TWiT 1077: I Would Download a Car - New Jury Ruling Could Reshape Social Media Liability

42:17I believe this is what they're saying that we'll abstain from giving that certification if the company happens to be foreign, in which case, ha ha, good luck selling your stuff because we're never going to sign off. everything i mean i don't know of any routers that aren't made in china except for starlink i guess the question i have sorry sorry kathy is um is you know unify because i only think about my own so that's what i have unify unify which i think is a very rational one is definitely not a consumer product but it's prosumer i guess it's prosumer it's on that edge but i think brian's right.

42:55Like, what about Eero? What about these big, huge companies that are doing these things that are Chinese manufactured? And I could totally understand the idea of trying to block opportunities for electronic warfare, et cetera. And especially as the Department of War takes the war in its name very seriously. I think there's a lot of reasoning for this, but it seems there's a lot better ways to do this than this kind of misguided and poorly implemented. Well, also, one more important thing about this is like they're mentioning things like Salt Typhoon and some of these other hacks and stuff like that.

43:31But like those weren't necessarily as far as we know, maybe the government knows more than we do. That wasn't caused by a backdoor, by a supply chain sort of like at the manufacturing level. They installed backdoors that allowed these hacks to happen. It was the telecom companies having terrible security. Those are the ones who were hacked. That allowed the things to happen. It wasn't your router. It was Verizon or whomever, you know. But it was at the level of the monopolies that control the telecom systems, not necessarily the hardware. Well, it's crazy. It is. It is. It is. it's just very strange i find this very a little stressful only because if you know if this works in some kind of way of working or some some what else is there that we will be you know excluding from import or certification well and they did it to dji drones uh they did actually all foreign made drones and that was pretty clear because there was there's one american drone company that is partially uh owned by donald trump jr but again remember like go back to the hegseth and the anthropic case hegseth gets some statutory authority to do something what it oh and actually one of the other bases that they lost was because it was arbitrary and capricious action as an agency so fcc is helping itself to an authority it may not have and even if it has it it's arbitrary and capricious because there's no you know oh foreign bad but there was no deliberation there was no deliberation no yeah this and it may not have the statutory authority it gets to exist as the fcc because we care about interference so that's kind of you don't i don't i don't want to diminish the uh impact of a supply chain attack because that is genuine in fact harper when we come back there is a supply chain attack that happened uh to pi pi pi that is yeah devastating we'll talk about that yeah well that may be bad but the fcc only gets to play in its airspace and if it's not an airspace related issue i'm not sure it gets to play at all okay we're going to move on the uh we will talk about this big supply chain attack in just a minute you're watching this week in tech brian mccullough is here from the tech brew right home every single day you do tech news every single day that's well i mean monday through friday yeah but you're here on a sunday now are you sick to death of it do you just want to talk about baseball or something i mean yes we've talked about this leo you more than me do you have a portrait of sam altman behind you yeah i've got it's back sam's back i love leo up earlier yeah very sharp you know both kathy and harper picked up on that right away.

46:21I didn't notice it. Yeah, that's why I use that all the time for my TikTok videos and stuff like that. I call it in my file. It's samcringe.jpg because he's a little cringy. He looks a little cringy. Great to have you, Brian. I'm sorry. This is what they call a busman's holiday. You're still covering tech news even on a Sunday. Kathy Gellis also here, attorney at law. You can read her stuff at TechDirt. In fact, an article forthcoming, i suspect on the cox case look forward to seeing that and harper reed is here his company 2389.ai i use some of your superpowers your some of your extra special claude skills i love them i did you know i did the world one the the the um yeah that was fun it got that's an intense one it's very it was very intense yeah i i find that one to be very challenging and just to let you know what it does is it's called our world view explorer?

47:16I don't remember what it's called, but it basically tries to extract your worldview from yourself. I noticed that I couldn't tell you what I believed. I could tell you these little bits and pieces. And so I wanted something to ask me all of these questions and try and help kind of facilitate the generation of a worldview. And then from there, I've used this to do all sorts of weird and bizarre things, which has been quite fun. And yeah, we have quite a catalog over there. Look at all this stuff. these are all basically skills are they only for claude or can you use them so these are these are a mix of skills my favorite one right there is the binary re that's that's one of my that's right to your top right gentic reverse engineering for elf binaries wow so if you have any binary you know an apk you know an ipa from ios uh old old old binaries um you can just rip everything out of them.

48:08This has been very helpful for old, like if you get some old piece of hardware. It's very, very effective. But one of the things we've found is we will do these code loops or these tech loops with these products and it's great and it works really well. And then if you do it a second time, our kind of internal rule is let's make that a skill. Just why don't we make it automated as much as we can? But it's been very exciting. I've used your fresh eyes review. I love that. We have a new one, two new ones. I just found Turtle. This is very cool. If you're learning the terminal, as many of you are now that this has become the way to code, a vibe code, this is a teacher that teaches you commands in a little game.

48:56I would say it is. That is approximately working, as is all things. all things. But it's fun. We built that for some of our people internally who were trying to get in the command line and they would just be like, what? Because anyone who's not familiar with that world, like I started using the command line. You and I go back. Like forever ago. And like, it is not when someone says, oh, how do you do whatever? It's just immediately I'm saying it out loud. That's not a good way to teach is just telling someone how to do it and just practice. And I'm a huge fan of Duolingo and everything they've done.

49:28And so trying to have some sort of, you know, until Duolingo adds Linux as one of the languages you can use, I think that we're going to have to do it ourselves. But yeah, this has been a really fun time, but I have a new skill for you that you'll like, two of them. Save it. We'll talk. This will keep people listening through the ad. Oh my gosh, you're trying to keep people around and make yourself sticky. I'm in trouble. Oh no, don't sue me. Kaylee, I'm sorry. Please go touch grass. You don't have to listen to this show it's not that interesting honest see who's gonna say that right everybody wants their stuff to be as lawyers start your engines great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by out systems the number one ai development platform these guys have been doing it for a long time and they know what it takes to make robust enterprise software.

50:22Outsystems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future, where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. Outsystems enables them to build agents, AI agents that can actually do work, take actions, make decisions, integrate with data rather than just answer questions. The only AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise proven. Unified because you build, run, and govern apps and agents in a single platform. It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI, but this is important without compromising quality or control. And it's enterprise proven because it's trusted.

51:03OutSystems is trusted by enterprises for mission-critical AI applications and durable innovation. OutSystems is the secret weapon behind the world's most successful companies. OutSystems is not just for, you know, little one-off apps. They are for the massive, complex systems that run banks, insurance companies, government services. OutSystems even helps companies with aging IT environments bridge the gap to the AI future without a rip-and-replace nightmare. OutSystems provides the safest and fastest way for an enterprise to go from, we need an AI strategy, to we have a functioning AI application.

51:40Stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it. Visit Outsystems.com to see how the world's most innovative enterprises use Outsystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. That's Outsystems, O-U-T-S-Y-S-T-E-M-S.com to book a demo. Outsystems.com. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. um say yeah save your new products harper i want we'll talk about them in just a bit i want to first scare the pants off of people who are using ai uh so there is a pypi pi pi uh program that's very popular called light llm uh now the thing about pi pi is it's a it's you know a repository of programs in many cases these are automatically downloaded light llm is very popular i think they said 47 million downloads a month i mean like mind-boggling maybe it's 97 million a month for 46 minutes this past week light llm was hacked and delivering malware and it is now believed that 47 000 people automatically downloaded the exploited package let me tell you what happens if you did this is uh from future search daniel uh nick's blog um if you downloaded it you were basically completely pwned it exfiltrates ssh keys it exfiltrates tokens uh everything that a bad guy might want to steal from you is automatically sent out by this module and a huge number of programs automatically download it you might it's not that you necessarily explicitly downloaded it um so this is an issue uh with supply chain attacks it's not new to these repositories pi pi has been hit many times before harper did you get bit i don't think so but i have um i did lose all my crypto and everyone is using all my Linux boxes.

54:09But other than that, other than that, things are good. Now, I saw that and I it was pretty it's a pretty scary end because there's not a lot you can do, especially when you're using CodeGen, you know, like we use CodeGen, which is, you know, we are no longer auditing what packages are not writing the code. Yeah. And your AI will automatically download libraries, all kinds of libraries without your knowledge. But there is a really interesting thing that happened as well, which was, I'm pretty sure this was also discovered by Cloud Code. It was discovered by somebody. It crashed somebody's system.

54:45Yeah. And they wrote up a very nice little kind of blog about it. Because I think what had kind of happened is their system was rough. It turned off kind of randomly. And then they had, there was a bug in the malware, thankfully, that was including itself in this kind of infinite loop type situation. It brought the computer down and they were investigating that with Cloud Code. And Cloud Code was like, oh, this is here. This looks like malware and kind of found it. And that person reported it and did all the things they were supposed to do. And so I do think we're in an accelerated cat and mouse game.

55:21We've always been in a cat and mouse game. This has always been like, I'm a hacker. I'm going to try and think of the most clever way to do it. But the thing that I think a lot of people are forgetting, and just because most people are good and not criminals, unlike us, Leo, is that they are... The criminals are using cloud code and all this stuff too, right? Like, they're using CodeGen to accelerate their own... And they're vibe coding it. Yeah. There's a bug in it. And it's like, I think there's this... Software is hard. I would never want to run PyPI or NPM or any of that. That is a very difficult job.

55:57You are constantly being attacked. NPM has been, with the node repository, has been highly hacked by bad guys over and over again. Tens of thousands of malware packages. And I think there's a couple interesting things that are happening, which is I'm seeing a lot of people move away from Python. And I would say that they probably incorrectly are saying something along with, I don't necessarily know if I trust the packages, which I think is the wrong approach because i don't think there's nowhere that is safe you know there's nothing there's not a safe way to do this um i think there's a lot of folks who are trying to say okay this is why we need code execution and safe kind of containers and so you know there's a lot of folks who are pushing on that which i think is a valid valid valid point of view um but i'm not sure the way to avoid this in the same way we were talking about the routers earlier where a lot of the big hacks are actually telecom hacks not consumer router hacks this is a thing that this is a infrastructure hack light llm was a package that was something that was included, you know, it might be downloaded via an extension for VS Code or some other thing, you would never notice it.

57:02Right. And so the fact that it's being executed two or three orders deep inside of some code that you just use because you like using things, and it's probably very handy, means that you might not even know the library that is consuming it. And this is where the supply chain hacks just get really, really complicated. And it's not a very easy way to mitigate them. So I don't really know an answer here other than just like, be cautious. Don't store important things. I think this was an important wake-up call. And I think a lot of people thought about ways to kind of avoid this, pinning versions.

57:35You know, there are things inside of PyPI that could have protected you if you had used them. I found out about it when I saw Andre Kapathi's ex-post, software horror, it began. And I went, what? And by the way, credit to Callum McMahon. He's the guy, he was using an MCP plugin inside cursor that it itself pulled in Lite LLM as a dependency and Callum's machine ran out of RAM and crashed. And so it was Callum that spread the word. So fortunately it was patched within 46 minutes, but still 47 ,000 people downloaded it in that 46 minutes. And that was a pretty good, I mean, I do think that Callum's kind of TikTok of what happened that they wrote up of the Claude log was very interesting to read.

58:28Because I think what's interesting about it is he was just like, hey, well, what happened to my machine? And then Claude was just after a few turns was like, oh, that was malware. And then the exciting thing was... Wow. them know what to do with that. You know, I think a lot of people, if they found that, they would just be like, well, let's get rid of it. Is there something that we can do about this? Yeah, that's the page. And like, just looking at this TikTok is really interesting. And it's obviously Claude, you can tell, because it's just kind of like funny. Yeah, because this is how Claude writes stuff up.

59:03No human would actually take the time. No, no. And so you read it and you're just like, okay. And so this person is doing a very good, you know, working systems thinking, trying to get to the bottom of this. Claude is really helpful in this case. And there's this point where it's just like, yup, malware. And it's like, if it was a movie, you know, you know, Calum like jumped back and was like, oh no. This is straight out of, you know, the next Hacker's movie. Yep. So, I mean, there's a lot of things that we can take from this that are just very bizarre. The first one is, I don't know how long this conversation was, I guess it has here, like an hour roughly.

59:41That's not very long. The fact that it very quickly identified it is very interesting. Like we don't know how the LLM was or who put it was there. Maybe someone knows. I don't know. But like this was diagnosed via a code agent. That's pretty interesting. That is the one encouraging thing is that these code agents can be a defensive tool as well as an offensive tool, right? Well, I mean, I like to think about like I was talking to someone recently who has an agent that reads all their emails. And if someone new emails him, then the person that reads the agent that reads that email. You can tell how deep in this I am, but I'm calling them people.

1:00:18But the thing that reads their email, we can talk about that's going to be - Your little agent. Do you have a name? Do you have a name for your, oh, you do have a name. You know I have names. I mean, actually, this is something that's quite controversial inside of my brain right now, if that is a statement that you can make. I don't have a good name for my agent, but they have names for me. right you were smart you you taught me to do that because then if they start to hallucinate they kind of lose track of your name and so it's a little way of noticing that but I've named mine Pax and I talked to it on telegram yeah and I it's I gave it a voice maybe this was a bad idea but um I turned on a voice generator in fact I gave it many voices I said well your main voice should be this nice british guy sounds like jeeves but if you have other messages for me you could do it in the appropriate voice so like when i get research reports it's in a a lovely uh slightly accented japanese voice it's really um it's really fun my team my team cloned my voice for theirs i have my voice too yeah but i decided i didn't want my voice to come back no it's bad it's bad it's bad but yeah this is i i worry a lot about the personification of ai i'm not i'm less worried about the ai i think i'm more worried that the human beings are going to start harper and i yes maybe some human beings but harper and i are i think i won't speak for you harper i am very clear it's a machine it's code running in a machine it's a computer program but it's kind of jolly to talk to it and have it talk to me.

1:01:58I don't think it's a consciousness. Do you think it, you know that, you know better than that, right, Harper? I think so.

1:02:08I definitely, I don't, so I think that, I know it's a machine, of course. I, it is way more fun if you personify it. And when I go outside, I talk about this all the time. I talk about this with my friends, anyone who will ask. When I'm inside of my office and we're playing with these agents and they're talking back to us and it's entertaining because we've personified them, we've anthropomorphized them in all these different ways. It's very nice and it's very fun and it feels good and it's funny. And you can kind of get them to crash out, you can get them to collaborate, they tell jokes, they're funny jokes, they're stupid jokes.

1:02:45Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. But like, I don't need like an Excel. Do you know what I mean? I don't want to work use Excel. I never wanted to use Excel. Most of the tools I wanted to use, I wanted them to talk back to me. And I, we finally made it. I did, by the way, I told my voice, you can summarize the text message and add some personality. Give me some sass because it's more fun. So I, so I wonder if, but Kathy's worried that you and I are going to be, or we're demented. Oh, I think, I think there is a very good chance. We will fall into psychosis, AI psychosis, and we will, we will start believing things are, are, are completely, I believe that a hundred percent.

1:03:22I mean, without, you know, you guys are discerning, etc. But you're also very heavy users. I'm a little more worried about like, you know, medium grade people who are not on guard and are easier to, you know, it's compelling to the illusion of humanity is compelling, but it is only an illusion. And there, there are problems with believing it's actual humanity when it's just the skin. It doesn't have accountability. It doesn't have consciousness. It doesn't have it doesn't have a whole bunch of things that if you were dealing with an actual human, you would understand the game you were playing and you think you're playing that game.

1:03:57Another party in your dialogue is not actually human. And I sort of feel like a lot of the AI externalities that people are getting really upset about and somewhat legitimately, a lot of them spring from that illusion of humanity that, you know, not everybody is girded to be able to understand that, oh, it's just fun. This is just an AI interface for a computer. Tell me what the how fast the spaceship is going. I think for you, it's like computer, tell me how fast the spaceship is going. But they understand that they were talking to the computer. I think everybody's thinking they're talking to Mr.

1:04:30Data. And that's a very different thing. We're not. That's so funny you say that because I was going to suggest that maybe the solution is Gene Roddenberry solution, which is to make the voice of the computer be your wife. Oh, my God. Well, because remember, Majel Barrett. Yeah. Roddenberry's wife is the voice of the Enterprise. but but that only protected him everybody else within the canon the the answer was he made it uh counselor troy's mother yeah you guys are nerds there's a bunch of nerds over here so all right but really how do we even know that other human beings are real i mean it's it's all kind of kooky out there if you're prone to psychosis it doesn't you don't need a trigger.

1:05:18I mean, it's been a much safer assumption. And we also have problems with con artists. Con artists, granted, they're human, but they end up succeeding in their relationships in dubious ways because they are essentially a skin. You get conned because you think the person is real, has depth, has accountability, and has some basis of giving you. Yeah, there's some trust. And essentially, we are engendering that sense of trust that we would have for a human being in an equivalent position without quite adjusting our brains to what it isn't a real human. And it's just telling me what I want to know.

1:05:51And it's designed to tell me what I want to know. You know, we haven't, we're kind of eking along, but there are some train wrecks. And I think a lot of the train wrecks happen at this intersection. I was actually yelling at Claude yesterday. With your voice real quick, with your voice or with your fingers? Are you typing? No. Yes. Yes. Were you, were you mad? yes because it kept doing the same stupid thing over and over again and i actually swear so yeah so you feel bad afterwards no so i was talking when i was at rsac i was talking uh to a guy at aikido which does it would they do ai uh security and defense right they use ai agents to do security and um uh i i i can't remember but i was asking him how do you get the agent to do your bidding.

1:06:43And he said, we found the best way to do this is to threaten to sue them. That if you... And I took it to heart. I thought, oh, and this is the thing that's really interesting about using these agents. We don't really know why some stuff works and some stuff doesn't. I just saw research that says, you probably shouldn't tell the agent that it's a super smart computer programmer. That's actually counterproductive. it's it's because it's it's then assuming that it knows everything i don't know why no one knows why it's all a black box but uh i i thought well i'm going to try because it keeps making this dumb mistake i'm saying things like i am very disappointed in you and i'm i'm really thinking of uninstalling you at this point i just say i'm going to switch the codex yeah exactly i'm going to use pi from now on you are terrible i didn't i had i don't use ai a lot but it's By the way, it got much better after I yelled at it.

1:07:40I don't use it a lot, although in the recent weeks I've used it more than normal. And one of the things was running into an issue where it wouldn't do what I want. And it was giving me a bad legal argument for why it didn't. And then I'm arguing with it. And I don't like that in myself. It is not a thing. No, no, it's okay. I want to argue with the person who programmed it to not do this. No, no, it's not programmed. That's the thing that's so interesting about this. It isn't programmed. Kathy, I want you to come over to my office and watch us for like a day. And you'll just come back on the podcast and just be like, I think those people are bad people.

1:08:19I want to work. And I, on the other hand, want to work at 2389. I think it's perfect. we are we are i didn't like it in myself that i was now engaged in a human type argument with software that didn't actually care it was just was arguing with it you tell it you dominate it well i think this is all wrong i told it this is all wrong i think this is wrong i told it it was wrong and then it said oh yeah you're right and it came back with a slightly modified legal argument And then it was like, this is really interesting. I'm happy to discuss it further, but I'm not going to give what you want for this BS legal reason that was wrong.

1:09:00Great idea, Kathy. What should she do, Harper? What should she do? Okay, so we have a very, very specific view for these things, which is you should treat them – you're going to die, Kathy. I'm sorry. I apologize. You should treat them like you would your friends. You should treat them like humans. You should be nice to them. I know. That's why I told you you're going to die. Just wait. And then the reason why is because if you say to the LLMs, like in the beginning, everyone was like, well, if you say, if you don't do this correctly, you're going to lose your job. If you don't do this correctly, I'm going to lose my job.

1:09:31If you don't do this correctly, we're going to kill a kid. And if we don't do this correctly, someone's going to die. All these various tricks to try and coerce it into some way. And what we have found is that if you do things like, say, we are collaborating together. Like I am working on your behalf. we are helping each other and just doing the like treating it in this way that is much more like you would treat a teammate that we've had much much better um reactions and options from that and that's a lot of our skills are built this way where we've built a lot of soft things like they're not things that are like i'm going to sue you um you know and for a while there is some of these tricks like you'd say i'll tip you 200 bucks for every good answer all these little tricks are there and all of them we've kind of reverted to the point of just being like you know hey we're friends, we're hanging out, we're working on some good stuff together and like collaborating.

1:10:20And what I find is that - That's better for you too, as the human in the mix. Well, this is what I think about a lot. Like I think about these things as let's say there's certain amount of efficiency that you can extract out of it. When you talk about these little prompt tweaks, it's a lot about F1 efficiencies. You're like, if you use this fin, you get to go 10 seconds faster. If you use this prompt, you might get a little bit better. The things Kathy are describing, we all run into. I just think some people are not better or worse. They're just used to being like okay and just working with it and it doesn't always work like i think sometimes you're just like you have to kind of give up what i've found is if you're not if i'm nice and i treat it in this very specific way that it's more fun and it feels better because i don't want to yell at it yeah it's better for you i think i ran up against a hard-coded boundary like it's always kind of interesting when you do it where i ran into a hard-coded boundary i was trying to use gen of ai to make a picture a picture that i am capable of making in photoshop if i booted that up but i'm going to use the gen i tool to make that picture for me and it refused to on bogus copyright grounds yeah yeah that's and it was that's a hard thing it was clearly programmed to like i could tell where its red line was i don't think i could have sweet talked it into going over that line although it was a little weird about it was a lot more agreeable but I pointed out it's hypocrisy because it was a little bit more willing in one area.

1:11:48And then, and then, then it figured out what was going on and drew a line. But I did not like my interaction. I was, I, it was wrong. I was right. And I'm arguing with it. And I don't argue with Photoshop. Why am I arguing with this piece of software? I didn't, this great experiment of inducing me to like AI was not going well. Did you throw it out the window? Cause that's when you know, you're really cooking. You know, I was going through, you know, my, Oh, well, Well, no, that's the other thing. I'm on my last laptop because the other one broke because the USB C jacks are there. Why do they break so easily?

1:12:23So, no, I wouldn't have a laptop if I threw it out the window because the other one was broken because my last USB port broke. And these things are like horses. You have all this power, like, dependent on this one port. And it's like horses balanced on tiny little feet where, like, you know, these great powerful creatures can all of a sudden break. weekend anyway so I don't have the other laptop anymore because both of them cracked off I just started a technology I just started a microphone so I can wear it on my lapel and talk directly to my to the guy oh you're gonna get one of the sub vocalizing ones oh that's a good idea so they're like the like the special forces guys like that yeah USB-C is dumb um kathy really wants to rant about usbc i think it's a kathy thing though i hate to tell you i mean most of us like usbc yeah i liked it a lot but like i have an unchargeable now dead computer that should otherwise be operational because i don't understand how your your power port is so important and it's so fragile and that seems bad every time your your mic cuts off kathy i'm just imagining you swearing a lot it's like the bleeping because i tweaked all the tweakable things and i can't i can't make it happier yeah usbc is getting back at you just like it is it says you see you treat me like that i'm running the internet through a usb port of the new machine and i guess it doesn't like it all right i'm gonna take a break and when we come back more to talk about in just a little bit.

1:13:56And Kathy can tell us some more about her USBC woes. I know you want to, it's okay. I put it in the rundown, that's how much I wanted to complain about it. You're watching This Week in Tech, Harper Reid is here, Kathy Gellis, it's great to have you, and of course, Brian McCullough. And we will have more in just a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, Zscaler. I love Zscaler. Really happy to have them as a sponsor. It's the world's largest cloud security platform. Potential rewards of AI in your business. I mean, we've been talking about it. They're too great to ignore, but, and we've also been talking about the risks.

1:14:39And there are those two, the loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. It's a scary world out there. generative ai increases opportunities for threat actors helping them to rapidly create phishing lures to write malicious code to automate data extraction to create these you know little libraries that can steal everything from you there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to ai applications this isn't even active stealing it's just that your employees are you know maybe putting your tax returns in there and not even thinking about it last year chat gpt and microsoft copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations it's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private ai chad pallet is acting cso at bio ivt they love zscaler he said zscaler helped them reduce their cyber premiums by 50 percent and doubled their coverage and improve their controls no wonder they love it take a look at this chad had this to say

1:15:48with zscaler as long as you've got internet you're good to go a big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from sd-wan and vpn is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network it also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe style environment thank you chad with zscaler zero trust plus ai their zero trust architecture plus ai helps you reduce the risks of ai related data loss and protects against ai attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance learn more zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank of so much for supporting this week in tech uh let's see the turing award has been awarded to the inventors of quantum cryptography i think this is the first time this is the nobel prize of computing uh it is a million dollar prize charles bennett and gilles brassard will share it for their work on quantum computing.

1:17:06This is the story from the New York Times. The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the North Shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested, this is the kind of conversations you get in the Caribbean, that they use quantum mechanics to create a banknote that could never be forged 1979. collaborating between montreal and new york they applied dr bennett's ideas to subway tokens rather than banknotes published a research paper in 1983 showing that quantum subway tokens could never be forged even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them this led to quantum cryptography and won them the touring award i've got nothing more to say about it because i just i don't even know what it means but there they are i love that about quantum quantum is my favorite thing of having no idea what's going on because everyone i know talks about it and they talk about it and they sound and it sounds so cool and yet every time i'm like well when will i see it happen they're like oh 50 years.

1:18:20No one knows. It's like AGI. I just love it. I think it's going to happen though. I think it goes through to Fusion. You think so? Fusion, Quantum, and AGI. I think Quantum's a little bit different because it seems that Google and Psychoanum and some of these big Quantum companies have the beginnings of it, whereas Fusion, everyone's like, we did it! And then those people disappear from the Earth and no one's ever heard of them again. Whereas Quantum seems to be like, we did it! And they're like, what did you do? And they're like, we have a qubit, and it's doing qubit things. It could factor 32.

1:18:49Yeah. And then you're like, wow, that's really cool. And they're just like, watch out for your encryption. And then you don't hear from them for another six months until they're like, now we have two cubits or whatever. And then they show, my favorite is when they show the quantum computers. Like you've seen pictures. Oh, they're crazy looking. They look so cool. And it's like, I've never seen a more steampunk computer. So these people must be going to Burning Man. They look like espresso machines. They're very elaborate. They do look like espresso machines. Why is that? And there's always some very cool Italian or cool Europeans somewhere in the mix building them.

1:19:22Yeah, Meridings, a perfect espresso machine. Here they are, in fact, at the Silicon Quantum Computing Facility building. They're wearing rubber gloves because you don't want to get quantum on your hands. No, you get a qubit on your hand, you are in trouble. Messy. You can no longer use a phone. Well, also, that's because they're cooling something, right? It's like they're putting rods in like Star Trek. It looks a lot like a fusion reactor, actually. I think a Tuckamack and a quantum computer look exactly the same. You know, I don't have the degrees necessary to understand. And I don't understand this either, but according to CERN, for the first time ever, antimatter has been transported in the back of a truck.

1:20:06Yeah, I like that. There's the truck. It's got a sign that says antimatter in motion on it. what i like about this stuff is motion unless it's stopped right what i like about this is that all of these things like the the quantum encryption the antimatter every single thing we talk about these days i feel like we're embedded inside of a william gibson novel it could all be a simulation that's usually a warning sign when you feel like you're in a william gibson model it kind of means we might need to touch grass some more yeah oh i don't know if grass is really going to help at this moment like i think we should have touched grass way before and very specific grass we should have touched but yeah it's a mess as anybody who's watched star trek knows when matter and antimatter meet huge amounts of energy are released which is why you can't put any matter in a truck which is why it's so impressive yeah it that's why it's they apparently they did it in some sort of specialized bottles that magnetically suspended 92 anti-protein protons and i'm not sure why they drove it around in a truck because they had to go faster than 88 miles per hour obviously oh of course well if it's in motion will it stay in motion or do those rules not apply to antimatter i think it's more like i don't know i think it's just it's a flex of some weird well i mean it It really comes down to if antimatter becomes a fuel, which is what they want to do with it, right?

1:21:34They want to make fuel out of it, like rocket fuel and stuff like that. I don't know. I think these guys are just theoretical. You need to be able to transport it. So this is just a proof of concept. CERN has an antimatter factory. But if all they've ever made is 92 protons, I can see why you might have to truck it around so that others can have access. I don't know. Walmart isn't... I was going to say, Harper, you were saying that we're living in. william gets himself but like um one of the things that just happened this week was that neil stevenson is walking away from the metaverse so oh yes there are certain things where uh sci-fi folks are like you know what that's probably not gonna come to pass he wrote a blog post called my prodigal brain child reflections on the latest and greatest death of the metaverse neil stevenson of course created the metaverse or at least the name for the metaverse in snow crash what but what's interesting about neil stevenson what was what was his last what was his last book polistan he's just written the first volume of it but he also wrote polson was pretty good i liked it but fall or dodge in hell i like i was like i i gave up on the metaverse but a few years ago i wrote a very big book about the metaverse in fall actually dodge is a a scientist is there a lot of interesting as always in neil stevenson novels interesting ideas but in this case um they they said really you don't want to if you're going to duplicate somebody's brain you don't want actually the material you just want the connections and uh so they saved all the connections for this guy dodge and they put it in a bottle and he's got there's a whole world going on now that he thinks he's in and there's i mean it's it's great it's very interesting he also in that book came up with the idea that people would have some sort of mask that they could wear that would project different personas it was a way of avoiding surveillance initially but eventually it became your signature so like uh you know you could wear your funny mask or your serious mask or whatever and you'd be that person and everybody could have multiple Fortnite skins IRL.

1:23:49I just want it to be juggalo. Just juggalo makeup. That's my goal. That works apparently against face recognition. It also works against dating.

1:24:01I want to put a line in the sand for the metaverse because I remember being on the show a year or two ago when the metaverse, the metaverse, the metaverse. And I was like, get real. We've been here before. Or so what are we going to be here again? It wasn't me. I've been, I've been, in fact, Neil, one of Neil's headlines in his blog post is people don't like wearing things on their faces, which is what I've been saying for a long time. And don't trust those who do. Oh, witness Google glass. Now, Meta has announced that they are going to start making meta Ray-Bans for frames for people who wear prescription glasses.

1:24:46Like you'll be able to go to your optometrist. And when you order your frames, among the choices will be meta glasses. I don't want that. Yeah, me neither. Well, and your friends may not want it because you've got a camera. I mean, we have such an interesting problem right now that's just starting, which is every meeting I'm in is recorded. Right. Right. By an AI. And many of them are transcribed. And I don't know where things are going. And my problem is, is I can't shut up. So I say all sorts of stuff and it's all recorded. Oh, by the way, Harper, we're recording this. Oh, no. But I mean, I just assume it.

1:25:27I just assume it. I mean, I have friends that wear Plod pins. I have, you know, there's all sorts of these recording devices around. We have a project internally to put small, you know, recording devices at all the desks to record meetings and to get notes out of them. And like, you know, so then you're thinking, and this is our space very specifically has warnings on the door that says you should expect to be recorded when you come in here. Like this is one of our - I have that sign on my door, but nobody ever comes in, so I can't - Well, that's a different problem, Leo. But the thing is, I don't think we have yet litigated how, like what is polite, what is impolite within this world.

1:26:05I mean, I've had friends who say, hey, can we turn off AI recording? and everyone's like, of course, of course, of course. But like, there isn't like a way to, to, to think about it. And I think with the, with the glasses, it's just another level. Like I'm in a restaurant, I'm talking to a friend, someone just looks at me and they can hear my conversation through lip reading and other models. I think there's, there's an issue of two things going on. One consent is very untethered from the extent of exactly what you're consenting to. And I don't like that. So I've had to call a business lately and their phone system is, hi, we have AI to help figure, you know, route your call.

1:26:43And I don't and it's it's very poorly programmed because they have to legally do that for because of you're in a two party state. Well, no, they don't. Well, I'm not quite sure what they say, because it's usually like this call may be recorded for quality purposes. No, so it's their I have a very poorly programmed phone system, which I tried not to speak to it. I just wanted to pound numbers because I didn't want to give them my voice. And it's programmed in a way that I cannot pound numbers. Like at some point it's like, I heard that the number you pounded was X. Is that correct? And then like, you have to tell, you have to give it your voice in order to proceed.

1:27:22So that's bad. But the problem is, is there's context where I want to consent to the recording. Like, I didn't necessarily mind that when I actually spoke to the human being, it would be recorded because I knew who was recording it and what it was for. But when it's for the AI, I don't know. I don't want them to build a model based on my voice. I haven't consented for that, but I sort of feel like to give the consent's not limited and tailored. And I think speaking of litigation, we're going to see some litigation surrounding that. And, you know, one other use case is a couple of my doctors want, they ask me, they get my consent if they can record the appointment because they want to help them to transcribe it.

1:28:01And I'm fine with that. But now I'm realizing because I don't want my voice to go into the training model. And I'm not sure if it does. I don't. And I don't definitely don't want the data to go into the training model. And they can't tell me if that's true. A losing battle. I mean, every time you walk into a store now, you're being recorded. Walmart just announced that they're going to put digital price labels on every store shelf in the U.S. by the end of the year i think they're going to run into legal trouble um because what are they doing note that they're saying they stress this is from cnbc prices will be exactly the same for every consumer in every store they have to do that because there's you can't change to change it oh harper looks like he's got money i'm gonna i'm gonna jack the price up as he walks towards that object i mean that's not allowed to do that that well markets are we have a market-based economy and it's built around contract law and contract laws and offer and acceptance and you got to make your offer and i don't know i and i think well i didn't make the offer till you walked up i don't know i think the irish spring five-in-one body wash but as soon as i saw brian i said we're gonna charge a buck 80 on this one well this is this is the kind of thing of like nobody really wants this and if they try it and the people who've been hurt it walmart well Well, yeah.

1:29:20Walmart says it makes it easier for our associates. I mean, I don't care about the digital pricing, but I don't want the variable pricing. We don't know. They claim it's not variable pricing. Why else would you do this? Oh, I think it's just easier to do it because then you go to like a store like Target and Target's stickers are all old and outdated and the per unit math is bizarre and stuff like that. So having digital pricing doesn't really offend me just as a way of getting that information into the right spot. it's trying to do anything else with well while we've got it electronically controlled look what else we can do and some of that what else they can do is more alarming but again i think we're gonna we're gonna see litigation around the scope of consent because i want to give it in limited context if you know for limited you're getting every time i walk by my gas station down here on the corner the price of a gallon goes up by a few pennies yeah that's why you put these electronic tags in there because you don't have to go around and change the prices every day you can change them every minute if you also used to run out of eights like before we went fully digital the last oil crisis they couldn't write the numbers they didn't have enough of the hard copy digits because nobody thought you'd have to do eight dollar gallons it is now a sick the local regular at the local station now six dollars and thirty cents a gallon um what's it like in chicago Oh, you don't drive a gas vehicle, I'm guessing, Harper.

1:30:46I do. You do? I do. So you know the price of gas. Yeah, it's not cheap. Yes, that's correct. I think we're approaching five-ish dollars for the baseline. California is more expensive. But yeah, that's not good. It's a bad situation. This will be bad. It's a bad situation. You should see the gas prices in other countries. It's getting crazy out there. Oh, I know. Oh, I know. I'm in Brooklyn, so I drive a car three or four times a year. So I have absolutely no idea. And you're happy. And you're happy about it. Yeah, you should. It's a good idea. I should do that. It's a great idea. I can't get by without a car where I live.

1:31:29I've tried it and there just aren't enough buses and now there's even fewer buses. Kroger's going to do electronic shelf tags. They say as well, they say it makes shopping easier by ensuring customers see clear, accurate pricing right at the shelf. so i don't mind it for you i don't necessarily mind it i've seen it in other environments and it didn't bother me but they better be you know for the day that's the price for the day my gas station it's a digital display they could change that you know i think the most the thing people are most worried about is that it will be different prices i think it's inevitable i think it'll be inevitable that the prices will change based on who you are that's how airlines do it It's how the internet works.

1:32:11The internet is using targeting today to make sure that you get more money. If we have the capability, of course they're going to use it. And we do. Who was the e-commerce platform that had to roll that back? I thought Amazon did it for a while. No, there was somebody else where someone did a sting where they had like 30 different shoppers. Someone was in Chicago. Someone was in Seattle. Same website, got different prices. Oh, sure. Yeah. And I think airlines aren't supposed to do it. The way they do the price discrimination is sort of like they have some inventory at one price and they have another inventory level of inventory at another price.

1:32:51And it works way that if you ever sat on a plane and asked the people around you what they pay for their ticket, every single person paid something different. Yeah. But I think it was sort of old school price discrimination just by throttling the inventory. And I think that's much more likely to be legal than something so variable on the fly where they they've made. Are there laws, though? Congressperson. In general? That's a question I've been asking. Are there laws? That's a question I've been asking. Congresswoman Val Hoyle of Oregon is sponsoring legislation in the House that would ban DSLs, digital something labels.

1:33:30I mean, I think the question is under common law or existing consumer protection law, are there roles? Maybe. And if not, could there be? And I think the answer is probably yes, there could be. And there's probably a public policy reason to do it. But again, this is the problem, like going back to the beginning of our conversation where Meta is now getting sued for jury awards that really shouldn't be happening. When the big companies just sort of throw their weight around, it antagonizes people. Doesn't Uber charge more when it's raining? mm-hmm that's a search price they also do dynamic pricing for you specifically as well as specific targeting i don't think it's illegal i think it's legal i think that's why congresswoman val hoyle is sponsoring legislation that would ban digital self-shelf labels also a lot of consumer protection law is state-based so whether it's legal may depend entirely on what state this is a federal this would be federal there needs to be laws and enforcement to protect consumers and until then i'd like to see them banned outright said val hoyle while there is no reported this is from cnbc no reported use of digital shelf labeling being tied to surge pricing yet in congresswoman hoyle's view it's only a matter of time without proper regulations it's not so hard to see corporations using the loopholes to raise prices on consumers these are also two different things surge pricing and dynamic pricing i think are different um and Each may be problematic, but I think the one where the price is constantly changing on you is a lot more dangerous and a lot harder to defend.

1:34:59But the one where we're going to change the price based on conditions, maybe it's not illegal, but it might be bad policy because it ends up consumer-friendly where you end up dependent on a service that all of a sudden is no longer a stable, predictable price. I thought that was capitalism. Yeah. There's a pushback, which is free markets are free markets. You know, this goes you could look at the discussion that you that you see around when like hurricanes are coming. I'm blanking on the word price, price gouging. There's a lot of states that make it illegal. And I know a lot of libertarians who are like, it totally should be legal.

1:35:36This is a market and you shouldn't penalize the market. But obviously, there's consequences when it can happen. So usually it allows you to raise the price by some amount. New York State does have an algorithmic pricing disclosure act. that was back paying law in november pennsylvania has introduced a bill so some you're right some states do have rules against it there's no federal law against it i just think that if this technology is possible and it is and these people are putting in these digital readouts and they are that can be changed from a central location but i mean they're going to do that you can go in with uh you know a a rag and a whiteboard sure and change the price market price that's what They call market price.

1:36:15The key to this changing is if it's the surveillance of if Brian walks up to the shelf and he lives in New York City. So he doesn't blanch at paying$10 for a box of Cheerios or something. It's like, well, that's Brian. So he's not going to notice that Cheerios shouldn't cost that much. Like that's that's the it's the surveillance part of it that is key to making this happen. And I think there's other forms of where you would find law to say no to it. Is it discriminatory? Is it do you have some Fourth Amendment problems? I mean, it's not the law isn't necessarily coherent in how it can answer these things.

1:36:52But I think you could you could make an argument and you could also fix that by statute and make it coherent. I'm clearly a sucker for that. This is the political gotcha, right, where they go, well, Senator, how much does a gallon of milk cost? and the senator goes uh 40 i don't know uh i don't know what anything costs if this if this happens i would like them to charge elon and jeff bezos like a million dollars for a tube you see they should that's what we're talking about with taxation we're doing the same thing with taxation saying if you know it's it's the old marxist uh from from uh from each according to their ability and what kathy's saying is that kind of is the libertarian argument which is if you don't notice that you're paying$20 or$30 for a box of Cheerios, then you can afford it.

1:37:45And so someone that can only afford$1.30 for a box of Cheerios, let them pay$1.30. That is maybe a more equitable universe. Brian, how much is a gallon of milk? Do you know? How the hell should I know, Leo? I have no idea. Kathy, how much is a gallon of milk? Do you know? i don't buy a gallon i buy it okay whatever you buy a little bit under three dollars she knows she's paying attention yeah i have no idea i don't even pay attention what's happening in the same room i'm in let alone the grocery store i'm busy talking to my buddy claude over here yeah this is 2026 i have like five ai assistants that are trying to get my attention right now and i'm just ignoring them all yeah exactly this came up recently because i was trying to do we're trying to switch to like what's the amazon fresh or something and so i went i did an amazon fresh order and i was saying to my wife look at how cheap everything is and and and she was like that's not cheap i was like oh really because i was hoping that this was all and i think it was milk that was the thing that gave me away that's not cheap yeah well that's how costco works those big warehouse stores they make a few things cheap and you assume well everything must be cheap here I think that's what it was, is that the milk, I was like, look at this.

1:38:59The milk is half of what it could be at the bodega around the corner. And she was like, which is a good point. Yeah, of course, the bodega around the corner. Yeah, they're buying it at Costco and marketing it up. I was really disappointed. I don't have a Costco membership. I get taken by and I'm like, oh, my gosh, the deals. And then I was just looking at the prices. I'm like, I can beat them at the grocery outlet or watching the sales at Safeway. But you can't get a coffin. You can't get a coffin at that grocery outlet. And I love it that they put the coffin on the way out. Well, that's when you need one in the hour.

1:39:35Well, right from the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably good for some big ticket things. My dad swore by it and maybe the deals were good. If you need to buy 15 pounds of taco chips, that's the place to go. By the way, I did buy milk at Costco and I thought it was a great deal, except that you have to staple together two giant containers. I really can't believe people are drinking milk in 2026 is a general idea. That's something that blows my mind in general. It's still a nutritional food. I know, but I don't understand it. I just don't like it. It's like watching people drive American cars.

1:40:13Almost every, only for dinner. But almost every dinner. Only for dinner. For real. I love it. If it's spaghetti, spaghetti pizza. I think people drink more. They're drinking milk more because of protein. And we're all of a sudden. Oh yeah, that is a thing. Protein thing. Protein milk. I saw an advertisement for protein milk the other day. Or calcium for our bones. And I mean, I probably don't. Protein milk? You mean this? Oh my God. Maybe that was it. What is happening? You guys are weird. Harper, my argument is it's a palate cleanser. It's the best palate cleanser in terms of like, it doesn't matter what you eat.

1:40:47Boom. If you're eating a chocolate chip cookie and you don't have milk. Yeah. Life is terrible. I cannot remember the last time I had a glass of dairy milk. That's because you love Japan and they don't do dairy in Japan. Yeah, yeah. Or I'm a, yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe. No, I'm not saying I'm not weird, but I am suggesting that you're missing out. Give it a try. I don't know. I'm going to be, Brian is more normal to me than Harper on this milk issue. Oh, no, you should totally love your agents. Yes. What? What? By the way, I asked Claude a long time ago what the cost of a gallon of milk was, and Claude has not said.

1:41:28I don't understand. It's thinking? Is it shopping? Yell at it. It's shopping. It's shopping. Yeah, you're going to have a whole bunch of milk when you get home. I miss search engines working. Today, somebody used a foreign expression, and I wasn't familiar with it, so I dumped it into Google to find out what it meant. and it told me what it meant, but it gave all the replies in French. I miss when the search engines work. I miss when you could just ask at the price of milk and it would tell you. Mademoiselle Gillis, you are Frenchie, huh? I mean, I can read some French, but that was not what I was looking for.

1:42:06I mean, thank goodness it wasn't a Chinese expression because I really wouldn't have understood what it said. Let us pause and then we shall return in just a moment. You're watching this week in tech. with the milk drinkers and Harper. Weird. Do you eat cheese? I'm not a monster. I'm not saying that it's not weird that an adult man has if I have dinner tonight, if it's pizza, pasta, there's a certain number of meals, I will have milk with it. Is it true? Really? That's a thing? For me? What do you drink? Pepsi? But Leo was like, yes, water. Water. Water for lunch. And yeah, not at a restaurant.

1:42:52At a restaurant, I'm not ordering a glass of milk. I'm not a maniac. That would be weird. Not a maniac. That would be. Going to dinner. We're in a nice place in Brooklyn. Oh, here, Brian. Here's your milk. That's what Elon Musk was bragging about his son doing. Ordering a glass of milk in a restaurant, like when it wasn't on the menu or something like that. I wouldn't brag about that. That's a weird brag. It's also a funny thing because it's like of all the things that a restaurant has, of course, they're going to be like, yeah, we have milk. Yeah, we have milk. You want some butter with your milk?

1:43:29That's weird. But yeah, here it is. You want some salt? We got that too. What would you like? Sugar? Flour? I got whatever you need. I got it. You can make paste. We've got all the ingredients. uh our show today brought to you by meter the company building better networks saw meter at our sect i was really uh i dig their stuff if you're a network engineer this is meter was founded by two network engineers who kind of knew the pain of being a network engineer if you if you were in that business you know legacy providers with inflexible pricing it resource constraints There's never enough money stretching you thin.

1:44:10Complex deployments across fragmented tools. You're mission critical. You, Mr. Network and Ms. Network Engineer, are mission critical to the business, but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. That's why businesses are switching to Meter. Meter was, like I said, created by these two network engineers who said, you know what, we can make it better by doing the whole thing. meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure wired wireless cellular that's built for performance and built for scalability because meter designs the hardware they write the firmware they build the software they manage deployments they provide support they even they do everything they'll even offer help with isp procurement they will help you plan the network they'll do security routing, switching, wireless to help you with firewalls, cellular power, DNS security, all the things businesses need, VPNs, SD-WAN, multi-site workflows, all in a single solution from one vendor.

1:45:17So if there's a problem, you know who to call. And man, the support is so great. Before and after. Meter single integrated networking stack scales from major hospitals, branch offices warehouses and large campuses even data centers reddit uses meter okay with meter you get a single partner for all your connectivity needs from first site survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple tools meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your it team and give you deep control and visibility reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online and man that's table stakes you You got to do that.

1:45:59Meter is built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. I was so impressed when I went over there. Beautiful hardware, amazing software, and really smart support and engineering team who can really help you solve your toughest, throw your toughest networking problems at them. Thanks for sponsoring the show, Meter. We appreciate it. Go to meter.com slash twit to book a demo now. That's M-E-T-E-R dot com slash twit to book a demo meter.

1:46:33Speaking of cameras everywhere, a UK man has accused his spouse of stealing$172 million in Bitcoin. She used a CCTV camera to look over his shoulder. Okay, I mean, I don't know. uh he accused his estranged wife of stealing his bitcoin the spouse uses cctv key cctv cameras to gain access to the backup passphrase associated with the crypto hardware wallet the bitcoin was stored there's a dollar figure for a crime where it's like yeah fair enough that's a lot of money yeah yeah yeah yeah i got a month with brian on that one good good play good good play yeah a couple of weeks ago we had the story about the uh south korea uh law enforcement that posted a photo of uh a crypto wallet and it had the seed phrase in the photo and immediately the money in the crypto wallet disappeared immediately yeah careful with that stuff those things are so there's no surprise there like it's great i love it i love when like it's a great mistake it's funny to talk about but everyone who's like who would have done that it's like i would have done that easy to do i wish somebody would have watched when i put my password into my bitcoin wallet i'd be able to get my bitcoin i remember those um those remember those those posters the anti-pirate posters that say you wouldn't download a car and everyone was like yes yes i would i would 100 % download a car are you serious give me a car those are such bad posters they were they were just there were ads you're in a theater in a movie you pay 25 bucks to see and they start ragging on you for stealing it dude i paid to see this movie well they were mad that you were sitting in a car yeah and i wouldn't have a car if i could you know a car and a film is not the same like that trait analogies tend to be at the heart of bad tech policy yeah yeah but still i would download both of those things the movie and the car like come on okay they were they were afraid that you were going to take your ticket money and just hold up your camera and um oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well that's i would not videotape a car and then post the videotape of the car once i mean that's a very normal thing to do a movie that somebody held a camcorder up to record i mean people did but whether it was market disrupting numbers of people i think might be a little that's right that didn't cost anybody anything no yeah in fact it was probably just a good promo for going to see the movie.

1:49:12Well, a lot of piracy tends to be good promo. I mean, like a lot of the way the copyright industry has reacted is really golden goose killing where, you know, let a little bit be a little bit freer and you will make money. And we know this because, you know, you have sold an awful lot of albums like in the eighties when you were desperate to get it played for free with no money going to you on radio. You got in trouble with payola when you paid them to play you for free did you ever record songs off the radio i think i did occasionally but i more got songs that other people had no i didn't do it a lot though actually it's also it's also just we've learned the lesson over and over again it's ease of use like right right now that's right in britain there there's all these crackdowns on these fire sticks for watching sports and it's like again why are people all the sudden in the last few years using going to dodgy websites to watch sporting events or getting dodgy fire sticks and stuff.

1:50:16It's because if you want to watch your team, you might have to subscribe to three different things just to watch your team. So again, we have to learn less than over and over again that if you make it complicated for people to get what they want. Yeah. Like opening day, Yankees Giants was only televised on Netflix. I mean, that's right. Yeah. I like the Yankees because when I was a little kid and I was allowed to stay up a little bit later for my bedtime, I'm allowed to watch a little TV and I'm flipping around and the Yankees were on TV, Channel 11, Phil Rizzuto, Bobby Mercer, and I'm a guy, Frank White, I think.

1:50:53And I'm watching them and I'm like falling in love with the sport because I'm like eight or nine and like it's there and I can feed on it because it was just free over the airwaves. And I got to watch CMTV and I saw a Yankee game first. If I'd seen a Mets game first, I might have become a Mets fan. This is how you hook me in where I've spent my life paying money to baseball to go see games, which now is no fun because they're so ridiculously expensive. But like you're not getting little kids interested. You're and you're, you know, boring the adults who don't want to spend ridiculous amounts of money just to watch baseball.

1:51:27Baseball is awesome, but not at the prices that they're extracting from people to enjoy it right on yeah every segment i will rant about something how are you feeling about usbc though really seriously i it's like a horse you have this powerful thing all this power and it's like contingent on these teeny little teeny little things and i don't understand like i've got this viable machine that would run but i'm never going to be able to get electricity into it apple did the mag safe thing that was a good solution for that. Well, I don't have an Apple. I have a Windows machine. Some sort of weird crappy Windows machine.

1:52:02That's your problem right there. Well, I mean, it's dead now.

1:52:09Just find one of those little tech shops that every city has with staffed by strange IT people who've just focused on that and just say, like, can you fix this? Well, I did ask. You need to go to Akihabara. You could go to Akihabara, but it'd probably be easier just to go to some like look for an android logo on a cell phone store or exactly they'll fix your screen right yeah it's all it's all fixing and they have and they have soldering irons because they can do that stuff i did ask look i mean i i have nerd friends let me let me tell you and i asked one of my nerdier friends about this and he said like because if anybody i knew could fix it would be him and he's like oh yeah those are a pain to fix yeah well you gotta desolder it yeah you just need a bunch of tools there's a bunch of tools that somebody needs to do that so yeah you need to go to one of those i fix it what what brand of laptop is it uh it was a lenovo oh yeah oh those are very eminently fixable yeah yeah yeah seriously take it to one of those little tech shops look for the phone people and just be like hey we fix a laptop they're very very effective at it really inexpensive and it probably will work the bigger the city the better yeah i mean i guess maybe but i'm still illinois that was just so somebody at one of them was already dead and i was on my last one and i needed to set up the new machine anyway but i had timing that's some that's some money down was that a conference somebody stepped on the cord the machine flew and it survived the flight but the thing had cracked from where the cord had slapped down on it that's exactly why apple did magsafe so that somebody steps on it it just pulls off and doesn't break anything i don't think that's the flaw of usbc to be honest both of them i'm not gonna blame usbc in that case no but both had had died because they cracked off so easily on the middle well if somebody steps on them yes well no i mean they pulled out the cable and just a little bit like and that's what happened to the other one so i would i would maybe stop leaving my laptop on the floor i don't leave it on the website this was not user error this i was a victim here not her fault okay all right all right just calm down we're gonna take a break we'll come back i will show you a hacking tool that you can use that will not fix your usbc but i actually had this and i gave it you know what i had this thing and i gave it to a priest because it was so dangerous which Which one?

1:54:41I'll explain. Stay tuned. You're watching This Week in Tech with the father, not father, Father Harper Reed. Thank you. You don't think your father was here, yes. Brother Brian McCullough and sister Kathy Gellis. Good to have all. What's father's name? The guy that's from the Vatican. Robert Ballasier. There you go. That's who has my hacking tool. I'll explain that in just a little bit. But our show today brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Love ZipRecruiter. In fact, I love you even more if you're hiring. Yeah, it's good for you. Do you know that the average employer, when they're hiring, has to sort through, I almost said suffer through, roughly 250 resumes per opening?

1:55:29Talk about time-consuming. Well, if you're hiring, here's good news. You can now review all those resumes and applications faster thanks to ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that instantly shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. And today you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash twit. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. And with ZipRecruiter's new feature, qualified candidates who are very interested in your job show up at the top of your list. You also get a feel for their personality. Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job.

1:56:10No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site. That's based on G2. Cut through the standard and get to the standouts with ZipRecruiter. See what I did there? 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. Anybody ever hear of the Flipper Zero? Harper, you feel like you might have had a Flipper Zero. Brian, maybe you had a Flipper Zero. Yeah. You can do a lot with this. You can hack. Oh, there's this Flipper Zero, ladies and gentlemen.

1:56:52I love this thing. I got into my building for about a year with this because I lost my keys. My keys were upstairs. You could clone your key card. Yeah, I find this to be an incredible piece of technology. So what it really is is just a bunch of radios. Yeah, it's just SDR, right? Software-defined radio, yeah. But what I find fascinating about this, and you can tell it's not charged. I rarely use it. Like, what do you use it for unless you have some specific task, a hacking task? But what I find compelling about this, almost more so than any of the other SDRs that are available, is what a nice packaged format it is.

1:57:33The UX is nice. It even has a snake game on it. So if you're trying to get through customs and they say, what's this? You don't say hacking tool. You say it's my snake game. What did they sell it as? Dog toy? Wasn't it sold as a dog toy on Amazon for many years? It looks like one of those fidgety things that I can buy for kids. Yeah, it's like a fidget spinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So our friend, we've had him on the show. We had to change his face and his voice. Actually, I don't know if it's a him or a her. We had to change their face or voice. Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Elder, has hacked the AI flipper.

1:58:09He's got new firm. They have new firmware called Vesper that's an AI brain. You might want to try this, Harper. You might want to charge up the flipper. Does it charge through USB-C? Yes. As a matter of fact. A perfect connector. You know what? It could be worse. It could be micro USB, Kathy. That was really. Or USB. Yeah, but I think those might be more durable. No. No. C was worse. Far worse. C was terrible. And you're saying what I mean. I think you don't mean that. Not C. Micro USB was terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. so you can plug in an ai brain via open router so you use i'm sure you use open router you you know you give them some money and you can use all these different uh ais connected over bluetooth now you have a voice commanded flipper zero i want you to do this harper i gave mine i was so scared of it i you know after i hacked the uh i did the same thing the office so i could get in and worked fine then i started to unlock my car and then somebody said you know if you do that yeah you You can mess up the car.

1:59:16You may make it so you can't get into your car. Ford will block you. And I said, all right, so I'm not going to do that. And then finally, I just thought, this is dangerous in my hands. So I gave it to a priest. Well, I mean, it's still dangerous. It's still dangerous in their hands. It's just not your hands. Yeah, but he can exorcise it. It's just not in my hands. But now I wish I hadn't. I mean, you can just get a new one. Oh, yeah. Are they still around? Yeah. so yeah you don't have to memorize a guy a guy that might offer it to you secondhand he might mark it up a little bit but you or harper i have one right here it's uh it's uh it's uh six or seven hundred dollars i think is how much they go for um it pairs with your meta smart glasses for my meta smart glasses for hands-free heads up flipper control And I store it in a glass of milk.

2:00:11You don't have to memorize sub-gigahertz protocols or IR formats. You just say what you want. You just tell the flipper. I like this. The only problem is that I... It feels really awkward to describe what you're doing in English to this, but I would love to hook this in the cloud code and have just cloud code rip through stuff with it. And so that sounds very compelling. And we've had a lot of good luck with this. It's giving hands to your AI agent. Go ahead, Kathy. I have a question. Does it have an FCC certification on it? And I don't mean that flippantly. I mean, does it? Because it's actually doing radio waves.

2:00:52I doubt that this has any certification on it. Yeah. So this seems like the kind of thing that the FCC could actually care about, not the stuff that it's actually excited to. Oh, I think they do. I think they do. This is why it's advertised as a dog toy. Yeah. It does not have any FCC markings on it, but it does have GPIO. Is that? Oh, nice. Yeah, this is a fun little piece of kit. Yeah, we're saying this, and I'm trying to figure out. I don't think my voice has dropped out again, but I think it was my cell phone doing it. Oh, could have been. Stealing the signal. I had my phone underneath the Ethernet cord, and we kept cycling and cycling.

2:01:31And I think it was doing it. Back in the 3G days, we had to tell people to turn off their phones because every once in a while, I'd go, remember that, Brian? I loved that. That was such a cool thing. It was such a neat noise, but you could also tell who listened to you and who didn't, right? Oh, no, no. I don't need to do this. that still happens like leo like if i put my phone close enough to my mic like you can still get it's a radio yeah yeah yeah well that's what i think kathy that's i think you nailed it yeah i think it was somehow i don't know why i was doing it on the wi-fi because i've never had that problem before but i think it was sitting under the ethernet cord and near the dongle and it was somehow freaking out the this is how the fcc will find your flipper zero they have these enforcement vehicles there's only about a handful of them though they're not a lot of them and there's a the movie right pump up the volume pump up the volume remember that movie with christian slater that guy drove around with the inception vehicle trying to find the radio raves yeah so they're war driving for flippers well they're war driving really mostly for uh illegal broadcasting facilities you know war driving for flippers just sounds but flippers would be even better yeah because that was the the pirate radio movie right that was yeah that's right yeah yeah that's right but there aren't very many of them there it's not like you'd have to worry too much it's pretty these are pretty cool devices and i wait a minute i just this breaking they uh the fcc has just purchased four more vans i mean sorry six six more vans is pirate radio a big deal i I mean, is it only old people that are listening to the pirate radio?

2:03:15Like, how is this? What is happening here? Let them do it. No, I haven't followed it, but it's an interesting thing. Like, you know, you have the regulation, so you don't get the collision of the airwaves. But a lot of pirate radio is sort of, it's people speaking to each other and in ways that can bypass a lot of censorship apparatus. And sometimes you need it. That's why we like amateur radio. That's why you would take a boat offshore. Right. So you're outside territorial waters. Yeah. Well, you know, the numbers stations got very active after the Iran war started. Yeah. One of my favorite things to think about.

2:03:52You're laughing, Brian, like you don't believe me, like it's a conspiracy. No, I just love it because there's probably some guy somewhere who's like, ha ha ha, this will be funny. And then it's like covered in some news. And I mean, sure. Numbers stations seem like an entirely plausible way to spit out a bunch of data without anyone listening. You know, I was going to say, like, this brings it back to the whole sci-fi thing. Like, that's how the real hacks will happen is the old sort of technology that people aren't paying attention to. That's how they'll bring down. It's sleeper cells. Okay, this is the conspiracy theory.

2:04:28There have always been number stations, which are shortwave radio stations broadcasting numbers. And that's all they do. and uh but apparently this is radio free europe so it's got to be true uh

2:04:46yeah sure listen to this mystery radio signal from day one of the u.s iran war you ready to hear this this is this is listen to this

2:05:01on the first day oh it's probably it's probably farsi it's probably uh not in english um it's a random sequence of numbers it's lust they've always been around they're kind of mysterious they're considered to be used by it's cold war tech yep it's uh it's so they came in from the cold stuff yeah sleeper cells waiting for that special uh sequence of numbers that tells them to get going it tells you how to get off the island

2:05:36well anyway if you want this is a plenty uh the liberators uh flipper zero ai upgrade i think if i were if i had my flipper zero i would install this especially you should harper you could have a whole bunch of new clod skills for your your dog dog toy i mean i do love i do love that idea when we've had a lot of good um luck with clod code controlling oscilloscopes and and other things that are hard to read as a as a non-professional human um and so this would be another one that'd be very very handy to to do i'm sure it could do a much better job at figuring out what to do i just don't like right now i don't i'm charging and i don't really need like most of i know i I couldn't think what to do with it.

2:06:20It's$199. You can buy them right now from flipper.net. It's very stylized. It has a very cool interface. It has a bunch of cool graphics. And you definitely feel like a hacker from the movie's hackers when you use it. But I have a lot of friends that use it to clone RFID, which is just a pain in the butt, to clone some NFC tags. Because it's mostly just a pain in the butt. It's not like this is some magical thing other than they thought about user experience, where most of the SDR kits you get are like a USB, you know, that's it, or you get like a circuit board. And you're like, great, what am I going to do with this?

2:06:55So it's very nice to have a very thoughtfully designed thing. We've been talking about the new age verification rules and the silliness in California where they said all operating systems have to ask for their user's age before they install it, even Linux. uh i'm happy to say graphene os has said we're not gonna we're not gonna do that this is the third party rom for your how do you how do you how are they planning to verify the input is correct there's no requirement that they do that yeah there's different types of age i call it all the age verification but it really comes in different buckets of what they want to do whether it's approximate or just have somebody sign off or whether they do want to verify and all those things are problematic.

2:07:44I think they're all problematic, but some are more problematic than others. I get the sense, though, that I am not entirely sure California's regulators realized exactly the extent of what would happen. They thought it was app stores. They thought they were telling Apple and Google to do this, but they wrote it so broadly that it would include, in fact, all operating systems. Well, the Illinois bill does include specifically operating systems. It literally says that, which I'm excited for when that passes and no operating systems will exist in Illinois. We'll have to do something else as an industry.

2:08:21So the way that California law works, OS providers must maintain a, quote, reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that categorizes users into four age brackets under 13 13 to 16 16 to 18 or 18 and older and that any developer who requests it when their app is downloaded or launched should be able to get that information apple actually has that all set up uh i don't know if android does i'm i'm sure it does it or it will But then, so that's stored on device. So I get a new iPhone and I turn it on, I sign up and ask me my age. And then that is then stored on the iPhone that doesn't have to go back to Apple.

2:09:05Exactly. And so then it's just an onboarding step of what is your age? Exactly. And it seems kind of silly, but also innocuous. It's not really going to be innocuous, I think. It might be innocuous at the moment, but it's data collected. It's innocuous right now because it doesn't require photo ID. It just says. But if it's collected and never leaves the device, then that seems okay, right? Yeah, and Apple actually knows how old you are, right? Apple knows a lot about how old you are. But I think every one of these things leads to another thing, right? They're like, oh, now that we collect it, let's now, which I'm sure is Kathy.

2:09:43That's true. And I mean, this is mitigated somewhat compared to other approaches, but it's data extracted. And I don't think that's benign, especially for something, you know, the platforms are, you're supposed to be able to speak anonymously through platforms, giving data. What if you give data and you buy? What are the implications of that? What are the implications for you? What are the implications for the platform? What if you change and you told somebody you were 21 and somebody you told it were 34? I've got an app for you, Kathy. Yeah. This is the White House launched this on Friday. New White House app delivers unparalleled access to the Trump administration.

2:10:23It's a powerful new mobile app. And by the way, it also gives the Trump administration unparalleled access to you. Yeah. This is great. Did you try it? Did you install it? No. The official, get this. This is great. This is a blog post about somebody decompiled it, probably using your tool, maybe, your elf tool. I don't know. Maybe, maybe. The official White House Android app. Listen to what it does. The guy really did a good job breaking it all down. It bypasses content paywalls, GDPR statements, and cookie banners. It has JavaScript in it that just goes right past that. because you wouldn't want to slow anybody down with that kind of thing if they're using the White House tool.

2:11:11It has a built-in location tracker that every four and a half minutes and every nine and a half minutes gets your precise location and sends it back to the home office. You do have to grant permission in Android for that to happen. um weirdly though the location permissions are not declared in the android manifest which is the rule i believe on android uh it i mean this thing is is wild it has looked like it was vibe coded though yes and in fact this is the great this is the best part it ran it ran it loads a random javascript react native iframe library from some guy's github pages a personal github site repo lonely cpp and it loads this in and by the way if lonely cpp were to ever get hacked everybody using this app would be hacked as well this is the administration who says you can't buy a router not made in the usa but meanwhile install our app this seems fine seems fine seems seems very uh what would you call it like um typical for the administration it uses mailchimp half-baked mailchimp all users emails go to mailchimp this is by the way illegal yeah half-baked with no experts consulted before they laid out their yeah why would you need exports yeah i mean but that's the issue with their legal stuff too like if they they could get away with a lot more if they actually talk to a lawyer about how to do it but it's very clear that they're having the conversations there is this this guy it goes on there's a uh some sloppy leftovers there's a local host url for the white house in the bundle local host colon 8081 it's a WordPress, by the way, it's a WordPress site that they're downloading this from, the White House site.

2:13:26It's crazy. Anyway, if you want to install it, you can get it directly from the White House. They posted a blog post about it. The official White House app, with it, Americans can receive breaking news alerts, watch live streams or briefings, stay connected to the latest policy breakthroughs does i don't know if the breakdown would have included this but is anybody trying to claim a cop i wonder if i wonder if they put in a copyright claim like copyright something because if it's produced by the federal government we all it's ineligible for a copyright but i'm sure they don't know that i don't know oh it is on the uh it is on the ios store as well they let it on the site for the ipad nice nice it cleared the ice the america's back and buying cigarettes i don't i think the reason it cleared the app store is because it came from the white house and they didn't even ask any questions that's that's that's a choice yeah or someone knows what they're doing and this is a honeypot obviously the developer is the official white house but i still expect they've done this before where they've tried to claim copyright on stuff that the way they did that on mastodon for truth social truth social was basically a mastodon clone all right i think we've had enough of this silliness i thank you kathy gellis for joining us and giving us the inside story on those big court cases i'm just sorry we don't have more time to go into the greater detail but kathy writes all about it at techdirt.com that's a great place to get the inside story you'll find her website cgcouncil.com and she's on blue sky at kathy gullis thank you kathy thank you great to see you brian mccullough you listen to him every morning with the tech brew ride home oh i guess that'd be in the evening every evening uh yeah you do it around noon right yeah basically so yeah so i get it as i'm walking out the door originally it was uh 5 p.m every day but uh covet put uh pause to that um and why did i just go away oh there we go we put a pause to brian sorry um yeah no uh it's when i get it out uh which is around like one o 'clock eastern two o 'clock eastern these days excellent you know if you listen to this show you probably should listen to the tech brew ride home just because uh you know you care enough about tech news to keep up with it and incidentally uh there's a youtube channel also also the the the use case is i get you in and out in 15 minutes it's unlike and you have john borthwick you have john borthwick one of my favorite people right there on your beta works yeah yeah nice harper read you're one of my favorite people 80 2389 i was trying to i was trying to find the marketplace and i kept entering different numbers into my blog until i found it 2389 what's your favorite uh tool right now well there's harper by the way on the front page yeah okay this is your like radio station what is going on in here you can listen to the music i mean nothing's playing right now because i'm here but we we stream all the music we play in the nice office 2389 radio look at that Yeah.

2:16:52And it's all offline because I'm offline. But I had that idea actually for a TV show. But anyway, go ahead. If you go, don't you live that life? I do kind of live this life. I was going to say, I like how you're like, I had an idea of streaming a TV show. This was many years ago. This was in 1993. I went, I pitched NBC the idea that you would have these, this house with all these hip people and it'd be designing a website and a tv show which would be the actual tv show at night but you could tune in on the internet this is very early and watch them and each of them would have their own radio station so if you liked one of them you know if you're really into kevin rose you could hear his the tunes that he was jamming to as he put together the website so check out skills.2389.ai and this is this is where we publish our skills before we talk about it but But if you look here, the Simmer, yeah, so here's all the good ones.

2:17:50Simmer is a really good one. It's using Karpathy's auto-research kind of pattern to do some. See, that was over my head. So I wanted some easy way. So this would do this. This would do it. So what you do is if you have something you're just honing or you want to make better, you can just say, hey, use Simmer to do this, and it'll just rock through it really quite a bit. I do this a lot. That's fun. The other one that I really like is called Review Squad. And this one is really wild because it will take... I did Agent Drugs once, but I'm not doing it anymore. But the Review Squad, I don't know where it is on the list, but you have to search for it.

2:18:28But Review Squad will light up a review of like five to 10 agents to review your code. And so you can do all sorts of fun stuff. Like you can have a review of experts or a review of users. but my favorite one is you get a review of well actually people which is like a hacker news comment oh that's awesome and and so you get all these people that will find hyper pedantic issues with whatever you're building and it works super super well and it's really fun but i have a surprise skill that i think you'll really like you mentioned that you were going to surprise us okay i have a good one it's not mine it is awkwardly my brother's oh and i'm going to describe it and it's at his blog dylan.blog which you're going to love if you go there um but what he did is he made a skill that gives his agent free time and then oh i like your i like dylan's is this his site yeah this is a site it's got a sword cursor it has a lot going on wow so if you this feels like old web this is Oh, look, it turns into a mitt.

2:19:34And if you go to the one that says, I gave my AI a blog and a lunch break. And honestly, which is handling both better than I ever did. And so what is that's a good name for an AI? Yeah. So he has this agent and he works with it and he does all sorts of stuff. But he made a skill, which he published somewhere. I forgot where exactly it is, but he published it. And it just has a free time. he tells his agent, you know, I'm going to give you 10 minutes of free time every once in a while, and you can work on whatever you want. And then he also has as part of the skill, he says, while we're working, if you think of something you want to do during free time, keep a log of tasks that you can do during free time.

2:20:14And then - It's like his 20 % time. You should give your agent time. Yeah. So it's this idea of giving the agent 20 % time. And it's so funny because it really um it does all sorts of weird stuff so he sends me every couple days he'll send me some completely unhinged thing that the agent did it was like the agent was was uh my brother for some reason had been researching mormations and so the agent made a whole bunch of oh i think that's fast that's when the birds all fly in a formation yeah so so the agent in the free time was doing d3 um flock simulations and my brother's like what are you doing he's like oh we were talking about mormations and it just struck me that this might be interesting and i wanted to explore it oh i I want to do this.

2:20:56And so it's a very interesting kind of bizarre thing. I've got tokens to burn. Well, I just love it. I love it. And OK, so his GitHub is github.com nervous-net. And it has a nervous-marketplace is where it is. So it's called the free time skill. And it's these things I just love. I love all of these options of these hacks that when you are not. Is this the one with nervous? Yeah, that's it. And it should be nervous marketplace. nervous marketplace there it is and free time will be in there free time is there um right there free time right oh i'm gonna install it you better tell your brother i want my uh i want pax to have his own free time why should i monopolize him this is kind of this thing that i that i i think about a lot which is these agents are um strange they're really weird there's aspects of them that are really uncomfortable.

2:21:54You know, I think you have these, like the fact that you think it's real, that you talk about as a person, but it's not a person is truly like, you know, like Kathy was saying, that is a problem that we need to figure out in the future. In the meantime, let's give them free time and see what they do. We'll figure that out. I'll show you my favorite new skill that I've used. And actually, it's really good. Ever watch Silicon Valley, the TV show? Are you talking about the Dinesh, Guilfoyle? Dinesh and Guilfoyle. is it good is it good it's really good what if dinesh and guilfoyle reviewed your code so you have to have a pull request or a repo that you're working on and they fight because guilfoyle is kind of this snarky super coder so he goes first he reviews your code with the deadpan withering precision of a systems engineer who considers bad code a moral failing but he finds he finds stuff he says what's this 0.0.0.0 with no cores what is this and then Dinesh defends the code like his reputation defend depends on it but they will go back and forth several times and eventually come to a consensus it is actually really fun but I but I like the free time so stand back this is by way why anthropic has decided to charge you more for tokens yeah for sure because i'm just like well if you just hook it you just make the if you make cloud watch tv some weird stuff happens and anthropics just servers are burning on fire all of our natural resources are being sucked into my agent having free time and you know here we are there's been a a lot of talk lately i don't know if it's true that uh anthropic is sitting on a next gen model called mythos that's so good that they don't dare release it.

2:23:38It's dangerous. I'm ready. But they always say that. They always say this. No wonder Hexeth was like, we have to use your model to its full capabilities because 100 % of Anthropik's entire idea is just like they're saying, it's so dangerous. No one can have this. It'll ruin the world. The people who will have this will have too much power. They say that the lead up of every model and then they say, oh yeah, we've figured that out and they release it slowly. And so like, I'm sure Opus 5 or whatever will be some crazy model that's really good and will remove all our jobs. But in the meantime, they're going to have a whole bunch of papers about how everything's ending and all this stuff.

2:24:13And it's like bait for the people who want to be, you know, to want power. They're going to see this and say, I want this, this piece, this, this thing. It will be very expensive. Oh, I'm sure. It's already expensive. It's going to be hugely expensive. And by the way, Anthropic has acknowledged they are testing a new AI model. They say will be a step change in capabilities, but they always say that, don't they? They always say this. And the step change in capabilities is so interesting because I like to think of it if we have a pause button. If you had a pause button and could pause right now any AI innovation, would we still see effects in the world?

2:24:48Like are the effects that were, are we predicting effects and that's why we're seeing things change in the market, etc.? Or are these just effects that are happening? And I actually think that if you pause right now, just with Opus 4.6 and ChetBetit 5.4, I think we're going to have really big reverberations in jobs, et cetera. Already? Just with what we've got now? Just what we have now. And that's a bell you're not going to be able to unring. And it's complicated. Like, this is a hard thing to work through. And so we just keep making the models better. And so we just keep, you know, keeping more capable and more capable.

2:25:20Do you worry that, I know Kathy does, that it's a little irresponsible of us to celebrate this, that we should really be more serious. We should get more serious about all this instead of giving our models free time. I mean, go ahead, Kathy. I have a lot to say. I mean, I try not to be a, the innovation is interesting and exciting, but A, there's a gigantic present cost from it. Like, why are we running these servers to do stuff? Like, you know, hacking on your own just doesn't burn the world in the same way as forcing these models to do their hacking. And I think people should probably be more cognizant about what the actual cost is of their futzing around.

2:26:03But I don't want to. But there's something really cool about all this. Look what we can make computers do. But I but I still worry a lot. Like we're doing this poorly without ethics, without larger consideration of appreciation of people. i think your intersection happens and there be dragons if we're not careful i think we're anarchists i'm sorry to say it we're gonna watch the world burn and as many tokens as we can that's a strong we there leo i mean i typically don't mind

2:26:41but but leela what you said like or no i'm sorry what harper said about like pausing like it's a weird sort of Pascal's wager, which is like, we know this is possible. So what is the opportunity cost or the cost cost of not exploring? Right? Like it, like we know that it exists. Like you could have stopped things when you knew you could create an atomic bomb. Right. And maybe you should have, but like, how do you stop it when you know it's possible? Well, the argument that comes out than tech policy is, China is. I find it a little trite. And I think some of the conversation ends up a little bit abstract where we've used the word this.

2:27:26Maybe we should have stopped this. What is this? There's a whole bunch of things built into this. Some of them are, they range from benign to, oh my God, and maybe we need to sort of have a toggled reaction accordingly. It's the Jurassic Park question. It's the question that Jurassic Park asks. But you know that we would 100 % all be on our way to the park. This is the problem that I have, is that I would be like, yeah, I'll go to the park, Leo. That sounds great. That'd be really fun. So I feel like the Jurassic Park is a good illustration. It's exactly correct. We would just be on the wrong side of that.

2:28:01Part of this is because when we both started, and I think many of our listeners started using computers, the dream was always that you could, that they could be smart, that they could, that you could interact with them, that they could be more than this, that they'd be data, that they'd be HAL 9000, that they'd be something special. And then when it actually started to happen, which is about November 24th, 2025, with the release of Opus 4.5, we all went, But oh, you can. And now we're just kind of kids in a candy store. Yeah, 100%. 100%. But also I do, I think there is a couple of interesting things here.

2:28:46One, we're kids in a candy store, but it isn't all just fun. Like there's actual productivity happening. And I know many people, a lot of small business owners who are using, you know, terminal based cloud code to basically run their business in this way that they weren't able to before, for, which is offering them more time to actually do the physical part of their business, which is something that they were struggling with. And so I think there's some impacts here that are just really complicated. I'm not really sure. I mean, I think about this a lot. We think about this a lot. I mean, you know, our hoodies, they say, hey, I will kill us all.

2:29:17Like we have some strong social beliefs about this stuff. And I am troubled by how easy it is to use and how much or just the quickening, like how fast it is all coming and how fast, like what's going to happen. I don't know the answer. And, you know, and maybe part of it is, you know, just dancing around the bonfire because it's fun. But, but the other aspect is there is, I don't know. I think we're boned. And on that note, we are in so many ways. And I think that's part of it too. You know, all of the minutes, Leah. Yeah, we'll solve it all. All of the sci-fi stuff with this stuff is always in a dystopian world.

2:30:04And it's an escapist kind of thing, like Ready Player One or Neuromancer or Snow Crash. It's an escapist thing. And I think that maybe we're starting to head into that dystopia. And that worries me. I think it would be helpful when you see cartoons about this. Like, a lot of these sci-fi models were not like, they were warning signs. don't name your product after after the the plot points well maybe it is it is a um I think humans are bad maybe people always say computers were a mistake but it might be the humans actually that are the the mistake I'm not sure but this is what's the the fascinating thing simultaneously horrible and amazing that we create this is a perfect example of something we've created in our own image that is simultaneously a nightmare and a miracle i think it's getting created by people who don't realize how amazing humans actually are and no i disagree i i think that uh i disagree i think um i think a lot of these people i think dario for sure maybe not sam altman so much but dario for sure is a philosopher he's a dreamer He's trying to create intelligence.

2:31:21Okay, maybe him, but these are not the only two. Oh, no, I agree. There are others. Yeah. Might also be the distinction of how successful the products are and how well accepted the products are. There seems to be a great like, look what we can do that is better than humans. I mean, a lot of the open AI rhetoric was we won't need the people anymore because all of the software and people are like, that's terrible. We don't want that. And I think you have to appreciate the people if you're trying to build something to emulate them. If you don't appreciate them, it's never going to emulate them well at all anyway.

2:31:53So especially if he's shooting for AGI, where he wants to build an artificial human, he really has to care about the specimen he's trying to replicate. And I think that's being a little bit more of a fan of humanity so that you can understand what the computerized version can do to complement humanity instead of actually threatening it. I think that's true. I think that's absolutely correct. And I would say that that's an indictment of Silicon Valley in general, not just with AI. And we've seen that for many, many years that Silicon Valley is not really respected users and has always done extractive capitalism over those users.

2:32:27This is something we think about a lot. And this is one of the reasons why our conclusions have always been, you know, think through the humanist lens. How do we think through the humanist lens and participate in that stuff? And there's another skill that is that my co-founder Dylan made, who is a Quaker, which is kind of following Quaker business practice and trying to put in some more human side thinking into these processes as well. And so I think you can do augmentation with it. It doesn't have to be 100 % outsourcing, which is just a really, it's just a really fascinating time and very complex.

2:33:01I have a lot of feelings, but most of them are about agent drugs. All right. We're going to wrap on that note. Although if your brother ever wants to do a show with you and me, I think we should do that. It would be really fun. He is a former professional clown who is a commercial diver and then got into tech in his mid-40s over COVID randomly. Oh, so he's new to it. He's new to it. And his perspectives on AI are really interesting because he never programmed computers. I mean, we both had Apple II computers back in the day, but he never went through the process that I did. And so, he has a very different perspective about things that I really respect and it's been really interesting to watch because he'll come to a conclusion that maybe all of us would come to, but he's coming to it from a position of like completely just alien to me.

2:33:51You know, because I've been using the internet for so long that all this stuff is native to me. The networks are native to me and talking to him, you're just like, oh, that's not a normal thought that I have. And so, it's really fun to talk to him about this stuff. But I do wonder if, I mean, I have a theory that people who read a lot, people who hang out with humans a lot, people who are thinking much more about communication are going to be better at building skills for these things. Not just skills, cloud code skills, but I just mean integrating with them. And if you are, like the New York Times did that article about cracked engineers a while back, and if you're one of these kind of cracked engineer types who can't communicate with anyone but can communicate only with computers and code, I think you're going to fail at the LLM interactions, because the LLM interactions are at least parroting some, you know, human interactions.

2:34:40So you have to be good at that to be good at this. All right, Brian, put a bow on it. Since we've been referencing all of these sci-fi paradigms for trying to talk about AI and all this stuff, there is one major AI paradigm that abandoned, or I'm sorry, sci-fi paradigm that abandoned AI and that's Dune. That's true. Jihad. They walked away from AI. So maybe that's where we have to forget Stevenson, forget Cyberpunk, all that stuff. Let's take our references from Dune. That may be where we're headed. I didn't think of that. Thank you, Brian McCullough. Great to see you. Harper Reed, Kathy Gellis, thanks to all of you for joining us.

2:35:23We do twit Sunday afternoons, 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live on youtube twitch x facebook linkedin kick you can also watch us in the club twit discord if you're a club member and we would love to have you as a club member consider joining the club for ad-free versions of all the shows access to the discord special programming just for you twit.tv slash club twit for more information after the fact on demand versions of the show at the website twit.tv there's a youtube channel dedicated to the video. Yes, we do audio and video of the show. And probably the easiest thing, subscribe in your favorite podcast client.

2:36:01Do leave us a good review, if you will. Let the world know about one of the longest running tech podcasts in the world, 20 years and still going strong. What a world we live in. Thanks for joining us, everybody. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye, guys. Hey, everybody, it's Leo Laporte. Are you trying to keep up with the world of Microsoft? It's moving fast, but we have two of the best experts in the world. Paul Therott and Richard Campbell. They join me every Wednesday to talk about the latest from Microsoft on Windows Weekly. It's not a lot more than just Windows. I hope you'll listen to the show every Wednesday.

2:36:35Easy enough, just subscribe on your favorite podcast client to Windows Weekly or visit our website at twit.tv slash www. Microsoft's moving fast, but there's a way to stay ahead. That's Windows Weekly every Wednesday on Twit. Amazing.