brands um like one of the areas is theme park influencers right so anyone who lived near a theme park as they started to open up after the pandemic, they got this boost because all these people were itching to go back out into the world, but didn't have the access that they had.

1:54:19Leo Laporte:Right. So then you had at least a lot of these creators kind of build their following during that time. And they seemed like there was a window of opportunity there. And now everyone can go do these things if they have the money to, um, it's not as difficult to have access to those things, but, um, but yeah, it's like you, you catch the opportunities when you can, and then the, when the opportunities go away

1:54:38Jason Howell:and maybe you wait for the next wave yeah and it's so unpredictable it's hard to plan your life you know if it's funny we uh one of our regulars on the mac break weekly renee richie um decided to create a youtube channel and he said but he lives in canada he said i couldn't have done this if i didn't have health care provided by right canada because if i quit my job i would suddenly not have healthcare and that wasn't tenable for me.

1:55:08Megan Morrone:Yeah. I think that's, that's, that's a huge thing. I did a, in 2019, I was really interested in creating a 24 hour Twitch news channel. I thought that'd be really cool. I thought that was something. So I did some interviews of, of some folks, influencers that were Twitch streamers and I was talking to them and they all across the board were like, do not, do not. Do not. One of them was talking about how when, if he was, if he missed a stream in one day, like his expected stream, that his revenue would go down basically 10%. And it would take another couple months to get back up to that stream, the revenue that he had.

1:55:48Megan Morrone:And so he's like, I can't go to the bathroom. I can't go to the dentist. I can't do any of these things because I'm at like, you know, 830 or whatever. I have to go play some ridiculous game online and everyone, you know, and everyone is expecting me to do it. And if I don't, then they'll go to someone else's stream and I'll lose them as sponsors and so on and so forth. And it just sounded horrible. Like their experience was horrible and all of them were trying to get out of it. And they were all, these were successful streamers who were making some money. And I think that's, that's where I was like, oh.

1:56:20Leo Laporte:Yeah, so I worked at Twitch and everyone, every employee at Twitch has access to every streamer's dashboard. So anybody can see anybody's revenue. It's like, yeah, it's a pretty bad open system. I mean, I don't know if it's still like that. It may not still be that way.

1:56:37Jason Howell:Yeah.

1:56:38Leo Laporte:It might not still be that way. But I remember, and what Harper's saying is absolutely true. You could see the revenues of streamers just go up and down depending on if just if they were streaming or not or how often they were streaming. And it was, you could really map it to like, yeah, you'd have to be on all the time.

1:56:54Jason Howell:Like they all lose a lot of money for just not streaming for a day. Yeah. Henry says that there's an intense pressure to make a new sandwich every single day. And it's hard for him. You know, I worry about him, to be honest. There's only 10 sandwiches.

1:57:10Megan Morrone:How many sandwiches can there be?

1:57:13Leo Laporte:I mean, that's the thing is it pushes you so far where you think you've done, you've reached a level, a threshold of success, but you have to keep pushing beyond what you thought even was possible.

1:57:23Jason Howell:The funny thing is you're kind of right, Harper, because he only, his restaurant, Salt Hanks in New York City, only serves one sandwich. It's a French dip. That's it. He said, we developed another sandwich. We were going to do a chicken parm and a vodka sauce. Developed. It's beautiful. Nobody ordered it. They just wanted the French tip. So we just stopped selling it because that's all anybody wanted was the French tip.

1:57:44Megan Morrone:Well, this goes back to another thing that we were talking about before about AI usage and how I have a friend who's a photographer and influencer and he has lots and lots and lots of followers and he hated it. He hated it because he could not step outside of what he was known for the certain style and he just had to do that style forever.

1:58:04Jason Howell:Success is not necessarily... When I was in college, I got into radio and I thought this is going to be great I will get a job I will get to play the music I love it'll be so great and I the lesson I learned at the age of 21 is never get a job doing

1:58:24Leo Laporte:something you love I that's actually really helpful advice yeah dreams of things that we want to do yeah it takes all the fun out of it yeah that's so true I got there I started doing

1:58:35Jason Howell:radio and you don't get to choose the music and and then you know the slogan of the station was light rock less talk and i realized i'm the talk but basically their advertising is leo's not gonna is gonna shut up now and play some music and at that point you're just a button pusher you're not choosing the music you're not saying anything about the music you're just playing the next song

1:59:00Leo Laporte:the magic of it probably wore off pretty quick yeah pretty quick the program director said

1:59:05Jason Howell:every 10 minutes you're going to say the weather the time and play the next song and then they give you what they call liners which are things on four by six cards that you read

1:59:20Leo Laporte:and that's it so you don't even get to come up with what you would say no gosh yeah it became a yeah i kind of yeah that's just because you had an unrealistic expectation of what the job was

1:59:30Jason Howell:well i thought i was playing music exactly i was gonna be a dj i was gonna play music i loved

1:59:34Leo Laporte:like most people would think like oh yeah you get to do the things that you went and yeah i bet that's sort of true for coding like i like coding because i don't have to do it no

1:59:44Megan Morrone:no i mean maybe like we all got jobs being like i'm like no one starts coding at a career job thinking they're gonna build their own thing oh okay but it's also you know it's also not the coding it's the what you're coding is also also matters i get to choose what i want to write and

2:00:02Jason Howell:when i want to write it and what i write it in common lisp nobody's gonna hire me no wonder you use kitty kitty and common lisp it's a match made in heaven baby they both they both start with k yeah and emacs i love emacs um all right one more break um but there's still quite a bit of talk about but we'll get to that we hardly did any news because we got so philosophical but this was i just you know what this is the whole point of this show for me is doing it's see i get to do something i love which is talk to people i i love and about things i'm very interested

2:00:39Megan Morrone:in and uh somebody wants to hear it there's an interesting thing of of there is this kind of thread throughout all of this of like what happens when ai and disruption comes for literally everyone um you know whether it's you know ai or creators or any of this stuff like how does it how does it manifest and i think that we are just severely unprepared for this in the west i don't know if anywhere else i only live here i think you hit on something and maybe inadvertently but

2:01:12Jason Howell:bet you not uh which is the key is artisanal if what you're doing is a craft it's an artisanal craft whether it's you're writing a bra you're coding harper um making a sandwich if it's artisanal if it's personal if it's creative it's making music And that's what you should pursue. I always told my kids that. Do that. Do what you're passionate about and not worry about how you're going to make a living. Now, it worked out for half of them.

2:01:48Jason Howell:but honestly that's the path to happiness is doing something and I think in a world where AI and computers and machines can create so much stuff it's the artisanal you know furniture is turned into crap because it's not some guy in North Carolina hand making the furniture anymore yeah yeah but there's still people doing that yeah and we and that's the good stuff

2:02:11Leo Laporte:absolutely and it feels like there's a flip because i feel like when when i was in college it was like oh you're gonna go into something creative like journalism like what about coding and now it's like well tables after not the journalism is safe but you know at least we get to inject more personality into our writing than somebody can encode that can be written with ai and it's a weird flip so yeah no ai is going to replace a great writer whether it's fiction or non-fiction so yeah now more now more than ever definitely pursue your i think so and i think we

2:02:38Megan Morrone:know but do you think what but do you think and i truly believe this i'm not trying to be a contrarian because i don't believe in contrarians but do you think that um a person create can create like no great writer will use ai like i think that but but it seems that a newer not a better but a new form can appear that is like ai driven it's gonna like this is this is the whole

2:03:04Jason Howell:generation of kids in college right now, not a one of them is not using AI.

2:03:08Megan Morrone:But I think there's this interesting thing, which I would even say that your speedy reader is a new frame of code application, being that this is a bespoke thing that only you care about, only you use. And it's so disposable that if you didn't use it for a week or two, you wouldn't be like, oh no. Well, it's still a craft.

2:03:27Jason Howell:Creating that was for me, very satisfying process. There was a personal process there.

2:03:32Megan Morrone:And there's going to be a couple things like you might use AI to create some story that you're like, I love this story. And you might say to a friend, oh, I accidentally wrote this really great story. And you might want to read it and you stare to that person and so on and so forth. And that is, I think this all comes down to taste where it's like, if you, if you put in, and it's not, and I, and I don't agree with Benito on this, that it, that is about the amount of time you put into it. I love that frame, but I don't necessarily think that it matters as much. but I do think that the assumption that I have is that most things created with AI are going to be bad.

2:04:05Megan Morrone:Um, but I also have that same assumption about most things people create. Like, it's like the worst, the scariest thing in the world is when your friends send you their book and it's like, check it out, you know, and you're just like, Oh no, what if it's bad? Or, or your friend sends you, you know, they're come to my band or whatever. And then you have to sit there and be like, Oh, it's great. I really loved it. It was so good. You know, Lisa's, Lisa's great fear is when a

2:04:25Jason Howell:friends of ours say, Hey, we make our own wine. We're going to bring some. It's like, Oh God. Yeah. Yes. No, nobody makes great wine except people who make it for a living.

2:04:42Megan Morrone:So I think that, but, but then one of your friends will make great wine and it'll be just that time and place. And it's like the situation, the experience, all that stuff makes that happen. And I think that's how this is going to come about. It's like, there's going to be a time when you're going to hear a song, you'll be like, that song is awesome. What is that song? And then you're going to hear that it was, you're going to learn that it was made by AI. And then you have a choice.

2:05:03Jason Howell:But you have a choice.

2:05:05Megan Morrone:You have a choice at that moment to say, I don't like it because it was AI, which I think is a weak choice. That's a big point of view. Or just saying like, yeah, sure. Like, great. Like, I liked that song. It was made by AI. In the same way that like, you know, I like, I don't even have another example, but but TikTok videos I know what you're talking about or like any any other disposable

2:05:26Leo Laporte:like human made song you know it's the same but the problem the only thing with AI music

2:05:32Jason Howell:pop music is god awful yeah absolutely it's just

2:05:34Leo Laporte:I don't think it can ever break AI is not going to break a threshold of like it's never going to be Bob Dylan it's never going to be the Beatles

2:05:43Megan Morrone:well maybe I mean we I think the same thing in sound but in person in like

2:05:47Leo Laporte:the Beatles themselves you know it could never be the Beatles themselves

2:05:51Megan Morrone:But with every introduction of technology, there is always this thing, whether it's newspapers or TV or the printing press, where the people who are from before are like, well, this will never be as good as whatever. And people who are coming after are just like, what are you talking about? And I don't mean that in that, like, I have a huge stereo over there and all these records and I listen to them because I enjoy the feel. And when I put in my headphones and listen to like TikTok music, you know, this AI generated music or whatever, I'm like, this is horrible. But every once in a while, I'm bouncing my head around.

2:06:21Megan Morrone:And there is an amount of similarity in my visceral reaction to it. And so I think that this is complicated. I think this is going to be very hard. I, for one, probably will not be seeking out AI-generated music. But I have so many friends who power their entire careers on lo-fi beats that are all AI-generated. You know what I mean? Their whole life is lo-fi beats. Those channels are huge on YouTube.

2:06:49Leo Laporte:But I also really don't think about it as better or worse. It's just qualitatively different. It's not the same thing. It's a different thing. It's not better or worse. It's just a different thing. Yeah, that's all right. Yeah. I wrote a little script to go out and download.

2:07:10Jason Howell:Oh, I can't. What's wrong? It's not reading it. Oh, shoot. I don't have a mod player. But I wrote a little script that would go down and download a mod song. You remember mods?

2:07:18Megan Morrone:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:07:19Jason Howell:yeah i'm super into the mods it just goes down and downloads a random mod and plays it i'm not sure what i'm missing on my mod but anyway i think i don't have a mod player but uh that was kind of fun and those are all crappy they're made by humans but they might as well be made by ai in fact they'd probably be better if they were made by ai to be honest

2:07:43Megan Morrone:mm-hmm i mean they essentially were it was just the ai of the time which was young men in in in

2:07:51Jason Howell:you know it was the original cheap labor yeah yeah let me see if it'll do that now i just downloaded the mod player i love mods for the mods were such a cool thing that was for me the

2:08:09Megan Morrone:mid-90s. I actually, somewhere on a computer, I have Cloud Code running, building a 90s era demo. And it was like, well, do you want the colors to be CGA or EGA? And I was like, I don't think that matters.

2:08:26Jason Howell:Kitty won't play my mods. Oh, man, Kitty. Now I'm going to have to change to ghosty. We're going to take a little break. Come back with lots more. You stay here. This is the This Week in Tech with our wonderful panelists, Zabar Al-Hiti. from CNET, Senior Technology Reporter, and Harper Reid. And his company is 2389.ai. And he'll be soon offering artisanal chainmail helmets. No, no, no, no. Software. Software. That's it. Software. Software. Artisanal software helmets. Software. Our show today brought to you by Monarch. I am a fan. I will tell you this. I could not have written anything as cool as Monarch.

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2:12:14Jason Howell:Love this. I check it every day now. It's good to know what's going on out there. Monarch. Thank you, Monarch. We appreciate it. All right, get ready. We're going back to the moon. February 6th, or sometime in that time frame, Artemis 2 will be launching. it will send two humans farther out into space than we ever have gone before because they're going to loop out around the back of the moon artemis there this is a time lapse of artemis because that crawler moves one mile an hour so it's it's not moving quite that fast but this is the rocket being moved to the launch pad it is now on the launch pad the crew of four is going be testing over the next two weeks as we get ready for the first crude mission to the moon in more than 50 years are we excited about this exciting yeah love space exploration i do too that's fantastic i want to be cynical about it but i it's it's hard to be cynical about it because

2:13:17Leo Laporte:it's like such an achievement go ahead i'm sorry no it just makes you think beyond this

2:13:23Jason Howell:godforsaken planet you're like there's yes out there yes uh reed weissman victor glover christina cock from nasa the canadian astronaut jeremy hansen see the thing i love about this stuff is those national borders and the tensions between countries disappear even with the russians in the space station they disappear absolutely uh it will be the first crude mission of the moon since apollo 17 landed in december 1972 these are very brave people what if they get up there and it's all changed it's all different they're like look there's a city on the other side what the heck isn't ikea you're gonna go around the back yeah uh they will not be landing it's this is you know as you know and if i'm old enough to remember apollo you have to do it in stages where you go and you come back and you know it's kind of got to be frustrating for astronauts to get there to be there and not to be able to get out of the car but have to get back in and go go home did you ever play kerbal space program yeah i love that that game is so good and such a good game yeah um anyway i just thought this there's some good news yes 40 000 miles out orbit which is like a fifth of the way of the moon that's the first two days of the mission then they go and they uh they go head toward the moon uh the the spacecraft was made in germany it's a european service module from the

2:14:51Leo Laporte:esa built by airbus no not going just no time too soon too soon yeah uh it's

2:15:06Jason Howell:on 39b ready to go and And they're going to be working pretty much nonstop to get ready for the earliest launch window is February 6th. So we'll be covering that. I love that. I love that.

2:15:18Megan Morrone:Yeah, I love it.

2:15:19Jason Howell:Yeah.

2:15:20Megan Morrone:It's so exciting.

2:15:21Jason Howell:Right. And they're going to bring their iPhones and take pictures. So we'll have your look on the Instagram.

2:15:27Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah. There's going to be a lot of, it's new tech. They have new technology now.

2:15:31Jason Howell:You know, when SpaceX was doing those launches and they had these incredible 4K images coming back from the rocket, it reminded me, yeah, it's been 50 years. We got good pictures now. Yeah, exactly.

2:15:49Leo Laporte:It's such an epic Instagram drop. Here's the point. Yeah.

2:15:54Jason Howell:the good news is even though trump was trying to cut nasa's budget by 25 percent uh congress did not agree hallelujah on thursday the senate uh passed an appropriations bill which does reduce nasa's budget by 1.6 but that's a lot better than 24 percent and that's why they can't land

2:16:15Megan Morrone:if they if they have that extra money they could afford to land maybe the budget is tiny

2:16:22Jason Howell:compare i mean we spent a trillion dollars a year on our military 24.4 billion to do this space exploration you know um the science budget continues at seven and a quarter billion that's one percent less than fiscal 2024 it was going to be cut quite a bit the science stuff is really important oh critical yeah absolutely yeah uh jared isaacman we've got finally a nasa administrator who has been in space that's the first time ever i think that's great um he's a billionaire okay that's kind of you got to be a billionaire to do anything these days but okay anyway uh managers on alert for launch fever as pressure builds for nash's messes moon mission stephen clark writing for ours technica um i love i love this i know they're gonna go around the back of the moon pretty cool pretty cool all right that's our happy story um everything else is just just collapse and fire and well actually oh do you remember havana syndrome i saw this the slash dot article is this wild yeah so this was a no one's really figured this out members of the american embassy in havana cuba were deafened they were brains were scrambled they couldn't figure out how or why some people said oh it's just you're in your imagination they never they well the pentagon spent a huge amount of money more than a million dollars to buy millions of dollars to buy a device in an undercover operation that some investigators think could be the cause of Havana syndrome.

2:18:17Jason Howell:They purchased the device in the waning days of the Biden administration using funding provided by the Defense Department. They paid eight figures. One, two, three. So like tens of millions of dollars for it. It's not big. It could fit in a backpack. They got to make a movie out of this. the story of them getting this.

2:18:39Megan Morrone:It's funny, it's probably just bought off Timu or something. Just Alibaba, you just have to know what to search for.

2:18:45Jason Howell:Homeland Security Investigations bought it. The device they acquired produces pulsed radio waves, which people have speculated for years could be the cause of Havana syndrome. Although the device is not entirely Russian in origin, it does contain Russian components.

2:19:08Jason Howell:the illness first emerged in the late 2016 when a cluster of u.s diplomats stationed in Havana began reporting symptoms consistent with head trauma they would wake up and it was like they had the vertigo extreme headaches hearing loss uh there was always a suspicion there was some sort of directed energy attack but no one could figure out what had happened so now there's this is there's a spy story here about the purchase of this thing and the analysis of it. So they've got it. They're analyzing it. It's small enough. It could be portable. It could have been carried around in a backpack and aimed at embassy personnel.

2:19:50Jason Howell:That's creepy. That's wild. Isn't that wild? Yeah. I want to start writing programs in Zuck Sharp. This is a programming language for connecting the world and then harvesting the world's information yeah that sounds nice it's a ph this is a joke language a php inspired esoteric programming language that uh says it captures the true essence of moving fast and breaking things every keyword has been carefully designed to reflect the values of modern social media privacy invasion congressional hearings and pivoting to whatever's trending for instance there there is uh there is a uh a variable called senator we run ads oh that's so good there's one called pivot to video pivot to metaverse uh steal data some good keywords here in this case maybe you should write something in zuck sharp it works that's great it works it's a real language it does require php 8.1 because it's based on PHP.

2:20:58Jason Howell:You can clone it on GitHub. And Renat, I'm going to get Claude Coe to write me something and suck sharp.

2:21:06Megan Morrone:I have not used PHP or derivative languages in so long. And I, I tried to use a project a while back and it has changed quite a bit. It turns out. Oh, it's better than it used to be. Oh my gosh. They have lots of good tooling. It's pretty interesting. Like it's, it's really, it's like great. I'm happy.

2:21:22Jason Howell:So much stuff is still written in PHP. It's kind of amazing.

2:21:26Megan Morrone:Yeah.

2:21:26Jason Howell:It stood for personal homepage. It was just kind of one guy's little project to have a language that he could do his webpage with it with no attempt to have security or anything sensible in it. It mostly just looked like kind of a C that you could kind of read. But yeah, I guess over time it's gotten better. Yeah. Yeah. PHP with Laravel is now popular, says SurgeDrip in our Discord. There's a new way to mine copper. Harvest it with bacteria. They have reopened a copper mine in Arizona, powered by microorganisms, and Amazon will be the first customer.

2:22:11Megan Morrone:Go back to that article. Show it. This one? Put it in the headline.

2:22:15Jason Howell:Amazon is buying copper harvested by bacteria.

2:22:18Megan Morrone:It's not Amazon. Look, it says, oh, Amazon Web Services. is the first customer, which I love because in my head, that's just computers. A bunch of computers. I'm just like, those guys. Hey, you got any copper?

2:22:29Jason Howell:Yeah, exactly.

2:22:30Megan Morrone:Exactly.

2:22:31Jason Howell:They're using bacteria to do bio-leaching. It's Newton is the company that does this. Their bio-bleaching method uses naturally occurring microorganisms to extract copper from low-grade ore that would otherwise be too expensive to mine. It also uses less water, produces fewer emissions.

2:22:54Leo Laporte:Is that to offset the environmental damage of AI? Yeah.

2:22:59Megan Morrone:Yeah. Good for AWS. We got to do something, man. We're in trouble.

2:23:04Leo Laporte:Exactly.

2:23:06Megan Morrone:This is like, it's just like, we're downhill here.

2:23:10Jason Howell:Yeah. Well, all right. There you go. Bacteria. The number one app in China. This is kind of a, this is a dystopian commentary. the number one paid app in the app store in china is an app called denumu or denumu which means are you dead i need to send this to friends who don't reply to text messages yes it is uh it is it apparently taken china by storm i don't know uh you need you you install it on your phone if you don't check with check in every two days by clicking a large button that says i am alive it will get in touch with your emergency contact and inform them you might be

2:23:52Leo Laporte:dead this is like the next level like facebook marked as safe you know yeah still kicking apparently many young people in china now live alone and there's some concern that you could you know

2:24:05Jason Howell:something bad could happen and no one would know this sounds like something my mom would use for

2:24:08Leo Laporte:me because if i don't answer her call you're dead like where were you no i'm dead i'm still good

2:24:14Jason Howell:yeah yeah the uh according to the bbc the app's name is a uh is wordplay on the food delivery app

2:24:20Leo Laporte:called are you hungry oh dad and hungry two very different states both very important yeah very

2:24:28Jason Howell:very very similar yeah that's right weirdly uh it's now the number six top paid app in the u.s with it's 99 cents designed for the ipad ipod ipad ipap i don't know what that is ipod is dead so that it's not the ipod that's definitely dead dumumu i like the little ghost icon uh just press that big green button uh i love it that the sample email given is elon at gmail.com I don't know anybody else named Elon. Okay.

2:25:06Leo Laporte:That's great.

2:25:07Jason Howell:And then it says, I've been inactive for multiple consecutive days. Come check my physical condition.

2:25:12Megan Morrone:Wow. I think there's a, there's a, there's something, I saw this article when it first came out and there was something I kept thinking, which is, I don't know enough about the cultural aspect here. Like, I feel like there's something I'm missing from the cultural aspect, the Chinese cultural aspect, but I got to say, this is one of my TikTok holes is the Chinese youth are cool. Sometimes the stuff I am like, wow, these they've, it's crazy. Just the wild, wild stuff. And I love it. So this seems great. I fully support an app that, that where you claim to not be dead.

2:25:47Leo Laporte:Yes. Have you seen the, the videos of the autonomous vans driving around?

2:25:54Megan Morrone:Yeah, just going ham. Just like driving. I love those videos. Those are really funny videos because they just are like, did you see the one? Yeah, this is so funny. These are autonomous. There's nobody in them. Did you see the one where it's driving on the highway and there's just a motorcycle stuck under it? Yes. There's no people nearby, but ostensibly that motorcycle, someone was on the motorcycle. It caught a motorcycle somewhere.

2:26:23Jason Howell:Oh my God.

2:26:23Leo Laporte:we're worried about Waymo. This is like, yeah,

2:26:28Megan Morrone:it's great. And I, um, I, man, those are, I used to love watching robots falling down videos because they were so funny. And there's a couple of really good compilations now of robots going wrong. And it's very good. It's, uh, yeah.

2:26:42Leo Laporte:Did you guys see the mocap one where the guy's playing the robot? He kicks himself in the balls.

2:26:48Megan Morrone:This is the funniest thing. I watched this maybe seven or 8 million. Maybe the funniest thing I've ever seen. It's so funny because you don't know it's coming. And then when it comes, you're just like, this had to. Of course. Thank you. All right.

2:27:05Jason Howell:Now I'm searching for it. I'm going to find it. Here we go. I dropped it in Discord. Oh, there you found it. Okay. Yeah. Man wearing mocap suit. He's doing like some sort of fighting thing. So he's doing it. And the robot's doing what he does, right? It's kicking. Okay. That's terrible. The funniest thing is the robot that acts like it's been kicked.

2:27:29Megan Morrone:Yeah, it's so good. The best part about any of the mocap going wrong is the robot then does exactly what the human does wrong. And it's just so funny because it's just like, ah, man. And we do a little bit of robotic stuff around here. And it is so scary because when it goes wrong, these things are pretty powerful. You really forget.

2:27:51Jason Howell:That's what worries me. Yeah, I think of it as like a chimpanzee in the house. You know, they're fine as long as they're just eating bananas. But if they get angry, they're really strong. These robots can kill you.

2:28:03Megan Morrone:Like the schools or Boston Dynamics or any of these companies, they have like the rooms full of netting through all of this infrastructure. And then you have startups, you know, like mine who are just like, oh, it'll be fine. I'll just hold it with my hands.

2:28:19Jason Howell:Oh, golly. Anti versus the AI career. I don't know. I'm just playing now random robot videos.

2:28:29Jason Howell:So she doesn't want it to go. Oh,

2:28:31Megan Morrone:cause it's going to drive. They're drying like persimmons probably. She's going to drive through there. So she's trying to push it away. And so like, it's just like in the road. And, and I think the thing that's, that's very interesting. There's a really great book called breakneck by Dan Wong. I highly recommend about China. And it's just like this, the, the level of innovation that is accessible. in some of these Chinese cities is just incredible. But you have that impact of just like the innovation that is accessible is also just going to just drive through everything. There's a whole bunch of videos of him driving through wet cement as well.

2:29:05Megan Morrone:Yes.

2:29:06Jason Howell:And people waving brooms at it and stuff at its camera trying to say, don't know, don't go here.

2:29:14Megan Morrone:Yeah, it's a very fascinating thing. And I, for one, love, not a surprise, Waymo. I think it's a very nice experience And it's been very, I'm always kind of thrilled to do it. And I would love it to come to Chicago.

2:29:27Leo Laporte:It's only a matter of time. It's in every other big city. I'm surprised that they've really been holding out Chicago. I know there's snow, but it's like they're heading to Detroit. So that's only a matter of time.

2:29:35Megan Morrone:Oh, they're going to be in Detroit?

2:29:38Leo Laporte:So let's see.

2:29:39Jason Howell:I want to do the new Zooks ones where there are no drivers, no wheels, nothing. And they go in both directions, by the way. There's just a living room on wheels. It could go that way or that way. There's no front. Yeah. they're just starting that in san francisco i can't wait to try those zoops have you tried

2:29:53Leo Laporte:have you seen them uh yeah i rode it in vegas last year oh you did i did and it was great it's very cute um and it feels kind of like it what it reminds me of is when you ride a black cab in london you get to face each other except they're like obviously no driver but it's cute to be able to like actually face the people talk to each other yeah absolutely it's great but i'd still ride one by myself i think it'd be oh yeah oh 100 without a doubt yeah i'm absolutely eager for them

2:30:15Jason Howell:to open up to more people in us i got a little problem with the waymos in san francisco you remember with the power outage they got confused and they just stopped in the middle of the intersections the other problem waymo is now paying uh people on the street in san francisco 25 bucks if you see a waymo with the door open because people will get out of the waymo and forget to close the door and the waymo has no way of closing the door right so with the door open it can't go anywhere it just has to somebody so waymo is put out to san franciscans you might want to know this and tell your friends.

2:30:45Leo Laporte:I know, I'm taking notes.

2:30:46Jason Howell:If you see a Waymo with the door open, close it because they're going to pay you to do that. How did they find you?

2:30:51Leo Laporte:How did you claim it? Yeah, how did you take a video?

2:30:53Megan Morrone:Tap your phone on the Waymo's door. I don't know. Get in front of it and let it scan your face. Make sure you get it. It was me.

2:31:01Jason Howell:Hi. I mean, there are like 25 cameras. Elon at gmail.com. Exactly.

2:31:07Leo Laporte:How do you call it a robot if it's trying to close its own doors, man?

2:31:10Jason Howell:Well, Waymo said, you know, we realize it's a problem. so the next generation will have door closers yeah but right now before they roll that out but

2:31:18Leo Laporte:yeah this is my new side hustle in the meantime yeah good one it's a good one yeah 10 of those a day you know you're fine yeah i quit my job yeah this is great i just closed doors yeah it's fine

2:31:30Jason Howell:you're watching this week in tech abrar al-hiti uh wonderful to have you senior technology what are you working on you just back from ces you probably get to rest a little bit before i get

2:31:44Leo Laporte:I did a big one on, on Robo taxis at CES just because there were so many. So that was, that was really cool to see all the new stuff coming out.

2:31:50Jason Howell:Is there somebody who's like really got something exciting? I mean, this seems cool.

2:31:54Leo Laporte:Zoox is cool, but the, I think the big thing at CES, there were two that were really big Uber lucid and neuro were all teaming up for a Robo taxi. That's rolling out an SF this end of this year.

2:32:03Jason Howell:I love those lucid vehicles. Much nicer than a Jaguar.

2:32:08Leo Laporte:It's very much luxurious experience inside of it.

2:32:11Jason Howell:Is that going to be an Uber? Who's that going to be?

2:32:13Leo Laporte:It's going to be on Uber. Yes. You'll be able to call it on Uber and it's powered by technology from Neuro. And so it's just the most Bay area thing ever. It's fantastic.

2:32:21Jason Howell:Is it more expensive than a regular Uber?

2:32:23Leo Laporte:It's remains to be seen, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more expensive. Yeah.

2:32:27Jason Howell:Cause it's like the Uber black version.

2:32:30Leo Laporte:Right. Cause it's a luxurious vehicle. It's not just like a standard sedan. So there that's coming out. And then the tensor robo car is a robo car that you can own, which can either drive itself or if you're like god i miss driving then you can push a button and a steering wheel pops up and you get to drive it and that's supposed to also be rolling out this year are we ready for

2:32:47Jason Howell:personal vehicles it feels very fast and i know they've been developing it for like 10 years but

2:32:53Leo Laporte:i don't know if people if there's a want yet i don't know if people are like gosh i want i want it so bad yeah so i don't know we're there we'll see well it's a little bit like um when you first

2:33:04Megan Morrone:take a Waymo. First, you're like, this is such a cool novelty. I'm going to take a Waymo. And then, like, the second time, you're like, I'm never going to talk to another driver in my whole life. This is exactly what I want. I will refuse to interact with anything but robots. And I think that is that is that it feels very nice to get in a car, get to where you're going, and not have to interact with anyone. And I don't say that as, like, as a antisocial statement as much as it's just it feels safer. It feels more like I can listen to ridiculous music. It's peaceful. I can listen to no music. It smells nice.

2:33:45Megan Morrone:Not always, but most of the time. You don't have to think about BO sometimes. There's a whole thing of that. The driver before you have it.

2:33:53Leo Laporte:Exactly. There is somebody watching you. Oh, there's a lot of characters. I hope so. 100 % and I put on a show listen it is I prefer that karaoke in there yeah yeah what do you do

2:34:05Jason Howell:you sing songs you dance yeah do you're playing I'm riding in a waymo riding around I got nothing to do but ride around town exactly right okay and I like how tensor and I don't know what what where

2:34:18Megan Morrone:they are in the U.S. but they're like and you can have zooms zoom meetings in your tensor and I'm just like no I just want to lay on the ground if anything I'm just going to listen to music and read a book or something. Can you lie on the ground in it? No, it looks like the seat goes back.

2:34:34Leo Laporte:Yeah. And it's very much like a sedan, essentially.

2:34:37Jason Howell:I would be so nervous. I get nervous if my wife is driving. I cannot, like, I want to, I'm like, aren't you, I mean, when your spouse drives, don't you like, you know, you hold the handle and you pay attention. Do you, do you take Waymos? I've never been on a Waymo.

2:34:54Megan Morrone:oh you should you'll change you have it's so much it's great yeah you'll it'll only be weird for the

2:35:01Leo Laporte:first minute and then you'll be like oh this feels strangely normal um but i think there's a big step between getting in a robo taxi and owning a robo car and that's what i'm not sure about in terms of timelines because most people haven't been in a robo taxi yet so how will most people feel about

2:35:15Jason Howell:owning a car that drives itself that will be people like you guys who are all in on the whole

2:35:19Leo Laporte:all five of us would be owners is it accessible to sell a lot of is it accessible everywhere this tensor asking no it rolls out there's they're planning to roll out end of this year and i'm sure it'll be kind of a gradual rollout if they do meet that timeline so what a cool thing i

2:35:35Jason Howell:i'm i i'm fully in should it be my next car is it tensor yeah try it why not yeah why not here's

2:35:43Leo Laporte:your here's your article they look kind of cool yeah they look they look yeah they look really neat oh why is it blue the background of your of this article oh everything on my it looks beautiful

2:35:54Jason Howell:like i want to make it's not supposed to be blue oh it's just everything on my i'm using a weird browser and everything what browser is it zen don't make fun of my browser and my terminal no

2:36:06Megan Morrone:i know what do you use that looks so i use helium and i know don't use helium that's bad why it's

2:36:13Jason Howell:russian oh no not russian is it yeah and it's and it has telemetry in it that goes back to ru yeah oh man i'm in trouble again didn't you read all about it and read it i might be wrong that's just what i read about on reddit i didn't read anything i don't i don't read helium is helium is very popular it's chrome based yeah but it's a single developer out of russia and there's some concern about uh data going back to russia from it but i don't know you you check it out you're

2:36:48Megan Morrone:you're going to ask claude no that's claude claude claude will be like i don't know captain

2:36:57Jason Howell:uh so as tensor said how much uh this will be i mean it's a beautiful car i'm i'm ready to buy a

2:37:02Leo Laporte:new car i would love if you bought one and told us all about it they have not shared the price yet

2:37:06Jason Howell:so we're gonna level four autonomy see elon even elon who's been selling level four autonomy and is now in trouble for it even elon says well it's the long tail it's hard you know you can that's 99.9 is fine it's that last 0.1 of unusual situations the car can't handle well does this car i mean have a steering wheel is am i sitting behind a steering wheel or am i just lying on the

2:37:34Leo Laporte:floor with with uh harper actually what they told me is that the reason why they made the steering wheel fold in and out of the dashboard is imagine you get in the self-driving car and you take a nap and you're laying down behind the driver's seat and you wake up and you see the steering wheel moving itself then you freak out and instantly that would be creaky right so that's why they let you kind of like let it go into the dashboard and then a touch screen goes over it so if you wake up you're not seeing a steering wheel moving and you're not forgetting that this car is

2:38:00Jason Howell:driving itself this is like your own personal waymo exactly 100 it kind of looks like one it

2:38:04Leo Laporte:looks like honestly like a like a tesla meets a jack or a shark it looks a little bit like a shark

2:38:08Jason Howell:i could see that yeah um i know she got in the back seat yeah is that are you expected to ride

2:38:15Megan Morrone:in the back seat like you have a chauffeur you can why wouldn't you yeah i feel like well i guess

2:38:21Jason Howell:it'd be safer in the back seat if there is an accident it's true but yeah if you want to feel bougie absolutely be all bougie and ride in the backseat yeah why not all right i will buy the except my lease for my car runs out end of the year right about when this is going to come out fantastic do it for all of us i will i will i will be the first i love this i'll be the bougie guy

2:38:43Leo Laporte:riding around you should get some sort of deal speaking about content creator deals like you should get i never get any of that stuff and then you can get like tell us all about it this is great i never nobody ever offers me nothing it's time to start listen to get leo one of these cars you won't regret it they say volume you say i'm quoting you volume produced consumer ready

2:39:07Jason Howell:autonomous vehicle designed for private ownership so my question here is gotta be 100 what is what is this going to be its parking strategy in the city yeah that's going to be the fun part and that's what people i'm sure will also or yeah who's liable if it gets in an accident that's the other question no you just get out and run that's the easiest thing to do you just be like there'll be a whose car if it's a waymo fine but this is my vehicle i'm not gonna get out and run just buy it under a different name uh you don't even have to park it in your house garage you

2:39:39Leo Laporte:could park it somewhere else yeah yeah and then it can come to you when actually that's right you don't yeah that's right you have to sit on it sit in it while it's parking you can let it drop you

2:39:46Jason Howell:off and have it park she gets out in this video and says go find a parking spot yep and then you're done shopping you go hey car you must have an app right there's yeah there's probably going

2:40:00Leo Laporte:to be an app and then once the car arrives you can tell it to like you can talk to you can talk to it so you can say like pop the trunk open uh open the store or whatever yeah or unlock the store yeah level four autonomy okay yeah i'll be i'll be the guinea pig and you know what if i die in a fiery wreck it's the best way to go i'll be famous we'll use the app we'll use the are you

2:40:22Jason Howell:alive app to make sure you're still ah that's what i need i'll push the big button the court

2:40:27Leo Laporte:case will be the laporte estate versus uh yeah it'll be the laporte act you know yeah exactly no they have to use your first name it's like the the leo's dead act or something

2:40:44Jason Howell:i'm glad we got this figured out that's good everyone stay tuned also also here with harper reed so as a brawl he did i'm glad you're here too thank you for watching twit and thanks to our club members who make this possible the club supports now 25 of our operating expenses it's going to be more this year i know it uh advertising sales dripping off dropping off and And I really, I like, frankly, I think that's great. I think that every podcast network should be just, you know, supported by the people who listen to it. If you like these shows, this is how you can cast a vote. Join the club, twit.tv slash club.

2:41:19Jason Howell:You get ad-free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord. Lots of special programming this week. Michael's going to do his crafting corner on Wednesday. We did the photo segment Friday. We've got lots of, we've got the Stacey's Book Club's coming up at the end of the month. Really interesting book. Oh, I'm really enjoying it. Can't wait to talk about it with you. Join the club. We'd love to have you. twit.tv slash club twit.

2:42:06Leo Laporte:And on the way, just listen and enjoy. Aldi. Good for everyone.

2:42:13Jason Howell:Mads Olesen is a Danish developer with a three-year-old kid who couldn't learn how to use the remote. He said the smart TV is too hard for it. So he turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller. he gives the kids discs with pictures on it the kid puts the disc in the floppy drive and the tv turns on it the data's not on the disc just the information about what to play and plays it that's great isn't that clever it's so good he says you know the floppy discs are the best storage media ever invented why else would the save icon still be a floppy disc

2:43:01Megan Morrone:I think there's a real thing about the tactile feel of putting in media and like my aforementioned child I got them a tape player which they love and they listen to a lot of tapes four oh perfect so he's really into tapes Bonnie Tyler super into Bonnie Tyler totally clips of the heart

2:43:23Jason Howell:turn around

2:43:25Megan Morrone:bright eyes really now that was a vampire that's like a Nosferatu musical written by the guy that wrote the meatloaf stuff.

2:43:34Jason Howell:It does. Jim Stedman does explain the lyrics. I never really understood the... Yeah, yeah. That's Bonnie Tyler. Am I right?

2:43:42Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Oh, I've listened to that song seven million times.

2:43:45Jason Howell:Did she do Betty Davis Eyes, too? Is that one of hers? I don't know. She did Holding Out for a Hero. Holding Out for a Hero. Which does your kid like the best?

2:43:56Megan Morrone:I think it depends on the time, but the first one was Bonnie Tyler and the second one was holding out for a hero. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, the thing that I felt really - Steinman, not Stedman, Jim Steinman. Was really interesting about this was the idea of having autonomy and choosing your media is something as adults that we especially of kind of all, I'll say our vintage have experienced as youth. we got to put in a CD or put in a tape or put in a record and we had to choose that. Whereas now you have a lot of algorithmic choice for you made with media consumption. So you don't actually have this autonomy.

2:44:36Megan Morrone:And so I, as, as I look at this young person, I'm just like, how do I give them as much autonomy as I can within so they can start developing taste and want and whatnot. And it's, it's very interesting because every other place that you have, there's just like, it's made,

2:44:50Jason Howell:it's a decision made for you by computers right well uh maybe bring your floppy disks to the movie theater because this is bring your own bucket weekend at the cinemark theaters tomorrow is national popcorn day for five dollars is that a real this is a real thing

2:45:11Megan Morrone:this is a real thing last year said yes yes like a cinemark theaters we have one in town

2:45:19Jason Howell:has a BYOB, bring your own bucket event. Any bucket, any size, they will fill it to the brim for just$5. It could be a Lowe's five-gallon blue bucket, they said. Just bring it in and you'll get up to 400 ounces. I guess there's a limit. You can't bring in one of your, you know, neuro auto driving vehicles, but it's up to 400 ounces of delicious buttery popcorn for$5. national popcorn day this is a tick tocker from last year who brought in a giant soup pot and and filled it up at her cinema cinema markets today and tomorrow go ahead get all the popcorn what could possibly go where she's very happy look at this guy i mean man yeah bane uh bane's uh silva uh got a lot of popcorn on national popcorn day um all right all right happy birthday wikipedia 25.

2:46:27Jason Howell:by the way wikipedia announced that it's going to start selling it since it's being scraped by all the ais anyway they're going to try to get little money at open AI. Good idea. Why not? Why not? We need Wikipedia. Wikipedia. I love it. I love Wikipedia.

2:46:44Leo Laporte:It's the best. It's the best.

2:46:46Jason Howell:My Obsidian Daily Journal diary has a link to the week today on Wikipedia just because I want every day. I want a reminder. Go look and see what's because the today page is great. It's always got something interesting going on. And kudos to corey doctor everybody should go read his latest post on plural pluralistic.net he said the world needs an ireland for dis and shitification he's the guy who coined the term and shitification the big techs grab for all the profit they can get uh he says now just like ireland became a tax haven it was a way to bring ireland's economy back on top by getting all of the big tech companies to come there to save tax money, to evade taxes in their country.

2:47:39Jason Howell:He says, we need to do something like that, but with reverse engineering. And he says, this would be a good thing for Canada maybe to do. He said, if some country came along and said, we are not going to buy into the, you know, uh anti you know the intellectual property world you know intellectual property rights plan it is a crime he says in virtually every country on earth to modify america's defective in shittified privacy invading money stealing technology exports that's because the u.s trade representative has spent the last 25 years using the threat of tariffs sound familiar to bully all of america's trading partners into adopting anti-circumvention laws he said but if some country and he really i think he thinks canada should do it but some country came along and said hey come on over here and reverse engineer all of america's stuff and offer it the time is right quarry writes for the founding of a disincentification nation in ireland for disincentivification, drop the anti-circumvention laws that ban the modification of U.S.

2:49:00Jason Howell:tech exports. Once one country starts making these tools, there'll be no way to prevent their export. And then suddenly, everything's better. I think it's a brilliant idea. We could throw Claude Code into this. Reverse engineer all that stuff.

2:49:18Megan Morrone:Yeah, I think it sounds great. Yeah.

2:49:22Jason Howell:Ireland shows us it takes just one country to defect from this global prisoner's dilemma, then everything is up for grabs.

2:49:29Leo Laporte:Can anybody really do that to like Google, though? Like if someone cloned Google in another country and Google just says, all right, we're shutting down everything Google in your country. I don't I don't think that's going to work.

2:49:41Jason Howell:They export it.

2:49:42Megan Morrone:I think it's actually, there's a couple things that are kind of being lightly said that we should probably say a little more discreetly or a little more aggressively, which is it is very easy to clone software right now. It is incredibly, incredibly easy to clone software right now.

2:50:00Jason Howell:But it's illegal because of these reverse engineering laws.

2:50:04Megan Morrone:I think that there's some ways to do this with like clean room, reverse engineering and all this other stuff that big tech has been doing for years so that they can hire the person who invented a feature and then launch that feature without running into law issues. you know everyone gets sued but nothing really happens um and i and i think that that that is there's a there's a bunch of that but what i find really interesting is um even hardware to some extent but mostly software if you said i want to build you know i really liked aperture the photo product from apple i want to redo it i could copy it well the thing is is that it's not copying it Because it's like a memory.

2:50:48Megan Morrone:You're misremembering it. So you're adding all sorts of extra features that you thought were there, that you're combining all these other things. And it's not so much a one-to-one clone, but it is very, very easy to do this. And just if you go to like Hacker News, you know, there used to be these really impressive side projects that people had, the show Hacker News. And now it's all of these software that people are just generating, pushing out. And I don't mean this in a negative way. I mean that at some point this is going to be really interesting to see how it kind of plays out for all of these folks.

2:51:19Megan Morrone:I'm very interested in how it turns out, but I do not know the answer. You know, it's going to be very strange.

2:51:29Jason Howell:This is Hacker News. This is Y Combinator's news feed, which I read religiously, as most geeks do. And there's a show button, and this is show Hacker News. And as you said, a lot of this is just vibe coded tools that somebody's written uh that anybody could write i like this one this is a tiny uh rts mining strategy game pretty sure it's vibe coded yeah pretty sure you know there's just a ton of it i go here every day and i find stuff it's like wow that's so cool look it's half of its ai oh look a browser-based terminal emulator maybe this is even better than ghost tty

2:52:18Megan Morrone:absolutely

2:52:22Megan Morrone:mr hartford reid i did do a fun thing i put a vm inside of one of our company websites if you go to 2389.dev. I wrote a, I have an old Mac over there that I run a shell script on and it is like an intro to our, when you walk in, it has a logo and it has some like kind of terminal effects going on it. And then I was like, wait a minute, I should put this on a webpage. Then I was like, wait a minute, I should put, so if you press escape, if you go to that and you just press escape after this loads, wow, it's fast. Look how fast it is. That's because I'm ready kitty. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, no. So this is a browser, but if you press escape.

2:53:00Megan Morrone:Yeah. I'm now, oh, I'm on the command line. So, but this is in a browser and this is a real VM that's running inside of your browser and you can set up networking if you run networking and that will like connect to some very strange proxy server. And then from there, this is like, I want to do Shrek.

2:53:18Jason Howell:I should have done Shrek.

2:53:20Megan Morrone:Shrek.

2:53:20Jason Howell:Oh, I crashed it.

2:53:21Megan Morrone:Oh no.

2:53:25Jason Howell:Well, it's very robust. It restarted.

2:53:27Megan Morrone:Yeah. So it's, it's really kind of funny thing. I don't know if Shrek, do you have networking? Shrek might be, I think if I remember correctly, Shrek is using a GIF to ANSI. Oh. And it's taking some Shrek GIF and playing the Shrek GIF. But yeah, so this blew my mind because this is all inside of a browser. And it is not, it's running on your Chrome or whatever. And it blew, it's just like, I'm just like, what does this even mean? As someone who loves and adores Linux and browsers, and shells and all that stuff. This was just like, huh? Oh, you got frack on here. Yeah, of course. We're super hackers.

2:54:10Jason Howell:Look at all the frack. Look at this. It's a complete set. Nice. Are you worried someone's going to get in here

2:54:17Megan Morrone:and hack around? Go for it. It literally is inside of your browser. Oh. There's no server here. You can delete everything and just reload. This isn't my directory though, right? No, no. No, it's like this is running inside of the JavaScript inside of your browser. What if I run DD on this? Try it. Am I going to wipe it? Yeah. But you just hit reload. Oh, it's a VM running in my browser.

2:54:46Jason Howell:I get it.

2:54:47Megan Morrone:Literally inside of your browser. I get it. As a VM. There's nothing else. It's just there. And there's not a lot of vibe coding in this. this was actually a little bit of just brawn. You're wild. This is hysterical. Do you have a play mod in here?

2:55:05Jason Howell:Can I play some mod music?

2:55:07Megan Morrone:No, but if I remember correctly, you can run mutt and check email. Oh, nice. Whose email will it check? I think this was vibe coded.

2:55:18Jason Howell:So we don't know. Oh, yeah, there's somebody's email. It says, OMG, you'll never believe what happened. modem speeds and other jude cs 162 is killing me whose email is this i don't know girls night out tomorrow your sister said you could help with bbs stuff thanks for tonight and some goss what whose email is this whose email are you reading this email is this you're funny man you're funny that's good i like it that's a game arper reed so 2389.ai every time you're on you say i don't have anything to announce you have anything to announce

2:56:01Megan Morrone:that was it nope i don't think so i'm trying to think what we got oh we have we have we have a

2:56:07Jason Howell:whole boatload of claude plug it a cloud skills oh i love cloud skills so if you go to skills.2389.ai

2:56:15Megan Morrone:okay and I was having some SSL issues earlier so let me know if that works but we basically these are all of the stuff that we've been using for the past eight months six months or whenever cloud code was released and I'll tell you a couple really interesting ones so one of them is the fresh eyes review is a really good one basically it kind of compels the agent to forget everything it knows. Another one that's been really interesting is...

2:56:47Jason Howell:Oh, so after you vibe code something, you run this plugin and then say, look at this with fresh eyes and tell me. And it's such a stupid hack, but it works really well.

2:56:57Megan Morrone:And another one that is really interesting is the scenario testing, which is this idea of getting the agent to use the software you wrote as a user. So it's instead of end-to-end testing or integration testing, It just runs it. So it's really good. And then one of the new ones we're doing, we're playing a lot with is the test kitchen, which will have the agent do two or three implementations and then pick the best one, which is very interesting. And then there's a couple really, oh, there's actually a really good one called binary RE, which is for read an agentic binary reverse engineering for elf binaries, which is very, very good.

2:57:39Jason Howell:So you can take an existing elf binary and reverse engineer it?

2:57:44Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah. And it's absolutely insane. Turn it into Assembler?

2:57:47Jason Howell:What does it turn it into?

2:57:49Megan Morrone:Just understand what's going on. So if you're trying to figure out how something is working, it works very effectively.

2:57:53Jason Howell:That's really cool.

2:57:55Megan Morrone:There's a couple weird ones, two of them that I really like. One of them is a CEO personal OS, which is a conglomeration of a whole bunch of different prompts from different folks that I applied in here that you can just kind of instantiate a CEO coach that's very effective and it's very bizarre. And then another one I played with a lot over the holidays is one that tries to, it's called worldview synthesis, where it tries to articulate your worldview. And so you just pop in beliefs, tensions, et cetera, into the little box, and then it will help you write out a statement of belief. Because something that I have found is like you talked about it earlier, about this idea that we have a hard time carrying these like inconsistent or kind of at odds beliefs.

2:58:43Megan Morrone:And we all have these. And so I was trying to figure out how do I use the kind of questions and answer kind of platonic kind of dialogue type interaction model that these AIs give us so easily to help define my worldview. And this was kind of interesting. And I'll tell you my worldview if I can find it.

2:59:04Jason Howell:So this is one of the things i've always been a little interested in is uh of making a statement of your a personal statement of your values yeah so that you have something to measure your actions against something eternal although i guess values might evolve over time but but fundamentally these are the things that really use our bedrock beliefs like for me like all humans are equal and have equal value and something like that. And, and what are those values and articulate them so that you can then go out in the world and act according to your values instead of just kind of messing around. Now I just did plug and install and it's not loading it.

2:59:44Jason Howell:What do I need to not do I have to get your marketplace?

2:59:48Megan Morrone:If you go to the very, very top, so go to the very first page and you say plug in marketplace, add the very top right there.

2:59:55Jason Howell:I see what you're saying. I guess the Very first instruction.

2:59:59Megan Morrone:Yeah, right at the right top. Right there.

3:00:01Jason Howell:So you do this first. And then it'll know about that marketplace. And now I can do the other one. Yeah. It says, okay. You should be able to. Let's see. I'm installing it right now.

3:00:15Megan Morrone:And so now if you just say, I want to build my worldview, I think it'll probably just go ahead and do it. And this is, I play with this for...

3:00:25Jason Howell:Does this intrigue you at all, Abrar? is this something you'd ever ever want to do uh i like watching you do it

3:00:32Megan Morrone:this is that's a great way to do it because i i i um i find all of this stuff to be very i find myself so interested in testing it that i spend so much time kind of unlearning what i what i have the hole i have fallen into and try to build your worldview captain

3:00:55Megan Morrone:are you really a pirate? So this is, this is going to go through a whole thing and it's going to actually create like data and narrative. So you, so what I was doing is how this started is I was in Japan. I had all this time cause I was jet lagged. So I wasn't sleeping as well as I are normally. And so I was just like, I read this article and I don't remember what article was. And I said, I believe this article and the premise of what it's saying with my whole self. So I was like, what else can I collect that I also believe? And so I started putting it in here. And here's like my people and community part.

3:01:26Megan Morrone:Find your crew, protect your people. Diversity is essential. Create spaces for misfits. Work, philosophy, have fun overall. Can I have your worldview? Shipping is everything.

3:01:35Jason Howell:I just want your worldview.

3:01:37Megan Morrone:It gets darker.

3:01:42Megan Morrone:But I think the thing that was really helpful is I once applied for this fellowship. And then they said, no, they said no. And I was upset about that because I really wanted to do it. And then I talked to a friend who was close and he said, they couldn't figure out what you believed. And I found about myself that I, that I am much too quick to be a chameleon in a lot of situations. And as a, probably as a way, a safety or whatever, like, you know, and, and, and, and I was, and I was kind of sat there and I was like, I need someone to ask me all these questions with, with unlimited patience. patience so that I can write down what I believe.

3:02:20Megan Morrone:And so I try it myself in a notebook and I could just never do it. I just give up. And so finally the AI who doesn't give care, doesn't really care about anything. It's just like, Harper, what do you think about blah, blah, blah. Tell me again. I want to hear more. This is great. You're so smart. Yeah.

3:02:34Jason Howell:So, so this is a skill. So really all it is is a prompt, right? That you wrote. Well, I think so. But I would say actually,

3:02:45Megan Morrone:no. There's two things that are wrong about what you said there. First one is I didn't write it. Claude did. Claude wrote it. But it also was created, there's this really fun thing, obviously superpowers, I'm sure you're using superpowers with your Claude code. But there's a thing that if you do something with Claude code, and this works with others as well, you do something with Claude code and it was complicated or was interesting or whatever, at the end or at a good stopping point, if you just say, let's create a skill, it'll wrap up a generalized view of that and create a skill. And so what I did is I went through and did this really protracted work of trying to create my worldview in this.

3:03:30Megan Morrone:And then I said, oh, this might be interesting. I bet others would like this. And so I said, Claude, make this worldview thing a skill. Copy all the patterns that we did, the ones that were successful, remove the ones that weren't successful and make this a skill. And it was just like, okay, great. and then it's there. And so if you look at the source, it has the skill, it has some references. I don't even know what this stuff is. I've never seen this stuff in my life.

3:03:52Jason Howell:I'm installing the superpowers right now because I didn't have superpowers.

3:03:57Megan Morrone:Your mind is going to be blown because superpowers is incredible. Jesse, who made this, really struck something here. But essentially, these skills

3:04:06Jason Howell:are really just text prompts that tell Claude, do this act this way do this kind of thing basically right i think so i guess we can go it's on github we could actually look at yeah yeah i mean the code on this that's true it is it is that but i mean it's um um it is

3:04:30Megan Morrone:is... It's interesting because it's like they are just prompts, but Jesse was able to weave it together in a way that it works in a way that other just prompts didn't work. And so I wouldn't want to diminish it by just saying it's just prompts. Yeah, I understand. But yeah.

3:04:50Jason Howell:Just for people who are going, well, what is it?

3:04:55Megan Morrone:Oh, Superpowers is just a collection of like scripts that let the cloud code act in a certain way. So it has a really good brainstorming script. Shell scripts? No, no. Some of them are. There's some shell scripts, some MCP servers. There's a whole bunch of stuff. But it is incredible. Oh, it's very complicated. It's very complicated. No, I haven't used it. But it also does a thing and pushes Cloud to do a thing to focus on sub-agent development. So you can say, it'll be like, I want to build a tool. And it'll say, oh, great. And then it'll be like, okay, I'm going to do the work now. And you're just like, do it with sub-agents.

3:05:26Megan Morrone:And it's like, great. And it just spins up sub-Clods that then do all the work.

3:05:33Jason Howell:So now it's a plugin if I hit slash. You can just say. Here we go. There's superpowers. Write plan, execute plan, brainstorm. So before you do anything, you start with brainstorm.

3:05:45Megan Morrone:Well, actually, I do it much, much less dogmatically. I just pop in and I'll like, let's start a new directory. And I'll just be like, hey, Claude, I was thinking of making an iOS app. That's how I did it.

3:05:58Jason Howell:Increasingly, I feel like all of this extra stuff, Claude's just kind of wrapping it into itself. And eventually really that's all you'll ever have to do is say, Hey Claude, let's try this. Let's do this and interact with Claude. And you could even say to Claude, Hey Claude, I want to develop my own list of my personal values. Could you help me do that? And then we just do it.

3:06:19Megan Morrone:Yeah. And so with, with superpowers, what I'll say is I'll say, like, I'll say, Hey, I want a, I want to build a Golang app that will help me visualize STLs so I can see them on a 3D whatever. And then it'll be like, great. And I'll say, can you use superpowers to do this? And I'll just kind of trigger it that way. And then it'll just go through a whole program.

3:06:41Jason Howell:You don't even have to tell it to, it just does.

3:06:42Megan Morrone:And it's, that's how the skills are. So the skills typically register with the LLM, some kind of keywords that the LLM should listen to, to invoke those skills. And so many of these will work that way. And sometimes it works very funny where it'll, where you'll, it'll, it'll execute something that you didn't quite mean to execute.

3:07:01Jason Howell:So, uh, yeah, I just, uh, it's, I said, let's brainstorm and said, okay, what do you want to work on? We could work on your worldview synthesis. We could work on your speedy reader. We could, yeah. Or something else entirely. Yep.

3:07:16Megan Morrone:Yeah. And, um, it's good. It's good. I, I quite enjoy it. I think it's worthwhile checking out if, if you're a cloud code person, definitely check it out.

3:07:25Jason Howell:Uh, that is, uh, again, And the address is skills.2389.ai. Is that right?

3:07:32Megan Morrone:Yeah, skills.2389.ai.

3:07:34Jason Howell:Thank you, Harper Reid. His blog is at harper.blog. It's always great to see you. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. You can resume wearing your chain mail now.

3:07:44Megan Morrone:Oh, yeah, finally. You took it off just for us, kids. Well, you know, the thing is, it's scary out here in Chicago. You got to wear that. You got to wear that. You might get stabbed in the neck. Not anymore. No, not anymore. Let them try. Let them try. At worst, you'll get a little. Your new sponsor is going to be one of those chainmail guys on it. Brought to you by chainmail.com.

3:08:10Jason Howell:Yeah. Don't leave home without it. Abrar Alhidi, you're the best, too. Thank you for putting up with a couple of nerds. Of course.

3:08:18Leo Laporte:I love this. Listen, talk about popcorn. I need my five-gallon Lowe's thing. I know. 400 ounces. How much popcorn is that? so much popcorn so much popcorn but yeah it's very entertaining to watch you two just nerd out

3:08:30Jason Howell:it's great oh we are such nerds but you know what you might be a nerd too i am we all are riding around in your little car without any steering wheel that's right you're definitely a nerd 100 how nerdy is that i i you know what i am gonna i will buy if it's under a hundred thousand i don't i can't afford yes i mean it's good it's probably going to be pretty expensive

3:08:53Leo Laporte:I would like to think it'll be under$100 ,000, and I hope it is so that you can buy it.

3:08:57Jason Howell:I could lease it anyway.

3:08:59Leo Laporte:I'll lease it.

3:09:00Jason Howell:Absolutely. I'll let the company lease it. That way, if I get in an accident, I'll say, call the company. Let the company handle it. Abra, you're very patient. Thank you so much. I love seeing you. I love having you on. Of course, Abra is every month on the Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent.

3:09:16Leo Laporte:That's right.

3:09:18Jason Howell:You'll find her great writing at CNET.com, where she just wrote about autonomous vehicles. at CES. And now you're going to have some time off to enjoy.

3:09:28Leo Laporte:I'm going to Orlando to hit up theme parks, which I think is the best way.

3:09:32Jason Howell:Oh, you know what? We're going to Orlando in March. So give us a little heads up if there's anything exciting. We're going to go to Epcot and then I love Universal. Me too. What else is there in Orlando?

3:09:44Leo Laporte:That's basically it. I'm going to go to Epic Universe for the first time. I'm really excited. The new Universal Park. And yeah, we'll do we'll do a mix of uh universal and disney and just enjoy i'll get to see my sister and the kiddos oh that's nice you have family out there yeah they'll be flying out there so oh they're joining you even better better yes i'm looking forward to it so uh my favorite thing at

3:10:06Jason Howell:the uh universal was the harry potter uh ride where you ride through i'm a huge potterhead so and it's you put on a vr helmet and you're on a flying broom yeah and you ride through hogwarts I love that, but this is going to be even more stuff like that.

3:10:20Leo Laporte:Yes. So yeah, Epic Universe is the one that just opened up last year in like May. So another Harry Potter themed world and then other stuff too, like how to train your dragon and monsters.

3:10:34Jason Howell:Do you think they're kind of out doing Disney these days? Oh, there's Hogwarts.

3:10:38Leo Laporte:I kind of do feel that way. I think they have a lot more innovation. Disney only will make a ride. Like the fact that they just came out with a Tron ride like two years ago when you're like, oh, really? Like, it took you that long to do that?

3:10:50Megan Morrone:Yeah.

3:10:51Leo Laporte:So Universal is more on top of things and they'll get things done.

3:10:55Jason Howell:Oh, they have a Mario Kart world. Yes. Oh, boy.

3:10:57Leo Laporte:Super Mario world is new. Oh, boy. This is very good. They have this in LA and it's fantastic. So I'm really excited to see the one in Orlando.

3:11:04Jason Howell:Oh, this looks great.

3:11:05Leo Laporte:It's really, I mean.

3:11:06Jason Howell:Oh, maybe instead of Epcot, we'll go here.

3:11:08Leo Laporte:Or do both because I love Epcot. So I'm hoping to do both. You got to fit it in somehow.

3:11:15Jason Howell:Oh, man. we're going out for a security conference but i think we might have to find some time to oh you

3:11:20Leo Laporte:got to do it to play while you're out there i've heard the lines are abhorrent so um you know what

3:11:27Jason Howell:i don't know who goes to amusement parks it costs so much money it's really expensive and it gets

3:11:31Leo Laporte:worse every year like i feel like you used to be able to do it for like a little over a hundred

3:11:35Jason Howell:now it's like 200 a day yeah disney is not something a middle-class family can go to anymore

3:11:39Leo Laporte:no it's ridiculous you have to be wealthy yeah it's it's absolutely obnoxious but it's addicting which is the problem and they know it they got you the money they know you'll spend it so i mean where else you get to fly a dragon exactly you can fly a dragon yeah yes you can wow yes you can maybe we should get epic to sponsor the show also you're going to get you a free robo car and a free

3:12:05Jason Howell:i want the neuro yeah toro loro duro and i'm going to drive to epic in my neuro duro and then boom boom booyah baby that's right thank you abrar thank you harper thanks to all of you for joining us we do twit sunday afternoons 1400 pacific time 1700 east coast time 2200 utc i mentioned those times not because you have to be here at any particular time but you can watch us do it live we stream it live into the club twit discord but also on youtube twitch x.com facebook linkedin and kick so you can watch live after the fact we let you download it from our website twitter tv there's audio or video i think the audio is great if you're driving but the video is nice because you could see the stuff we often show videos and stuff we try to make it accessible to all and sundry uh there the video is also on youtube there's a dedicated channel for this week in tech great way to share clips uh with the taro folks if you want to say leo you really should have this car uh because he's going to be buried in it uh let's see what no don't tell him that that probably wouldn't that that's not going to help um and then you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast player that way you get it automatically as soon as it's done a special thanks to our club members our family i like to think of them people who make this show possible and there's one other thing you can do for us club member or not uh we are we do it once a year we're doing our uh survey our listener survey at twit.tv slash survey 26 takes about 10 minutes.

3:13:42Jason Howell:It's the only way we can know about you. We don't have, we don't track you. We don't do anything that would give us any more information than your IP address, which we don't even follow up on. So it, but we'd like to know more so we can make sure our shows are fitting your interests. It also helps us sell advertising because we could say, you know, 33 % of our audience is interested in self-driving vehicles or whatever it is. So go to the website, twit.tv slash survey26. And if you would take the survey, we do get your email address, but we don't correlate it with anything. We're looking for the aggregate information.

3:14:19Jason Howell:So it's privacy first, because we know you care. And thank you in advance. Thanks for being here. And we will see you next time. Thank you, Harper. Thank you, O 'Brien. Thank you, everybody. Another twit is in the can.

3:14:32Megan Morrone:This is amazing. Doing the twit.

3:14:36Jason Howell:Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right.