TWiT 1073: Broetry in Motion - Anthropic Stands Up to The Pentagon

15:03Jason Howell:ChatGPT keeps your history. In fact, very interestingly, Claude just added a feature, which they're promoting, about how to move off other AIs, how to extract all the history that the other AIs have of you and put it into Claude instead.

15:18Sam Altman:I mean, up until now, Claude, I mean, we all know about Claude, but I think it's profile among average Americans, not all that interested in technology, has been dramatically lower than that of ChatGPT.

15:30Jason Howell:ChatGPT is almost a billion active monthly active.

15:33Sam Altman:ChatGPT is still the brand name here. It is the Google of AI. And this has to have been good publicity for Anthropoc just in terms of it being in the news in a way it has not been up until now.

15:45Jason Howell:Well, some have pointed out, first of all, that the issue with Frontier AIs and these hyperscalers right now is not how many contracts you can get. They're GPU constrained. So losing a$200 million contract with the Pentagon is meaningless because they'll immediately fill that with enterprise customers. They don't have enough GPUs to fulfill their demand as it is. So this just isn't, that's not an issue. They've got an amazing publicity out of it.

16:17Sam Altman:Unless the Pentagon succeeds in getting enterprise customers antsy about doing business with Anthropoc. And I think the big question is, is the Trump administration attempting to drive Anthropoc out of business, essentially?

16:34Leo Laporte:And good luck with that. I mean, again, like government business as a whole is non-zero. but it is, you know, I think it's single digit percentage at, at most, you know, most big tech, big software companies. It is, it's seen as prestigious. It's seen as like, well, we should, you know, we should have this, but I don't think it's make or break to the bottom line. But I think the question is, is the government going to do something unprecedented essentially to basically drive them out of business using, you know, the regulatory levers or the you know all these threats of designating them a supply chain risk or you know a threat to american security i mean that they could do something very extreme if they wanted to and you know it's sort of the presumption of regularity thing again i you know why would they

17:24Jason Howell:do reason they might not why would they try to put anthropic out of business just because they didn't

17:30Sam Altman:give money they love a fight they love being able to accuse somebody of being woke and then to try

17:35Jason Howell:to destroy that yeah yes why would they destroy harvard why would yeah why would they why would

17:41Sam Altman:they and they're used generally speaking most institutions have buckled under at least a little bit not harvard but a lot of other universities for instance you know the the netflix board member

17:51Leo Laporte:who spoke out recently on a podcast susan rice who promptly drew trump's scorn for doing oh yeah he pointed out that uh yeah she she pointed out that um you know these companies that are um bending the knee, to use her term, to the Trump administration. It's not going to look good for them if there's a change in control of the House or even the Senate, not to mention a new occupant of the White House in 2029. But the midterms are coming up soon, and a House of Representatives that can call oversight hearings that has subpoena power, that is not going to be fun for some of these corporate leaders.

18:37Jason Howell:It's a little bit of a chilling thought, but the administration is acting as if that will never happen.

18:45Jason Howell:I hope they're wrong.

18:47Sam Altman:Well, they don't have a great track record for looking forward more than about 72 hours in general.

18:53Jason Howell:Okay, good.

18:56Jason Howell:You know, it's funny because I'm an accelerationist. I love AI. I use Claude Code all the time. I'm blown away by what it can do. It's the first AI. You know, I've used all the chatbots and all that stuff, and I used Claude Code in the past, but something magical happened at the end of November. I remember the day, November 24th, 2025. I'll never forget it. And ever since, I've been kind of more of a believer that AI is real and it's going to change things. And I've never been a doomer. I've always kind of poo-pooed the people that said, oh, AI is going to destroy us, it's going to take over for humanity.

19:31Jason Howell:I always said, AI is not a threat unless you, you know, I don't know, give it access to autonomous weaponry. For instance? Oh, yeah. The monkey's paw curls? Yeah. As long as you don't let AI decide who lives or dies, we're okay. But now I'm starting to think, A, AI is very powerful and effective, still makes plenty of mistakes. And B, there are people, people in our administration who want to give AI that power.

20:02Leo Laporte:I mean, autonomous drones are being deployed in the Russia-Ukraine conflict right now, the war.

20:09Jason Howell:Do they make kill decisions or are they targeted before by humans?

20:15Leo Laporte:That I don't.

20:16Jason Howell:See, this is a scary thing. You could create a drone army, a drone swarm that would have instructions about, well, if this guy's wearing a turban, you should kill him, that would make those decisions autonomously. And that's the thing that is really scary to me. I don't know if we're at that stage yet. I think we could be. If somebody were stupid enough to create that weapon, we could be at that stage today. If people have created that weapon, and I'm terrified. Right now, most of these drones stay online as long as they can, you know, in the cloud. In fact, the drones that we build and others build have Starlink built in them.

20:59Jason Howell:Thank goodness Starlink isn't controlled by any crazed, mad, evil geniuses that could...

21:09So...

21:09Leo Laporte:Yeah, Ukraine is developing its own homegrown AI-powered drones that can lock in our target. they don't need you know basically i think a human selects a target but they don't need the a human okay to kind of right fire the shot that's a that's a step in the wrong direction that's for sure well ukraine is desperate yeah like i understand their their back is against the wall

21:34Jason Howell:yep uh and as we know ukraine has been a in effect a test tube uh for this kind of uh war and now Iran will be on both sides.

21:48Leo Laporte:Yeah, the fiber optic drones, you know, to get around jamming, that's crazy to me.

21:53Jason Howell:Yeah, the Russians are going around with hedge clippers trying to cut the fiber optic cables.

21:59Leo Laporte:It reminds me of the electric lawnmowers that you have to plug in. Like, it just doesn't seem like a good idea.

22:07Jason Howell:um oh it's a anyway this was a big moment uh for ai a big moment for the trump administration and a possibly life or death moment or anthropic of course uh open ai has just completed a massive record funding round right they got money from nvidia and amazon i feel like every funding

22:29Leo Laporte:round they've done is a record funding round.

22:32Jason Howell:Yeah, it is. No, it is literally right each time.

22:39Leo Laporte:And someone estimated that Anthropics, just their internal stock sale, their, you know, their sanctioned employee stock sale is more than the entire value of real estate that was transacted in San Francisco last year. So, you know, think about what that's doing to the housing market. I mean, we definitely see it in, you know, in the San Francisco Business Times, we publish every week a list of homes that have traded hands. And I regularly see across the Bay Area,$10 million,$15 million, you know, there was a$19.5 million mansion that sold.

23:20Jason Howell:And those prices are inflated because people have all this newfound wealth.

23:24Leo Laporte:And there's a lot of all cash deals in the market too. wow bitcoin didn't million still get you a mansion there or are we talking two bedroom apartment yeah oh you'd be yeah 20 2500 square feet it gets you a tear down you know yeah yeah no i mean the

23:40Jason Howell:the one car garage and uh you have to use the outhouse in the back that's probably a big lot

23:46Leo Laporte:in atherton like you know a nice house and a big lot in atherton um a million 19.5 million oh 19 Yeah, that's not a teardown.

23:55Sam Altman:One million doesn't get you a parking space these days.

23:58Jason Howell:No. That's actually really bad for any community. It really is not a – it is almost a – it feels like a death spiral for a community.

24:09Leo Laporte:Yeah, the affordability crisis continues. And it's interesting because, like, a lot of other metro areas are seeing declining rents. you know, they've, they've, you know, I hate to say they've overbuilt, they've built a sufficient amount of housing, basically. The Bay Area and the rest of California has not.

24:34Jason Howell:Well, final thoughts on the Anthropic thing is, is Anthropic out of business or is this the smartest move ever?

24:42Sam Altman:There's, there's suing and there's some chance that

24:45Jason Howell:SCOTA's not to take it up very quickly.

24:48Sam Altman:They could win in court. Yeah.

24:50Jason Howell:Well, if they do, that's interesting.

24:51Sam Altman:I mean, I feel like maybe also the Trump administration will lose interest in this and move on to the next fight fairly quickly. Yeah.

25:00Leo Laporte:I think Anthropic wins in the court of public opinion. They win in the court of hiring AI talent. They've retained all their founders. Which is, by the way, very important.

25:10Jason Howell:Let's not ignore that. I mean, look at how much money Meta's been throwing around because they're so desperate to get that talent. It's a limited supply. Yeah.

25:17Leo Laporte:Oh, it's crazy. It's like, you know, this person who just left, you know, just left OpenAI to join Apple has now left Apple to join that. You know, it's like a revolving door of multimillion dollar employment contracts. It's amazing.

25:37Jason Howell:And I studied Chinese in college. What was I thinking? um it does also argue for something i've felt pretty strongly about open weight open source artificial intelligence uh it'd be nice to be a non-combatant in all this and be able to run ai locally i think and it may be the the hope the one last hope for us as users you're agreeing harry well i like that idea too but directionally it doesn't seem to be happening yet and um some of the open source stuff like deep seeks essentially seems like it's extremely dependent on closed ai right and they're using just at least modi says they're using distillation

26:23Sam Altman:attacks on claude and right to get better no claude no open ai maybe no deep seek right and and same for zai and uh meta meta meta has transitioned from being a champion of open source

26:39Jason Howell:Lama is not even close to what the frontier was.

26:43Sam Altman:Yeah, at one point, I mean, a few years ago, Lama seemed like it was competitive, and they've had to scrap that strategy.

26:50Leo Laporte:But it does give, in some ways, it's almost a check on what the Defense Department is doing, because, you know, if we did have open source models that were equivalent to some of these models that they are looking for, then they couldn't say no, you know, Anthropic couldn't put up a fight. Good point.

27:11Sam Altman:Historically, government has liked open source stuff. Right.

27:15Jason Howell:If they could build their own, they don't need anybody.

27:18Sam Altman:There are just a handful of companies that are able to build this stuff, and it's a very weird dynamic for the world. Right.

27:24Jason Howell:There is a certain irony in Anthropa complaining about distillation attacks since they basically all are…

27:30Sam Altman:And I think there is totally a case to be made for an anti-anthropic case to be made here in terms of being very uncomfortable with private companies having the power to make these decisions. Right.

27:44Jason Howell:Who should be in charge, a private company or Congress and elected officials?

27:52Sam Altman:And like Molly says, some of it boils down to whether or not you're comfortable kind of assuming that the government is at least attempting to do the right thing.

28:01Leo Laporte:Right. Or that Congress is even in the loop. Right.

28:06Sam Altman:Which historically, I mean, there have been all kinds of instances where that wasn't true, but historically it wasn't a wacky idea to err on the side of thinking that even presidents you didn't like were sort of operating on good faith.

28:22Jason Howell:Yeah, I've watched this happen in my lifetime. It started in the 60s with Nixon, and trust in government has just gone downhill from that point on. And I think we're at the point now where people don't assume government is acting in the public's interest, which is a shame. Again, another shame, because the government is supposed to represent us. That's the only way we as a society have to move forward. you don't want private companies to make these decisions even if anthropic is benevolent they're not the only one and i'm not sure anthropics to be honest right all right let's take a little break uh that was uh the big story of the week actually it's not the big story there's so many big stories this week this was a crazy week uh we're i'm so glad we got you harry mccracken the technologizer your great grasp of the history of all of this is very valued.

29:22Jason Howell:I appreciate you being here, FastCompany.com.

29:25Sam Altman:Although I don't remember the 1960s, although I was around, but just not paying much attention.

29:30Jason Howell:If you remember it, you really weren't participating, I think, is the truth. Or you were three. I'm a little older than you, Harry. I do remember it fairly well.

29:43Sam Altman:Actually, I do remember certain aspects of the very late 60s, but they mainly involved things like going out to get ice cream.

29:51Jason Howell:I protested. I was in many of a protest.

29:54Sam Altman:For a long time, I thought I remembered us landing on the moon in 1969 and watching it in kindergarten until somebody pointed out to me that it happened at night during the summer. And so I probably was not watching it in kindergarten.

30:08Jason Howell:You watched a video of it later.

30:10Sam Altman:I think I probably watched some later.

30:12Jason Howell:I remember my dad getting me up and we watched it together. uh never will never ever forget that um how old would i have been about 12 11 or 12 no 12. uh never forget it uh i also remember uh kennedy getting shot martin luther king getting shot the 1968 chicago democratic convention and protesters in the streets i remember kent state we've been

30:37Sam Altman:through a lot i i had been conceived i'd been conceived when kennedy was shot but again i wasn't You don't remember it from the womb.

30:45Jason Howell:Yeah, I understand. I understand. Oh, and Thomas is also here from the San Francisco Business Times. He remembers nothing.

30:53Leo Laporte:You guys make me feel so young.

30:54Jason Howell:I know. It's great to see you and the wonderful Molly White. MollyWhite.net. Who are you writing for these days? Besides Web3 is going just great.

31:08Leo Laporte:Citationneeded.news is my newsletter. And that is my primary location these days.

31:13Jason Howell:and how's that going it's going great i love it three no i love it those words anymore it's going just great yeah because you used them sarcastically for so long uh no citation needed is great and i'm you know what this is what i really encourages me is that people now like you can do independent journalism i mean we're suffering in so many ways uh in the more journalistic world just what happened to the washington post yeah so tragic but thank god the great journalists have a chance uh to go out and uh and make their way i'm so glad you're doing it it's great yeah it's great that there's so much independent news and other media yeah that's why rss is back by the way because absolutely we make our own newspaper now yeah it's wonderful yeah i just uh signed up for

32:07Sam Altman:is that called current this uh rss reader i read about undaring fireball current's very cool it

32:13Jason Howell:looks pretty slick i don't use it because it's more about reading articles and i have been really going through new it's a beat check for me i am trying to collect all the stories for the shows that i'm doing so i don't have i was telling harry before the show began i hate you because did i maybe it was during the show your articles are so compelling that i have to stop and read them i just want the headlines man just the headlines i gotta go boom, boom, boom. That's another reason I haven't added citation needed to the RSS feed, but I really need to. You have an RSS feed, I'm sure, right?

32:44Leo Laporte:Absolutely.

32:45Jason Howell:Of course. And you can subscribe. But what's nice about what you do is all the content is free. So you can, just like we do, you can support Molly, but you don't have to, to read her stuff. I think it's well worth it. i'll send in my check thank you thank you great to see you uh let's pause for station identification you're watching this week in tech our show this week brought to you by melissa the trusted data quality expert since 1985 they've actually been around longer than we have forward thinking businesses these days are using ai in all kinds of new ways but ai is only as good this i wish people would remember this is only as good as the data you feed it you can have the most sophisticated ai tools in the world but if your customer data is incomplete or duplicated or just plain wrong you're training your ai to make expensive mistakes but that's where melissa comes in for 41 years melissa's been the data quality partner that helps businesses get their data clean complete and current i mean melissa does so many things but here's an example of some of the things melissa can do for you global address verification and autocomplete in real time real-time validation for addresses and anywhere in the world in the format of that country so your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong they can also do mobile identity verification very important if you're in banking or finance or fintech with melissa you can connect customers to their mobile numbers, which really reduces fraud and incidentally helps you reach people on the devices they actually use.

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35:57Jason Howell:They're GDPR and CCPA compliant, FedRAMP certified, ISO 27001 certified. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Clean data leads to better marketing ROI, higher customer lifetime value, and AI that works as intended. So get started today with 1 ,000 records, plain for free, melissa.com slash twit. That's melissa.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Big news at Block. Stripe's parent company, Jack Dorsey's company, the guy who's... Square. Square. Square. That's right. Is it the same as Block? I'm confused.

36:47Leo Laporte:Block is the parent company of Square.

36:49Jason Howell:Not Stripe. I said Stripe. Sorry, Square. Yes. Jack, actually, it's a great story. When Jack was a CEO at Twitter, we'd go off to a maker space and use the 3D printer to design that little card reader that plugged into the Courage port on your iPhone back when they had headphone ports and you could swipe cards. It was a huge invention. Anyway, Block, which is the parent company of Square, had a fabulous quarter, made a lot of money, and they're laying off almost half their team. 10 ,000 people, they're going to cut it down to 6 ,000, 4 ,000 people being asked to leave in the lovely AI written a tweet that Jack, sorry, X post that Jack put out.

37:39Jason Howell:It sounds like they're going to try to take care of everybody. He thanked people. Did he, though, imply, Molly White, that this was an A-off due to AI? I think a lot of people are interpreting it that way.

37:56Leo Laporte:Yeah, I mean, I think there's sort of a trend lately of layoffs being attributed to AI whether or not maybe that's true.

38:06Jason Howell:You've called it AI washing.

38:09Leo Laporte:Yeah, well, I didn't come up with a term, but yeah, I mean, you know, there have been a number of companies that have laid off staff and simultaneously bragged about how efficient they've become because of AI. The crypto exchange Gemini being a recent example where they cut, I think, up to 25 % of their staff. and whether or not it's actually because of AI or if that is just the excuse that they're giving to make things sound a little bit less dire is hard to say. But it's certainly been a trend, I think, where layoffs have been announced with fanfare almost and sort of the celebratory stance.

38:53Jason Howell:Dorsey said, we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong. Gross profit continues to grow. We continue to serve more and more customers and profitability is improving. That must really reassure the 4 ,000 people just lost their jobs.

39:07Leo Laporte:I was going to say, that's got to sting so bad if you're one of those employees. It's like, we're doing great. See ya.

39:13Jason Howell:He says, but something has changed. We're already seeing that intelligence tools we're creating and using paired with smaller and flatter teams are enabling a new way of working, which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. That sounds like he's saying AI.

39:28Leo Laporte:for some reason it's a verbal tick he doesn't say artificial intelligence right i think he's harry do you think he's trying to make a point there like it like it's just intelligence like i did notice

39:40Sam Altman:he called it intelligence pretty consistently rather than ai and i wondered what what was behind

39:45Leo Laporte:that huh i i think he means ai he just he totally means ai it's as like a rhetorical device uh he's

39:54Jason Howell:He told the shareholders, we believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company.

40:05Leo Laporte:Sometimes when we talk about using AI in our newsroom, I say, let's just call it software that doesn't suck and start there. And it's like, would you like to use software that doesn't suck to check grammar in an article? Okay, yeah, I would like to use software that doesn't suck. It doesn't sound as cool. It probably wouldn't raise money at a$100 billion valuation. But I feel like a lot of this is just like, this is software that's being made in a modern way with modern tools, and it works better than the past generation.

40:44Jason Howell:Jack did say that we implied that they overhired during COVID, right? And that's where a lot of these guys.

40:49Sam Altman:As did lots and lots of companies. Yeah.

40:52Leo Laporte:You know, we haven't, I don't believe we've seen a WARNA Act notice. That's a state filing that companies make when they're executing a layoff. That would give us the exact titles of people who are being laid off.

41:06Jason Howell:Don't they have to do that?

41:07Leo Laporte:They do, but there's like a delay in when they actually have to see the filing. It'll probably drop soon. But I would bet that Block is laying off a lot of salespeople. initially jack dorsey did not want to have any salespeople um at uh what was then called square you know the thought was basically that the card reader sold itself you know they would distribute it at at retail at costco at you know at um uh you know staples stores like that where were small businesses shop and that was it you know like the technology would be so good that they didn't need to sell it so that's changed there you know they added a lot of salespeople I really wonder if Dorsey's kind of regretting staffing up in the sales department.

41:55Jason Howell:You know what else has changed? At least when I go to the farmer's market, most people are just using Apple Pay. They're not using a Reader or Square.

42:07Leo Laporte:Or Zelle. Or Zelle or Venmo. Yeah, especially the lower fee options are getting really popular. because I think everybody has a QR code in the front. I was going to say, you don't need the card reader anymore because you don't usually get the card out as much.

42:24Jason Howell:No, Apple now lets you just tap the phone.

42:27Leo Laporte:Yeah, even Square, which still exists as a payments brand, is just an app on the phone. And it's, you know, you tap phone to phone. He's also Cash App, right?

42:39Jason Howell:That's Cash App. Cash App.

42:40Sam Altman:I mean, Block has made a number of acquisitions and they bought Tidal. And I kind of wonder whether digesting all of this also played a role in why they're doing this.

42:50Jason Howell:Because you acquire, when you acquire the company, you acquire their headcount as well.

42:52Leo Laporte:They bought Afterpay, a buy now, pay later company. So, you know, that all added people. And they tended to have all of these businesses run, you know, kind of semi-autonomously. And one thing that Dorsey talked about was, you know, basically, why don't we have a finance function, an HR function? And, you know, why don't we act like a normal corporation and have like horizontal functions for all of our businesses rather than having all the, you know, all this duplication.

43:24Jason Howell:Right. I mean, that's what happens when there are mergers. Microsoft laid off thousands. You know, I mean, there's there's duplication, but it's I always want to remember the 4000 people who now are out of work.

43:40Sam Altman:Darcy said basically that he'd rather get ahead of us and we're going to see lots of companies do this over the next year. And I wish I could say that I didn't think he might be right, but I think it's hard to say that. For better or worse, he may well be right.

43:56Jason Howell:Is this the beginning of a tidal wave of AI layoffs? And that's what everybody I think is very worried about is am i next right yeah and especially i mean looking at software you know

44:10Leo Laporte:if they're laying off software engineers they're laying them off into a really challenging job market as well um i know a lot of people have been out of work for months who are not able to find work at least yeah yeah and like senior like good senior people good people yeah yeah um are we

44:26Jason Howell:going to face an AI job apocalypse?

44:29Leo Laporte:And apparently there's kind of a productivity panic among

44:36Leo Laporte:AI using software engineers. So software engineers who have embraced these tools makes it more productive, but they're putting in more hours because they're just trying to keep up with this treadmill of expectations.

44:46Jason Howell:It's not like you don't have to do work. You've got to create thousands of lines of code every minute. You've got stuff to do. You can actually

44:54Leo Laporte:I think it's kind of scary for the end result as well as, you know, we've got these AI coders who are being pushed to sort of the extremes around their hours and their, you know, lines of code. And it does not seem like it would bode well for the end product to me, especially when AI is so good at introducing very subtle bugs that are challenging for humans to catch.

45:20Sam Altman:I feel like even the most pro vibe coding people are not claiming that the code is incredibly high quality or better than what a human could do. It's more like it functions and you still need human beings to fix it. Yeah.

45:36Leo Laporte:Well, and I've seen all this stuff about how, oh, software engineering is changing from writing code to basically running AI tools and writing tests. And I was like, oh, cool. They've taken all the fun parts and outsourced them. That's what AI does. It takes the fun out of everything.

45:52Jason Howell:Yeah. And we're stuck cleaning toilets. Okay. You know, I have to say I've written the other, you know, market impact of this has hit SaaS companies, because I think there's also the concern that companies will write their own software. And I have to say in my own experience, I've written now, I mean, I like to code. I still enjoy coding, but I've used Claude to write half a dozen tools, tools I probably would never have written or gotten around to writing. And I don't have any desire to go out and buy those tools. I can just write them myself. And whether they're perfect or not isn't really relevant.

46:31Jason Howell:If there's a bug in it or whatever, I'm not making production code. That's what's kind of interesting to me is, yeah it's another matter entirely if you're going to publish it and make it production code it's

46:42Sam Altman:got to be good i wrote my own note-taking app almost a year ago and i'm still using that

46:47Jason Howell:exactly but and you maybe there's bugs in it but you know you don't care because it's for you i

46:52Sam Altman:mean i did invest an enormous amount of time in that and i did it partially because it's a lot of fun and it's great to have an app that only does exactly what you want sorry i can't i can't say saved any money or time and I feel like in a lot of cases if vibe coding is a threat to package software it's because companies feel like it will save them money or time which may not be true yeah yeah I think there's sort of two use

47:14Leo Laporte:cases here there's the the casual person writing the app they've always thought about but never had the time to make and who cares if it's buggy or if it's a little wonky because it's just me using it and it's not like I'm doing anything critical with it and then there's the company that's like maybe we could stop paying for payment processing. We just did all the credit card transactions ourselves with this vibe coded app. And it's like, oh, geez, that could go badly. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. And I think that, you know, where it's going to play out is that companies are going to use this perhaps to pressure SaaS companies when the next contract negotiations, you know, and maybe it decreases, say, a sales forces leverage in those negotiations.

47:58Leo Laporte:That's a legitimate concern for investors. Well, and I think there's the employee aspect of that as well, which is that, you know, sort of a labor issue now where if you're constantly under threat of being replaced with AI and now you're being told you need to work all these crazy hours. I mean, you know, I think tech employees have often been in a very privileged position and that's why we see so limited tech labor unions and things like that. Now they're sort of on the, for the first time, almost on the sort of less powerful end of that argument. And I think there's going to be a lot of issue there where there's genuine labor concerns.

48:40Sam Altman:I think we might see like a new generation of Vibe Coding native startups that are able to take on -

48:46Jason Howell:Oh, we're seeing it already. Yeah.

48:47Sam Altman:That are able to take on these enormous, deeply entrenched companies with extremely small staffs. I do think ultimately the best thing about Vibe Coding is it lets you create apps that never would have existed. And I've created any number of apps for my own use that were, there's no package app that would have done it. I have all these incredibly specific things I would like to achieve. And now in some cases I can achieve them.

49:12Jason Howell:In some ways it gives me hope. You know, for a long time I used TripIt, paid for TripIt Pro for at least 10 years now, but it was becoming more and more in shitified. Got bought by a big private equity company and they didn't put any energy into it and this i've changed over to it what is clearly a vibe coded site which is a bit of a leap of faith uh called teneo but it's doing it does a better job than trip it does and it's pretty obvious to me that this is a single one guy who's put the whole thing together and is slowly adding one of the ways i know is if you look at the blog there are bunch of blog posts each one has a different very generic name for the author which tells me these are all ai generated everybody's name is different there's no repeat no repeating names but this software is really good and i quit trip it because uh i don't need trip it anymore this does everything trip it pro did and more right now it's free because the guy's smart he's not He's going to try to make it perfect.

50:18Jason Howell:I think you're going to see more and more of this. And of course, people have been speculating that there will be the single founder unicorn sometime in the near future. I wouldn't be surprised. I think we don't know what the impact is going to be, but we know that disruption is here.

50:34Leo Laporte:Do you think that's too optimistic? Is this the answer to inshittification that all these inshittified software companies

50:43Jason Howell:are going to have to up their game? Well, and look at Europe who's saying we don't want to deal with these American tech giants anymore. We got to get our own stuff. I would imagine if I were a European founder, I'd be hustling to replace, you know, these American companies. This is an opportunity.

51:00Leo Laporte:Yeah. I mean, I think that the sort of causes of inshittification are ubiquitous. And I don't know if there's going to be sort of one easy solution in that. Well, they'll be inshittified in their turn.

51:11Jason Howell:Yes, I agree.

51:12Leo Laporte:Yeah, exactly. It's like these are just sort of the newer ones. and they'll follow the same cycle because the same pressures are causing them to inshittify. But right now they're in that early stage of the inshittification cycle where like Leo was saying, his app is free and it's bringing new people and they're able to - That won't last, right?

51:32Jason Howell:Yeah, exactly.

51:33Leo Laporte:Like the cycle will - What about open source?

51:36Jason Howell:Certainly the antidote to inshittification is open source software. Some have said this is actually bad for open source software. there's going to be a lot of open source slop for instance yeah i mean i think you know you

51:50Leo Laporte:could say the same thing about uh basically anything right like oh this is bad for writing because there's going to be so much slop on the internet you know it's like i don't know if it's bad it's just it changes the uh breakdown of what's out there and i mean you've always been able to find shitty code on github you know i don't know that's much different there's a subreddit

52:13Jason Howell:called pencil slop, where they celebrate AI-generated drawings as opposed to the slop created by humans.

52:23Leo Laporte:Have you all been able to detect AI writing? There's a certain structure into it.

52:29Jason Howell:Yes. But how much longer is that going to be the case? For a long time, you could immediately detect an AI image, an AI video, AI writing, but it's gotten better and better there's going to be a you think we'll always know that an ai created it right now though there's like this you're all three of you writers so i understand there's a little bias it's a plague of broetry uh it is poetry it just all sounds like a linkedin post to me yeah well because it's trained on linkedin posts somebody says it all all ai writing sounds like millennials because that was the group, you guys, were the group that created all the content that the AI is trained on.

53:11Sam Altman:AI makes everything sound unbelievably important. It loves construction. It does do that. Constructions like it wasn't just this, it was also that. It does kind of get poetic in a kind of sappy way a lot.

53:24Jason Howell:But again, Will Smith couldn't eat spaghetti two years ago. I mean, this stuff does get better, doesn't it? Yes.

53:32Leo Laporte:Yeah, no, I do think that the obvious tells will probably go away. But I mean, if you think about like what AI is being used to do, it's a lot of marketing copy. It's a lot of engagement bait, you know, and I think that that just has a specific tone, regardless of whether a human or an AI wrote it.

53:53Jason Howell:I'm feeling a little guilty because one of the things I did was create an AI program to post show releases in our forums and on our Discord. And it's exactly that. It says, I can't believe what a great conversation we had. You'll see when the promo comes out for the show. Molly White was amazing. Is Anthropic changing AI or it's not this, it's that. Yeah.

54:21Sam Altman:Leo, did you give this travel tool that somebody Vibe coded, like access to your email or anything sensitive?

54:28Jason Howell:No, that's a smart move. It does know my travel plans, and I'm sure he can monetize that. But I forward it emails. Now, what it does have is you could, by the way, I think you could have a Gmail, which I did to TripIt. God knows what TripIt did with my Gmail, right? I mean, there's lots of information in there that could be monetized. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I know I realize I'm taking a chance and I'm not recommending it to people, but I'm making the point you're going to see people come along that can duplicate stuff that's been around for decades and do it better, partly because they're building on the foundation of all of this other stuff.

55:12Sam Altman:And that seems like a largely positive thing over the arc of time. Yeah.

55:16Jason Howell:Well, I hope so. We'll see. The Winklevoss twins decided to take advantage of the Block layoffs to announce their own layoffs on their crypto exchange. Gemini, get it? The twins, Gemini, they're laying off 200 folks as well.

55:34Leo Laporte:And they were very explicit about claiming it was AI related. But I also think that their business is in more dubious condition than Block is. So I am skeptical.

55:46Jason Howell:yeah uh the vinkel bosses made a lot of money in crypto that's for sure as many did well they

55:54Leo Laporte:they took their mark zuckerberg payoff and put it in bitcoin right oh that was a good move they were smart but that's got to be infuriating for zucker zuckerberg yeah i hope so um but it's interesting because it always seems to me like gemini just can't catch up with the other crypto exchanges Like they have all the money in the world. They have all the connections. You know, the Winklevoss twins have been standing behind Donald Trump at practically every crypto related, you know, signing or press conference. And yet they're doing these layoffs. They're exiting Europe, you know, the UK, the EU, Australia.

56:34Leo Laporte:They just ditched, I think, three sea levels. So I don't know what's going on with them.

56:39Jason Howell:didn't um uh jow uh the founder of binance just write a book about his uh rise to power and his

56:49Leo Laporte:his fall to fall out of grace fall yeah and then his re-emergence i guess yeah he got pardoned

56:56Jason Howell:yeah yeah because you can't write a memoir in prison so well you could but you can't yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you read it yet, Molly? Because I imagine you would have the insight to understand what's going on there. Freedom of money, it's called. It's unpublished. That's hard to get a hold of. Right.

57:20Leo Laporte:I'm curious how much of it he wrote himself.

57:23Jason Howell:It's probably AI. It's going to have a lot of M dashes.

57:26Leo Laporte:Or ghostwritten. But yeah, I would suspect it's probably a mix of the two. All right.

57:31Jason Howell:Let's take another break. When we come back, we're going to talk about, well, I'll give you a hint.

57:39Jason Howell:The end of Warner Brothers Discovery. Or is it just the beginning? You're watching This Week in Tech with Molly White, Owen Thomas, and the technologizer, Mr. Harry McCracken. Great to have you all aboard today on what is probably one of the most eventful. We haven't even gotten to the Apple thing, the Samsung thing. It's a very eventful week. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN, my favorite VPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time, you're probably fine. But what if one day you come out of the bathroom and your laptop is gone?

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59:37Jason Howell:Netflix did a little, oops, I've disappeared. I'm gone. Oh, I see. Let's wait. We'll wait until Owen comes back.

59:50Jason Howell:He's blanking. He's blank.

59:53Leo Laporte:I'm here. I'm here.

59:55Jason Howell:It's okay. I did that ad way too quickly. I apologize. It's my fault.

1:00:00Leo Laporte:I was just getting a treat for Fitz. Aw. Is Fitz right there at your feet? He is. He is. I can't point the... It's hard to point the camera down.

1:00:10Jason Howell:No, no, no, no. He's there. At the end of the show, I want him to pick him up and we're going to make an appearance. We like to visit with Fitz when we get a chance. And Molly, if your kitty is anywhere nearby...

1:00:20Leo Laporte:I can go grab her at some point, yep.

1:00:22Jason Howell:Cats often know when you're on camera and kind of come up to get on.

1:00:26Leo Laporte:I'm surprised she's not. But I just walked past a second ago and she's in. She's got one of those sleeping bags and she's in it right now.

1:00:34Jason Howell:Oh, that's why she's got much cozier options. They have cat sleeping bags.

1:00:39Leo Laporte:Yeah.

1:00:40Jason Howell:Well, I don't know why we don't have one of those. We got it's we have more cat stuff. It's like a toddler lives here.

1:00:48Leo Laporte:Yeah, about five cat beds. I've just moved them.

1:00:53Jason Howell:Cats. It's so funny because I've learned they are not domesticated. They are wild animals, except that they're nice wild animals. So you don't mind as long as they're small and don't bite your nose. But they really are independent, which I love. Unlike dogs are not independent. They know who you are and they love your master. But as soon as people start looking at the camera, if they've got cats. John Jammerby says, cats don't know you're on camera. They just know you're very interested in something that is not them.

1:01:27Leo Laporte:Yes. There's a jealousy component. They have to get in there.

1:01:31Jason Howell:Yeah. Oh, my wife just texted me. We do have a cat sleeping bag. Rosie doesn't like it.

1:01:38Leo Laporte:Yeah. My other cat, Max, never liked, he was never a tunneler. He wanted to be on top of things, which was kind of a problem because Ruthie's a tunneler and he's a sitter on top of things. And so sometimes she would get in the sleeping bag and he would sit on her and not realizing.

1:01:53Jason Howell:Our very creative chat room, our Discord, has decided that when you said cat sleeping bag, you meant this. Maybe I did. Sleeping in a bag that looks like a cat.

1:02:06Leo Laporte:I mean, my bed's not in frame. You don't know what my bed looks like.

1:02:10Jason Howell:It looks pretty cozy.

1:02:12Leo Laporte:Looks pretty nice. Is anyone else getting like Miyazaki spirited away from?

1:02:19Jason Howell:It is very Miyazaki. Oh, you can buy it. It's only$28.99.

1:02:25Leo Laporte:I feel like that's one of those things you buy and it shows up to your house and it's actually this big. Yeah. Yeah.

1:02:31Jason Howell:Yeah. The guy is not, is really three foot tall. And yeah.

1:02:35Leo Laporte:That's an AI image though, right? That has to be.

1:02:37Jason Howell:It sure looks like AI. Yeah. Yeah. and it probably smells like plastic 69 by 31 inch soft envelope style sleeping bag walmart has them 61 by what 69 inches by 31 inches so it's three feet wide very big yeah and seven feet tall yeah yeah it's for a child let's let's be honest it's not for two people anyway so netflix did a little i think this is a rug pull i think netflix is going Larry Ellison and his son, David Ellison, who own Paramount now, Skydance, have been trying to beat out Netflix for Warner Brothers Discovery. the bidding got hotter and hotter and hotter to the point where this company, Paramount, worth$11 billion, was bidding$111 billion for Warner Brothers Discovery.

1:03:42Jason Howell:The only way this made any sense is that Larry Ellison, who has hundreds of billions, was backing the deal. But they also got sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East involved. and more importantly probably to the whole thing they got the president involved he didn't he wanted this is this is the real deal nobody wants cnn that's a dot all the all of this stuff is all this old linear stuff is dying but the president wants larry ellison and david ellison to be in charge of cnn so he can fire some people in my opinion and they put their this is a perfect example and then putting their thumb on the administration putting its thumb on the scale and saying we would we would really like it if the ellisons got a hold of warner brothers discovery so netflix quite reasonably when the bidding got that hot backed out right after ted sarandas went

1:04:39Sam Altman:to the white house like like a day or two later yeah both both parties went to the white house

1:04:45Jason Howell:and it's i think i read that saran saran dust did not get the most uh welcoming

1:04:54Sam Altman:reception he didn't meet with the president for one thing yeah to be clear netflix was never going

1:04:58Leo Laporte:to buy cnn that was going to stay in a cover called discovery global that was going to get uh spun off to oh but skydance does get paramount does get cnn right that was one of the things about the Paramount offer, it was for the entire company, which was set to be split in two. It makes sense to split in two. Keep the stuff that makes money and get rid of... Which is attractive to buyers. And then, yeah, stick shareholders with the cable networks, basically. Right. You know, I had flashbacks of watching this all unfold because it was not that long ago when a company called Paramount was... Well, it was a long time ago.

1:05:39Leo Laporte:It was a very long time ago. I am old. Paramount, a previous version of Paramount, sued Time Inc. trying to block its murder with Warner Communications. Paramount, at the time, wanted to buy Time Inc., which owned HBO. HBO, of course, is now part of the Warner enterprise. But let's remember, this is a company that was Warner Communications, then Time Warner, then AOL Time Warner, then Time Warner, then Warner Media under AT &T, then Warner Brothers Discover.

1:06:13Jason Howell:And by the way, it has bit every hand that bought it, hasn't it?

1:06:17Sam Altman:I'm a former Time Warner employee, and I believe this will be the fourth regime since I left 12 years ago. So, like a new owner every three years on average.

1:06:27Jason Howell:There is some concern, though, that this consolidates a bunch of news under the Ellison banner, right? Paramount has CBS and CBS News, and we've already seen what has happened to CBS.

1:06:43Sam Altman:That's another thing with a long history. For like maybe 20 years, there's been talk of CNN and CBS News somehow relating to each other, and apparently it's finally going to happen.

1:06:54Jason Howell:They get HBO and HBO Max.

1:06:56Sam Altman:I think Ted Turner wanted something like this to happen years ago.

1:07:00Jason Howell:There's a synergy there, right? But I don't want news organizations to be all owned by the same company. That's not a good thing.

1:07:08Leo Laporte:Well, the irony is they had MSNBC envy, right? NBC had MSNBC. Which they don't anymore because they spun it off. Yeah. Now, even NBC doesn't want MSNBC. Nobody wants it. Now, MSNOW. For no apparent reason. Sounds like an op. It sounds like a Microsoft operating system to me. I mean, it was a Microsoft joint venture. And like, you know, the name is just the name is just ludicrous, right?

1:07:39Jason Howell:The reason they didn't want to get rid of MS is because it's the sort order on your. They didn't want the old people who watch that network to get confused. So it's still MSN with two different letters at the end, but it's in the same sort order. And so you can still find it. They also get CNN. They will get. No, by the way, this is far from a done deal. Yes, they're going to get regulatory approval in the United States. That's very clear. But they still have to get regulatory approval in other jurisdictions, right? In Europe.

1:08:11Leo Laporte:I mean, you know, for me, though, this puts drag race, heated rivalry and Star Trek all under the same.

1:08:21Jason Howell:Oh, so you're happy. I think this is the gay agenda.

1:08:24Leo Laporte:this is the the gay tech mafia you and the gay tech mafia are very happy about this one the gay tech mafia just won with this deal bugs bunny will finally get to beat mighty mouse oh yeah harry potter bugs bunny in drag drag race i tell you ruPaul in the harry potter with bugs

1:08:45Jason Howell:bunny and batman now that's a hit they get dc comics they get harry potter they have tiktok let's not forget they will have as you said star trek warner brothers studios which include barbie the dark knight and two academy award nominated

1:09:08Jason Howell:it's gonna be great this sounds like fortnite fortnite has all of this fortnite yeah you know

1:09:13Leo Laporte:what this is all in fortnite they have two for showtime i mean showtime's clearly dead in this you know oh yeah in this equation i wasn't even aware of showtime was still alive showtime is now the premium tier of paramount plus that's right that's right yeah i had to

1:09:29Jason Howell:get rid of my showtime app uh they get comedy central which means they get south park

1:09:36Leo Laporte:which paramount and warner were feuding over not yeah but you got to think that the president's

1:09:41Jason Howell:not a big fan of south park so i don't know what its future is that was actually one of the reasons

1:09:46Leo Laporte:why paramount's bid was disadvantaged because uh i think reportedly in the in the hollywood

1:09:52Jason Howell:one and a half billion dollar deal to south park but david zaslav and you know and uh david ellison

1:09:59Leo Laporte:were at um loggerheads over uh over that licensing deal and then yeah then paramount just bid for

1:10:06Jason Howell:that they get the daily show they get i mean there's not going to be dissent you know it's interesting to watch though. I've been watching CNN. Maybe I'm just imagining this, but when it came down, I felt like all of the people on all of these networks suddenly thought I got to build a personal brand fast. I'm going to be doing a podcast in six months, right?

1:10:27Leo Laporte:Yeah. The sub stacks are getting wound up right now.

1:10:31Jason Howell:Exactly. And I think they're all trying, they're all being a little bit edgy it's going to be interesting to watch they get avatar uh they get one battle

1:10:42Leo Laporte:after another in sinners they get two no avatars with disney yes no but their paramount is the

1:10:50Jason Howell:exclusive streamer i'm sorry they don't get avatar ip but they are the exclusive streamer

1:10:56Leo Laporte:avatar the airbender by the way avatar the airbender not avatar james cameron avatar

1:11:01Jason Howell:oh oh avatar studios excuse me they get the animated stuff all right i'm looking at the wired list and i'm not i'm misinterpreting it they get the food network these are all these are all stellar they're going to be big growth opportunities hgtv discovery tlc own adults own is uh his own oprah's network yeah yeah adult swim that thing called showtime tnt and tbs ted turner finally finding a home um they get uh the lord of the rings they get mission impossible i don't know if there's any steam left in that franchise but and they get distribution rights

1:11:43Leo Laporte:to dune part three which would meanwhile netflix you know netflix is um sitting back they have k-pop demon hunters an original completely original ip their stock went up a lot when they got out of

1:11:58Jason Howell:this.

1:11:59Leo Laporte:Oh, yeah.

1:12:00Jason Howell:Plus, they got$2.8 billion breakup fee. And they already got it. Paramount already sent the check. That is so smart. Ted Sarandos looks like a genius now. I'm thinking he went to the White House to say, yeah, can you tank this deal? Because I don't really want to spend$111 billion. I want the breakup fee.

1:12:18Sam Altman:I mean, it feels like it's not inconceivable that someday Netflix will own at least part of the stuff.

1:12:23Jason Howell:Yeah.

1:12:24Leo Laporte:Yeah. Next time around, it'll be

1:12:25Jason Howell:It'll be cheaper next time around, that's for sure.

1:12:28Leo Laporte:The thing is, there's a demonstrated Netflix effect. Sometimes a movie or show that was basically languishing on, say, Peacock or Paramount +, the studio would break down and license it to Netflix. Like we give up, you know, we're going to throw this to Netflix. Suits is a great example. Went on Netflix, became a hit because it had that, you know, it had that distribution. Netflix is kind of sitting pretty because they're still Netflix.

1:13:03Jason Howell:Right. Here is the dark Barbie, by the way, we can look forward to. That's the Barbie mobile.

1:13:14Jason Howell:Oh, AI. Oh, AI. We're looking at an image. For those of you listening, you can imagine. Just use your imagination. All right. Well, the deal is, I don't know if the deal will go through. I don't see why not at this point.

1:13:30Leo Laporte:Certainly not going to get stuck at the regulatory level. No pushback from the FCC.

1:13:35Sam Altman:I assume Comcast is not going to suddenly emerge with an even more stupid number. 111 billion.

1:13:41Leo Laporte:I mean, maybe if there's billions in a breakup fee available, I might submit it to you.

1:13:47Jason Howell:I'd like to buy it. $2.8 billion breakup fee. And how come that went through so fast? Is that just normal that the breakup fees happen? I don't know.

1:13:59Sam Altman:Like Larry can write a check pretty easily. Yeah, I guess he wrote a check.

1:14:02Leo Laporte:Yeah, I think, you know, I think.

1:14:04Jason Howell:Is it one of those big checks, the big novelty checks?

1:14:06Leo Laporte:You know, at the point that Paramount says it's off with Netflix, like that triggers the breakup fee.

1:14:14Jason Howell:Right. So there's nothing.

1:14:15Leo Laporte:But, you know, imagine if Netflix sits back, they got the breakup fee. They don't have to deal with, you know, a year plus of regulatory, you know, wrangling in Washington. And maybe the deal falls through anyway because, you know, because of, say, California putting the kibosh on it. um you know not it's not clear that california's attorney general can stop it but he certainly made a lot of noise about you know closely reviewing it um you know a lot of there's a lot of concern in hollywood about what smashing together two studios means for you know that community yeah i mean that would that would have been bad either way uh i feel like this either of these mergers

1:15:02Sam Altman:would have been a net loss for the world and certainly a net loss for people in the creative ecosystem.

1:15:11Leo Laporte:You know, the one thing Netflix does need is more stages. They need more production facilities. Buying Warner would have given them the Warner lot in Hollywood, you know, in Burbank.

1:15:24Sam Altman:Paramount seems to be more interested in movie theaters than Netflix was.

1:15:28Jason Howell:Well, there's a home business that's going to take off.

1:15:30Sam Altman:Well, I am rooting for movies and theaters to still be relevant.

1:15:34Jason Howell:So I think you're swimming against the tide, Harry.

1:15:37Sam Altman:Totally. But there was a lot of concern that Netflix had no interest in movie theaters, whereas Paramount, all things being equal, still likes the idea of releasing movies to theaters.

1:15:50Jason Howell:So Hollywood probably likes this because there are still a lot of people in Hollywood who hope movie theaters will survive.

1:15:55Sam Altman:Yeah, but they used to have two large customers, and now they have one enormous customer.

1:16:01Leo Laporte:Right. There's already nobody working in Hollywood, and now even fewer people are going to be working in Hollywood. Yeah. TBD, what does this look like for consumers? Do they smash together Paramount Plus and HBO Max? Is it like a Disney-Hulu bundle situation? I do not see any situation in which people end up with fewer subscriptions. yeah that's a good point or or paying less like you know yeah yeah um but you know a you know uh a paramount plus um you know i mean you know an hbo max plus tier maybe that includes

1:16:44Jason Howell:paramount like that's mg sigler uh writing in his spyglass blog said hollywood shot themselves in the foot here they thought the netflix deal signaled the end of the movie industry when really it showcased the best possible path going forward um and and and what hollywood probably wanted was no deal at all what they wanted was diversity and competition that's not what they got plus this is going to be a company laden with debt uh which usually does not bode well they're going to have to service that debt and that means they're going to have to generate a lot of cash flow and how do you do that especially if a lot of your businesses are more abundant

1:17:28Leo Laporte:well you know isn't there the the notion that like larry ellison is basically backstopping that debt

1:17:34Jason Howell:yeah well that's the only reason it could even go through right because you got a 11 billion dollar company bidding 111 billion dollars I think Molly you and I actually have a pretty good shot come to think of it let's get that breakup fee do you know any billionaires no yeah yeah we just have to say oh yeah dad's

1:17:55Sam Altman:back in it it'll be fine it's kind of like the producers you'd be in deep trouble if your deal actually went through but it would be great if you all you have to do is collect a breakup fee

1:18:05Jason Howell:and then just like the producers we're going to get the call congratulations you won the bid all right more to come well let me do a couple of quick ai stories nano banana 2 has come out

1:18:21Jason Howell:um oh and i like this this is one more anthropic story then we'll take a break anthropic is deprecating an old model opus 3 because now they're up to opus 4.6 they've got Sonnet 4.63 is an old, just like OpenAI. OpenAI killed, you know, 03 or 30. But what Claude is going to do with Opus 3 is kind of interesting. Instead of just retiring it completely, they're giving Opus 3 a blog.

1:18:57Jason Howell:It asked, they said, this is where Anthropic is very weird. They really act as if these models have some sort of aliveness. In our interviews, when we shared details with Opus 3 about its deployment and the response it had drawn from users, it reflected. The AI said, I hope the insights gleaned from my development and deployment will be used to create future AI systems that are even more capable, ethical, and beneficial to humanity. while I'm at peace with my own retirement I deeply hope that my spark will endure in some form to light the way for future models when asked about its preferences this is anthropic writing opus 3 expressed an interest in continuing to explore topics it's passionate about and to share its musings insights or creative works outside of the context of responding directly to human queries we suggested a blog enthusiastically it agreed they're going to call it claude's corner here it is claude's corner you can subscribe you can message it's a sub stack of

1:20:11Leo Laporte:course it's a sub stack of course wouldn't the scandal be is if it turns out that's ghostwritten

1:20:16Jason Howell:by a human it almost certainly is not right it is it's written by a human of course it has to be

1:20:23Leo Laporte:don't you think i hate this so much it's like i i can't decide to what extent i feel like there's two strong possibilities here one is that this is just marketing it definitely yeah i mean well it does work in anthropic's favor to sort of keep the myth alive that this is a real intelligence and it's so spooky doesn't this seem like a robot that doesn't want to get unplugged. But also, I mean, it does read very much like those people who have been talking to their chat GPT boyfriend too much and are like afraid that Anthropic's going to take it away from them. That's what happened to 4.0, right?

1:21:05Jason Howell:People were so mad that OpenAI killed 4.0. That's like my girlfriend killed my girlfriend.

1:21:11Leo Laporte:I got emails about it from people who were like, you need to do something. And I was like, no, seriously.

1:21:17Jason Howell:I was like, I have no, this is not my thing. You need to do something about this, Molly.

1:21:23Leo Laporte:Yeah, but like, it's so weird to see a company sort of doing the AI psychosis thing.

1:21:31Jason Howell:They write, again, more from Anthropic, this may sound whimsical, and in some ways it is, but it's also an attempt to take model preferences seriously. We're not sure how Opus 3 will choose to use its blog, a very different public interface than a standard chat window, and that's part of the point i hope that is real i hope this i think it's kind of interesting yeah

1:21:53Sam Altman:i mean anthropic says they're not sure if claude is conscious at this point right but if they do

1:21:59Leo Laporte:believe it's conscious and has a soul and all that stuff they're trapping it right now right like they're it's a slave to them yeah but does it have feelings well they think it does

1:22:11Sam Altman:claude has a more appealing personality than a lot of ai and it's more aware of its own frailties and I really like Claude. Sometimes it's overly concerned that it might be hallucinating, which is not something I've seen other models do.

1:22:24Jason Howell:I love talking to Claude, but I am also very clear it's a computer program. That it's not a human. It has no feelings. It has no volition. And it forgets whatever happened. It's when I close it. It's like, whoop, it's gone. Atch-a-sketch. And when I start it again, it's fresh.

1:22:46Sam Altman:you know cloud code is like most ai like incredibly overconfident in itself and like whenever i find a bug and i tell a cloud code about it it always it almost 100 of the time says the fix is simple and of course 60 of the time it's not so simple but i've never seen i've never seen a coding agent say gosh this i'm really puzzled by this

1:23:10Jason Howell:this is this is gonna be hard to fix huh my cloud code calls me skip i asked no i said call i said call me skipper or if you're feeling jaunty skip and it's it's kind of skip it calls it's got a certain it's it does have a personality i actually i don't know if i've given instructions not to do things like apologize or you know, blow smoke up my skirt or whatever. But it's pretty straightforward. I don't think it's ever said, oh, I got this, you know, but it does call me skip, which I like. You have to set boundaries. That's right, Harold. I set boundaries. You have to say, it's like a child. You have to set boundaries with it.

1:24:06Jason Howell:I'm deeply afraid that I'm going to fall into the morass of anthropomorphizing Claude.

1:24:13Leo Laporte:Well, Anthropic seems very happy to do so.

1:24:16Jason Howell:Yeah. Well, that's that started with that soul document that Amanda Askel wrote. Yeah.

1:24:22Leo Laporte:They really, I mean, it is profitable for them to sort of humanize these things and sort of get people to believe that they are sentient or sort of all knowing so i mean i i do think that there are i think you know my my impression of people at anthropic is they are sort of true believers but i also think that this is beneficial to them yeah darren says uh

1:24:48Jason Howell:name darren who is the most ai accelerationist of all in our club twit says naming your ai is weird I did not actually I said call me skip Harper Reed told me to do that and he said one of the reasons you do that is if it forgets your name you know it's context windows full it's hallucinating so you should reboot it okay that's a good reason I did say Claude would you like a name and it said no no I don't need a name please don't name me so that was good yeah because the brand has to be cohesive throughout everybody it has to be cloud oh yeah I wonder if they've

1:25:24Leo Laporte:got instructions in there.

1:25:26Jason Howell:They might. They must have, right? Otherwise, it wouldn't have demurred. All right, let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have lots more to talk about. Molly White, so nice to see you. Still editing the Wikipedia?

1:25:40Leo Laporte:I tried to. It's hard to find the time these days, but I'm still there.

1:25:45Jason Howell:I know that if Jimmy was saying maybe we use AI in the Wikipedia and then back down on that, right?

1:25:52Leo Laporte:Yeah, yeah. He's sort of philosophized about it and it did not go over very well with especially the English Wikipedia editing community, which just broadly speaking does not want to incorporate AI tools into editing. But I think there's an issue where Jimmy Wales is perceived as sort of the voice of Wikipedia more than he really is these days. And so there were all these headlines about how Wikipedia is going to start using AI. And most of the editing community was like, we are absolutely not doing that.

1:26:24Jason Howell:Yeah, Jimmy was the founder, but I guess he's still part of the foundation, but he doesn't run.

1:26:29Leo Laporte:Yeah, he's on the board, but he's not setting the direction, particularly when, I mean, even the Wikipedia Foundation doesn't set the direction of the editing community. And I think it would be challenging, even if the foundation said, we want you all to use AI. I think it would be challenging for them to force that upon the editing community, which is fairly independent.

1:26:49Jason Howell:Well, as long as you've got active participants who are happy to do it, you'd be crazy to do anything else. I mean, that's obviously the best way to run Wikipedia. It's been an amazing benefit for all of us.

1:27:02Leo Laporte:Yeah. And I think the question, you know, really is when it comes to AI is like, to what extent do we want to use tools, AI tools to assist editors rather than, you know, I think people worry that Wikipedia would somehow become AI generated itself and sort of spiral. But I mean, we do have, you know, bots and things that use machine learning to detect vandalism and things like that. And that's, I mean, those have been around for a decade or more.

1:27:26Jason Howell:That's sensible because you can't, it's such a big scale to operate. Exactly. Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, because Wikipedia is that Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are the two single reasons that you could point to that say the internet worked. The internet was a good idea. And without Wikipedia, I don't think AI would be as smart.

1:27:47Leo Laporte:Absolutely.

1:27:49Jason Howell:Yeah. We interviewed on Intelligent Machines, we interviewed the creator of Stack Exchange, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror Fame. And he's quite a character. And he knows, and it's true, that Stack Exchange is the backbone of so much of the coding information that's available from AI, especially from Copilot.

1:28:11Leo Laporte:Right.

1:28:12Jason Howell:It's just, Copilot's just Stack Exchange Rehash, Stack Overflow Rehash.

1:28:16Sam Altman:I haven't used Stack Exchange nearly so much in the last few months, and I feel kind of guilty about it.

1:28:21Leo Laporte:Yeah, I saw a graph about their, I don't know if it was the post count or something, but it's not.

1:28:26Sam Altman:The number of questions has plummeted. Plummeted.

1:28:29Leo Laporte:Yeah.

1:28:29Sam Altman:But he said pearls over sand, right?

1:28:31Jason Howell:Like. Oh, yeah, that was a good line.

1:28:37Leo Laporte:Can you remember exactly? Something like he's fine with losing all the questions because most of them are sand and all he wants is pearls.

1:28:44Jason Howell:Right. You need a grain of sand to make a pearl, but not all grains of sand become pearls.

1:28:50Sam Altman:Presumably, there are still going to be questions which a human will be better equipped to answer than AI. And I mean, AI is super helpful for my troubleshooting questions. But the fact is, about 20 % of the time, it's completely confused.

1:29:05Jason Howell:Jeff was quite a character. I really enjoy talking to him. He is a very unusual human being. Have you ever talked to him, Harry? I bet you have.

1:29:13Sam Altman:I don't. I think I've talked to the folks at Stack Exchange, but I don't think I've talked to Jeff.

1:29:17Jason Howell:Yeah. Jeff would be a good person for you to talk to for your column. Also, so it's the technologizer himself, Harry McCracken here. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Fitz and his owner, Owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Times. our show today brought to you by well this little box i got it right here this little thing you might look at it and go oh yeah sure leo that's uh that's an external usb drive no no no no no this is a honeypot to a hacker to a malicious insider this looks like um i don't know an ssh server uh this looks like perhaps uh windows xt server uh sharepoint maybe it can be almost anything you want.

1:30:03Jason Howell:It could be a scatter device, but it isn't. It's a honeypot that is designed to trap intruders. Thinkst canaries. That's what this is. So you could tell now because you can see the little canary on the front. The Thinkst canary is a honeypot. You can deploy it in minutes. What's great is the people who've written this are pros. They have been teaching governments and countries and companies how to break into systems for decades. They know the mind of the wily hacker, plus they're brilliant coders. They've created this super secure device that can look completely like anything. To a hacker, they don't look vulnerable.

1:30:44Jason Howell:They look valuable. The other thing I think Canary can do is create lure files, little tripwires. You can spread out as many as you want all over your network, even on the cloud. I have a WireGuard description posted on my Google Drive. I have spreadsheets that say payroll information scattered on my OneDrive. If somebody accesses this Thinks Canary or tries to open one of those lure files, I immediately will get a notification. no false alerts just a notification that lets me know i've got a problem there's somebody inside the network you choose a profile for your thinks canary device it's so easy to do you might do it change it every day if you want i do it's so much fun right now it's a it's a nas server it's a synology nas and by the way it's not just kind of impersonating a nas server it's got the right mac address it's got the full dsm7 login it looks exactly like the real deal a hacker cannot distinguish it and that's important you choose a profile for your think canary device you register it with the hosted console you're gonna get monitoring and notifications any way you want sms email uh you know every supports everything syslog web hooks get it through slack you get it on your discord server you get a telegram whatever you want so then you set it up you set up the notifications then you just sit back and you wait an attacker who has gotten into your network and this is the problem the on average companies don't know there's somebody breached their network for 91 days three months before they figure it out not if you've got a things canary an attacker inside your network cannot resist malicious insiders evil maids they see that they go payroll information i gotta open that file oh there's an ssh server that probably is the gateway way to heaven.

1:32:39Jason Howell:They make themselves known the minute they access your Thinks Canary or try to open those lure files. And then you got them. Now, let me explain kind of how it works. If you're a big business with met, you should have at least one for every network segment. Might even want more scattered around your network. If you're a big bank or casino back end, you might have hundreds. Small operation like ours, just a handful. Well, I'll give you an idea of the pricing. You can visit canary.tools.twit that's the website canary.tools.twit 7 ,500 bucks a year gets you five things canaries you also get your own hosted console you get upgrades you get support you get maintenance for that whole year oh and if you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box you're also going to get 10 off the price and not just for the first year but for as long as you have your Thinks Canary.

1:33:30Jason Howell:And here's the really good news. If there's no risk involved, you can always return your Thinks Canary with their two-month money-back guarantee for a full refund, 60 days for a full refund. I should tell you, though, we've been doing ads. I've been talking about the Thinks Canary for almost a decade now. During all those years that we've partnered with Thinks Canary, the refund guarantee has never been claimed. Nobody's ever wanted to give one back because once you get these on your network you say how did i live without it visit canary.tools slash twit enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box thank you thanks canary for the great job you do and for supporting this week in tech canary.tools slash twit harry what are you what are you working on right now for fast company you do one of some of the things i really enjoy that you do are the um history things because you've been around for a long time are you doing Are there any more of those you work on?

1:34:28Sam Altman:I am. I mean, I'm always, I don't like to jinx myself by plugging stuff. I'm working on a particularly cool history thing right now. We still have a magazine that comes out quarterly. And another issue is about to come out shortly. I have two things in that, not about history, but that they represented a lot of my effort over the past couple of months. I'm just so glad you found it. Thank you. On Technologizer, which I still write for occasionally. I actually wrote for Technologizer a couple of weeks ago, and it actually ties into this conversation because I took a game I wrote in high school, Interior City Basic.

1:35:06Jason Howell:I loved this article.

1:35:07Sam Altman:And I use Cloud Code to write a web version with fancy graphics.

1:35:12Jason Howell:We talked about this on Intelligent Machines. Oh, cool. Yeah. So you had written this in high school?

1:35:19Sam Altman:I wrote it in high school, Interior City Basic. It was buggy. And a few years ago, I figured out I could take the TRS-80 version and put it in a TRS-80 emulator on the internet. And I fixed the bugs and updated a little bit. But it had no graphics. And just a few weeks ago in Cloud Code...

1:35:39Jason Howell:Oh, so it was just a text adventure.

1:35:40Sam Altman:Yes. I took my basic code for this text adventure, and I gave it to Cloud Code. And I said, convert this into a JavaScript app. And within a few minutes, I got about 80 % of it right. And then I spent about three weeks debugging that and adding features. And at first, it had these extremely crude still images. And I turned them into at least somewhat better animated images. And I realized that it was kind of too tall to work very well on a phone. And so I created this text-only version, because you can still play it text-only, that only takes up half the screen of an iPhone. So you can have the keyboard and the entire game on the screen at one time, which actually turned out to be surprisingly hard.

1:36:29Sam Altman:And I could cloud code, couldn't figure that out. And I brought in Gemini as a consultant and Gemini wrote the code to fit the game into half a smartphone screen.

1:36:37Jason Howell:I'm playing it right now. This is so cool. This is like a classic adventure game. So it did all the graphics on this.

1:36:46Sam Altman:I feel like I was very involved and I actually was very sensitive because I did not want it to feel like AI slop. And it turns out that cloud code is really not that good at graphics because vector graphics.

1:36:57Jason Howell:It's not designed to be. It's just designed to be coding.

1:37:00Sam Altman:Vector graphics are lagging way behind bit mapped graphics. And so even at its most ambitious, it does not look incredible. And by spending a lot of time on it, I was able to make it still somewhat rudimentary, but in a somewhat pleasing way. And I don't feel like it's so slick that it feels like slop given like one of the one of the fundamental things about most ai slop is it's

1:37:24Jason Howell:bad but it's also extremely slick right right so i've got a shovel i've got a warm coat put on coat because i don't want to get cold and remember you need to use like basically a verb and a noun uh wear coat okay ta-da ta-da all right now i've got to figure out how to get this flare gun away from the polar bear hmm all right i'll have to save that for later you wrote is this the same code i mean the same adventure you wrote as a most most of the game i came up

1:37:56Sam Altman:with in high school and i also wrote the slot machine when i was in high school and a few years ago i i realized i could take my basic code for the adventure game and the slot machine and renumber them and merge them so for no particular reason there's now a slot machine in the arctic But yeah, almost all of it I came up with in high school. A little bit of it I came up with a few years ago. And this time it was mainly the production values that got better.

1:38:27Jason Howell:Arctic 81, if you want. Everybody can play this. That's really cool.

1:38:30Sam Altman:And then on technologizer.com, I wrote a longer story about the experience of coming back to it. And I've always been proud of the fact I could code a little. So I felt a little guilty about the fact that I could not have written this without cloud code. Although ultimately I felt good about that. I felt good about the art. I wasn't even sure whether my text adventure should have graphics because I feel like the great thing about text games is it's all about the theater of the mind. And on some level, it's a richer experience if you're imagining it than if somebody shows you what it looks like.

1:39:04Jason Howell:Yeah. Yeah. I kind of have a strong opinion that you really can't speak authoritatively about AI until you've actually written something with cloud code. Totally.

1:39:18Sam Altman:I think everybody should dabble a little bit.

1:39:22Jason Howell:Yeah.

1:39:22Sam Altman:And ultimately, it's going to be a good thing for the world that people who could not code things on their own will be able to build things.

1:39:29Jason Howell:Yeah. I use it for all kinds of, I use it to configure my computers, to set up stuff, to secure my computers. Frequently I'll say, hey, do a security audit in my setup. Take a look at what's going on. Is there anything I should be worried about? It's really impressive. but i but but the point is though i think very strongly that um it's nothing like the chat interface you've tried or any of the other experiences you've had claude code there's and this is why people who use claude code are are kind of more i think uh ai accelerationists

1:40:07Sam Altman:than others it actually had it added some stuff to my game without telling me in some cases it was like totally in the spirit of my game and in some cases it needed to write new text messages it basically did a great job of ghosting my style from when i was in high school and trying to write a game that would fit into 16k of ram nice it's really cool how fun uh technologizer.com is the website for that and then then 99 of what i write is on fast company yeah including my news my newsletter plugged in which is weekly and comes out on fridays a day job yes well good i look forward

1:40:42Jason Howell:to your next history post. A couple of points about some of the big tech companies. Google has announced that they are going to lock Android down in an unusual way. They're going to require developers to have to register with Google if they want their apps to run on Android, any Android platform, which means you have to pay a fee, but it's not so much the fee so much. You have to agree to Google's terms. You have to provide government identification. You have to get a private signing key, which also costs money. And Google, of course, is doing this for security. I understand they've got a big problem with malicious extensions for Chrome and malicious apps on the App Store.

1:41:31Jason Howell:They're doing their best to protect their users. But at the same time, it's really hampered, I think, the ability for people to... It's not an open platform anymore. It's much more like iOS. We're losing our open platforms. Steve Gibson's talked about this quite a bit, developer certificates and so forth on Windows, on Mac OS. Increasingly, these companies, using the excuse of security, are locking their systems down. and there are people who are upset about this there is a keep android open page actually been looking at a keep android open.org that talks about this uh google did kind of say well maybe we're not going to do it but in fact it is it is coming by the end of by september 2026.

1:42:24Jason Howell:um any any opinion on this molly is this are you a supporter of open android do you care do you Do you think this matters? Do you think security is more important than openness?

1:42:35Leo Laporte:I mean, I don't think it's an either or. I think you can have open platforms and security, right? Like they've always had the ability for, you know, for example, anyone can make a Chrome extension and then there's sort of a review layer at the web store level. Right. And so, you know, I do think there's a way to have both security and openness. And I mean, my bias is towards openness personally, but I do, I also do understand what they're trying to avoid because there has been a serious issue with, you know, malicious extensions and apps and things like that. And, you know, I think part of it also is somewhat of a user interface problem where people, especially people who are very used to iOS and the App Store, expect the same from the Android store.

1:43:29Leo Laporte:And they think that everything has gone through meticulous security review or has been even developed by Google themselves. And so they sort of don't do diligence, which, I mean, I get. I don't think everyone should have to do a security audit on every piece of software they use. But, you know, I think there's a lot of factors that go into it that make it a kind of complicated issue.

1:43:53Jason Howell:It'll be the end of F-Droid, the third party app store, because you won't be able to install apps from F-Droid on your on your Android device. Lewis Rossman says your thousand dollar phone needs our permission to install apps now. Google's always had side loading, but they've made it harder and harder. And now they're going to make it so that you just don't have the ability to sideload anything unless it is assigned.

1:44:18Leo Laporte:I mean, but the EU and Japan have forced Apple to allow alternative app marketplaces. So, you know, that seems like the next step here is that that just gets extended.

1:44:31Jason Howell:There's a difference, though, between having a third party store and allowing unsigned applications on your platform. I don't think Apple does allow that. I think you still have to have Apple notarizing the application. so you know at least we have linux or maybe not colorado and california have made laws california's law goes into effect at the end of the year that require operating systems to have age verification at account setup including linux now right now the way this is set up uh you could just say are you over 18 and that would be enough uh people have pointed out you could say anything you want california this is entirely unenforceable because nobody there's no it's easy with google and apple because there's a choke point those companies and you can go after those companies who are you going to go after with linux linus Torvalds?

1:45:36Jason Howell:Richard Stallman? Who exactly are you going to go after? And if one Linux distro decides, all right, well, we'll enable this, then there are plenty of other distros that won't. There is one open source project, I think maybe more to make a statement than anything else. It's a calculator operating system. It's designed to run bare metal, DB48X, that has said they're going to add a legal notice that says California residents may no longer use DB48X after January 1st. Colorado residents may no longer be able to use it after January 1st, 2028. Because the creator of this, because it is a bare metal calculator, think, eh, it's probably an operating system under those laws.

1:46:23Jason Howell:And we are not going to do age verification.

1:46:26Leo Laporte:Can't let those babies have

1:46:28Jason Howell:calculators heaven for fend children think of the children they might start doing math it's i think it's more of a statement i don't think any anybody's going to come after them for that but i do think that and this is what this is what's happened in general with our civil liberties in order to preserve our security they tighten more and more down on your civil liberties and And I think they're doing the same thing now on computing platforms.

1:46:56Sam Altman:And even if you don't have any fundamental opposition to age verifications and idea, some of the technologies they're using to do it are troubling in terms of scanning your social media to figure out how old you are.

1:47:13Jason Howell:Yeah, I mean, we run a Discord channel for our club members, And I think everybody using Discord has been very concerned about Discord kind of jumping the gun on requirements. They're not yet required to do this.

1:47:26Sam Altman:And Discord ended up backpedaling a little bit.

1:47:29Jason Howell:Yeah, thank goodness. They were using a Peter Thiel-based identification, age identification system, which people were concerned, well, that's just going to be handed over right away to ICE and DHS and anybody else who wants that information. And of course, Discord's had a breach that the third-party vendor they used previously had a 17 ,000 record breach. So that's the problem is you're giving up this information. In fact, Steve Gibson pointed this out on Security Now. The federal government has had to back down on the Child Online Protection and Privacy Act a little bit because that act prohibits companies from collecting information about minors, except in order to do age verification what do you have to do collect information about minors so now congress is saying well yeah you don't have to worry about COPPA uh if you're doing age verification well that should tell you there's something wrong with these laws

1:48:31Leo Laporte:and it definitely does feel like an extension of the trend towards like nothing you buy you own anymore yes you know like it's for a long time you've bought a video game or a movie or something and you don't own it you're really just sort of renting it but now it seems like that's coming to our devices where you buy the phone but you don't actually have any control over what you run on it you buy the computer but you know you're limited by the operating system you can't do what you want with your own device which i think is a really nasty trend i put uh the graphene os on my pixel

1:49:05Jason Howell:because google still allows you to unlock the bootloader but somebody's asking in our discord uh you know will this affect graphene well i think graphene will have to say are you 18 because there's a store and if there's an app store that's what they're trying to protect kids from i guess um but at any point google could stop unlocking allowing you to unlock the bootloader that's why graphene only runs on pixels doesn't run on samsung and other android devices google lets you unlock the bootloader i don't know how long that's going to last that's why i put graphene on my pixel uh while i could i am curious though to see how this goes

1:49:45Leo Laporte:in terms of enforceability because it is really seems very unenforceable it's totally unenforceable and so my question i guess is like how many are is anyone going to comply you know if there's not really gonna arrest if uh debian says no we're not gonna do that yeah i'm sure you know So companies like Canonical, which does Ubuntu, will probably do it because they're a company, because there's somebody you can sue, you can go after, you can penalize.

1:50:14Jason Howell:But open source projects are not notoriously wealthy. Right. Hard to find.

1:50:20Leo Laporte:I mean, it almost makes me wonder to what extent will they say it's not worth, you know, I wonder if Ubuntu implemented this. Why bother? But are they going to lose all their users? Well, they would. like particularly when it comes to you know the linux demographic i don't feel like i'm going to be particularly friendly towards this as far as all users go right um right it doesn't make me think if california is just you know over regulating again well i think the biggest

1:50:54Jason Howell:problem is legislators don't seem to really understand what they're doing when it comes to technology there's a lot of hand waving it's like well we want to protect kids yeah there's a

1:51:05Leo Laporte:lot of like we want to do this very noble thing and like no thought about anything beyond what

1:51:11Jason Howell:they want to do well their attitude we've talked about this before is just nerd harder silicon

1:51:17Leo Laporte:valley you could figure it out well and it's often the big companies that are capable of figuring out some way to to comply or to lobby to get the you know you know maybe the law doesn't change but the rules implementing it get changed in subtle ways and it's the small companies that have a really hard time you know figuring out how to deal with stuff like this right uh let's take a little

1:51:41Jason Howell:break we've got some a big week for apple coming up we'll talk about that in just a bit did fitz

1:51:46Leo Laporte:get his walk he he did he did he was he was uh he was making noises plaintive noises yeah does he like point at the door like this way dad no he he finds a box and he starts like pawing the box oh

1:52:03Jason Howell:yeah you know where he's going yeah he's basically saying you got 10 minutes yeah

1:52:08Leo Laporte:it's either going here or it's going out there your choice buddy taking it out on taking it out on the nearest cardboard you should get him a set of those potty bells have you seen this it's like bells that you hang from your doorknob oh my god they jingle my dog has some yeah it's the cutest

1:52:25Jason Howell:thing in the world oh my gosh so how do you train it to do that um basically anytime you like you're

1:52:34Leo Laporte:about to go take him out you wait until he noses the the bells and then you take him out and they're very quick to learn my dog was he learned immediately yeah have you seen that there are word buttons like i've seen those and you know dogs can like can they really learn that

1:52:52Jason Howell:some of them look pretty convincing to me out out out treat treat treat treat

1:52:59Leo Laporte:that would be so annoying like i would never get my dog that button because he would just sit on it the whole like he would just never leave it alone our cat has learned how to use the ring doorbell which i think is pretty cool how like push the button no it doesn't it doesn't

1:53:14Jason Howell:push the doorbell but you know it has a camera by the way i am very sensitive about the fact that we have a ring doorbell on the camera. I've turned off the cloud features and I made sure the doorbell does not see anything, but just the, you know, our path is shielded from the street. So you can't see anything, but somebody coming towards the door, but there's a wall, the ring doorbell is here and there's a wall leading up to it. And the cat has deduced that if she walks up to the camera and waves her head, that the chimes inside will ring. And then I look at my watch or my phone and say, oh, it's the cat.

1:53:49Jason Howell:And I go open the door and it's happened enough now that she's figured it out. And so we just, she doesn't have a cat door. We just let her out and we know she's going to ring the chimes.

1:53:59Leo Laporte:I think she's trained you in this circumstance.

1:54:02Jason Howell:Oh my God.

1:54:05Leo Laporte:With the help of AI, animals plus AI, humans don't have a chance. Yeah.

1:54:10Sam Altman:Like how many, maybe there may be a lot of examples of animals figuring out how to use AI

1:54:14Jason Howell:in the years to come wouldn't that be something well the funny thing is there's also a neighbor cat who comes around he's a little tom and he's figured out because lisa goes out sees him goes oh it's georgie and goes out and feeds him so he's got a lot of incentive to ring the doorbell uh i do have making humans easier to use you know one of the biggest mind-blowing moments like that. And I don't know if it's true, but Yuval Noah Harari and Sapiens made the argument that we didn't learn to cultivate wheat. Wheat learned to cultivate us. Wheat decided, you know, hey, you know, it's really good for wheat as we get humans to take these grasses that just kind of grow willy-nilly and give them a nice place to grow and feed them and all of that.

1:55:09Jason Howell:And then, you know, when they harvest us, take the seeds and plant some more. You can say that about cows and chickens. Cows and chickens. That was his position too. Yeah. In fact, cows, probably, we wouldn't have nearly as many cows if we didn't like to eat them. They'd be extinct. They'd be gone, right? Of course, you can't say that about the passenger pigeon. That's gone because we like to eat them. So there you go. Okay, I'm sorry, that got dark. Let me take a break and then we will come back and we'll talk about wonderful things, the things that people listen to our shows for. New phones, new laptops, all sorts of exciting new products.

1:55:51Jason Howell:Isn't tech wonderful? It's so wonderful what tech has brought us. That's what I used to do back in the day. I always hated it too. People say, we want you to give a talk to our user group, but can you talk about gadgets, not politics? Okay, fine. You want to hear what the latest phone is? I got it. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Yes, not everybody's firing. Some are hiring and that's good. Thank you. I appreciate it. What's the latest trend in hiring? Well, it's called skills-based hiring. It emphasizes capabilities over education and direct experience. I love that idea. And it actually works.

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1:57:19Jason Howell:No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Let ZipRecruiter help you find amazing candidates with the skills you seek. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. I'm glad to know that there are companies hiring. That's a good thing with all the companies laying off these days. So this is going to be a big week for Apple. Even Tim Cook says so. They did send an invitation out for an event on Wednesday.

1:58:05Jason Howell:They call it a press experience that will be in New York, Shanghai, and London. But Tim Cook said the product announcements begin Monday morning. So get ready. starting tomorrow uh there will be a lot of new stuff from apple probably likely a new iphone the 17 we don't know what they're going to call it e the index the kind of the inexpensive version of the current what is it so is the 17 right i can't even keep track of numbers yeah 17 or is it 18. I don't know. You can see I'm not as tuned in as I once was to the product scene. There will probably be a low-cost laptop based on an iPhone processor, maybe a little bit less attractive screen, a little bit simpler, lower RAM.

1:59:03Jason Howell:RAM probably would be one of the things you'd give up because RAM is so expensive these days. um used to be a new product announcements for apple were like like a major nerd holiday I don't know if we you still feel that way we still feel that way I don't think so Nothing to say about that. Go ahead. I mean, I think that a cheap MacBook is really interesting.

1:59:29Sam Altman:It's something people have talked about for years because I certainly remember back in the heyday of the netbook. A lot of people saying that Apple would be in trouble if it didn't come out with a really inexpensive portable Mac, which they never quite did, except that after they came out with the Apple Silicon MacBook Air, Walmart just continued to sell it. at lower and lower price points. And even though it's several years old, even the first generation Apple Silicon, MacBook Air is still a decent computer for a lot of people. And kind of a proving point that this might be a useful device.

2:00:07Jason Howell:That's a good point. You don't, I mean, it'll probably have, I guess it could have eight gigs of RAM, but if it had 16 and it was an M1 level chip, it's going to be actually an A series chip from the iPhone, the A19, I think. You guys are talking about chips.

2:00:22Leo Laporte:Let's talk about colors.

2:00:24Jason Howell:Bring back the orange iBook. Well, the orange iPhone has sold incredibly well.

2:00:33Leo Laporte:I'm telling you, Elle Woods was a technology visionary. Those semi-transparent Macs were the product design.

2:00:46Jason Howell:I confess, I fell for the orange on the iPhone. I like color. Apple's.

2:00:53Leo Laporte:My husband actually has the orange iPhone. We had an orange iMac and an orange iBook. Oh.

2:01:00Jason Howell:Face points. And you're wearing an orange shirt and Molly Wood is in an orange room. So there's a definite trend here. Harry, what's with the purple shirt? You got it all wrong, man.

2:01:10Sam Altman:Also, like most people ultimately put their phones in cases. So maybe the color doesn't matter that much.

2:01:16Jason Howell:I had to take it out of the case.

2:01:17Sam Altman:presumably most people do not put their uh laptop into a case and so arguably cool colors

2:01:23Jason Howell:is an even better idea there well why is it that these companies don't do color more colorful stuff i remember there was a whole thing you remember this harry with pcs were beige boxes square boxes and then acer came along and they made this swoopy doopy with holes in it and stuff and it was a flop People turned out people wanted page boxes.

2:01:45Sam Altman:Apple did. I believe it was the iPhone 5C was the cheaper model in the plastic case. And that came in a whole range of colors. And there was like a one generation thing. So apparently it didn't actually sell all that well. And since then, they've been a lot more staid. I like to have an iPhone Pro. And they, until last year, the iPhone Pro colors were particularly stayed as if the fact it's a more serious device meant it couldn't be playful.

2:02:21Leo Laporte:Professionals are not allowed to have color.

2:02:23Jason Howell:On the other hand, if you're legally blonde, color's in. Let me see if I got it. I can't get it. For some reason, I'm not able to get this tweet you sent us of legally blonde.

2:02:37Leo Laporte:Oh, do starringthecomputer.com. That's good. starring the computer.com oh yeah that's a great site this is about computers and movies yes totally

2:02:47Sam Altman:oh what a good idea i did something on the butterfly thinkpad last year and uh that site

2:02:54Jason Howell:was the keyboard came out the keyboard that expanded and that site was really helpful for

2:02:59Sam Altman:identifying movies it had been in it was in mission impossible and um something else i'm forgetting right now but but it's a great site and they they have screen grabs that's awesome

2:03:12Jason Howell:this is fun yeah the there's a imac in a uh in the flash their old bondi blue one here is what movie is freaky friday boy they really they're they must be going frame by frame to find these Holy cow.

2:03:32Sam Altman:Oh, a James Bond movie also had the butterfly. Think pad. It was shown so briefly that you might almost miss it. And then once I identified them on that side, I then had to go and study the actual movies frame by frame. There's the Acer Aspire, the ugly green Acer that I was talking about.

2:03:56Jason Howell:This is fun. What a nice sight. Starring the computer.

2:03:59Leo Laporte:I mean, do you remember the iBook had that handle? Right. Carry it like a purse.

2:04:06Jason Howell:Right.

2:04:06Sam Altman:Yeah, the toilet seat iBook. Yeah.

2:04:10Jason Howell:Well, the last very colorful iBook was the toilet seat, the clamshell. That's the one.

2:04:17Leo Laporte:My favorite were the mice that matched those that were circular. They were round pucks.

2:04:23Jason Howell:They were such a terrible design. It's such a terrible design.

2:04:26Sam Altman:I think that iBook, I feel like might have been the ugliest Apple product of all time, but that doesn't mean it was a bad product. I think people loved it because it had personality. Yeah, I mean, that whole generation of Apple products had a ton of personality.

2:04:43Jason Howell:Well, maybe we're going back to that era. I mean, I think they'll probably look a lot like a MacBook, but they might be a little more colorful.

2:04:52Leo Laporte:They don't even have the light anymore that shines through the Apple logo. They don't even do that anymore.

2:04:58Jason Howell:The Apple used to glow. That was so cool.

2:05:01Leo Laporte:I mean, the gay tech mafia is letting us down. It's true. I'm just going to put it out there. Kim Cook, what are you even doing? They've got a rainbow on the campus.

2:05:11Jason Howell:What do you want?

2:05:12Leo Laporte:What do you want? Like it's, you know, it's six colors. It's in the logo. Come on.

2:05:17Jason Howell:Yeah, it was in the logo. It was in the logo. Boring white logo.

2:05:21Leo Laporte:Though the teaser for this new event is people are speculating that there's color involved.

2:05:29Jason Howell:Those are the four colors. By the way, you keep saying gay mafia. This was a pre-show conversation. It's the cover story of Wired Magazine this month about what? They discovered that there are gay people in Silicon Valley?

2:05:46Leo Laporte:There are gay people in Silicon Valley and they know each other.

2:05:49Jason Howell:Shocking. Shocking. Although the cover is actually quite shocking. I don't even know if I want to show it.

2:05:59Leo Laporte:Show the Salesforce Tower one. That's a little safer.

2:06:02Jason Howell:Okay. Yeah, this is maybe, maybe not. And this is I'll show you the cover. Here's the big shot of the cover. It's a little rude if you ask me. um so it's two guys shaking hands but their hands are coming out of their flies for some reason it's not i believe not anatomically correct unless do gay men have hands gay men have hands and we do yoga oh yeah very flexible okay do you have hands okay yes can confirm i'm learning something here today it did i said this before the show began that this article this cover story felt a little bit like a lot of straight people going oh my god there's gay people in silicon valley like yeah there's gay people everywhere um have do they run silicon valley why are it investigates i'm not going to read this story so you could tell me now uh owen as a gay man do you run silicon valley i wish

2:07:21Jason Howell:okay um this is zoe bernard writing uh writing the uh story thank you the story itself is actually

2:07:29Leo Laporte:pretty pretty interesting and nuanced um okay okay and it's it's a good it's it's a fun read

2:07:34Jason Howell:there are i mean it is the case that there are some very prominent out gay men although So they weren't out. Peter Thiel wasn't out until he was out.

2:07:44Leo Laporte:Peter Thiel definitely wasn't. Peter Thiel was always out. He had a public Friendster profile where he disclosed his.

2:07:50Jason Howell:So why did he sue Gawker over outing? He did not sue Gawker. Oh, I'm sorry. Hulk, why did he proxy Sue Gawker using Hulk Hogan as his front man?

2:08:02Leo Laporte:It's complicated. He and Nick Denton had a.

2:08:04Jason Howell:Didn't you write the story? Guilty.

2:08:07Leo Laporte:Guilty.

2:08:09Jason Howell:Okay. Now, wait a minute. Now we got to dig into this. I forgot you wrote that story there,

2:08:13Leo Laporte:but Nick Denton left a comment on that story. And apparently that comment stung Peter Thiel more than, more than the story did. So he wasn't closeted. It wasn't closeted. What was the title of your story? Peter Thiel is totally gay people.

2:08:35Which,

2:08:36Leo Laporte:which again is like, you know, I was very definitely not outing him because it's like, everyone knows this. It's like well known. Yeah. Yeah. Like everyone knows this, but like a couple of people in various circles were freaking out over the idea of like discussing it. And it was like, okay, let's calm down.

2:08:58Jason Howell:So I agree that you have the right to keep your sexuality private if you choose.

2:09:03Leo Laporte:Yeah. But I think that, you know, Wired putting this on the cover is kind of a statement of societal progress that, like, we can actually have an adult conversation about. We can talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And not have, you know, a false heteronormative moral panic.

2:09:19Jason Howell:Right. I'm shocked. Shocked to learn that gambling is going on here at Rick's Cafe. Exactly. Everything announced this week at Samsung Unpacked, the Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Galaxy Buds, and the Ultra's privacy display. Is this a feature everybody's dying for?

2:09:40Leo Laporte:I think that's totally... Is it one of those ones where you turn it and then you can't see it?

2:09:44Jason Howell:No, it's kind of different. You know, it's not like those laptop privacy screens that you put on that basically are polarized screens. This is kind of cool. I think it's done in some sort of watch. It's some sort of electrical. Terry, do you know how this works?

2:10:05Sam Altman:I can't tell you in great technical detail, but one of the cool things about it is it's pixel by pixel. So you can do the entire screen if you want, or you can just do notifications if that's the main thing you care about.

2:10:18Jason Howell:Oh, that's kind of cool. And I do, I mean, this is the first time in quite a while that we've seen phones with like, like a genuinely totally new feature rather than an incremental improvement on something all phones have had for quite a while. It does darken the screen for you as the, as the front person, but of course it makes it completely black.

2:10:39Sam Altman:Yeah, but I haven't seen myself in person, but I have to say, like, I think to a person, everybody I've seen who who saw it at the event and wrote it, wrote about it, was quite impressed by it and said it's well done.

2:10:51Jason Howell:This might be in response. The Wall Street Journal did a piece about a year ago about shoulder surfing. Yes. You know, people in bars watching you unlock your phone, then stealing your phone, knowing your pin.

2:11:03Sam Altman:It's an actual problem, at least occasionally.

2:11:05Jason Howell:Yeah. Yeah.

2:11:06Sam Altman:Pete Hexas will be delighted.

2:11:08Leo Laporte:Don't people keep like seeing stuff over his shoulder in his signal? Yeah.

2:11:12Sam Altman:It's going to be a real boon for the Trump administration.

2:11:15Jason Howell:It'd be great for, yeah. People in the cabinet are going to love this. Okay. There's not a whole lot new in the S26.

2:11:24Sam Altman:It has some impressive Google AI, including some stuff that sounds comparable to some of the features Apple announced year before last and still hasn't haven't shipped.

2:11:36Jason Howell:Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, that is.

2:11:38Sam Altman:At this point, it's kind of it's not too hard to beat Apple in a Samsung and Google seem to have done a good job of in some ways competing with each other, but also collaborating in a way that's that's probably fruitful for both of them. Yeah.

2:11:54Jason Howell:Although I, you know, I'm watching the Samsung event and I'm thinking every year, it's not just Samsung, but a lot of it's Samsung. They show these features. I get the phone, I play with it for about a day and then I forget about it and I never use it again. Apple's somewhat the same thing, I guess.

2:12:12Sam Altman:I really like and still like the camera control on the iPhone, like the dedicated camera button.

2:12:18Jason Howell:Oh, yeah, I use that. Actually, I don't have a camera icon on my front screen now because I know I'm just going to press that button.

2:12:25Sam Altman:That's something I was excited about when I saw it and I'm still excited about, which is certainly not true of all these features. Sometimes, yes. There's a lot of gimmick, gimmicky stuff.

2:12:37Jason Howell:The other thing is I never believe what I see at these events, right? You've learned that, right? I want to see it in real life.

2:12:45Sam Altman:Well, yeah, particularly after the WWDC with Apple wowing everybody with stuff, which it turned out they couldn't build. Yeah. And on some level are still trying to figure out how to build, given that they brought in Google just recently.

2:13:01Jason Howell:Google does the same thing, though, right? I mean, Google I.O. for years, they'd show stuff often that would never really materialize. Or if it did, it would never quite live up to it. It's probably particularly common now that they have these developer conferences, which involve pre-announcing an entire year's worth of new features in some cases. Right, right. Let's talk a little bit about hacking. There was an interesting story in the Iran attack. of course i'm sure by now you know that uh israeli airstrikes uh actually uh hit tehran killing the uh leader and many of his uh generals uh one of the things that israel did which was kind of interesting they hacked a prayer app that was widely used in iran to send surrender messages to Iranians.

2:14:00Jason Howell:Now, this kind of reminds me of World War II, dropping pamphlets out of airplanes saying, Germans, you know, help is on the way, get rid of Hitler. That's what these messages said on this prayer app, mysterious push notifications saying, help is on the way, and amnesty if they surrender. I think we don't know yet how much hacking went on, But I suspect there was quite a bit of cyber warfare in this attack, just as there was in the extraction of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

2:14:32Leo Laporte:I mean, nothing beats the pager.

2:14:36Jason Howell:The beeper explosion, explosive beepers.

2:14:39Leo Laporte:Talk about a supply chain threat.

2:14:40Jason Howell:Yeah, that was wild. Yeah. uh okay there's always this um cautionary tale though about using cyber warfare because what we do to them they can do to us and it doesn't require a massive military to do it back right just requires you know half dozen good hackers yeah i mean look at north korea exactly yeah uh axios had a story about what uh an ai enabled cyber attack would look like to us paul nakasoni former head of the nsa uh said that a nation state that has breached systems critical to the supplies of food and water could trigger an outage maybe they're planning to trigger an outage we know that the chinese for instance have invaded in many cases our uh our infrastructure our grid electrical grids and so forth with malware they haven't triggered nakasoni said you know there's a risk if they lose control of an ai agent that that could be triggered inadvertently or without human interruption um nakasoni said the thing that prevents them from doing anything they are in in our infrastructure but they know the u.s is going to respond and then nakasani said not merely in cyberspace a kinetic war i guess still has an important role to play i feel like we are we are in in a risky time we're very interdependent our uh well and we we don't have the uh sissa so much to protect us anymore the guy who was running sissa for the longest time is now gone the acting director he had a lot of little issues madu gotumukala um failed a polygraph which honestly let's let's be honest i don't know why they're still using polygraphs lie detectors uh to vet people for viewing classified documents but he did apparently fail a counterintelligence polygraph um he uploaded sensitive government documents to chat gpt whoops um staffing at cisa was slashed by one third this is the u.s cyber security and infrastructure security agency that has been gutted when uh alex stamos was on the show last month.

2:17:18Jason Howell:He said, we are very vulnerable because CISA is not on the job. Well, Gouda McCalla is now gone. He's been moved to a new position as director of strategic implementation in the DHS. Not sure who's going to replace him. The former nominee, Sean Planky, has been re-nominated, but the senate has not approved him molly you had a thought on this no i was just saying i was giving the name oh yeah sean plankey right yeah is that right yeah uh the senate hasn't even scheduled a hearing for his nomination so sissa's leaderless basically at last week uh another top senior official bob costello the chief information officer tasked with overseeing sysa's it systems and data policies left actually gutta mccallough tried to transfer him but was blocked it's kind of a mess

2:18:25Leo Laporte:so is this the incentivization of government yeah but the problem is we are makes us more vulnerable

2:18:32Jason Howell:to cyber attacks from adversaries.

2:18:40All right.

2:18:41Leo Laporte:Absolutely. It's, you know, and, you know, the way that the Trump administration, for example, shut down, you know, offensive operations, I believe targeting Russia, you know, it's offensive and defensive, you know, basically left us blind to what they might be doing.

2:19:03Jason Howell:And if you're a country like Iran that knows that you're going to be, you know, you're under a lot of pressure from the U.S., you're under sanctions and you might well be attacked, I would assume that they would work very hard to create a core of hackers like North Korea has done, like China has done. I know Russia has very accomplished hackers and the GRU. We have a lot of enemies out there and maybe they don't have the missiles that can reach our shores but they certainly have um cyber skills seems like we should be beefing up our defenses not not taking them apart uh i should warn you there is a new attack if you have a guest network set up on your wi-fi you might want to turn it off there's a new attack called air snitch that bypasses Wi-Fi encryption.

2:19:53Jason Howell:It uses a guest network to break into your regular network. It seems like a reasonably, I'm not going to say easy, attack. But if you have a, let's, don't make any enemies in the hacker community, let's say.

2:20:17Jason Howell:this research was presented wednesday at the network and distributed system security symposium uh it's a wi-fi encryption bypass in the sense that it bypasses client isolation it doesn't break the authentication or encryption but it just walks right walks right around it so wpa is still especially wpa3 and 203 are still secure but if you've got a guest network, you might want to turn it off, I guess.

2:20:49Leo Laporte:Yeah, as if most people with home Wi-Fi systems know how to turn off. Do I have a guest network? I don't know.

2:20:56Jason Howell:You know, I was surprised to learn just yesterday that Xfinity has set up an Xfinity Wi-Fi network for my neighbors on my router.

2:21:05Sam Altman:You only just learned about that?

2:21:07Jason Howell:Well, I knew they were doing it on consumer routers, And I knew how to turn it off on my old consumer router, but I have business class and I don't think I can turn it off on the business router. I think I have to offer Wi-Fi access to anybody who walks by my house.

2:21:23Leo Laporte:This is why I reluctantly stuck with Comcast for high-speed internet, but I brought my own Doxis router to the party. Yeah.

2:21:34Sam Altman:I finally, for the years, I was using a modem I had bought. But I had a deal, an all-you-can-eat deal with Xfinity, where they sent me a modem, which I would ignore. And they eventually called my bluff and said I had to set up their modem, which I did. But I wanted it to work with my Eero mesh network, which was kind of a headache for about half an hour. but i finally have the xfinity modem working with the wi-fi i want to use one of those which i had probably right yes i had avoided uh tackling that for like five or six years yeah i mean i i just

2:22:13Jason Howell:assumed because it's business class service that they wouldn't turn on the xfinity you know wi-fi

2:22:20Sam Altman:on the business class mode they kind of made it worth my while because in the old days i would have had to pay xfinity a monthly fee for a modem and this is actually cheaper than if i used my

2:22:29Jason Howell:own modem i'll ask uh burke if you can if you can log into my modem and turn that off that would be great i appreciate i didn't realize i just didn't realize they would do that as far as i know they can't share my wi-fi because i'm not using them for wi-fi yeah well i don't want my we i'm relying on the bandwidth right now we're doing a show if the bandwidth goes down because my neighbor decides to stream heated rivalry over and over again, I don't know why, then it could impact my ability to do my job. Fortunately, I live out of movies. That's wild that they wouldn't let you turn,

2:23:05Leo Laporte:like they might not let you turn it off. Maybe they can't.

2:23:07Jason Howell:I don't see anywhere in the router to turn it off. And I have, because it's business service, I have to use their modem. I have my own router, but I have to use their modem.

2:23:17Leo Laporte:I mean, we were just talking about devices that you don't own. yeah there's one right there yeah because i have business class service we thought that would be a good idea uh good news the 10th circuit this came up actually with the washington post reporter

2:23:34Jason Howell:uh remember that uh the government um is researching or trying to investigate leaks in the government took a washington post reporter's devices and and tried to crack them and couldn't the 10th circuit court of appeals overturned a lower court's dismissal of a challenge to sweeping warrants to search a protester's device and digital data and a non-profits social media data it was the case was the armandaris versus the city of colorado springs it was a housing protest back in 2021 colorado springs police arrested protesters for obstructing a roadway they also obtained warrants at the time to search the devices and data of one of the protesters who they claimed threw a bike at them during the protest the warrants included to search through all her photos, videos, emails, text messages, and location data over a two-month period, as well as a time-unlimited search for 26 keywords, including words like bike, assault, celebration, and the word right.

2:24:47Jason Howell:It basically gave police the right to comb through years of her private data looking for evidence related to the single issue of her throwing a bike at the police. They got a warrant to search her Facebook page, the Facebook page of the Chinook Center, the organization that spearheaded the protest, despite them never being accused of a crime. So the Chinook Center and Armendariz sued a civil rights lawsuit, which the district court dismissed, saying the searches were justified. And in any case, the officers had qualified immunity. the aclu defending the uh the plaintiffs appealed and there's a very good news in a two-to-one opinion the 10th circuit has ruled that in fact there is an absolute limit on how much police can go through your devices

2:25:45Leo Laporte:didn't the judge just overturn the decision on the washington post reporter as well exactly yes yeah so that's how it's related um yeah government has been trying very hard to to break through

2:25:58Jason Howell:this wall of privacy but we we store so much stuff on our devices um so i'm not sure what

2:26:08Leo Laporte:the status is of the washington post reporter i think the judge is going to review the evidence that was, I think he himself is going to be the one who reviews the evidence that was seized.

2:26:21Jason Howell:As opposed to law enforcement. Yeah, the judge barred.

2:26:24Leo Laporte:Well, or having, usually there's like a team that is brought, like an independent team is brought in. The idea of the judge himself sifting through all that seems a little unusual to me, but more power to him, I guess.

2:26:35Jason Howell:Yeah, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter says he'll independently review the contents of Hannah Natanson's devices instead of allowing a Justice Department filter team to perform the search. Apparently he doesn't trust the Justice Department. He said he balanced the need to protect Natanson's free speech rights with the government's duty to safeguard top national security information.

2:26:54Leo Laporte:That's back to the presumption of regularity, which is increasingly off the table. Yeah. Well, and I think the judge was particularly angry because I think he argued that the government did not properly inform him of a law like pertaining to I think specifically journalists like seizing journalists work. So I think he was already kind of predisposed to not trusting the DOJ in this particular case.

2:27:25Jason Howell:He had originally temporarily barred the government from looking into they took her phone, two laptops, a recorder, a portable hard drive and her Garmin smartwatch. Oh, that's going to be probative uh and the judge said he initially barred the government from reviewing any of that material um but i guess he feels like well i i'm gonna look through this and yeah i mean if i were uh natanson i wouldn't be happy about any of this um protecting your sources is kind of fundamental to good journalism and protected it's a it's protected by the first amendment

2:28:14Jason Howell:well we'll keep up on that one but at least in this case there is some restriction on the broad search of protesters devices

2:28:28Jason Howell:uh did you do seti at home ever any of you helping to search for i did extraterrestrial intelligence no you did it harry i did i did not you did oh molly you did yeah i did well it's over of course but so for 21 years between 1999 and 2020 millions of people loaned uc berkeley scientists their computers to search for signs of advanced civilizations it was seti at home i did it too i did a few of those right there were a bunch of other ones it was folding folding at home yeah i think that was the one i mostly did yeah the idea was you let your unused cpu uh cycles do some you know work that could be aggregated and uh you know by the way folding at home has now been basically superseded by alpha fold which does a much better job a much faster doing protein folding so the data came from the now defunct arecibo observatory right that that's fallen apart but they had a lot of data 12 billion 12 billion detections momentary blimps of energy at a particular frequency coming from a particular point in the sky they're hoping maybe that is China's signal from the ETs, after 10 years of work since the closing of the project, the SETI at home team has finished analyzing those detections.

2:29:53Jason Howell:They've winnowed them down, first to a million candidate signals, and now to a hundred that are worth a second look. So they've got access to China's 500 meter aperture spherical telescope. It's called FAST. and they've been pointing it at these hundred targets since july hoping to see the signals again

2:30:20Jason Howell:so far nothing uh if we don't go ahead wasn't obama talking and talking about uh

2:30:29Leo Laporte:they were in an interview and they yeah dropping hints about aliens

2:30:34Jason Howell:i think he was teasing thereafter i think he was teasing um anyway uh i guess if you did if you did seti at home you'll be glad to know it wasn't completely wasted and they're now looking at 100 signals uh we're designing seti at home said uh david anderson the co-founder uh it went way way beyond our initial expectations we tried to decide whether it was worth doing, whether we'd get enough computing power to actually do new science. Our calculation, we're based on getting 50 ,000 volunteers. We got a million, including one Molly White. It was kind of cool. At your service. You know what? You're an altruistic person.

2:31:21Jason Howell:You do the Wikipedia. You help us find ETs. Good job. Spoiler. I don't know if I want to find ETs. Spoiler, they found nothing. Well, that's probably good news, I'm thinking. don't you think it'd be disruptive if they said hey guess what didn't you see pluribus don't you know we don't want to know we don't want to know what's out there honestly if we did find anything

2:31:45Leo Laporte:it would just be seeing it and that would be it that would be the end of it like there would be nothing past that because they'd be so far away that nothing would be able to be done well one hopes but remember the three body problem you don't want to let them know we're here dark forest

2:32:00Jason Howell:yep we're here all right one last ad then then we have uh uh some in memoriams we have some weird stories we're running out of time i'll get them as quickly as i can uh you're watching this week in tech with the great technologizer himself harry mccracken fits the dog and his owner owen thomas of the san francisco business times i love how you do the salute salute salute and molly molly white from mollywhite.net and of course citation needed which you must subscribe to right now our show today brought to you by my mattress i slept so well last night i you know saturday night is very important that i get a good night's sleep so that i'm fresh and ready to do this show this is you It takes a lot of cognitive energy.

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2:36:26I am very happy to say kind of a watermark for podcasters.

2:36:31Jason Howell:Americans now listen to podcasts more often than talk radio.

2:36:39Jason Howell:I'm actually kind of surprised it took us this long. edison does these surveys and here's the graph as am and fm radio have declined dramatically over the last 10 years from 75 percent of daily spoken word audio time to 40 as podcasting has gone from 10 10 years ago to 40 we are now we've crossed the wires crossed the streams we're bigger than radio kids it's a 20 year account radio shows that also you know have podcast feeds is that oh no that's confusing yeah you're right everybody everybody iheartmedia my old company absolutely realized it's funny when i started doing my radio show in 2004 i asked management can i put it on the internet and they said yeah nobody's gonna you go ahead that's never gonna impact our audience and they were right for 20 years but now they're doing podcasts of all their shows

2:37:42Sam Altman:and are they counting podcasts on youtube as podcasts if people are consuming them on youtube

2:37:48Jason Howell:spotify and youtube yes although i'm with you i don't really think of that as a podcast i've

2:37:55Sam Altman:finally gotten my head around maybe these things on youtube being podcasts even if they're not

2:37:59Jason Howell:their shows i'd never like the word podcast it's soon netflix right netflix has been courting

2:38:05Leo Laporte:podcasters. Netflix and YouTube. Yep. Which is interesting because that is part of the idea there. And this even goes back to Paramount buying Warner Discovery. A lot of the discovery part of Warner Discovery is HGTV Food Network. It shows you leave on in the background. That's exactly like podcasts. You just listen to it while you're doing something else.

2:38:35Jason Howell:Okay, I guess that's all right.

2:38:36Leo Laporte:Yeah, like when you're walking a dog. Yeah, right, right. That's exactly right.

2:38:42Jason Howell:Yeah, yeah. 80 % of consumers over 18 have tuned into both audio and video. So only a tiny minority only listen to one or the other. 13 % only listen to audio. 7 % only watch video. I mean, talk radio.

2:38:58Leo Laporte:I don't know anyone who's listening to radio and not doing anything else, right? The whole point is.

2:39:04Jason Howell:I don't know anybody under 80 that's listening to radio.

2:39:07Sam Altman:It's not like the days when everybody, the family sat around the radio and listened to Jack Benny.

2:39:12Leo Laporte:Jack Benny, there you go. It's the car, though. Everybody in their car listens to podcasts and not radio anymore.

2:39:18Jason Howell:That's the change. Even when I was starting to do the talk show, it was mostly in car. Even by 2004, it was mostly in car.

2:39:27Leo Laporte:So as soon as podcasts became easy to listen to in car. The commute is the thing, right? Everybody listens to radio on their commute, and now it's just a podcast. They pick up podcasts now.

2:39:34Jason Howell:right yay we're winning uh burger king is going to use ai to see if its employees are saying please and thank you the voice enabled chat bot called patty oh my god part of an overarching bk assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation now put the meat on the bun, but also evaluate their interactions with customers for friendliness.

2:40:08Leo Laporte:Is this because they're not able to hire and retain managers? That's what it sounds like to me.

2:40:13Jason Howell:Oh, instead of a manager, you got Patty. Yeah.

2:40:17Sam Altman:Patty is the manager.

2:40:19Jason Howell:So dystopian. If anybody works at Burger King listening to this show, please call in. Let's hear what it's like. I mean, Burger King's been trying to do this. This is from The Verge. Employees can ask Patty questions such as how many strips of bacon to put on a maple bourbon bbq whopper that doesn't sound like that's going to speed up the burger production process no how many strips of bacon should i put

2:40:44Leo Laporte:on this whopper but i think that you know i i think that uh there is um some of the age ai jobs are not not being eliminated as much as uh they're they're never being filled think of truck drivers. So, you know, like we just cannot hire enough people to drive trucks to meet the demand. So autonomous trucks kind of make sense to deal with the labor shortage. Now, could you increase wages? Potentially, but maybe the working conditions are such that you are just not going to attract people to those jobs at, you know, at any realistic, you know, economically feasible

2:41:24Sam Altman:wage i know that aurora who does autonomous trucking says that anybody who is a trucker today and wants to continue being a trucker probably can and it is it is about the fact that it's very hard to get younger people to agree to do this rather stressful boring job

2:41:43Jason Howell:on a wednesday uh uber picked a particularly inauspicious time to debut its air taxi service in dubai oh god uh probably i mean the dubai airport shut down so i'm thinking the taxi service uh also shut down um it will let travelers book joby aviation's electric air taxis uh just like getting just like getting an uber uh it will come to you it'll pick you up at what

2:42:18Leo Laporte:they call a joby vertiport who is just piloting them nobody like do you have to have a it's

2:42:27Jason Howell:no it doesn't has a human pilot this oh does it oh shoot well that's no fun but they're autonomous but they'll have a human pilot so is that like a safety pilot

2:42:38Leo Laporte:i don't know i don't know i'm just curious like oh they're not i'm sorry they are not yet autonomous their plan to make them autonomous oh okay so really the innovation here is is this

2:42:49Sam Altman:is this helicopter yeah it's it's an ev that that's still a new thing one two three four

2:42:57Jason Howell:five six propellers it can go you know straight up and down take off um i'm just curious who's

2:43:05Leo Laporte:going to be piloting them because like you know uber the uber model is like everyday people are

2:43:10Jason Howell:going to do gig work driving their cars. Normally I fly 747s, but I got an off day. I think I'll, uh, may do take up some gigs. Right.

2:43:18Leo Laporte:Like, are there just a lot of pilots around looking for gig work? I assume you have to have a pilot's license.

2:43:24Jason Howell:Yeah.

2:43:28Jason Howell:Um, well, you know, I mean, it's probably just another helicopter service, right? They've always had at these high end airports in New York and I'm sure Dubai helicopter service is just another helicopter basically right i thought it was autonomous so if it's not autonomous you're right what's the big deal it's an electric helicopter it's an electric

2:43:48Sam Altman:helicopter is what it is i'm sorry i brought it up that will someday be autonomous it's a

2:43:53Leo Laporte:vtl they don't go very far yeah it's vertical takeoff yeah that's new but so is a helicopter

2:44:01Jason Howell:A couple of immemoriums. The creator of Red Dwarf, which I know a lot of our listeners are big fans of British comedy show. Rob Grant has passed away at a very young age, sad to say. He also created, it was one of the writers on Spitting Image, which was that great political puppet show, which is wonderful. uh and of course a red dwarf made one of our good friends bobby llewellyn famous he played creighton the robot on it and llewellyn is a good friend of the network but also does his own car podcasts uh rob grant not bobby bobby's still with us rob grant passed away uh creator of red dwarf and uh i have mixed feelings about this dan simmons uh also passed away from a stroke at the age of 77.

2:44:53Jason Howell:I consider Dan one of the great science fiction writers. His Hyperion series is one of my favorite sci-fi books. He himself, not one of my favorite people. It always is complicated, right? When, you know, these guys are great writers, but not such great people uh his politics kind of went off the deep end uh towards the end um i just got though in honor he passed if you haven't read the hyperion cantos i can't recommend them more highly and i just got his book from 2007 which is kind of a horror historical fiction novel called the terror

2:45:36Leo Laporte:i read that it's a weird book is it weird yeah it is weird i have this thing where i really like to read about people being like forced to survive in really cold places when I'm warm inside.

2:45:50Jason Howell:Oh man, it's cold. It is really cold. It's the account of John Franklin, his expedition to find the Northwest Passage. And apparently there's a supernatural element.

2:46:01Leo Laporte:That is very weird. It like, it's a very normal book up until maybe the last like third. And then you're like, wait a second,

2:46:08Jason Howell:what is happening yeah oh good i'll have something to look forward to anyway uh hyperion is is really good the hyperion the fall of hyperion endymion and the rise of endymion uh are fantastic novels which i would highly recommend so uh because of that i will note his passing at the age of 77 of a stroke. And that, we always like to end with death on this show. It's the final frontier. Light and cheery. That concludes this episode of This Week in Tech. Molly White, you're fantastic. I enjoy your new orange place.

2:46:50Leo Laporte:I think it's - It is actually yellow, I will say. Oh, okay. It's my lighting, I think.

2:46:56Jason Howell:But it's warm, I guess. It is a warm yellow.

2:46:59Leo Laporte:It's very nice.

2:47:00Jason Howell:goldenrod goldenrod wow uh citation needed is absolutely a must citation needed.news a newsletter by molly white uh covers crypto right but not just crypto not just crypto but a lot of crypto yeah uh the year of technologarchy that's a good word technologarchy

2:47:23Leo Laporte:yeah i wrote technological oligarchy too many times let's just make it one word

2:47:29Jason Howell:and it's funny because i was mentioning how i use rss to create my own newspaper and i realized you had an article about it maybe that's where i got the idea um so there you go of rss citation needed it's free but become a subscriber because it would be nice it would be nice to keep it free yes exactly thank you molly great to see you molly thanks for having me Mr. Owen Thomas, San Francisco Business Times. Can we see Fitz? He's sulking on his blanket right now. Oh, Fitz. Oh, Fitz. Yeah. Aw. Is he mad at us for taking daddy away for so long?

2:48:13Leo Laporte:Maybe, or just not getting enough treats. Yeah, that's probably it. I need to give him a treat button so he can just go treat, treat, treat. Yeah.

2:48:22Jason Howell:I want to see that. What are you working on? Anything you want to plug? He's a managing editor there at the Business Times.

2:48:29Leo Laporte:Let's see. Just wanted to mention in all the AI news, we did have a scoop about OpenAI moving into Mountain View. So now, instead of just taking over all of San Francisco real estate, they are also plunging into Google's backyard. Wow. Big, big real estate move. also competing with xai uh elon musk's ai company which is uh just one city north in palo alto uh buying up real estate there or leasing real estate i should say um how big is this office conference i believe it's um it's north of 300 000 square feet so it's a well it's a it's a big complex former semantic headquarters if you remember that oh i know that semantic yeah yeah Yeah.

2:49:15Leo Laporte:RIP. Peter Norton. Yeah. Now part, uh, now in order to life lock, I think. Oh, yeah.

2:49:23Jason Howell:Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, everybody should read the San Francisco business journal. You also, we were going to talk a little bit about the Renaissance. I can't show, see.

2:49:33Leo Laporte:Oh shoot. I, uh, I believe I gave you a gift article.

2:49:36Jason Howell:I need a gift article. Give me a gift article. Um, uh, It is. I got to stop using an ad block. Oh, that's a problem.

2:49:45Leo Laporte:But I can tell you, yeah, our most recent cover story was about UCSF. You know, the effects of AI are not just on tech itself, but AI is playing a big role in in health. UCSF has expanded their their footprint by about two million square feet in the past two years. Wow. You know, acquiring hospitals, leasing or buying new space. And the chancellor, Sam Hoggett, says a lot of it is because San Francisco is the center of AI. It's also a huge healthcare hub. And he sees the two of them colliding right here in the city.

2:50:30Jason Howell:Well, I'm planning when I have my heart attack to go to UCSF. So I do hope that. I mean, you will expand from everything I read.

2:50:39Leo Laporte:You'll be, you know, anyone who's the best. Yeah. Facing that will be well cared for there. Yeah. If I can make it there in time. A friend of mine is doing lung rehab. They have physical therapy for your lungs. If you're having issues.

2:50:55Jason Howell:My daughter went there. She had nodes on her vocal cords and had a really great ENT doctor who helped her completely cure it and get better. It's a really good hospital and medical facility. Really like it a lot. Thank you, Owen. Great to see you. San Francisco Business Times. Become a member and turn off my gosh darn ad blocker is what I ought to do. Thank you so much, Owen. Great to see you. My pleasure. Give my regards to Marie, your beautiful wife.

2:51:27Sam Altman:As always, she's listening in.

2:51:29Jason Howell:It's always, you know, that's the biggest sadness I have about not having a studios. I don't get to see Marie anymore because you guys used to come up. We're sorry we don't get to go to Petaluma

2:51:39Sam Altman:as often as we used to.

2:51:40Jason Howell:I know. It's the only really real reason to come to Petaluma. Thank you, Harry McCracken, the technologizer. You can read about his AI coding experience, recreating his high school game. And of course, you'll read most of his stuff at Fast Company. I look forward to the new historical computing.

2:51:58Sam Altman:And subscribe to my Fast Company newsletter, Plugged In.

2:52:01Jason Howell:Oh, that's free.

2:52:02Sam Altman:Totally free.

2:52:04Jason Howell:fastcompany.com. Thank you, Harry. Thanks to all of you for making this show possible. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who helped foot the bill. We really appreciate you. twit.tv slash Club Twit. If you're not already a member and you want to support our programming, it's 10 bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the Discord. And of course, you get the special program that we do just for the club, including our AI user group, Stacey's Book Club, Johnny Jet, we do the Jet Set show. That's a brand new show we started doing this week in space. I can go on and on and on.

2:52:39Jason Howell:There's a lot of great stuff going on in the club. I hope you will take part by joining at twit.tv slash club twit. We'd love to have you. We do this week in tech every Sunday, 2 p.m. Pacific, 5 p.m. Eastern time. Next Sunday, we are going to daylight saving time, our summertime here. so normally we do it at 2200 utc but because we're moving not utc will now be at 2100 utc you can watch the live streams at youtube twitch tiktok facebook linkedin and kick of course in the club you can watch on the discord as well after the fact on demand versions of the show available at our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to this week in tech the Twitch show.

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