TWiT 1076: I'm Monitoring the Situation - Meta's Horizon Worlds Stays Alive Against The Odds

37:50And it's the first time the FBI has admitted, yeah, we buy people's data from data brokers, location data and more. We aren't required. We aren't required to have a warrant to do that. There's no there's no you don't visit a judge for that. uh ron wyden who's always been pretty good on these digital things asked if the fbi would commit to not buying american location data patel said we use all tools to do our mission he said we do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the constitution i don't think the constitution knew about data brokers cash but there was this thing called the fourth amendment you might have heard of now and the laws of it come on under the electronic communications privacy act it has led to some valuable intelligence for us said the director of the fbi uh wyden said this is at an outrageous end run around the fourth amendment um so now you know they said the quiet part out loud i yeah i would be oh go ahead yonka i was going to say he was probably going to say it really wide-eyed with the deer in the headlight that he had next to him.

39:07What do you mean? Of course we buy those. Of course we do. I would be genuinely surprised if... I mean, honestly, that sounds like every testimony I've ever heard from an FBI director or anyone else. I would be surprised if they weren't already buying data from previous administrations. And, you know, we know about pen register warrants that allow them to get location data for like a buck 50 from the cellular companies and all this. There's always been this free flow of information. So it's people like me, frankly, who have for years said, oh, don't worry about your privacy. It's not like the, you know, the feds are spying on you or anything.

39:53Surprise! It's people like me whose eyes are now wide. Free game you've downloaded. I mean, I think that really there should be much more education on what you put on your mobile device and how you can use services. This is not a plug or a log roll, but services like Delete Me and others that will do the perpetual data removal. Are they a sponsor? Yes. Thank you. I mean, it's a great service. And I think that educating consumers about what you put on your device and how it impacts you and your privacy is really important. and what you can do about it is equally important because we went to see hail mary on thursday there was a big ad from the state of california about your privacy saying you know showing how you're being spied on and all this stuff and then go to privacy.ca.gov and learn what we're doing to protect you and they made a lot of hey when they announced that we're going to have a registry that you can remove yourself from data brokers but i went there and first of all it doesn't take effect until this fall.

40:56Second, it's only 40. When I checked, it was 49 data brokers. There are more than 500. It's a drop in the bucket. It's to me, this is almost, yeah, California's doing something. It's like Marsha Blackburn's federal privacy bill, which really all it did was nullify state privacy laws with a weak, virtually nothing federal law. So it was really an anti-privacy law. I feel like lawmakers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes, that they don't, they understand, law enforcement's going to them, Cash Patel's going, hey, it'd be a shame if we couldn't buy this data. And they're going, oh, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right.

41:41And there's no movement towards privacy protection. I don't think it's Kash Patel. I think you have lobbyists for the data brokers who are like, without data moving through an information economy, nothing can get done. You wouldn't want to be the reason the economy slows down, would you? They hire the same people Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax hire to say, you know, our entire economy relies upon credit brokers who we've got to collect this information. We don't, in this country, we really have not created a culture where people understand that as of right now, you are generating a lot of data that people make a lot of money on and you're not seeing a cut.

42:28I mentioned earlier. It is basically, you are providing a lot of free assets or resources for other people to get very rich on. That's so smart. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, you know what? It turns out the internet's not free. This whole time we were sold this notion that, oh, look at all the free, look at Gmail and all this free stuff you get on the internet. It was never free. Wasn't the adage, if it's free, you are the product? Like that, I mean. It's always been. I think it may hurt that perhaps back in the 90s, you had a lot of journalists who would uncritically echo the information wants to be free.

43:07And what that morphed into was, oh, information should be free. It was somebody else named Shmeo Sheport that said that. I definitely said things like that. Well, you know, it was so easy to be idealistic because you're like, we'll connect everybody and you'll be so informed. I was a wide-eyed optimist. Yeah. Yeah. I mentioned earlier that if Amazon wants a law against comparison shopping, they might also want a law preventing you from using an ad blocker. Great blog post this week called the 49 megabyte web page. This guy went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines, was greeted with 422 network requests, 49 megabytes of data.

43:54This is one page. two minutes before the page settled we've all gone through this he says and you wonder why every sane tech person has an ad blocker installed on all the systems of their loved ones uh we've gotten to this crazy world where it's expected that they that they're collecting all this information that they're showing us all these ads um and it's it's not even surprising anymore

44:26so 49 megabytes is a little surprising this is a shubham bozay's uh blog and uh well done on picking that one up speaking of which might be a good time to do an ad right now thing is our ads don't follow you around because it's a podcast and an rss feed i don't know anything about you i can't collect any information our advertisers buy ads on our shows because they say well we're pretty sure you have a tech savvy audience and that's the audience we want to reach i think that's a better kind of relationship it's a i think it's a fairer relationship so i have i am and then we also offer a club if you don't want ads you can pay us a little money and that way we don't have to show you guys i think that this is up front we're not following you around unless people listen on youtube or twitch or well this or that or spotify and by the way this is why you know uh joe rogan moved to spotify with an exclusive with offered millions of dollars uh this is why spotify was was for a while trying to eat the podcast world because advertisers love it because spotify knows who listens they have your credit card number they know how much you listen they know when you're rewound they know when you stop they know all of that stuff but we as a podcaster with an rss feed we don't we are on spotify we are on youtube we're on apple we're on all those platforms and even apple has announced they're going to do video now but only through companies that sell ads right put two and two together you see what the whole point of this is apple is going to get an ad revenue of that ad share share of that ad revenue in return and advertisers get the information about who you are and who's listening.

46:18So we don't do that. And it's one of the reasons it's harder for us to sell ads, to be honest. This is a different world. We're kind of old fashioned in that regard. It's a great panel. And I appreciate all of you. Alicia Schmeiser, always a pleasure having you on nojitter.com she's the e-i-c and the person in charge nojitter.com also at no jitter on all your platforms right yes and it's about telecommunications we cover enterprise communication and collaboration and we do focus on the levels from from the very basics such as network configuration and the technologies that allow you to rapidly move video and audio signals plus other data, all the way up through the end users unified communication experience.

47:13So we'll cover Zoom or Teams or WebEx. And we're also taking a look at contact centers and technologies that are part of the quote unquote customer journey, since that involves how companies choose to communicate with people who work outside their company nice and before this you worked at windows it pro so i'm going to take advantage of that okay uh on our next story because microsoft said something pretty funny this week and so i kind of need somebody who knows a little bit about windows thank you for being here janko records is also here his newsletter lowpass.cc doing well right yanko yeah it's doing well it's uh i'm running up to three years actually next month yeah you were one of the first people who said you know what i uh i want to own my own stuff my own content 17 000 subscribers that's that's pretty good nice job roughly around that number you know it goes up and down but yeah it's something to be proud of well done lowpass.cc and yanko covers ar as well we have a story for you actually a story you broke so right we'll get to we'll get to that in uh just a little bit and dan patterson who works at blackbird.ai he's senior director of content we've mentioned it before blackbird does a great job of helping people see through the misinformation yeah thanks we try to do that um well give us i'm giving you a chance to plug yeah um we haven't talked about ai yet leo you know what this is a weird i think part of it is that we have an ai show now in intelligent machines on wednesday and so i don't channel as many AI shows as you tweet.

49:05For a while, it's all we were talking about. Yeah. Well, we use AI, but we also have a large intelligence analyst team. That's a big part of what you do. We help organizations, commercial but also non-commercial, and executives or leaders. We protect them from narrative-based disinformation attacks. um that's an interesting thing is that becoming an issue with businesses now yeah for sure um i mean you and i might think of this colloquially um we might think of it as as deep fakes or even doxing brigading but at scale and and targeted uh at um a an individual or teams, executives for sure, leaders, whether you're an executive at a commercial or non-commercial entity.

50:03And, you know, many of these, a lot of what we see on the web is manipulated. And a lot of these attacks, you know, you can think of it as just people saying bad things, but there's, there are actionable threats and there's a lot of really harmful information that is spread by bad actors at large scale. So we use AI to analyze and monitor trends and we use human analysts to not just interpret the data, but to work directly with organizations and help them make smart decisions. I think this is a growth industry, I hate to say. This is increasingly so easy now to to create an army of bots uh what what did the what did x announced they had they had uh killed 800 million accounts bought accounts last year 800 million i remember when twitter had 350 million members period yeah yeah you know unbelievable i think actually that well we're talking about elon as well because that was of course the whole thing he before he bought twitter he said you know they got a bot problem yeah and it's nothing it's only gotten better bigger little did he know what was in that kitchen sink this episode of this week at tech brought to you by shopify have you ever thought of starting your own business you have a great idea but those pesky little details they can get in the way how do you charge people who's going to design your website how do you handle fulfillment But look, I know what it's like.

51:43I've been there and I've watched my own kids start their businesses. But you know what? They got it done with Shopify. Yeah, Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started like my boys. You know, Salt Hanks Salt Lovers Club. It's a great site. He was worried about a website, but Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store that matches his brand's unique style and they can do the same thing for you too shopify also helps with marketing easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling and of course shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond and let's not forget that iconic purple shop pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world it's why shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet it it's time to turn those what ifs into with shopify today sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shopify.com slash twit go to shopify.com slash twit that's shopify.com slash twit uh so we we do a show called windows weekly uh and of late i think people have been kind of upset with our one of our hosts paul therott because he seems kind of grumpy he's a little grumpy you know i mean he's he's has a lifetime covering windows but he never seems happy anymore apparently he's not alone uh microsoft announced this week that uh they are going to make major improvements to windows 11 quote we're evolving how windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar we're pavan davaluri who's the new executive vice president of windows and devices at microsoft we are focusing on making windows 11 more responsive and consistent so performance feels smooth and reliable yeah lately windows stutters and it bogs down over the course of the year we're improving system performance and app responsiveness file explorer and windows service pack two well you know what in the back in its day service pack two for xp that was good that that was really good right yeah come a long way since windows seven sorry to interrupt you part of the problem also is copilot microsoft's been shoving their ai in every corner and they say they're going to back off on that as well you don't buy it no i'm just

54:28did you not want co-pilot in literally everything you do in everything google's kind of doing the same thing in workspace man it's everywhere there's there's a gemini button in everything it's driving me nuts it's when they began um auto mashing it into maps that i got super mad because all i want is a really simple map app that tells me how to get from point a to point b and when to switch lanes and what time to go and I do not need Gemini for any of that. I had a structured workflow that worked just fine. Pavan Devaluri even mentioned Linux. He said, we're going to make Windows subsystem for Linux better.

55:08Please don't move to Linux, please. Please. It's practically begging. One of the things people consistently complain about, because we all have widescreen monitors, is Microsoft in Windows 11 took away the ability to take the taskbar, which sits on the bottom, and put it on the left or right, where you have a lot more space. Pavan says, we're going to bring that back too. Good, good. I hope that makes people happy. Quote, repositioning the taskbar is one of the top asks we've heard from you. We're introducing the ability to reposition it. They should say reintroduce, by the way, Pavan, because you took it out to reposition it to the tops or sides of your screen making it easier to personalize your workspace windows update will be improved to allow users more control over how and when updates install how many times have you been sitting there using windows and it says i'm going to reboot now you don't mind do you

56:08i don't i don't mean to beat up on windows paul does a very good job of that all by himself But that's why we love Paul, because he's honest, right? He's not a cheerleader. And he's such a deep subject matter expert. Like I would definitely, when Paul talks, listen to what he's saying and why he's saying it. There's a code name. It's called Windows K2, which is the same name as Mount Everest's peak. Maybe because this is a tall mountain to climb Microsoft. I don't know. Also, there's not a lot of oxygen up there. yeah k2 is is number two behind everest oh k2 is the second tallest yeah yeah that's right sorry thank you yeah have you been up there you sound like you you know no but i've read a lot of john krachauer oh yeah yeah into the wild into thin air in there oh that book is so great and so harrowing i love it so much he's my favorite narrative non-fiction writer oh he's the best i love him and that was the year that so many people died on the way 96 yeah yeah i remember watching that was actually, to get back to the shifting media paradigms, it was actually one of the first developing stories where it was easier to get dispatches over the web than in the more conventional media outlets.

57:29People were going to be like, well, I'll see what time our newsweek has to say. And meanwhile, there were websites going, oh my goodness, guess what just happened? So it was... That was the beginning of that, 96. It really was, yeah. When it all started. Yeah. So, yeah. Now, if, you know, somebody passes away. So, Leo, I want to note that with Microsoft, something they have been trying really hard to do for about 10 years is de-center the operating system and the desktop as the hub where you work. And in a lot of ways, lockdown was great for this because they were able to pivot really quickly with Teams.

58:11And because of their huge enterprise footprint, where they already had a built-in customer base with Microsoft 365, it was super easy for them to push Teams out to everybody and make that your default collaborative workspace. But even pre-lockdown, as far back as 2016, they were really pushing the idea that you needed to get away from an operating system, a desktop and apps over to a centralized workspace and a shift in how you looked at computing. So it was more task focused rather than apps focused. So instead of saying, I'm going to open up this Excel spreadsheet, put in 100 numbers, and then see what that means for sales projections, what you'd say instead is, oh, I'm going to, oh, it's time for me to do the sales projection workflow.

59:00And if that touches on parts of email or Excel, then hooray, that's what happens. The biggest obstacle they've had is that... And the typical user and the typical customer does not move as quickly as a tech company does. It's really easy to eat the dog food inside a company. But if you're a regular company with an IT budget, you are probably using workflows and systems that are 10 or more years old and they're fine. And you don't have money for an upgrade. And you don't want to upgrade. You don't want to retrain. You don't want to suffer through the bugs. It's a huge capital expenditure. And you have to be able to, if you're a school district or a local government, you have to really justify it.

59:45Which is why Microsoft has found itself in a position where it's trying to push people to one model, but a huge percentage of its customer base is like, we need you to support the thing that we bought back in the before times. And with Windows 11, they were trying to - That's tied them down, hasn't it? That's really been their problem. Backward compatibility is a curse. No, that's the difference with Apple and Microsoft is that Apple has been willing to go. No, Apple, Apple's like, oh, do you not like that? You can no longer charge your phone using this cable. Well, that's too bad. Here's how you buy the cable.

1:00:21Sorry about that. And Windows. Yeah, no. And Windows hasn't. And Microsoft hasn't done that. And what they tried to do with Windows 11 instead is be like, we're going to try and gently use you into this. And people are like, you are not. And also you cramming Copilot is the exact opposite of gentle. So please, please stop. Yeah. And it's, I'm going to guess Lisa, you're the only person on this panel who still uses windows though. You would actually guess wrong. I've moved to a Mac environment. Dan windows. Yeah. No, I, I mean, I have, and you know, it was, I was pretty X-Box for a long time. Xbox is not windows.

1:00:57Wait a minute. No, no, no. I have an X-Box that counts. Yeah. I mean, I have a test. The next X-Box. The same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but that's not for two more years. Just out of curiosity, Yanko, you're using Windows? I just try to remember when I used Windows the last time, and it might have been XP or something. I don't know. Windows XP was fantastic. Oh, my gosh. I was a Windows 7 fan. I think Windows 7 was really the last great Windows. Take us back to the timeline where Windows XP was the last Windows. Yeah. I didn't like the UI so much. It was a little Fisher Pricey for me, big buttons and colors and stuff.

1:01:35that's why i like seven which is basically xc xp with a nice interface on top of it so it's just me anyway i'm the only windows user here i guess benito you use windows i play video games yeah oh it's gamers that's right although that's changing rapidly thanks to steam and proton uh this the steam deck runs linux and the compatibility layer proton now runs many, many great Windows games as well, if not better than Windows does. And so things are shifting a little bit in that world. I used to have a Windows laptop just for accessing Salesforce because it was so much easier. There you go. There you go.

1:02:17But you know, Mac OS. Mac OS is certifying itself as well. You know, Mac OS. Well, that's, yeah, honestly, it's, don't. Oh, the apps. Don't get me started on how bad the mobile apps are getting. Like, they really need to do a, uh and and heart starting over people not watching video uh she's drawing a finger across her throat when she makes that sound just so you sorry yeah use your use your use your imagination

1:02:47speaking of changes uh well this is kind of a strange story because this earlier this week meta said we're you know that uh virtual reality world that uh you guys have been hanging out in your meta quest we're going to shut that down uh we're going to have a mobile version we're not going to have a meta quest version but uh very quickly yanko had the story they changed their mind what happened yanko it was basically a day later they came out and we're like oh our bad we're actually going to keep it around uh we're just not going to update it anymore essentially we'll not be able to you will not be able to uh create new worlds and we will we are also not make any new worlds in VR anymore.

1:03:28But people can still use these existing Horizon Worlds for the foreseeable future, which... So what you're saying is Horizon Worlds has legs? It has legs, yes. Very nicely done. So it's an interesting and complicated story, right? Because it's one of those things where people are like, oh yeah, but VR has been dead and nobody's using it. and there's some grains of truth to it in Horizon Worlds and VR has never really been a big hit. I actually used it for a while quite a bit. Did you? I like playing a couple of games Arena Quest is that the... No, I'm actually not remembering the name. But you had to put on the nerd helmet to do it?

1:04:14I mean, it was fun. Even in those pre-lag times, actually that was a lot of fun. once you're having fun i had a meta quest i actually stupidly bought the 1500 meta quest pro that was insane it was quickly marked down by about 50 or 100 and uh no i gave it away but uh i played a few games and there was fun i really liked the one where you listen to music and is it beat saber yeah i really enjoyed that and that was fun but i mean so the the the bigger trends here is that VR is still around. People are still using VR, but the audience really has shifted over the last year or two. Where before it was a mix of a little bit of everything.

1:05:01There was people who were doing fitness, older people actually getting into this, and people playing Beat Saber. And one or two years ago, it really started to shift where now it's all teenagers and younger, even kids, using it. And they're all playing these like crazy, messy, free-to-play games, Gorilla Tech and so forth, which are like, when you're my age, I just have to throw my arms up. It's too much. I can't do this. But they're getting a kick out of it and it's actually getting used quite a bit. So that's sustaining VR. It'll be interesting. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Janko. It'll be interesting to see, speaking of Steam, how the Steam frame, their ARM-based VR headset that comes out this summer, how that kind of shifts the market, or at least, no pun intended, reframes it onto gaming.

1:05:54Did Apple make a mistake not focusing on gaming with the Vision Pro? I think so. I mean, I don't know, because it's a$3 ,500 device, right? Yeah, no 18-year-old, no 17-year-old is going to buy that. Those teenagers are not going to buy that. And the adults, their parents are probably not going to hand it down to them, which is what happened to a lot of those meta quest heads meta quest is pretty affordable if you don't do the pro version i want for 300 bucks which is actually really good some oftentimes it's it's even you can pick one up for 250 and for that it's like really hard to beat essentially um but like going back to this horizon worlds thing uh so they said oh we're going to shut it down then they changed their tune on it because there was enough people in it really protesting and being upset about it because they had created stuff for it.

1:06:42There's comedy clubs in there. There's music shows in there. There's all these different games in there. People meet there for Alcoholics Anonymous and those kinds of things. Really? There are AA meetings in medical? There's all kinds of stuff. Wow, that's interesting. So all of that going away. That's actually a great use for that. Yeah, for sure. Come to think of it. You've got anonymity. You don't have to leave the house, but you can get support anywhere, anytime. time I think that's actually kind of cool and then meta gets to grow its list of alcoholics no they don't I hope not I would hope that is strange marketing right there there's still people playing Second Life right Second Life has gotten weird but there I mean it was always weird it was always a little weird uh but that so there's enough I guess well not enough for them to keep it up to date they're not going to work on it and it also like there's some stuff that wasn't actually part of the official announcement or it was kind of hinted at but mana has been moving to their own engine essentially for some of these things like on mobile and on vr they wanted they were using unity right they were using unity right now if you get into horizon worlds in vr most of that stuff is still unity based and so they were going to transition to this new engine both on mobile and in vr and essentially i assume they just ran the numbers and were like well really not enough people are using it in vr it's going to be very expensive to bring this new engine to vr so let's just only focus on mobile with this new engine and let's shut everything down that's that's not running on it and then when people protested whether they were like well actually it's not that expensive for us to keep the unity worlds up and running so let's do that but the new stuff is going to be on mobile essentially interesting i mean if you're doing it for mobile you might as well just do a meta quest version of it i would imagine it's not i mean the the mobile strategy i do not understand to be quite is it vr how do you do it in mobile you just hold your you you use your it's it's mobile games essentially so when you do the horizon app on your phone you can now play games in it and some of these horizon Whereas social games where you meet with other people and do all kinds of stuff.

1:08:59You don't have to strap your phone to your face. No, no, no, no, no. But so a lot of these games and a lot of games that they're investing in now are mobile only. And I'm still kind of unsure who's going to download the Horizon app to play mobile games because there's so many other places you can play mobile games and get mobile games. it kind of feels like um like meta like there's still corporations that have a like a contract in place for the metaverse so they can't shut it down you think it's that yeah it's like ford is using it to design their cars or something why would they just shut down well do people people don't pay to do horizon worlds right it's free right it must cost them so much money you know it must cost them so much.

1:09:43Generally it's free. I think you can now or you could buy certain things and they started to introduce some monetization stuff. Yeah, goods like in-game stuff. Yeah. Like everywhere. But also they don't really have a replacement yet. So they obviously cut back on the VR efforts. They like fired 10 ,000 people by part of Reality Labs. They're concentrating more of their efforts on mobile and obviously they're spending a ton of money on AI, so they're cutting back, but they're still also not completely giving up on it. They're still working on future headsets, like two different lines. You know what would save it?

1:10:21Actually, it would save Second Life, too. If they use the new NVIDIA DLSS Sexy Filter, that would make it so much more fun. So GTC, we covered this on Monday, Jensen Wong's keynote at the NVIDIA conference on Monday. and among many things they announced one of which made the stock market jump when he said we're going to actually make a trillion dollars selling our chips next year up from half a trillion uh but the thing that they announced that got the most attention because gamers hated it was something called DLSS5 which takes existing game content and sexies it up it adds the lighting it adds some smoother textures and that makes it more real I think it makes it more realistic I don't I think it's actually pretty cool, but gamers don't like AI, I guess.

1:11:14And there was a kind of a general sense of revulsion. There's also some problems. I think The Verge wrote about it where in some of the sports games that use, actually you have one up right there, that use actual characters based on likenesses of real athletes. When you add VR to it, that doesn't really understand who's who. They're just going to turn into this other good looking dude. Not a real athlete. Who has now a lot more detail, but doesn't look at all like the person who is associated with the number on his shirt, right? So that's a little problematic. I think, honestly... The skeets about this are absolutely hysterical.

1:11:52Oh, I think... With the before and after contrasts. Yeah, that's true. It was a good meme. I think it looks pretty good, I'll be honest with you. Let me see if I can... The Yasify filter. The Yasify. look i'm a gamer but i like the the gaming takes have all been uh pretty basic and boring like it they gamers gamers just have this kind of knee-jerk yeah revulsion to anything with ai i got bad news for you it's gonna happen no matter what you think okay i gotta speak up for the gamers here it's okay i said you know i said this i said this last week on intelligent machines but it's about changing the art direction of the game like this changes the art direction of the game period i think this changes the consensual reality huh don't you think this looks more like me uh than me i mean i think that that's uh that dlss version of me is pretty hi there so you know i have a you know i have a question for you on that you know the yesified version or the hello version, is we already have this body of work that shows the negative self-esteem or the mental health effects when people spend way too much time scrolling through on Instagram or TikTok and they're seeing these AI-tweaked people that don't look like real life.

1:13:16Don't you think something like this, if you're also seeing in your games, don't you worry about how that might experience people know i mean we've we've for a long time there was this thought that cartoons would make kids violence but kids know the difference that's a cartoon yeah and i even movies don't make people violent even violent movies i think people will know it's a game i'm not expected to look as handsome as leo laporte i think i can buy i can buy benito's argument uh It is different artwork. Right. Okay. If you're changing a specific art direction or artistic intention, I can understand that argument.

1:13:59But I don't think that is every use case in gaming. I think that is particular use cases. And especially when you apply this to older games or games that don't have the budget of a AAA studio, I think this can provide one path. It's going to be an option in the game, too. If you don't like it, you go into your video settings and you just turn it off. It does have some potential risks. Here's a DSLL, DLSS SpongeBob, and that's damn creepy. I don't think that's really what DLSS will do. I can't help it. I think it is with the participation of the game publishers, right? it's not like yeah no i think you can i think it if you have a nvidia video card you can turn it on on any game oh i thought that publishers had to consent to this well maybe they do but that would be our an artificial constraint because it's built into the card you could do it without their permission if i mean that's also the whole thing smart of nvidia you've raised an interesting question about consent then haven't you because who gets to consent to this stuff well maybe nvidia is smart enough to say yeah i mean one could then the counter counter argument is yes the publisher may say do it because we like that everything looks so shiny now but the artists who actually worked on the game may still be really upset but could you make the same arguments about ray tracing like yes i mean that fundamentally changes how your game looks it fundamentally changes how it looks it's a setting and you can turn it on and off depending on your performance but all that stuff is programmed in by the game designers that's true but it's also a button i can click to turn it on yes but they intended that they intended that it's a you know i have machines that do ai upscaling my nvidia uh tv my shield has a ai upscaling uh feature and it actually does a very good job taking hd content making it 4k and it looks great uh and i you know nvidia it's probably the same technology just a later generation or earlier generation of dlss us um I don't know I think we're gonna I think the initial reaction will fade and we're gonna get used to this kind of thing there's also the whole thing we're gonna take a break here listening to this week in Tech with Dan Patterson Lisa Schmeiser and Yanko Rutgers a great panel good to have you we'll have more in just a bit Elon's gonna be paying some money maybe some big bucks this version this episode this segment of this week in tech is brought to you by out systems the number one ai development platform out systems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale out systems enables them to build ai agents that can actually do work such as take actions make decisions and integrate with data rather than just answer questions out systems provides the only ai development platform that is unified agile and enterprise proven it's unified because you can build run and govern apps and agents all in one platform it's agile because you can innovate at the speed of ai importantly without compromising quality or control and it's enterprise proven entrusted by enterprises for mission-critical AI applications and durable innovation.

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1:18:16reliability and security that's out systems o-u-t-s-y-s-t-e-m-s.com slash t-w-i-t to book a demo out systems.com slash twit we thank them so much for their support i take you back now to uh early 2022 when elon musk tweeted out i'm gonna buy twitter because it's just a mess and it's full of bots and it sucks and uh he even i think said funding secured and uh he yeah no that was another tweet he elon was big at tweeting at the time um the sec even looked into his tweets because at some point it he was so critical of twitter it looked like he had initially said he was going to pay 44 billion dollars for twitter and it looked like maybe he was trying to drive the price down by driving the stock price down the sec took a look at it stock manipulation and declined to do anything about it well uh a class action lawsuit from shareholders did do something about it on friday a jury jury in california determined that elon musk had misled investors via public statements that depressed the price of the company's stock ahead of his purchase of the service i mean it was to me it seemed pretty obvious that that's what was going on uh a number of investors started a suit certified as a class action saying we've been defrauded uh the jury and that musk made them intentionally those tweets as part of a larger scheme the jury rejected arguments about the larger scheme but did find him liable damage is not yet determined that will happen later but the plaintiffs are seeking as much as 2.6 billion dollars which i guess elon could afford he's worth much more than that but even when you're worth a hundred billion a few billion starts to add up is this justice dan i'm curious maybe i just haven't googled this deeply enough i'm curious about the who which shareholders joined this uh steve garrett nancy price john garrett and brian belgrave sued him in October of 2022, the month before he actually closed the deal.

1:20:56I mean, is it justice? I think you said it yourself. Like it, it seemed his tactics, it seemed like he was trying to do something very particular. So I think that if you, if you, you should know who you get into bed with. Ah, good point. So he tweeted in May of 2022 saying, I'm going to put the Twitter deal on hold pending details supporting calculations that spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than five percent of users twitter had asserted that he said i don't buy it i think it's a lot more than five percent now that he's the owner we know it's a lot more than five percent uh he also said in a may 16th conference a comment at a conference that he believed that 20 percent of Twitter users were fake accounts.

1:21:48When the then Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said, there's no way for a third party to even know this. We don't make that information visible to third parties. Elon tweeted a poop emoji. This might be the first time a jury has found a poop emoji misleading. Elon loves the poop emoji, by the way. Isn't this the same case where they had a hard time finding a jury? Because so many people were like, I hate that guy. Maybe. Maybe they didn't. It's been a little while, but I also vaguely remember that him making the point about the bots was really back of the napkin mouth. He's like, well, I tweeted something, and then I read all the retweets and comments, and they're all bots.

1:22:37Really, that only proves that all your followers are bots. yeah it doesn't mean anything are you the typical twitter user no uh so uh twitter ultimately sold uh for for a lot more than uh probably it was worth 44 billion dollars uh after uh elon was forced by uh in a delaware court to buy it at the price that he had quoted he didn't want to he was trying to get out of it the jury deliberated for four days so that means it wasn't like an instant like oh yeah this guy's guilty it took him four days but they did unanimously found find that the tweets from may 13th and may 17th were materially false or misleading but they didn't hold them liable for the press conference or their comments at the conference from may 16th uh and they said even though the plaintiffs part of the lawsuit was that there was a scheme going on they didn't they didn't agree with that but they are going to award damages per share of Twitter stock for each day of the class period which goes from May 13th 2022 to October 3rd 2022 uh so it could be could add up to quite a big deal and the irony of all of that is that his if If there was a scheme, it clearly didn't work because he had to pay the original price.

1:24:07And now he has to pay on top of it for some stupid tweets that he did. Yeah. Elon had taken the stand during the trial saying, I really did have concerns over the bots and I didn't intend to drive the stock price down. That wasn't my meaning at all. I guess they were not persuaded. at the same time you argued that he should pay less for it so right undermined his argument good point he was he was trying to get out of the deal at the time yeah um in other news samsung is ending sales of its two two thousand nine hundred dollar trifold phone this uh on the heels of news that samsung is is really suffering in its phone business that it's that it's losing money hand over fist which is a surprise since it is the number one android handset i believe yeah that is a surprise uh i think that the trifold sold well uh buyers were paying above retail on the on the on ebay and other secondhand markets um there's ars technica speculates it might have more to do ryan whitworm ryan whitwom sorry writing in ars technica it might have more to do with the cost of the components with ram prices uh doubling and so forth which could also explain why they're losing money on phones in general right yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah and and storage and processors it's all it's all gone through all gone up and i have to think i think you're right that at this point the iran war the resulting oil crisis is going to hit a lot of companies really hard and helium right yeah a helium plant was destroyed this is a besides it's not just for balloons anymore no it's used in semiconductor manufacture uh and medical devices i might add uh and that's going to really hit the helium supply so we're economically we're in a world of hurt i think except for party city yeah make a buck party city party city party city got hit by the vulture capitalists it's oh it's gone huh yeah yeah we used to have one we don't have private equity wrote again that's where i got all my balloons yeah you have to go to a dollar store now because i think they still do them there or a grocery store that's sad i that yeah we used to get those big uh mylar you know 70th birthday balloons things like that yeah you can't get them anymore i guess um speaking of the war uh there has been some concern with the slashing of CISA, our national security organization.

1:27:14They had a leader who left after a year of turmoil, and they have a temporary leader now, and many, many CISA security experts were fired. That with the war in Iran, there's some concern about Iran hacking activity. um so far there's only been one i don't know kind of minor if maybe it's not so minor if you're one of the 200 000 devices that were erased a medical equipment provider called striker was hit by a hacking group handala claiming to be pro-iran they say they erased data from 200 000 devices including servers and mobile phones used by their striker employees i mean if that's all that's not i mean as bad as it is that we know about right now i mean this is we're working with an incomplete data set and as the conflict intensifies and perhaps prolongs uh asymmetric attacks will likely increase um that i mean that's just geopolitics and it's it is one tool that uh somebody who is an actor that's on the defense is like especially what do you mean by asymmetric in that well i mean the u.s has greater kinetic capabilities um and we have greater economic capabilities meaning we can just fund things for longer uh there will be some attrition but we can fund things we can fund our kinetic activities longer so uh an actor on the defense will will use tactics i mean this is a time tested in every war ever this is what happened in vietnam and vietnam for sure yeah so um we saw guerrilla warfare in vietnam and cyber attacks are the new form of that and iran is one of the most, you know, they are not up there with the US or Israel in terms of their cyber capabilities, but I would put them, you know, they're certainly as good as North Korea and many and much better than most of the other, their peers.

1:29:32They are very cyber capable and they learned a lot from Stuxnag. So again, I wouldn't expect we see massive cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure right now, but perhaps the likelihood would increase as the duration of the conflict extends. And adding to that comes physical attacks on infrastructure, right? I think just this morning, Iran said when there was this whole back and forth about that strait of Hormuz, and Trump said he wants to blow up power plants now, Iran mentioned a bunch of targets that they would retaliate on. And interestingly, IT infrastructure was part of that. And there was like early on in the war, there was the attack on the Amazon cloud data center in, was it in Dubai?

1:30:16I don't remember exactly. Two of them. Two of them, exactly. One in Bahrain, I think, and one in UAE. And all those countries are, or a lot of those countries are trying to become havens for AI companies, right? They're investing heavily into AI. You'd be nuts to build a data center in the Middle East right now. You'd be nuts to build anything in the Middle East right now, actually. Is it just me? I've, I'm made very nervous. I have not been sleeping well. I'm very nervous about all this. I know it's far away from us in the United States. It's not though, because the street of Hormuz controls.

1:30:5220 % of the world's oil. Yeah. Yeah. So it's threatening everything from, from, from how we move goods and services, because the price of diesel is going to shoot up to whether or not we will be able to have genuinely global networking and data movement. Because when cloud centers go down, that's going to hit people in different places. And if you have hackers coming in and targeting medical service companies, that's the beginning of an iceberg. What about utilities? What about hospitals? I'm very nervous. And I'm also nervous about the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. No, it shouldn't be on the table.

1:31:38I don't think there's any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon when the effects are shown to be global in nature anyway. Yeah, and we have launch on warning status with all of our nukes. Oh, God. Yeah. But I mean, like, I would be surprised if we, well, I won't be surprised. I don't know. I mean, this talk of tactical is, you're right, Lisa. tactical becomes strategic very quickly, especially with nuclear conflict. I just, and there's the huge humanitarian cost. Now, I did say that we're in the U.S., but many of our listeners are, we have listeners all over the world. I'm always glad when I see Galia in our Club Twit Discord, she lives in Tel Aviv, and I'm terrified for her.

1:32:23We have many listeners in the Middle East right now uh the humanitarian cost uh in Iran alone is heartbreaking heartbreaking it's nightmare uh Galea says she was in a shelter uh during the show already she was down there and she came back up to join us I just um it's going to be good news for the box office on project hail mary however because escapism as you know when times are tough people go to the movies japan has decided as of october 1st to allow what they call proactive cyber defense that's called hacking back yeah yeah uh this is something we've always as chewed um from time to time i think our fbi and others have for instance put out malware that removes malware but it's always a very risky thing and there's always this nervousness that this will escalate as well you know we we know nukes escalate that that's a bad thing to use a nuclear weapon we know that very well and as a result no one's used a nuclear weapon since world war ii and we were the only ones who've ever used a nuclear weapon but uh i think sometimes i think that cyber attacks could escalate to that level of risk as well you attack their infrastructure they attack our infrastructure and i don't know if we're very very vulnerable this is happening all the time you know there was there were very well-documented cyber attacks on gas infrastructure in 2021, 22.

1:34:13Look, everybody is hacking everybody all the time. But Leo, to your point, we had a policy that was, Stuxnet was an interesting event for a number of reasons. It certainly was an interesting cyber event, but it also shifted our policy. And you're right, Leo, we - Just as a little bit of history, Stuxnet was created by the israeli and american uh forces to break under the obama administration by the during the obama administration to attack the scatter device scatter devices that were used in the iranian centrifuges to control the speed to basically break them to turn them up so fast that they'd break so they could not create you know enrich uranium to as a precursor to making an atomic weapon and it was very effective except it was really interesting by the way the hack because those skater devices were air gapped so they had to figure out some way to get them on there that was very clever uh except it leaked out and was widely used in attacks by hackers against us yeah and it also shifted her policy from defensive to maybe it's okay to do a little offensive well japan has now decided that at the time is right to allow offensive ops because online the nation faces quote the most complicated national security environment since world war ii the uh chief cabinet secretary minoru kihara explained the threat from cyber attacks are having a huge impact on people's lives and economic activities.

1:35:57This is quite an important threat to national Japanese national security. So they're going to enact the proactive cyber defense actions.

1:36:10Allowing if authorized, and it looks like it will be Japanese police and the security forces to attack a disabled infrastructure. Only we're only going to attack the infrastructure that's used to run cyber attacks but i guess that could include skated devices uh i this is just one more uh step in a kind of a weird escalational spiral that frankly terrifies me especially when you look at cuba uh where the power has been out now all week the whole island imagine what would happen if we lost well you wouldn't have a twit podcast if we lost power for a week that wouldn't be the worst of it i know but everything we do our entire lives rely on electricity imagine if americans think of all the medically fragile people who would die think of all the people who are in ventilators think of all the babies in icu think of all of the people who depend on medical equipment to live not to mention the fact that our food supply we really only have five days worth of food without food deliveries and if that falls apart uh mass starvation ensues i hope you have a victory garden i bet you're growing tomatoes lisa i just feel like you must be growing tomatoes i do we we i was actually going through going well we could probably barter a lot of citrus but in california No, we have that.

1:37:45We have an apple tree. I do garden, but not enough to support everybody who lives here. Right. Actually, it wouldn't be that hard to do that. You wouldn't need that much space to do that. No, I saw something on social media today, and I can't credit who it was from, where they were like, look, we can't micro garden our way out of 2026. But this is a great opportunity for us to start having conversations about what the food systems in the US look like, and how people can live in high density places and still have a little bit more food autonomy than they have. So, I mean, this is the other thing, too, is it's one thing to be like, oh, I grew everything on my own backyard.

1:38:26And there were books about that through the 2000s. Do you remember? Yeah. Like Animal Vegetable Miracle. I kept meaning to do that. Well, like the thing that they point out is you have to have an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount of space. Yeah. I mean, there's. I want to do a. There's a reason humanity stopped doing that. I have a friend. But what we can do is we can take a look at some of the models we've seen in Europe where they do have community gardens and people have their little sheds. I have a friend who's really into aquaponics. He has a greenhouse. Yeah. And they have fish.

1:38:58The fish fertilize the vegetables and fruit, and then you can eat the fish. So I was a microbiology undergraduate, and my undergraduate research was actually in recirculating aquaculture, where it was a huge cross-departmental collaboration. And my job was honestly just to assay bacteria because that's what you do when you're 21. And the whole point was it was supposed to be a self-contained recirculating facility for growing tilapia. And then the nitrogen can be used for fertilizer and things like that. Those are incredibly complex and finicky systems. Like it's not just a matter of sticking some fish in a tub and putting in a pump and calling it good.

1:39:42There's a lot of chemistry involved. I mean, and modern agriculture is really data-driven. A lot of, I mean, a lot of these tractors are tied into satellite services that tell you when to do everything you need to do in the fields and exactly how much fertilizer to put down and when and how to water and things like that. And farmers know what they're doing. And asking us all to upskill to that level in a hurry is probably not going to be as successful as we would like it to be. Yeah. You know? but yeah i think everyone should try growing tomatoes go to the store get a five gallon bucket from home depot look it up on the internet you can grow tomatoes in like a little patch of sunshine on your front porch or your back porch there's nothing better than homegrown tomatoes oh my god they're amazing yeah is it too late is it too late to plant them or is this no no no no that's the time yeah yeah go do you live in an apartment do you have somewhere you could play No, I actually live in a house here.

1:40:38Oh, you live in a house? I do a little bit of gardening. Oh, good. I'm not very good at it either, in part because our backyard is sort of shady. Yeah. And then it gets warm suddenly, and I forgot to water and all those things. But the plan B is just go to your local farmer's market. Yeah. I think. So if you want to reduce the use of fossil fuels, not getting your apples from South America is a good start. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think there's a lot to be said for eat local. Also taste better. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I would argue that would it be nice to have strawberries in November sometimes? Sure it would, but they're going to taste terrible.

1:41:21And like, just wait. I mean, I can say this from a position of California privilege. And sorry about that, Dan. And I'm sorry about that, Dan. We have to relearn canning and making of jams and all of that stuff, right? And salting our beef. We're going to all need to learn how to salt meat. And do you have a potato cellar? I'm just saying, if not, start digging. Oh, my gosh. You guys should look at potato sack because I kid you not, we grew 50 pounds of potatoes one year. One of those things was life-changing. That's like The Martian. Oh, my God. Love that movie. I cannot wait for Project Arnmiss.

1:42:00I have to go soon. we have learned you can grow potatoes in space yes we just learned that it wasn't it was a fictional um trope but in fact they were able to grow potatoes on the international space station so there let's take a break uh we have more to talk about and we have a wonderful panel to do it with lisa schmeiser from nojitter.com yanko records lowpass.cc and of course dan patterson blackbird.ai another radio refugee our show today brought to you by modulate this is really cool this is a really interesting use of ai everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic right customer calls, agent conversations, and sad to say fraud attempts, most of that audio is still being treated just like text, basically flattened into transcripts, which strips tone, intent.

1:43:08Frankly, it strips out the risk. But Modulate exists to change that. First proven in gaming, Modulate's technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. And where there's all that chatter going on modulate was used to separate you know just playful banter from intentional harm at scale and it works today modulate helps enterprises including fortune 500 companies understand 20 million minutes of voice every day by interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world this capability is powered by modulates newest elm it's called velma 2.0 it's a velma is a voice native behavioral aware model built to understand real conversation it's not just a transcriptionist it orchestrates 100 plus specialized models each focused on a distinct aspect of voice analysis this is such a triumph of ai to deliver accurate explainable insights in real time it works so well velma's ranked number one across four key audio benchmarks beating all the large general foundation models in accuracy cost and speed velma's number one in conversation understanding number one in transcription accuracy and cost number one in deep fake detection number one in emotion detection it's really not a surprise velma's built on 21 billion minutes of audio velma's a hundred times faster cheaper and more accurate than llms at understanding speech and this includes the top frontier models like google's gemini open ai and xai most llms are a black box not velma velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing time stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation meaning you can see exactly when risk rises when behavior shifts or intent changes.

1:45:13With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model can really do. Go to Modulate's live ungated preview of Velma at preview.modulate.ai. You'll be blown away. That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding deep fake detection and emotion detection velma check it out at preview.modulate.ai really really good speaking of sears and voice fraud it all ties together in the end sears uh exposed ai chatbot phone calls and text chats they were saving them to a wide open database on the web and of course when you talk to a customer service chat bot you may be giving personal information contact information phone numbers uh now sears department stores as we were talking about earlier are gone but they still have brands and they still have an appliance repair business still going on and in fact they're even so uh up to date they have an ai chatbot and a phone assistant named samantha unfortunately oh and it's named after women samantha hello sam yeah um always always a woman that's helping you and it's always well because you know why and this is true fighter pilots too we listen to female voices we ignore men yeah right actually what's really interesting i don't remember the...

1:46:58What? Did you not hear me, Dan? Are you not listening? I don't remember the vendor off the top of my head, but we recently got pitched by a company that was telling us about the different specialized AI agents it was building for different lines of work. And what I noticed when they did the pitch was for HR and for marketing, they had given the agents female names and for IT troubleshooting and procurement. No, they were. More troublingly, the IT troubleshooting was named Vikram. Oh no! Have you rebooted the computer? I can't believe they named it Vikram. I was like, this seems vaguely problematic for a lot of people.

1:47:41Yes! Oh my god! And when you call up to get recipe advice, it's always a nice Italian voice. No, no. Mario answers. I actually assigned a reporter to look into and talk to people about, hey, how is agentic AI enforcing and introducing systemic bias into workplace interactions? Because if this is what vendors are putting forward, like, how is this shaping the way people perceive, you know, people named Vikram in real life? I'm sure all of you are IT geniuses. Or, you know, the way they're saying this needs to be a female role or a male role. Yeah. uh jeremiah fowler security researcher found three publicly exposed databases from sears containing massive troves of chat logs audio files and text transcriptions oh my god from sears home services customers uh 3.7 million chat logs 1.4 million audio files all public Fowler said I found a csv file um that contained 54 359 complete chat logs uh with Samantha nobody with no no Vikram uh chats though no anyway do you want a csv file that tells you 50 000 times to turn it off and on again you don't need that uh you know that's right you don't really need that one um let's talk about uh prediction markets because this is a really interesting uh growth market we've all heard about couch cashy now um what's the what's the other one uh poly market yeah uh these are basically gambling right it's obvious you're but they call it a prediction market so it's not illegal in many states or any states because i guess it's kind of a loophole wait a minute nevada just out well arizona just filed criminal charges over at calci over illegal gambling nevada which is the home of course of all those casinos has been uh and made them illegal nevertheless there's billions of dollars being traded back and forth and the problem with these prediction markets is you can bet on anything and we've seen this insiders from you know the pentagon who knew something about uh the venezuela extraction of maduro would place a bet right before it happened saying yeah i think maduro's going to be captured in the next two weeks and then it happened and the person made three hundred thousand dollars it's the other thing about these prediction markets is they're basically anonymous you can use crypto and so forth Good news, Major League Baseball, which I guess FanDuel and DraftKings was already taken by football.

1:50:44Major League Baseball struck a deal with Polymarket, the official event prediction platform.

1:50:55Major League Baseball is already, you know, I remember Pete Rose was kept out of the Hall of Fame for betting on a baseball game. those rules are kind of long gone and they've prosecuted or at least come down pretty hard on players who were clearly throwing throwing games yeah throwing games thrown in in the dirt or or you know predictions on particular pitches right major league baseball there actually last year was a case of two players facing federal charges for manipulating their on-field performance So what's the best way to ensure the integrity of the game? Do a deal with Polly Market. Right.

1:51:38Because then you could do prop bets on anything. Look, there's a lot of reasons to dislike Pete Rose, but it's really, the league really has to confront that hypocrisy. Fair, fair. It's just unbelievable. I just, but I guess there's so much money. Well, I'm wondering how long until we're going to see some legislation around this. Well, and you know, the sad thing is all, most of the time that legislation comes from lobbyists with the casino operations who say, if you're going to defang it as much as possible to our casinos. It really feels like, I mean, there are conversations, especially in the media world, about how this is an interesting and new emerging technology.

1:52:26And there are reasons to consider it. But this really, to me, feels like the 2000, 2001, 2002 era of crypto, where there was a rush to the space. and we saw massive companies doing massive deals with crypto companies before regulation came in and we found out there was, oh, surprise, there was a ton of fraud going on. So polymarket. No, I think you're right. Crypto is a really great analysis for that where people like to... It makes it easy. Well, people like to make it sound like they know what they're talking about, too. And they've gamified the experience. And all you have to do is give someone the quick dopamine hit and like, oh, there is nothing wrong with this ever, donk.

1:53:13So what is a particularly masculine thing that we men do? We are standing monitoring the situation, right? With our arms folded, just watching it go down. We're monitoring the situation. Well, Polymarket has created the Situation Room in Washington, D.C., where you can monitor the situation. it's got big screens with the world you know the war everything you can bet on anything it's not a sports bar live x feeds flight radar bloomberg terminals where you can sip your bourbon and smoke a cigar and monitor the situation men's spaces men's activities you can tell look there's a cigar there's some whiskey uh it's opening uh march 20th uh on k street just up the street uh k street on k street that's where all the that's where all the really yeah that's isn't that where all the lobbyists are yeah this is like the most 2026 thing ever isn't it it's just yeah if i could get this napkin for christina warren she collects this kind of memorabilia meet me at the polymarket situation room news bar this is just dc's version of watching a construction site you know how men can't stop can't help you gotta do it inside yeah look at this but this is not just construction you can monitor the world situation everything going on and you can make and because it's polymarket you can make a bet on any of this will his hair catch on fire when he's lighting the olympic torch six to one odds there are other places i would like to spend my time i'm monitoring the situation jesus flip what a world we live in also prediction markets are like the wrong name for this it should be prophecy markets because like yeah like when you watch like like the election like the elections in the last week's elections like they were all wrong it was all what the people who are betting wanted to happen not we're thinking wishful thinking well there was that story where that journalist got threatened oh yeah when they were reporting on um what bombing in in the middle east they were gonna they were gonna kill him because he had people they're like i bet this and you said that and you need well first thing first they reached out and tried to do the more flies with honey thing with hey there's an inaccuracy in your story, if you could report this instead, that would be great.

1:55:47Thank you. And like a good journalist, this guy was like, oh, did I get something wrong? And then he's like, no. And then he was like, why am I getting so many messages from people whose social media handles are all about online betting? And then he realized what was happening was these guys had bet against what he reported and they wanted him to change his story so they could recoup their losses. And they began threatening him when he wouldn't do it. Wow. Yeah. No, it's a genuinely disturbing thing because it's another way where you're going to have under-resourced reporters whose names are attached to reporting the facts who are going to get threatened by institutional bettors.

1:56:32And what kind of backup do they have? What kind of protection will they have? And it's easy to find your address with data sold by data brokers. Or given to you by Cash Patel. Yes. Hi, here you go. Cash? This is reported. It's bugging me. And of course, Cash goes, yeah, is he a liberal? Well, don't these guys also, don't these markets also advertise on podcasts? Isn't it all just one giant? Oh, yeah. Not on mine. Yeah, no. Not on mine. In fact, we've turned down not a significant amount of money from crypto investments and prediction markets and all this stuff. Well done, Leo. Well done. But this is the reason why they don't allow sports teams in Vegas before, right?

1:57:11it's because like the mob would threaten the players exactly nothing bigger now than the knights and the raiders vegas is sports city usa now although if you ask every time i go to vegas i'll ask a a driver you know hey how are you feeling about the oakland days they're like we don't want them except for the a's yes to a person for a's they're like no one asked for this poor Oakland A's Oakland wanted them nobody wants them they just didn't want their owner what are they called the ballers? yeah it's the Oakland B's the Oakland ballers are fantastic are they staying at the Coliseum? no no no no they played a completely different venue one that's a little bit closer to Emeryville actually it's triple A or is it single A is it good?

1:58:00it's fun we used to have a no A minor league baseball team in Sonoma called the Crushers because it was like great crushing grapes. Yeah. Yeah. And it was, it was, it was so much fun because there it's like handymen and high school teachers. Now these guys are pro, but they're like, well, they're pros. They want to be pros. They got Kevin Mitchell to the former San Francisco giant to manage them. So it's called the Pioneer League. They're part of what's called the Pioneer League. They play at Raimondi Park. It's so much fun. Like one of my favorite things from last summer is I went during the day that they teamed up with the Oakland Zoo.

1:58:41Awesome. Oh, my gosh. No, they were giving out like possum hats. They had Oakland Zoo docents there to give you animal facts. The Oakland Bee's mascot is actually a possum as well. So it was just this great synergy of two really classic, you know, pro-community Oakland things. have to do this stuff because otherwise they wouldn't sell tickets so the crushers they would have they have like a barca lounger right behind home plate yeah that you could win the right to sit there during the whole game and watch the game which sounds deadly uh they it was you know they would always they would have amusements in between every inning right i'm sure the possums do the same thing yeah yeah like with one where you bring 10 kids out and you have them put their forehead on a baseball bat and run around in a circle on the home plate until they get really dizzy and see if they can run to first base oh i love those laughs yeah no like one of my goals for this year is to get up to a humboldt craps game i love independent baseball like but the oakland ballers are they were such a good time last year um like i i also go to the oakland roots games because i'm i'm for all of the small non-nfl and and um no i would say if That's how sports used to be.

1:59:55If you are in the East Bay, do yourself a favor and get to an Oakland Ballers game this season. It's going to be amazing. It used to be farmhands, you know, and stuff. That's what baseball used to be. Yeah. Yeah. It's too bad it got so corporatized. Yeah. But anyway. Tickets so expensive. We're all about the Oakland Bs now. Las Vegas hates the Oakland A's. Betting is happening. Oh, I get it now. Betting is coming for us all, Leo. The B's replaced the A's. I get it. Yes, yes. now i get it uh that took a while the whole world started going downhill i could tell you the exact date march 21st 2006 was when it all started going to hell that was the day twitter launched 20 years ago yesterday oh no kidding the first tweet jack dorsey the first tweet and it was but wasn't called twitter with an e it was twitter without the e that was that was the fashion because you had tumblr flicker and remember and you can only interact with sending a text to 40404 that's right because it was originally it was the only way that was the only way you could do it before only way you could interact yeah and that was why it was 140 characters right yeah that's why yeah i remember i was on uh audio which is a podcasting platform started by biz and ev and and some of the others who co-founded twitter and we logged in one day and they said we're shutting down audio to start this new site called twttr so uh a bunch of podcasting nerds signed up that's right yeah right around now yeah yeah actually they did a good thing they biz paid back the audio investors gave them their money oh no kidding yeah which was audio was really great too i mean it was podcast like it took i i think it was kind of killed by itunes 4.9 which is exactly what happened It was the first podcast directory mainstream, but audio was a great directory.

2:01:50It had Ajax, which was big at the time. You could drag and drop stuff. They also had this interesting idea of people leaving each other personal voice messages to become part of the RSS feed or something, right? Yeah, that's right. I don't know if anybody ever did it, but I thought, oh, that's kind of cool. Oh, that's such a blast from the past, right? Yeah, I think I filed a couple of reports back then using that. Yeah. Bring that back. I would do that. I have my plaque. Wait a minute. Let me get my plaque. Hey, what do you guys use for RSS readers, by the way? I'm using Feedly right now. There's one that just launched this past week.

2:02:28I'm trying to look it up. Elon took over Twitter. And remember, he took away all the blue checks. So I got this plaque. It said, in honor of Leo Laporte, who had verified a Twitter account before they were available for purchase November 2022. yeah it's got light but now i have a blue check because elon gave it back i get a i get a what they what cory doctorow calls a non-consensual blue check i have a consensual non-use of twitter policy yeah well i don't want people to think i paid for it or anything anyway 20 years ago yesterday uh twitter it all started actually that's uh and south by southwest in 2007 when Foursquare launched, Twitter launched.

2:03:16Foursquare blew up at South by. It was so cool back then. Oh, South by was this week, wasn't it? Yeah. That's when internet was new and exciting and fun. You can use all the platforms to cross post onto all the other platforms. Oh my goodness. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then use Yahoo Pipes. Yahoo Pipes was great! Yeah! Oh man, I made so much irrelevant nonsense with yahoo pipes all the the young people are going who are these old people old stuff you're watching this week in tech with with old people not so old as me but uh we're not as young as you either we're glad you're here uh dan and lisa and yanko uh and i'm very glad you're here you club twit members we thank you so much uh for making twit possible uh we started the club during COVID when we realized, you know, we were going to have to really go to our listeners and help get them to help us stay afloat.

2:04:18And you've done it. And I really appreciate it. If you're not a club member and you like what you hear, if you want us to keep doing shows, if you like the club shows that we do, a whole bunch of them in our club twit discord, if you want ad-free versions of our shows, twit.tv slash club twit, 10 bucks a month gets you all of that and more but mostly gets you that nice warm fuzzy feeling that you're supporting quality programming that doesn't spy on you that doesn't talk down to you that delivers good content with as much integrity as we can muster i think that's pretty important and it's frankly a endangered species these days twit.tv slash club twit to show your support thank you thank you in advance.

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2:06:33so i did go see project hail mary on thursday i went to see it in a format it's available on imax i'm kind of against imax because it becomes all about the screen you know and the movie kind of loses comes in second place i've seen enough movies now in imax i'm thinking like i saw everything ever yeah one battle after another rather uh an imax and i thought it was better on a normal size screen because it was so big, you know. But I saw it in this new Screen X format, which is a little weird. It's movie theaters trying to find some way to get you to come in, something that they can do that you can't.

2:07:12So our local movie theater has, you know, the Barca loungers and the food that they bring to you and all that. But they also have taken the sidewalls of the theater and turned them into screens. And they have laser projections on the sidewalls. and some movies including project hail mary are made so that in some scenes that extends around the wall so it's like almost like watching in virtual reality you know um and it's a gimmick but actually worked pretty well in project hail mary it was mostly the space scene so they could and you could tell they'd made the movie makers made content for those sidewalls and it's foveated just like the vision probe because you're you know it's your peripheral vision so it doesn't really need to be in focus but you just get a feeling like it's the space expanding around you but and and benito said don't know spoilers and i said benito you read the book how can i spoil it he said no i don't want to have any movie spoilers i will tell you this this isn't a spoiler great movie they lived up to the book if you loved the book which i did you will still love the movie they were pretty true to the book as always there's a few differences they added a little more action to make it an action movie but i think in general it's really good i remember talking to andy weir the author the guy who did the martian and now project how mary when uh the book came out and he had already signed movie rights and he told me yeah ryan gosling's gonna star and i kind of went and then he mentioned that the the the direction the team of directors it's two directors uh uh phil lord and christopher miller were uh known for the lego movie which i thought well okay so i was a little nervous and he said no no no you're this is going to be great he was very much involved in the production of the movie he has a producer credit and i think he was sitting there the whole time because they were it's a great script they did a good job and it's a it's a it's a feel-good movie as salon said it's movie medicine and in these troubled times it's nice to see something that makes you feel good so that's my review so for the imax thing leo for most films that are shot on imax you'll probably want to shoot it on imac you want to watch it on imax and project hail mary the thing with the thing with it is that it changes aspect ratios and that's what the wall thing is yeah I hate that it didn't have to be on the walls it could just be like a longer a longer landscape right I mean that's that's that's another thing I don't like that I'm actually it's sometimes fills the screen and sometimes doesn't like when it goes back and forth I did that with that's the filmmakers choice that's not I don't like that yeah one battle after another was full IMAX the whole movie but it's just it's too overwhelming it becomes about the screen to me and i really just want to see the story um i don't actually honestly think i needed screen x either but that i was able to get good seats for it so i don't think anybody wanted to see it in that format uh so i was able to go uh see it i i watched a really good uh youtube with a astrophysicist who said it's the science is very good and there's some they take some liberties they have to to make the story work but uh i think in general it's quite good there is i won't say anything because i want to protect you benito after you see the movie there's one thing you can say i'll just mute you for myself no i don't want to spoil it for anybody i'll wait there's one thing where they make a statement about the ability, the perceptive abilities of a character in the movie that they don't follow through on.

2:11:00That's really kind of opaque. But other than that, it's fine. That didn't bother me that much. I think it was very good. I think Project Hail Mary is superb and you're going to enjoy it. It's a feel-good movie. Take the kids. there's no swearing because uh the star of the movie is a school teacher not ryan gosling the character he plays rylan grace is a school teacher right that's a whole thread in the book i forgot yeah yeah it's in the book too he says i don't know if you've ever met any actual teachers in real life they don't say swear like i was gonna say high school teachers anyway it's a very funny part of the book actually because at the beginning of the book you can't remember who he is and he says fudge and he goes why am i saying fudge anyway it made me want to reread the uh the book uh casting is excellent and actually ryan gosling is perfect as rylan grace because as we know from the move from the book rylan grace is a wimpy coward perfect uh they did the spider-verse movies that's right lord and miller and they actually are very good directors.

2:12:15I am anti-animation, Alex. You're right. I don't like comic book movies, and I don't like animated movies. But I did like Project Hail Mary, and I think you will too. The only thing I didn't like, it's an Amazon production. And they say it in big letters, and there's a smile. It's like, Jeff Bezos saying... They're going to finance Melania somehow. Yep. somehow very nice uh we were talking about south by southwest normally i do an in memoriam nobody nobody uh as far as i know nobody died this week so i will do the in memoriam on amy webb's annual trend report she uh has been doing this with their future uh institute uh for many years she said she had a funeral at south by where she announced things are moving way too fast to do an annual trend report.

2:13:11I can't. Her Future Today strategy group was going to stop. That was the last one. She put on a black... We're going to get... Are we getting Amy on soon, Benito? I think she's coming soon. Yeah, I'm trying. She usually tries to come on after South by South by South. Yeah, she does this great thing. She says, we are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the life of the trend report. 1 ,500 people to see her. She's famous for her South by talks. and then it's very somber. Then the University of Texas marching band comes in and they pepped everybody up. So good on you. Actually, I guess Chuck Norris did pass this week, but he's not a tech leader in any way, but we can acknowledge that.

2:13:54And Xander from... Buffy. Buffy. I guess that's sort of nerd adjacent. Should mention that. And finally, speaking of nerds, I like to do a pick every week. This is a cassette player with USB-C and Bluetooth. So if you still have your old cassette collection, your mixtapes from when you were 19, this sounds pretty cool. This is from Maxwell, not Maxell. Maxwell used to be like... No, it is Maxell, right? It's Maxell, yeah. It's where they had the hair going back. Yeah. Yep. this is maxell's new cassette player uh it has a usbc port so it's rechargeable it has an audio jack so you can use wired headphones and bluetooth 5.4 so you can play it through your sonos speakers just wait it looks like a walkman i might actually buy that i don't have any cassettes but i might actually buy that i have a whole box of cassettes in the base can i borrow some cassettes janka my fear is that they're all like the tape is degraded at this point but yeah they're gonna fall apart the minute you put it in the cassette player because that's coming back is the weirdest uh legacy tech that come to come back next it's eight tracks and then we'll know that i think it's the romance of the mixtape yeah that's the highly personal tangible artifacts like cds cds are so much better but getting into 45 minutes and then having a perfect transition when it switches or when you have to turn it over yeah that was such an art so so one of the things that i've among the teens anthropologically speaking like they will use spotify playlists as sort of temporary social watering holes where they'll collaborate on a playlist together to send each other messages or be mean to each other or be nice to each other or to like process or like because because my daughter was recently making one with friends after a particularly harrowing test where they were all like this is how i felt about that french test um but for them spotify is this really transient liquid environment and they are all super into the romance of fixed music media like vinyl well vinyl is something that you collect for the aesthetics for them mixed tapes are a way for you to demonstrate your personal flair in an artifact i agree but see like the same way they have they don't do it on cassettes yeah they do spotify they no spotify is too fluid spotify is online so they do do it on cassettes very quickly you know spotify right it's an ephemeral they can come and go a cassette you have to listen you can try to fast forward and rewind and fast forward and you can hand it to people.

2:16:45It's not just texting a link. There's but see, so you know how like what it is. So you, but they don't have CD burners though. And it doesn't have that nostalgic pre-internet feeling that they don't have cassette players either. They don't have cassette players either. Well, they do now, thanks to Maxell. Yeah. Now just, can they get some cassettes? The other thing bringing us full circle from the beginning of the show when's the last time you recorded a song off the radio trying to avoid the dj talking and 1994 yeah oh my gosh that's the true mixtape great movie high fidelity with john cusack it's all about mixtapes making the perfect mixtape oh that was a great movie yeah great movie if you want to learn about the ancient art of mixtapes janko it sounds like you made a few mixtapes in your time i made quite a few mixtapes did you woo your spouse with a mixtape uh you know that was a little too late at this point because but that was why we did it isn't it to to get girls i mean we pretended to have other reasons too it was one of the ways you could have a conversation with the music you chose right yeah yeah yeah that's right a conversation with the music you chose and to extend your personality right as burke says in our chat room the true mixtape is about who it's for who you're making it for you don't make it for yourself you're making it as a message to somebody and then you get to do all the art maybe somebody you have to do all the art and this is yourself yourself and all that stuff now i want to make some mixtapes yeah thank you so much you guys are great dan patterson uh blackbird.ai things going well yeah things are good your health is good scratchy yeah yeah health is good my daughter had strep last week and so i've got a little bit of it this week antibiotics are wonderful but i didn't notice you sounded fine a little scratchy here yeah and the uh the other stuff is yeah that's right that's right uh no it's wonderful to be here and wonderful to see you yanko and lisa to see you and i'm glad your health is good dan had a little health scare and yeah i was nervous i'm really glad everything's going well yeah you'll find him senior director of content at blackbird.ai take a look at raven that's the new thing right with a yeah we just uh released an api oh so i can use my uh my claude to oh yeah we have i mean like api feels like yeah we have mcps and yeah that's the hotness the new hotness yeah yeah we will talk to your clod your clod and my clod can talk yes i've been having so much fun getting my agent all hooked up.

2:19:31Installed on your new Mac Mini. Yeah. It's an old Mac Mini, but yeah. Thank you, Dan. Lisa Schmeiser, thank you for your Girl Scout cookies and your longtime friendship editor-in-chief at nojitter.com. Anything you would like to plug at all, please do. Just let me say, please come read us. That will be... It's the thing. We're doing some great work, taking a look at work, uh, automating workflows at this point and what AI does well and where there are still opportunities to excel and how this will impact everything from the way we work together to the way that we interact with corporations. Oh, you have a lot of AI stuff now.

2:20:15Oh, this is good. Yeah. We're, we're also beginning to focus a lot more on how the raw material of AI, i.e. data, is really going to end up shaping the ways in which it's used and the emerging problems that we're seeing with enterprise-level data. Oh, it's a big one. I know. Yeah. Man, data discovery was a problem well before this, and it's only become more amplified over time. Well, and with AI, garbage in, garbage out, right? It's all about the quality of the data. See, you want to say mixtapes are classic and retro, garbage in, garbage out is - That's very retro. absolutely foundational thank you so much lisa yanko records thank you everybody should subscribe lowpass.cc yanko is one of the you know he's still doing journalism wow yes that's amazing man that's older than mixtapes in a way yes it's great to see you uh subscribe covers ar vr streaming media every Thursday.

2:21:24Lowpass.cc. Thank you so much. And three-year anniversary coming up. Really? That's going to be some fun stuff. Yeah. Fantastic. That's so great. It's$8 a month. It's great. It's well worth it. And you have a lot of free posts, too, so people don't have that. I do have free posts, yes. Yeah. So sign up for free, and then if you like it, maybe you will pay. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twit every Sunday, 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern 2100 UTC. You can watch us live as we do it. Of course, if you're in the club, you can be in the Discord with us, watch on the Discord, or, and anybody can do this, watch on YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kik, six different platforms.

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