TWiT 1078: The Great British Marmalade Scandal - Building Your Own Router

35:52Because that way we get more screen time per user. But see, here's my problem with this is for, first of all, there's this perception. And I think this has happened in the jury that there's something magical about technology companies and they're magically threatening to us. And they're using some sort of hypnosis to get kids to use their product and i think that that's basically fundamentally an anti-technology point of view we don't ban cigarettes we don't ban alcohol we don't ban gambling in most cases every state now has a lottery so there's state sanctioned gambling as addictive as it is my fear is that this is going to be used it already is being used to ban social media for young people without acknowledging that there is value to social media as well right all of the examples you just gave are also banned for young people.

36:42So, you know, young people is one thing. Okay. You're right. Okay. That's a good point. And I don't think we need to necessarily, maybe we need to, I just feel that this is going to products are designed, but. Expand into a huge anti-tech movement where we do in fact say, we've got to get these companies out of our lives. I think we should be very aware of this, but we also shouldn't as an overreaction to that possibility, decide that there is nothing that can be done. And these companies can just design the products the way they, you know, there's an example I like to give because I lived through it.

37:17Video games in the eighties and nineties when Mortal Kombat was released, it created an outrage and everyone was like, oh, video games are bad for kids. And like, we shouldn't, and us as kids were like, no video games are awesome. And like they're all trying to, to uh to to to outlaw and to ban video games and ah but look in the end video games stayed and this was moral panic and blah blah blah it wasn't i just realized this recently actually that is the reason that the um you know peggy and uh and oh my god what's the rating system for video games in the us um oh um the name escapes yes that is when they were created the the srb thank you benito the srb was created and it's it's not banning games but it's just putting a label on i'm okay with that are inappropriate for certain ages to inform the parents and that is an important societal reaction to these things because you know i have to point out that it was the same kind of pseudosciencey opinion that well it's just everybody can tell that video games are bad for you and are going to make you violent everybody can tell that social media and spending too much time on your phone is bad for you without any scientific background backing and there's no scientific backing that there's a lot of people there's jonathan height saying that and there are a lot of people saying that now about social and there isn't any real science saying that any more than there was about video games but because i think there's more and more studies i think there's more and more maybe we're not there yet and maybe we should i'm not you know objecting to uh i'm not saying we should do all of this now.

39:00I'm just objecting to the idea that it's impossible and that we shouldn't. No, no, I agree with you. We can do something about it. I agree. I just don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. There's real value to it too. Me neither. I think especially with a platform like YouTube, we talk a lot about Meta and Instagram and how terrible it is. YouTube is, there's so much. Oh, it's incredible. I watch it every morning. I learn. There's educational content. I learn so much from YouTube. I love it. I love YouTube all the time. Yeah. And there's a reason there's a YouTube kids like there, there are things that are trying to be done, not, but there are also terrible things on there.

39:34So that's a really tricky example of like the breadth of content that you could access. It's a perfect example. Completely remove access to YouTube, I think is detrimental. I think that is a bridge too far. They did that in Australia. that middle ground i know that that really blew my mind i was like taking away instagram is one thing that youtube is i think i think youtube you can't be logged in to youtube um but you can still share for example videos on discord or whatsapp with your friends right i think you can still in australia you're talking about i believe so yes yes i'm talking about australia because how would you see that video well you're just not logged in you're allowed to use it without you can watch you sure it's not blocked or you just can't have an account no you can't have an account i think that's that's not the restriction that's meaningless well you have to see all the ads no because the algorithm is the issue there because they're worried about how that and you know maybe i'm just going to throw something random here maybe we don't need the infinite scroll feed maybe we don't need it maybe it would be a small section should the courts be deciding that maybe yes that's the whole point maybe there's no one else there's no way the social media companies are going to get rid of it so you know it's like what other choice is there and there should be scientific consensus behind it before we there is none and it's very paternalistic to say well you people just can't be trusted with an algorithmic feed so a bra no algorithmic freed for you it's very paternalistic there is also the potential that this backfires i mean do you remember in the 80s when i think it was al gore's wife yes behind the thing to to put you know parental advisory stickers on albums those albums they wanted to put a chip on your tv yeah i didn't say algorithmic field uh feed leo i said the infinite scrolling thing because that's been named a few times as a cause and you're saying there's no science I don't think that's true.

41:35I think there is, you know, a growing corpus of scientific studies that show that it does affect. There's not a consensus yet, but I don't think it's a very hard thing to prove. And I think the problem is it seems right, but it's an impossible thing to prove because human beings are very complex. And what are you going to do? You're going to have a control. How do you have a control group? well you get the algorithmic feed you don't and let's watch for 20 years and see if you go crazy yes that no how is that that's not gonna happen why not because you can't this is this is why nutritional science is messed up it's very hard to do this kind of in vitro test in vivo testing with humans i mean maybe we're taking the comparison too far but if you're saying your nutritional science is difficult there are still things you can take away from you know what is good and bad in nutrition.

42:26But how do you measure this? Well, behavioral... I got depressed because I was spending a lot of time on Instagram. I think you're belittling a whole field of science that is psychology and... I think you should look at the results. I think experts in the field are in agreement that there is no scientific basis for this. I don't think that's the case. All right, we'll have to disagree now. We'll take a break. I'll try to find a couple of studies that I've seen go... Oh, you can cherry pick. But, you know, when Jonathan Haidt's book came out, there was, and I'll find the article, a very respected person who's studied this for years.

43:03This is her field who said, no, there's no consensus on this at all. That this is something that people feel is right. Makes sense. But see, I always think when science makes sense, that's when you say, well, that just seems sensible. That's when you're in trouble. That's when you're in trouble. So are you saying there's no issue and we should change nothing? No, I think it's okay to change things. and I think there are ways to do it. I think there's a great risk because of people's antipathy to technology, and that's what I want to defend, there's a great risk that we will overdo it and that we will do real harm.

43:38I think that the long-term evidence in Australia is going to be that real harm happened, that there's a whole bunch of marginalized kids who have no social, who now are completely cut off from the support groups that they had. There are many examples of things like this. and outside the cities where you know distance is such a big issue in australia you know and i still have access to youtube they have access to discord they have access to whatsapp and they have access to all of these sites without being logged in i don't think they're like being but that was that an intentional thing well we want to make sure that they have something or is it we just forgot to make that no i think it's impossible you'd need to block youtube in the country if you want to do not.

44:19But you know, it's still... It can't be done is also part of the argument against it. And it's a huge violation of privacy because age verification has no way of being, you know, you can't do that in a private fashion, in a secure private fashion. That's true. It's another issue, but I will admit that it's true. Yeah. And you're right. You know, you have consistently, every time you're on, have argued this. And I respect your position. I think your position is actually completely sensible and logical. I just think it's very, we have, it's a challenge to solve this. And I agree with you. And I think we shouldn't go too far.

44:55And there is a danger of going too far. It's just that we are, you know, among friends here, this is a safe space. And we can admit, don't tell the other ones, don't tell the legislators. But maybe there are some things we could change. I don't have TikTok. I don't have Instagram on my phone. I have taken all of that stuff off. I don't have Facebook on my phone. The only reason I have X still on my phone is because it is the last place where I can really get up-to-date AI news. And so what I do is there X now, thank goodness, has a filter where you can say, I only want to see AI news or I only want to see science news.

45:26Don't go to Blue Sky and talk about AI. You will get shouted. I have an account on all these things, but I don't use any of them. They're all taken off my phone because I spent too much time on them. I will say one last thing. There's a report called the World Happiness report, happiness report that's done every year that ranks countries on many different, you know, criteria that decides which is the happiest country in the world. That should be easy to measure, shouldn't it? I'm sure we're not. Yeah, well, it relies on things like unemployment benefits and wages and social security, all of those things.

46:03Finland, number one consistently for years. But there is a section about. But do you agree with that? Is it a happy place? It's really interesting because - Don't they have a high alcoholism and suicide rate in Finland? Well, that's due to certain things that happened - But it is the happiest place on earth. It's happy in the sense that, well, Finns are weirdly - But if you take those criteria, you're not going to die if you get sick, you're not going to be thrown out of your house if you lose your job, these kinds of things. But there is a section about social media. And the really interesting thing, if you're talking about science, you can go check it out.

46:42The really interesting thing is that they're saying social media seems to affect people's enjoyment in general if you consume too much of it. But if you consume like an hour a day, which is not ridiculous, you are better off than if you consume none of it. Oh, that's interesting. And there are some social media that actually improve your well-being. The ones that connect you to people you don't know, like, you know, X, Reels, like the ones that are heavily algorithmic are worse than WhatsApp. Okay, that's understandable. You talk to people you know. And Facebook. Facebook is actually because they put the emphasis on people from your family and from, I don't really use Facebook.

47:34But I was very surprised because of course I'm like, ah, Meta, Zuckerberg, hang him from a tree, bring out the guillotine. Of course, I'm exaggerating. That's not what I say. But you see Facebook there and you have to think, OK, I understand the logic behind it. Maybe there is some something. So that report is saying some social media, specifically some apps can make you happier. And I'll stop monopolizing. Wait, can I present a quick counter argument to that? I actually don't like seeing people I know on social media because when I compare my life to them and I'm like, Ooh, they're doing better than I am.

48:09But if it's somebody I don't know, then I'm like, Oh, they made me laugh. But it's all subjective, right? It's all like, what do you enjoy seeing? TikTok is an entertainment. It's like TV. It's like watching TV. It's like TV. So it makes me laugh. I watch a lot of TikTok. It's fantastic. It's so creative. And you know, I really don't want to give the impression that I'm anti. There's so much cool stuff. Like I watch theoretical physics videos on YouTube all the time i watch tick tock way too much like i love it i'm just yeah you know i was watching the the chess chess uh candidates tournament is going on right now you're never going to see coverage of this on espn but youtube has excellent coverage of it this is this is the road to the world championship the winner of this gets to take on the world champion it's very important people play chess but it's a very narrow slice of the population but it's well covered on youtube because you only need that narrow slice to succeed on youtube that's a blessing you know and i can i'm sure there's a million little narrow niches like that that youtube serves beautifully and god bless it uh i think that more than makes up for any negative you know radicalization caused by youtube and things like that humans are problematic we're never going to keep humans from going bad bad no they will go bad the thing that bothers me with that argument is that then you you're this direct next step is well then we do nothing yeah we can't touch it about that well I don't say you can't touch it if people decide as a group that they want to touch it that's fine but I think that there's a risk and I think uh some of that risk is some is also some of the smaller non-giant companies who can't defend themselves in court who are also now threatened because of this decision and that's another story for another day because we have to move on thank you patrick for asking i apologize to bring this up but i feel one more time no it's an it's it is a very important discussion maybe one of the most important discussions in tech right now frankly the only person i talk to on instant messaging is my ai assistant and he's great he's my close personal friend never let you go i'm so glad you got a male one but yeah he has a nice british accent and i call him jeeves and he's he calls me sir and puts a little butler hat on his messages actually it's a top hat i don't know it's about what's what is a butler hat i don't know ask jeeves has been reborn yeah no as soon as i said well i'd like to call you jesus oh p.g Wodehouse.

50:44I love him. It is a very smart AI, even though it's from China. We're going to take a little break, come back with more. There is a lot more to talk about. Patrick Beyshaw, thank you for bringing that up. I appreciate it. Not patrick.com. No, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I think it's a very important topic. Abrar Al-Heaty, always great to have you from CNET. And Ian Thompson, where's your writing these days? I know you're doing the letter to... yeah i'm doing well we've actually after some potential copyright problems with bbc we're calling it view from the valley now no kidding they they want even though how long has it been since alistair cook wrote his i know i know but unfortunately it's the anniversary of his death so people got a bit twitchy um i do i did love it and i loved his you know i i used to listen to it every you know every week and just sit there with the with the radio beside me and listen in bed it It was marvelous.

51:37And it was a homage to it rather than trying to steal this thunder. But, yeah, I'm doing a lot of work for the stack at the moment and PC Pro and various other titles. And there's always corporate writing to pay the mortgage. The view from the valley is at Techfinitive. That's right, yes. Yes, we should give you a plug for that, techfinitive.com. Yes, headline this time, don't call it a war. What is it? It's a military operation, apparently. way they don't have to go to congress sure it looks like a war boy yeah pretty much sure it looks like it i'll just drop it there uh more to come in just a bit but first a word from our fine sponsor this episode of this week in tech brought to you by rippling brand new sponsor welcome rippling to uh to the family one of the hardest things about running a startup and you don't have to ask me because I know this for a fact.

52:34Back when we started up, it's easy to get distracted by, I would call them low leverage tasks. Tasks you have to do, but don't have a huge payoff, like payroll. You got to do it. In fact, it was when I accidentally forgot to pay people that I really heard about this. Onboarding, new employees, right? Hardware setup. These are all things that have to get done, but they pull you away from the work that you care about that actually moves your company forward, right? That's why Rippling is here. It's what Rippling was built to solve. Rippling, R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G, like Rippling Waters. It's a unified platform that lets startups run HR, payroll, IT, and finance in one system from day one.

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53:59So if you or your startup want to move as quickly as you can and focus on what really matters, like your product, right, or your customers, you need Rippling. Right now, venture-backed startups can get six months of Rippling startup stack for free. Head to rippling.com slash twit and sign up today. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot com slash twit to sign up for six months free today. Focus on what you're building and leave the rest to Rippling. Rippling.com slash twit. So glad to have them helping us out here at This Week in Tech. Big story in the AI world this week. claude code's source code leaked everybody you know messing with that trying to duplicate claude code which is one of the hottest right now ai coding vibe coding tools is one i use love it and then following that anthropic really got the open claw movement on their backs saying you can't use your subscription for anything but Claude code and the Claude app you can't use third party apps essentially saying OpenClaw can't use Claude you've got to the subscription you've got to use your API tokens and this has pissed off people of course OpenClaw's creator Peter Steinberger works for open ai he's been jumping on this uh i want to i i want to defend uh anthropic the the creators of claude i understand why they did this uh a lot of us who use claude were saying claude is not so smart in the last few weeks and it's because so many people are using their subscriptions and using so many tokens for their agents that are running day and night doing silly stupid things and uh and and really kind of nerfing claude uh code so i honestly think anthropic was right to do this immediately people noticed yeah claude's working a lot better this went into effect uh actually uh april 4th which was yesterday right yeah at noon east at noon pacific and immediately people were started reporting hey claude's working a lot better uh there were i think they've got a perfect right to do it the free party is over yeah of course they do but yeah that's really the the lesson of this i mean i don't want to get into the back and forth and everything but the lesson of it is we've been kind of much as the internet in the early days of course we run it we're speed running this internet uh life cycle with ai uh what was free is not and it wasn't tenable and then people were using it so much with a subscription because the subscription was close to unlimited use, that Anthropoc had to do something about it.

56:53Yeah, because the issue is that the idea would be that the subscription you would use for occasional like when you're in front of the computer, or maybe you set off one agent to do something from time to time. But with OpenClaw, it's running all the time. So it is an over consumption of these tokens on for a company that just like all the other uh ai companies is not making a lot of money i mean they're making money but they're losing money on all of this so it's completely understandable and it's not like they're saying you can't use it ever you just have your api key and pay for what you have to pay for what you use exactly yeah i also uh I think that it's also, which is, and this is a good thing, going to move people towards local models, open weight models, less expensive models.

57:48I have been experimenting with a Chinese model. It's about a third the cost of a Claude Max subscription, and it's doing very well, possibly because they trained it on Claude. That's what Anthropics says, but it does a very good job. I think this is good. I think this is going to stimulate people moving in other directions. Anyway, it's a big story. I don't know if there's that much to say about it. How about Gemma? You can run OpenClaw on Gemma, right? You certainly could. Here's the problem. There's nothing as good as Opus 4.6. There really isn't. That Claude model is so good. Claude code is so good.

58:27Although we have learned from the leak of Claude's source code that it has all sorts of bizarre things built into it, some of which are designed to screw you up and make it cost more for you. I don't know if that's on purpose or a vibe-coded bug. People have been complaining about Claude usage all week, and I think this kind of fixed it. Anyway, you know, maybe this impacts me more than others because I use Claude code all the time. I have been playing with a Chinese model and it works quite well. I tried Gemma. Yeah, it's good. It's not great. It's good. There's nothing like Opus, unfortunately.

59:11What do you think of the leaked thing from the code that shows they're developing a technique to basically give Claude infinite memory? This is the biggest problem in my mind right now with all AI is that every time you start a new session, it starts from scratch. It doesn't remember anything you did before. And it's like, yeah, it's like Memento. It doesn't remember anything. But just like Memento, you can have your agent make post-it notes, write down its memories. And I've been doing that. There are a lot of systems around. everybody's trying to solve this problem. And that worked out for the dude in Memento, right?

59:58I don't remember. How did it end? Did it end well? Not well. Not well. OK. He kind of misunderstood what was happening in the beginning because he hallucinated the situation. That's exactly what happens. So you create all these markdown files, and then Claude, when it starts up, has to kind of get these shorthand versions of what happened before. So that's what they're developing, essentially. they're having your AI, because of course people know, I guess mostly, but the reason you have to start from scratch is that every time you add a question, the AI, the LLM has to go through your whole thread to get back to and predict the next answer it's going to give.

1:00:39So at some point, the context window is full or it's using a little bit too much, too many tokens to give you one answer. So if you can summarize everything you've ever told the assistant into something that fits into the context window, then it can remember everything. But how does that work? Like at some point you can't compress it anymore, right? It feels like it would hallucinate things or what, what did they call it? I think there was a research paper on that where it was catastrophic memory loss or some term like that. It can't remember, oh, sorry. It can't remember everything you've ever said, right?

1:01:23Even with its, it has dream programs that it does at night to consolidate its memory. Actually, that was one of the things we saw in the Claude Code. Yeah, the leak. That's what I said. Yeah, it had this thing where a dream at night and try to consolidate its memories. People are trying to solve it. And there are, you know, I have a memory system. that works pretty well. Claude seems to know who I am every time I show up. It's a balancing act, but yeah, it's an interesting issue. OpenAI, of course, has announced that one of the ways it's going to solve this cash crunch is, well, first of all, they just raised$122 billion, with a B, dollars this week.

1:02:04The biggest raise in history. I mean, there's nothing to compare to it. And I guess they don't need to go public if they can get venture capitalists to keep pouring money into it uh the uber model yes yeah but well there's an upside in there's like a pony and there's an upside in there somewhere um uh i a lot of people wondering how long this can go on with open ai and they in fact said well we're going to cut we're going to close down the sora app we're going to focus except i don't know how long that lasted because they just bought a podcast for hundreds of millions of dollars. But low hundreds of millions.

1:02:43Okay, well, what is that? 200? Probably. This is a podcast that last year had revenue of$5 million. Okay, so let's see. That's two, I don't know. What is that? 200 million. That's 40 times a beta. That seems like a lot. Plus, of course, there's the issue of, well, if they're owned by OpenAI, Are all those companies going to still buy ads? Those ads that they were buying? This is the TBPN podcast, which is essentially CNBC for the nerd bros, the AI bros, the tech bros. And that was how it was pitched. It's daily. It's for four or five hours every day. 70 ,000 viewers. We have more people listening to this show every week than that.

1:03:33We have more revenue than that. I don't know. where it was all i'm saying is sam yeah because sam has appeared on many times he loved it yeah right so what are they going to do with it that's completely like do they want to do they want the you know permission to train on it do they want like what's that but it's public they don't need to buy us they don't need to buy tbpn i don't understand either and they say they're going to editorial uh independence and they're going to stay in los angeles which is only an hour away from sam ulman but okay i think they just want a media channel right they just want a media channel why anyway that's a scary precedent i don't know if we want more media owned by yeah it's bad enough yeah podcasting is the last bastion of kind of independent non-corporate yeah yeah absolutely stuff news let's do you wear ray-ban glasses a bar I don't I'm not a huge um like champion of smart glasses I love people who are really into it but I'm like I wear my boring contacts and I'm good to go like I don't need to see things as I'm walking around would it help that they now are making special versions for people with prescription lenses I think that definitely helps them for sure.

1:04:53I know people who are like, if I could get my prescription lenses on something like that, that's great. There are times where I'm like, it would be nice to be hands-free and recording video. And there are new models that look a little less dorky. That's a good word. Do I look like a dork to you? No, I think this is very fitting. I like this. That's great. The best way possible. Mine are the black, black ones. You know, they're great airpods or you know earbuds yes they're temple based and they sound fantastic because i don't like putting things in my ear so that is really nice the other thing too is with like metaray bands and smart glasses in general are really great accessibility tools so i really value them for that reason that's a good point yeah if you're blind or low vision this could take a picture and you can say what am i looking at right now i could tell you can you read me that label yep and even though meta's ai uh is not the top of the line at this point uh i think potentially this is a good form factor at some point it's a lot better than the other stuff that we've the other you know heads up stuff that we've seen yeah do they sell them with just the speakers no i don't think so because that sounds good i'd like those yeah but the the camera is a big part of it because you can but it's also what people find offensive about the speakers hey meta Take a picture.

1:06:13So you see the light comes on. You know, I hadn't noticed. Hey, Matt, take a video. We're kind of heading into glasshole territory, though, here, because, you know, it's... Well, I don't know. What do you mean, Ian? What are you talking about? Talking to the... I like it. No, I mean, you saw the report about... It's capturing all kinds of stuff that really shouldn't be captured like people having sex or going to the loo uh a friend of mine actually went to a hotel where the um check-in staff were wearing them and he was like can you take that off because i don't want you looking at my credit card when you're you know signing me in so there are still privacy stuff to to be dealt with i think it's a great form factor it really suits a lot of people um yeah get prescription lenses in there to open it up they'll be in all the uh esselor luxotica you know which is everybody uh luxotica are possibly the biggest unacknowledged monopoly out there they own yeah they bought everybody up make billions out of selling basically pieces of plastic you know it's a remarkable business model must be phenomenal on these i mean these are seven or eight hundred dollars uh then you have to get the lenses for another seven or eight hundred dollars i mean it's crazy yeah the form factor is definitely um something that has huge potential for the next evolution of computing devices.

1:07:43Because obviously, if you're going to use AI a lot, if you're going to make a chatbot your computer human interface, if you're going to replace keyboard and mouse or touchscreen by a chatbot, then all of a sudden you don't need the slab of glass and plastic that is your smartphone. You don't need your keyboard and your mouse. So what are you left with? A kind of AI pin that you can pin on you or glasses, something you put on your face. And the glasses obviously have the advantage that you potentially have a screen or, you know, you have something you can see and very good access to your voice and to your ears to, you know, give you feedback.

1:08:30I have for years seen this as the holy grail. I've worn all of the little, you know, the pins and the bracelets and the things that record everything. And I've had people yell at me for doing that. But my, my desire, especially as I get older, is to have something that is kind of recording my life, ingesting it in an AI so that I can query, I can get information. I can have a dialogue with the AI without, you know, running over to my computer or opening up my phone right now i could talk to my ai on telegram and i do that but i think having a ubiqui i want to be able to talk to my ai i want it in the air i want it to be there at all times is that nuts am i nuts no no no no i don't think so too nutty she says backing off slowly no uh too crazy so then are the do you think so the glasses aren't enough for you is what you're saying no they are enough yeah but they have to connect i can't i know meta is not enough i i have to connect it to my own if i see this is that open claw thing if and i don't think open claws is is all all that but the idea of an agent this is the yeah this is the year of the agentic where you have an ai that has kind of a memory of you and knows about you and knows about your life and that you could talk to and you could query we're moving moving towards that all along right i mean siri and you know talking to an ai and it's more than asking what's the weather going to be like but saying what's my calendar look like yeah um what's the last time i called my mom i i think i should probably call her stuff like that yeah i think would be well that's the ultimate it is the ultimate form of computing yes it absolutely i think you tend which is why yeah which is why when we imagined compute you know the ultimate computers a few years ago or a few decades ago it was you know hal and uh whatever other version of that it was it's something that can render services and is accessible kind of in the ether you speak to it it replies uh i think you're not a little crazy for for i feel like this this is what we really want with ai yeah leo how do you feel about um like google's in development smart glasses do you have any or is that too limited in terms of no i think it's google products yeah uh i would prefer it wasn't i mean maybe apple would be the only big tech company i would trust with this and i'm sure they're working on something absolutely i know they are yeah um honestly though what i really want is a non-platformed device that i can hook up to my own i bought a machine to run ai locally i want to be able to do this all for privacy reasons and for control reasons uh and for because it's i want it to be as personal as possible i don't want to be google's idea or apple's idea or meta's idea of what this should be i want it to be how i want it so i want to run it on my own systems so really i just need an interface device that i can hook up to my own systems basically and that naturally becomes the glasses i think and it's glasses yeah it could be an ear like a you know from her the earbud but the glasses and this is why the camera is important it's yeah it sees what you sees what you're saying yeah well then you can potentially show you stuff right yeah that's right neil Stevenson had a very interesting blog post this week where he was saying, I was wrong about glasses because he was a big proponent of glasses.

1:12:04He says nobody wants to put something on their face. He's not wrong, but he was talking more about VR helmets, right? Isn't he? Yeah, that and also the social aspect of it. If somebody is using a phone, you can clearly see they're using a phone. If someone's using the glasses, even with a little light. and I remember when the original Google Glass came out, some people were deliberately covering up that light that showed that the recording function was on, which honestly, I'm not a violent person, but it would slap the damn things off their face if I saw that. Yeah, well, that's what worries me, especially if I go down to San Francisco that you might come over and bop me.

1:12:43Yeah, but you guys are thinking too short-term. We're going to get used to it. In a decade, everyone has them. You just assume, you know, if they if they become as ubiquitous as smartphones then you assume everyone has them i feel like even at this point yeah even taking a walk around the block you're like how many people's ring cameras am i you know what i mean like the way most recording me as i'm crossing so you know what i mean like there's all these things but can i point out something it does seem like an invasion of privacy but it's it's a double-edged sword i don't think we would have known what happened to to Alex Preddy or Renee Good if it weren't for the ubiquitous smartphone camera.

1:13:22It keeps everybody honest, including law enforcement. And I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing. Yeah. Well, I think there's an argument to be made that, yes, you have, you know, beneficial aspects to it. In public is in public. I don't think you should come in my house. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. But you're in public. Yeah, you're already exposed. Yeah. You could be captured by anything at any moment. Yeah. already honestly a lot of cities have like cameras everywhere oh yeah yeah anyway we have automated license plate readers now pretty much everywhere alp and it turns out that is the real surveillance tool because when you're driving around you have a unique identification number on your back and these every intersection these cameras are picking it up they know exactly where you are and what you're doing i do think we need to be careful about like how far we take it if i'm going to play devil's advocate a little bit uh when you everyone has a phone you can pull out your phone when something happens it is a little bit different from everyone is being filmed all the time you know totally no and there need to be very strong safeguards i mean we've seen time and time again we had the story a couple of weeks ago about the poor grandma who was taken to south dakota because of a misidentification with face recognition lost four months of her life lost her home and uh with no apology from law enforcement who fingered her based on bad face recognition yeah that was appalling and that is not the first time that's happened but i think that was mainly down to police laziness it was basically said that's why we need regulations right no no i agree i mean it's just like they said oh well the facial recognition is says if they'd gone into a bank accounts for just five minutes they would have seen it was rubbish they could she had that perfect alibi yeah she was not in the state she was thousands of miles away the fact that she was arrested and put in jail for four months is a tragedy to begin with but the biggest issue is that you know i don't know if she can sue or if she even but her life was ruined because she couldn't pay her debts and she lost her house as you said and like that's even like mistakes will happen like it's terrible but kind of but when you realize that the the state or government should be liable to help her out i guess this is a this is a brand of mistake that's been happening more often though is that no one checks the ai work no one checks the ai's work ever right that's a very good point of course of course and that's a huge issue well let's take a break because i have some good examples it's in our military section coming up great there's a reason that the acronym foobar was made up in the military uh and snafu uh we have a wonderful panel a.n thompson's great to see you my friend always a pleasure did you have a mustache or is that is that a mandela i i grew a mustache during lockdown and i kept it for about six months i got so sick of having to strain tea out of it every time i took a mouthful it was four straining tea and also it's just itchy and so much trouble i kind of wish i'd grown a beard at the same time but that's just not going to happen so yeah i wish i had a beard but i don't want to grow it that's the problem it's great to see you ian uh brah al-hiti great to see you as always senior technology reporter at cnet i think you've never had a beard or a mustache just for no no well how disappointing happening uh so movember really it isn't that meaningful for you no okay i'm just checking um what are you working on uh these days what am i working on these days you know i don't even remember anymore um it's just a blur it's a blur honest to god i'm like what did i work on did you go to ifa did you cover that or uh for mobile world congress i'm sorry mobile world yes i did go to mobile world congress it was very fun but then i had to review the iphone 17e and then the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra.

1:17:18So then I had to take a week off before I work. So now you're exhausted. Yeah. But it was good. It was a good run. It was a fun time. Yeah. Does it get busy again in June? We've got Google I.O. and WWDC. Right. Exactly. Starting May, June, it'll start to pick up again. So this is the time where I'm like, I can write all the things I want to write, but I don't have time for the rest of the year. So I'm going to try my best to do that. So glad to see you. And of course, Bar also is a regular on Tech News Weekly with Mike Sarchin. We're just on Wednesday. day and of course the great patrick beija who's you've been on our show for it must be decades at this point i think the first time was was it pod media what was it new media expo media expo really way back when i think so holy 2007 maybe that's gotta be that's really early i i remember i got in a car with Mark Spagnuolo and Nicole Spagnuolo, the good whisperer.

1:18:17I still have this beautiful cabinet that he made for me. And they drove me to, well, their house, but also on the way we went from BlizzCon to the cottage back then. Oh, so it has been that long. So that was the second time, I think. There's four pages of appearances with you going way, way, look at this, way way way way back holy cow i could find the first one let me go oh that's gonna be embarrassing no no no embarrassment everybody had a let's see you were first on 2009 episode 213 that's later then oh maybe it wasn't on the show when i went to yeah you were on with john c devorak john graham coming who was a cto uh at cloudflare for many years and david poge who's in the news again with his new book i was on the show with all of these incredible people amazing and you don't remember a word of it um i'll ask my uh ai agent to summarize it back next time that is fantastic oh you can tell how old this is because these story links were at delicious.com and there was a friend feed conversation for this episode oh good lord holy moly and the cheering apology that really was a while ago yeah that's why cumming was on yeah he he good for him john graham coming got the british government to apologize to alan turing uh a little too late but yes yeah well you know he's he's now on the 50 pound notes so you know he's not gonna be replaced by a possum or something well yeah they're talking about replacing them with wild animals but you know so it goes.

1:20:04They'll always be in England. That's all I can say. We like to keep it silly. Our show today brought to you by my mattress. Oh man, nothing silly about a good night's sleep. It's kind of vital. I mean, and honestly, we spend more than a third of our life on that mattress, right? How are you planning for spring cleaning? You know, maybe this would be a good time to clean out the old and upgrade to a Helix mattress for an extra specialty good night's rest. And I can tell you, we did this, I don't know if it was spring, maybe it was spring of last year. Yeah, I think it might have been. Man, we love our Helix mattress.

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1:23:38Actually, David Pogue was on MacBreak Weekly last Tuesday to celebrate Apple's 50th anniversary, which is April 1st. And he's got that book, Apple, The First 50 Years, which is an amazing book. Really, really amazing. It was so cool to hear him again after, you know, he left the scene. Can you believe it? Since 2009, you've been on our shows. That's amazing. That's nice, Patrick. You know, 20 years from now, I'll be saying the same thing to you. I hope so. I look forward to it. I love it. Let's see. After 16 years and$8 billion, the military's new, I'll put that in air quotes, GPS software still doesn't work.

1:24:24Space Force last year, right before the 4th of July, took ownership of a new GPS navigation system. The Next Gen Operational Control System, or OSCX, was designed for command and control of the militaries. They have their own GPS, 30 GPS satellites. It was specifically designed to be jam resistant. That's been a big problem during the Ukrainian war, and I imagine now in Iran. GPS-3, which started launching in 2018, these new satellites. Two master control stations, upgrades to ground monitoring. but the company that made it former the former Raytheon now known as RTX was paid 3.7 well wait a minute I take it back the contract was for 3.7 billion dollars it's supposed to be done 10 years ago uh the official cost now twice that 7.6 billion dollars and it still doesn't work the gao the government accounting office uh found that the ocx program was undermined by poor acquisition decisions and a slow recognition of development problems situation normal all messed up nothing to say about that i just thought i'd pass along this was a little concerning apparently according to Fast Company, the Pentagon, for its high-energy laser weapons, uses Xbox controllers.

1:25:58It's not funny. I think they should use PlayStation controllers myself, but okay. No, I mean, it's used in submarines as well, because the old submarine controllers used to cost an arm and a leg, and they just decided, let's use Xbox. And the kids who are using them actually, you know, are used to using them and are quite adept at doing so. But on the GPS thing, I just would like to put a shout out to the land of my birth. This week in the UK, they tested out quantum navigation systems, which are based on fluctuations within movement and are totally unjammable. So I think the US military has done what it sometimes does and spent an enormous amount of money on software, on a technology system which is already outdated.

1:26:42Completely redundant and outdated. What a surprise. all it happens in military spending like yeah this is one example i'm sure which is why we should uh give them the one and a half trillion dollars that's in president trump's new budget one and a half trillion dollars is that more than before 40 percent more goodness and they also for the war they want another 200 billion after they have a trillion more than trillion dollar budget already I have to file my taxes and this is not encouraging. Like, we can't afford health care for everybody. You know, that's that's out of the question. No, it's ridiculous.

1:27:23The interesting thing is that every country around the world or at the very least, Russia has had to increase military spending. Everyone in Europe is increasing military spending. And I thought that, you know, I say that without any political, I don't know, preference or whatever. My understanding was that Trump wanted to decrease the intervention of the U.S. And I'm not even talking about Iran. Why does the military need more money? Oh, well, that's why we have other things, whether fish to fry inside and outside the country. they're also spending on some really odd stuff like you know m1 abraham's tanks and if the war in ukraine has told us anything it's tanks on the battlefield are toast you know it's like if you can knock them out with a two thousand dollar drone then you know spending a million bucks plus on the tank is just makes no sense whatsoever

1:28:29iran's iran's missile blitz has taken out two data centers uh aws data centers in Bahrain and Dubai, Amazon is declaring a hard down status for multiple zones in the Middle East. And Google is also in the firing line, according to the Iranian Republican Guard. If this goes on and they start hitting energy centers within Iran, Iran has said, yeah, okay, data centers and power systems are fair game then. And that's going to make things really interesting, because a lot of people are going to get severely inconvenienced by this put it that way and a lot of tech people who are supporting trump at the moment are going to be like hang on let's just ease this up a bit and iranian hackers who are actually quite good um are also going to war this from the financial times tehran's cyber operatives have sought to sow fear and extract intelligence in a series of attacks on israel and uh the u.s chris krebs who i like quite a bit former head of cisa the cyber security and information security agency he of course was fired and is now being prosecuted by trump for having the temerity to say the 2020 election was the most secure election in our history uh says uh the iranians are throwing everything they have at this it's all hands on deck if cyber operators are breathing, they will be on their keyboards.

1:29:56Oh, that's bad news. And of course, meanwhile, the president wants to take, according to the register, a battle axe to CISA and slash$707 million from its budget. This is the most successful U.S. agency in terms of protecting us against cyber risks. And yet, while we're giving the military another half trillion, we want to cut nearly a billion of CISA spending. I mean, this is Leo, you and I were both at RSAC this year. And I don't know if you saw the they had four heads of the NSA on a panel. And it was fascinating because they were saying this is we need to be spending more on this than we've ever spent before, because this is where our adversaries are going.

1:30:47and the ability to take down systems. You know, we've demonstrated in Venezuela and Iran, but the rest of the world is also ready and prepared. And cutting over 700 million from CISA's budget seems ridiculous. Well, it's certainly poorly timed. You know, the fact that Iran hackers are getting ready to do things is not surprising. any administration that would prepare for a military conflict with any nation of that ilk would be prepared for this and i think these days especially right this is how war is waged yeah absolutely um so the really concerning thing here is that it doesn't seem again i'm trying to not be i don't like trump but i'm trying to look at this objectively there doesn't seem to be um a coherent a cohesive strategy or preparedness i think this goes beyond politics this is not political dogma this is not a battle between the right and the left republicans and democrats this is just nonsense this is just poor policy period right yeah no i mean it's it's something that the that might rot oh we lost you we lost your audio did your cat knock here no no it's just The sure volume thing is a pain in the backside.

1:32:15No, this is something that Mike Rogers said in the panel. He was asked, will the next war be primarily about missiles, about boots on the ground, or about cyber? And he was like, well, all, obviously, but cyber is going to be a much more important role in this going forward. And, you know, there's no way we can ignore this because anyone we're going to be going up against won't ignore it. So, you know, you've got to be prepared to call it the Boy Scouts, which is like the military, but the military has heavy artillery. And they have a better salute.

1:32:52Can I say something dumb? Yeah, please. You're saying too many smart things. Start saying some dumb things. I'm continuing to say dumb things. You're all very concerned about this. I'm going to be like the agitator who's being annoying. You're all very concerned about all of this and hackers and CISA being cut and all of this. If they're at some point in the next five to 10 years or 20 years, there's going to be an issue with Taiwan, right? China, and there's going to be an issue with China. How many Chinese made routers do you want in the U.S. when that happens? Or would you rather, through a long and painful process, I'm really working for the Trump administration decisions there, through a long and painful process to start a situation where routers are made in the U.S.

1:33:51and your country has more control over them? Of course, I'm referencing the fact that routers made in China have been banned in the U.S. just china routers may outside anywhere but the us have been banned even french routers are banned oh that's that okay that we have so many routers um no but i don't think you see where i'm going there i don't think we have a lot of american we don't have any the only one that i know of that's made in america is is guess what elon musk's starlink that's the only router in the us at this point but you need to start somewhere well we should start get going fast by the way this doesn't eliminate any router you've already purchased you can continue to use it yeah we all know how long routers stay in operation i mean some of these things are 20 years old i was when i was at rsac uh i went over to the ubiquity booth because i thought i really liked it this had just gone down uh the fcc's ban and i went over to the ubiquity booth i said well um Does this impact you?

1:34:58And they said, we're not talking to the press. Go away. It was a good sign. Go away. I've been surprised by what I think is not insignificant amount of American manufacturing in the tech sector happening since Trump has been forcing it. And maybe I'm, you know, being bedazzled by the PR of Apple and whoever. Apple says, oh, yeah, we're going to make everything here. and they've got one factory that makes it tiny not everything but there are there are cpus coming out are made in that u.s factory are made in china they import the parts and they assemble them in the u.s yeah what happened over the last two decades is we have exported our manufacturer especially of high-tech gear oh i've read apple in china i've i know all about this yeah it's a great book and it's i've read one book so i'm an expert well but i think it wasn't just apple this was this is the story of all the tech sector uh china became our and and this was by the way chinese government policy this was they were very aggressive about supporting this they wanted this business and they became the the manufacturer for the world and the u.s was uh supporting this as well on the governmental level because they thought oh china is going to open up and capitalism will do to China, what it did to other countries.

1:36:22And but OK, that's happened. But if you want to bring back manufacturing in the US, I remember, who was it? Steve Jobs, who was talking to Obama, who was like, those jobs are gone. They're never coming back. And it does seem like you do have more CPUs coming out of American factories now, TSMC. They're building fabs like crazy. Yeah. um and like high-end cpus like what is it three two nanometers uh coming soon and of course they they are being sent to china for assembly so it doesn't you know at this point i think some of that is i'm trying to play devil's advocate you know some of that is in response to the fact that there is some concern about china invading taiwan and uh so we may lose in fact uh tsmc which is a Taiwanese company.

1:37:15We may. Oh, we will. I mean, there was a paper in the National War College, which was their most read paper, I think of 2018, that said that in the event of war with China, the Taiwanese are going to destroy their chip fabs. And if they don't, we will, you know, it's as simple as that. Yeah, we can't let them have them. Yeah. I'm sure they're rigged with C4 everywhere. Like, they can't let have the Chinese have them. I'm, again, I'm an expert. I've read one book and I am certain they're they're with C4. Well, and you know, you have a point. The routers are how we all connect to the internet. The number one router in America, 40 % of all routers in America are made by one company, a Chinese company called TP-Link.

1:37:58For years, Wirecutter recommended it as the best router that carried a lot of weight. A lot of people have TP-Link routers. They're made in China. I guess firmware updates come from the company in china and in theory a firmware update could be injected that was malware and yeah there would be a lot of i mean that would certainly be a vulnerability i mean i'm curious what the rest of the panel thinks about this if china did start in you know in making moves to invade taiwan and the chinese responded by shutting down for example atm network networks in the us or power networks or water networks would the american public really give that much for monkeys about taiwan when they've got so many problems on their own plate i personally think this is what the chinese will be banking on well and in fact if you really want to leverage your hacking ability you would do what china has done with salt typhoon you would invade our telecommunications networks you would invade our power grid my personal home router is not the first thing you're going to hack i mean yeah maybe you will it might be a little bit farther down the list though uh and i don't know if we've done a whole lot the tele the tele the u.s telecommunications companies have said yeah we can't do anything about salt typhoon we would have to rip and replace everything the phone network would be down for a few days while we did that they say so they're not doing anything about it so but meanwhile we've got to bear the brunt now the good news is our audience is smart and And I bet you a third of you have already made your own routers.

1:39:33You could do it with a Raspberry Pi. You could do it with an old computer. You could do it with a NUC. It's simple enough. You could turn practically any computer into a router. There's open source Linux distributions that are designed to be routers. There's some very good ones like PFSense. It is a simple thing to do. And if you search online, here's one article from Noah Bailey, how to turn anything into a router. you can't turn a potato into a router maybe you can i don't know is that you yeah yeah uh-oh okay oh oh we've lost him he hasn't no he hasn't muted his mic i'm i'm sorry i have heard somebody moving around in the house my wife is supposed to be out at the moment so is it your wife or do you need to do we need to arm you here uh no no this is a second amendment house but even so i just heard people moving around so i have like i have a stick with a big brass knob on it that i could bop a burglar with but it's next to the front door which probably means i'm more likely to get bopped than they are i'm thinking yeah right lisa won't let me have a gun she says what are you going to do with a gun well i'm appointed a bad guy she said they're going to take the gun and shoot you you don't this is not a good idea on the other hand you can't unrub it with a nice rifle.

1:40:54And rabbit is terrifically expensive over here, which I just don't understand. Nobody wants it. And they're everywhere. Rabbit? What are you? You must be British. I'm based on rabbit. You use rabbit for bubble and squeak or something? One of your weird British... Rabbit and bacon stew. I mean, come on, Patrick. We eat. Patrick, support me on this. Yes, yes, I will. There are very few things I will support a British person when it comes to food. but rabbits can be eaten this is easter and you're talking about eating rabbits that is showing the bible where it says anything about rabbits and chocolate everybody knows an easter yeet ham okay come on oh my god cassoulet is one of my favorite dishes and i know that often has rabbit rabbit in it so there you go yeah but leo for your break-ins at least hopefully they don't happen but you'll have your meta ray-bans on them i will while i get bopped yes i'll have a record we will know who bopped you that i have you'll be like meta but film film call the police call the police we have so many cameras around the house that if we will have a complete record of them coming and going oh they will come in through the the cat door maybe they won't ring the door like the cat does okay not see that again all right let's take a break while you go out and buy a old computer to make your new router out of i think this is you know they talk about victory gardens people planning gardens there's all sorts of things people do in times of of strife and and warm but for us geeks building our own router sounds like a good project it's not hard you can do it yeah it's cool you can you know i used to think that we were the, my parents generation was the last one that would need their children's help to do tech things.

1:42:47Um, it's yeah, because what's happening, what's happened with tech for us is what was happening with like car mechanics for our parents generation. I don't know how a car works i really don't care and the kids today are the same with with computers and stuff so i don't know how many people are going to build their router build your own router probably kids start learning okay when china invades taiwan you're going to need you know how to make your own router bake your own router it'll be too late though right because they won't have access to the internet anymore oh yeah that's true that's the first thing they do your router is irrelevant not if we you know only make and buy american-made routers okay we're gonna have victory gardens for routers but patrick what okay let are we ramping up the big router manufacturer is there any margin even in routers is there any they did the same thing with drones by the way you can't buy foreign-made drones in the united states yeah but people don't need drones you need routers yeah that's true um well i mean i don't know i don't know that it's even you know being voted in or put in place in good faith like maybe they just want to get elon musk's routers to you know sell 300 i don't know but you know there are things like for example um something something you might not know about Europe is now kind of wary of Visa and MasterCard.

1:44:23We are switching over our payment systems from Visa and MasterCard to American Express. Oh, wait a minute. No. Among others. Well, France has CB, which is carte bleue, which is another name for, and we've had it. It's kind of like our aircraft carriers and our nuclear plants. we've had it forever and everyone was like what do you need cb for most people didn't even know what it was and like people in the government were like don't you know we just trust us at some point at some point that yeah we're gonna need it so are people now is that what's happening is visa mastercard are going away and they're not going away but cb is actually it's actually on every single credit card that we have, it has to have CB.

1:45:12So it's kind of, you know, a secondary financial transaction. And now, yes, it's a payment system that is handled by French entities. And now you can select on your, like Apple Pay, for example, you always could select either CB or Visa on, you know, payments on internet services and stuff like that. I never knew what it was. I never knew the difference. Now I do. But even on Apple Pay, you can select for your credit card if you're going to go through Visa or MasterCard or whatever, or CB. And so if at some point, not even, you know, Visa decides they don't like the French, but like the government, the US government says Visa is an American company, American payment system.

1:45:55You cannot, you know, do business with the French because they stink. like, well, we can just switch over to CB and we're fine. Cheese eaters. Yes. And so I like this because for a long time, Europe's been getting more and more like America. Like it's not, you know, it's no different anymore. You got the McDonald's, you got your Kentucky fried chicken. So it's going back. Let's make Europe weird again. I think this is good. I think this is good. To be honest. You get there, they don't have Coca-Cola. They have Afri-Cola. It's so weird. We have like all kinds of cola. We have like Breche cola in Brittany.

1:46:34We have like all kinds of. They make it with apple juice. Yeah. I would much rather we just, you know, traded with everyone. It's a better world where we all cooperate. About all of this. And didn't have to increase military spending everywhere. It would be because at some point we're going to, someone is going to want to do something with it. It'd be nice, as the bumper sticker said, if schools had all the funding we need and the military had to have big sales yeah i mean uh patrick is minitel still operational just talking about backups they gave up no i i don't think i think somebody brought me a minitel terminal by the way i wish i still had it oh minitel was amazing it's like it brought communicate i i we have to explain what it is now the french government wanted to place your phone books with a digital tool and this is before there was aol i mean this is way, way back.

1:47:28It was like in the mid 80s. And it wasn't just a phone book. It actually had the infrastructure for like online services. It was inspired by what was happening on BBSs and stuff like that. And they had great, a great design idea, like design, not just the device, but the entire service at the French post and telecom company at the time. And so they designed this terminal, which had kind of an integrated keyboard and a screen and would connect through, you know, low speed modem to your network, it would use up your phone line, just like modems did at the time. It was video text was the interface.

1:48:10Yeah. And so you would connect to, there were different phone numbers, there were different models. One of them had a like collapsible

1:48:21keyboard. And you would connect to different services. There were different numbers, which had different kinds of prices. And then you would log into, you would connect to a specific service. There was a lot of chat services happening. Some of them, you know, not for children. Did everyone have one? Was this like in every home? Many, many people. Yeah. It was, it was a very widely successful. Like it was, imagine 80, what was it? 84 it started, 85, maybe around that time. The first minute tell was it 82, it says on Wikipedia. Yeah. I'm sure it got popular a little bit later than that. But it was like - It predates Prodigy.

1:49:01I mean, this was like Prodigy, but it was, everybody had it. It was really amazing. And of course it was like the young people like us, which would get our, you know, make our parents crazy because we'd use it was very expensive you know to connect and it would use up the phone line and it was like a place to meet people who would like watch the same anime that we did or play video games it was amazing so the people who learned how to type on this thing did they'll get all mad when we switch to qwerty no no france still has a zerti that's the french yeah we still have a zerti yeah yeah that's the french keyboard i know it looks weird doesn't it i mean uh i probably you were at um at mobile world congress which used to be 3gsm down in in in can and the press room was equipped with french keyboards and everyone other than french journalists got in there and was just like oh that's all you know there's like five letters you're still having to look down and do like finger finger finger finger yeah the rest is more normal yeah and the the worst part of that is that a lot of uh video games don't account for french keyboards so you launch the game and it's still qwerty but the qsd are not yes exactly crazy the numbers are upside down too oh yeah one two three four five oh are they nine oh fascinating it's like a phone it's like a phone on this one yeah i think maybe that was only the minute maybe the the number pad is but i think every computer should still have an envoi but it was it was really cool like it was very french or like in the way that it was a very top down a national company thinking up how can we bring this technology to the masses at a time that it wasn't.

1:51:05I mean, I know it used the phone line, but it was kind of like the phone. It was a BBS essentially. And you had like numbers that you would call that were very expensive, like a couple of bucks per minute. And especially the, like my generation remembers the ads for certain services that were on those very expensive numbers, you would call. And there were like, it was organized like forums from back then where you had like users who would become moderators and administrators. And like it was a whole thing. There were at the end of the 90s, 9 million Minitel terminals, 25 ,000 Minitel services, but then the internet came along, right?

1:51:50And it was kind of superseded that you didn't need it anymore as of this article which was on the in the independent in 2012 so it's 15 years ago there were still 800 000 old people in french france using their minitel because they didn't like computers yeah i think it's been shut down since by now it's gone yeah but of course the when the internet uh started showing up of course you know we were like all in to the the internet immediately we have the internet at home but um you don't need it yeah but it was like so in the 90s like i got on the internet quite early because i had it at university but uh in the 90s i would say 97 90.

1:52:32what really happened was that in the early 2000s i think it was a company called free which was a mobile uh sorry a uh internet service company uh phone operator actually got their service, which was actually free. You would connect to the internet. It was a, you know, ISP that was free. And it turned into a huge, huge company that is now mobile operator and ISP and everything. And that really popularized it. Well, we're getting a little tour of French culture today on Twitter. It's nice to have you, Patrick. Appreciate it. Our show this hour brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985 spring is here I love spring it's the season for tidying up closets and garages and yes your customer data because in most organizations data doesn't stay clean for long just like your closet inputs constantly change pipelines get fragile technical teams end up spending more time fixing data problems and building new systems and that's not good that's That's the challenge Melissa set out to solve with Unison, their new data quality platform.

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1:57:56Yeah, that was a strike right within the thing. They call it the automated ball strike system, or ABS. And it is really interesting how it's changed the game a little bit. But you can't use it too much. You have to use it very judiciously. Why don't they just use this on every pitch, though? Why isn't this on just every pitch? because well that's right you know in tennis it's on every foul line call right well yes but that went badly wrong at wimbledon when the first introduced it because it kept on getting things wrong well also some line judges were just like i don't care what the computer says i say it was out so you know it's right you've got to deal with the human thing i do like the idea of a human being able to say actually i don't think that's right but...

1:58:48I think there is the drama is part of the experience. And I mean, the drama of it adds drama to the game when you go. Well, no, that's not. I think, you know, if the thing happens and then that's part of the criticism in soccer, in football, I think. But if like you score a goal, everyone's happy, everyone's running around. And but then no, wait. Okay, wait, we have to check with the video. That's bad. It really slows the game. Okay, you can be happy now. Yeah, I know. That's very annoying. I can see how... No, no. Baseball, I think they're right. They say teams can have unlimited challenges, but you only get to be wrong twice, and then you can't do any more challenges for the rest of the game.

1:59:31So I think that's a good way to do it so you don't have this infinite tapping of the helmet. Formula One could do with something like this because the stewards' decisions over the last couple of years have been absolutely terrible. Yeah. No, see, Ian and I are Formula One fans, and we are also going through a drought because there were two races scheduled for the month of April, one in Bahrain and one in Saudi Arabia. I imagine those got canceled, yeah. Not the best place to have a lot of people gathered in one spot. No, no. So we're going through a drought until May. What do you think of the new rules, Ian?

2:00:08Are you enjoying it? I can't say politely. Sorry, I can say politely. You're a traditionalist, aren't you? swear i think they're bloody i love them oh i really yeah because you're seeing racing you're seeing well no there's some problems i understand you know formula one is foot to the floor racing not going slow to recharge your battery and then get a mario kart boost at the end of it you know ollie behrman nearly slammed into the back of another car at the last race yeah that was because he was traveling 50 miles an hour faster than the car in front because he used his magic mushroom boost and you know that sounds interesting that sounds interesting all of a sudden it's going to be a banana what's happening it's going to be great i can't wait it's going to well max verstappen has officially been asked apparently to stop referring it to as maria mushroom mode um but they're going to have to make some changes before miami because it's dangerous on the track that's the real problem yeah um but also speed are not good you know it's it's formula Formula One, it's car racing.

2:01:11It's supposed to be foot to the floor, balls to the wall, and get out there and go as fast as you possibly can. Not super... I mean, the Formula One Association made a huge mistake when they put out on social media Kimi's fastest lap from the last race. And apparently, oh, the camera died while he was recharging his battery. It was just like, well, we've just checked his feed and it definitely didn't. So, you know... Sorry, I'm Formula One nuts. So... Yeah, I shouldn't have brought it up. How do you feel about baseball, though? Cricket on steroids. Colorado lawmakers have passed a right to repair, a landmark right to repair law.

2:01:54In fact, many states are now working on right to repair.

2:02:02But tech companies are not too happy about this, which is strange. you would think they would like the notion of right to repair you would think you would think yeah you won't buy a new one though you won't buy a new one though yeah yeah i mean there's a new bill in colorado the exempt critical infrastructure from right to repair bill which would modify the right to repair uh bill which was passed two years ago and went into effect January of this year. Cisco and IBM support this exemption. And by the way, Cisco makes routers, as well as other equipment. They cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad guys to use those methods for nefarious means.

2:02:55Well, I interviewed Corey Doctorow about this, and he was They're saying any router is therefore a national security piece because it could possibly be used by the military. I'm presuming IBM has the same example. And, you know, it's rubbish. If it's a specific router used exclusively for national security, you could kind of see a point. But this is blatant lobbying against a very good bill indeed. And it's basically big tech who you're, I think you're right. They just want you to have to go to them and give them an exorbitant amount of money. It seems like right to repair is one of those ideas and concepts and laws that are difficult to oppose with a straight face.

2:03:38Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I think the lawyers are being paid very, very much to keep their straight face. It sounds like one of the most American things, to be able to fix your own stuff. It's fundamental. You own it. You should be able to fix it. It also kind of runs counter to the whole sustainability measure that companies always talk about. They spend at least 10 minutes of every keynote talking about how sustainable they are, and yet you can't easily repair the device that you've bought. I don't know. I mean, even when Apple introduced their repair kits, they were phenomenally difficult to use, very expensive.

2:04:15And it's also a security risk. I think CNET's covered this, but also other publications. At one point, farmers in the U.S. were downloading Ukrainian control software. Well, they had to. Right. Yeah. For the combine harvesters, which is just bonkers. You know, it's like just for one sensor going out, which measures the height of the combine harvester, they had to wait for a week or so for somebody to turn up and fix it, which at crop harvesting time is catastrophic in some regards. so it makes perfect sense that people should be able to repair their own kit but there's money to be made and this is america so let's stall this as long as possible i think there is like maybe you could go from the default being you can't repair stuff to the default being you can and then you can apply for or you have cases where it's important to not be able to you know to not let the user repair it themselves maybe there are cases that can be made but right now it's the opposite and i think that's or it's a free-for-all and i think that's not to the benefit of society no no i mean it's um it's kind of like with cars if you've got one of these plugs that the data ports for your cars i bought one online and it's really interesting going in there and just seeing what's going on in your engine i'm not going to suggest that i would even try to repair it because I know I'd brick our car in a second.

2:05:40But it's nice to be able to talk with a mechanic and say, yeah, we've got this fault, this fault, this fault. Gets everything done so much faster. Let's take one last break and then a potpourri, a grab bag of stories that I couldn't figure out how to put them under a single heading. How about that? Ian Thompson, Abrar al-Hiti, Patrick Beja, great to have all three of you. Great to have you watching, especially our club members thank you for your support we appreciate it makes a big difference if you're not a club member and you don't want ads there's an easy way to do it go to twit.tv slash club twit join the club get ad free versions of all our shows plus access to the discord and all the special programming we do uh in the club twit discord like this friday our ai user group we have some really good stuff going on in that ai user group people in the club who are using ai in very interesting ways, very smart people.

2:06:34If you're interested, we would love to see you this Friday for our AI user group. And if you're not a member of the club, join twit.tv slash club twit. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by our sponsor ExpressVPN. A few decades ago, private citizens used to be private, right? What's changed? The internet. Think about everything you've browsed, searched, watched, or tweeted. Now imagine all that data being crawled, collected, and aggregated by data brokers into a permanent public record, your record. Having your private life exposed for others to see was one something only celebrities worried about, but in an era where everyone's online, everyone's a public figure.

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2:09:16But you know what? The picture they showed is of two very short people. I wonder how. One of the club things we do is with travel guru Johnny Jett, and he's actually seen it. And we looked at the picture. And the thing is, you know how wide a three-seat across economy row is, right? Wide enough, yeah. If you thought you could lie down across that, and you can, then you're in luck. because what they're going to do is have a little fold-out thing that makes the seat. You know about the sobriety. Did you go to the event? Did you see it? No, I didn't go to the event, but I am united as the plane that I was flying, or the airline that I was flying with.

2:09:56Would you pay extra? Because you have to buy the whole row for this. You have to buy the whole row, which makes me wonder how expensive would it be. But was it three seats or was it four seats? I feel like in my mind, I thought it was four, but I could be wrong because I can definitely lie down on a four seat. Four seat, I could lie down. When I get lucky, yeah, and nobody's sitting next to me. I had one on an international flight. It was fantastic. I don't want to know about you getting lucky in an airplane. So that's another. I could sleep very well. Let's see. Let's see. It looks like three seats.

2:10:24Is it three? Here's from Johnny Jets. And you see they have a little thing that folds up. But then the picture of people in it, it's a little deceptive because, well, the mom is all curled up and the child fits very nicely. It is three seats. See, that's different. Yeah. Yeah. That's not great. and i united says it's it's for families traveling with small children solo short solo travelers but this is the one that gets me couples who want the value of you know i was couples really here's johnny jet attempting and he's not a he's 510 staying yeah yeah i don't know if you need that much space kind of going in that direction you just need more leg room really plus you're going to get your toes clipped off when the cart comes down yeah yeah yeah but yeah my biggest question is the cost because you've just uh two other people can't buy tickets and so how much are you gonna have to foot from that bill um to make that work but yeah you know what they're getting a lot of attention for it it's nice to see them yeah it's a good option yeah and for families absolutely but to the um starlink point i know that united and other airlines have added you know, Starlink.

2:11:34It's a lot better. I've used, I use Starlink on a Hawaiian airlines flight and it was great. But I, my favorite thing about flying is the fact that nobody can access me and I can't access anybody. So I'm kind of torn where I'm like, do I really want to be on the grid all the time? If only it were true now. Yeah. So otherwise United has terrible wifi if there's no Starlink. So I'm kind of like, I got used to it. I'm like, Oh, okay. I can't talk to anybody. It's great. I don't want to give Elon my money, but it works, right? It works. Other airlines already do this extra seats thing where you can buy out your row.

2:12:06And it really, the Philippine Airlines does it. I know that because I fly from the Philippines. And you can buy out the whole row for, I think it's an extra, I think it's$300. Oh, okay. For an international flight, that's pretty good. Yeah. Now, you see, I remember traveling on French railways and doing a Eurorail pass in the 80s. I don't know if they still do this, Patrick, but it used to be that the seats, when you had six seats in an economy class carriage, which they could actually fold into one and you get a full lie down bed. And that was amazing. But you're really sleeping in public, aren't you?

2:12:38Well, yeah. But on the other hand, when you're a penniless student going around in Europe, compared to a hotel room, there's a marvelous train that goes from Paris on a big loop and gets you back, leaves about midnight, gets back about 6 a.m. I've just saved myself a hotel cost for the price of a train ticket. I always take red-eye flights too. So I love the idea of being able to sleep on public transportation. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. I can't sleep on planes, but yeah. I, for some reason, and I think it's terror, I fall asleep as we're taking off every time. That's the worst time to fall asleep. It's the best time.

2:13:12It's so relaxed. It's soothing when you're taxiing and then you just doze. Yes. So it's not just me. Oh, no. We're a lot alike, Abra. You look in other people's windows, you fall asleep when we take off on planes? Yeah, exactly. I did a year as the editor of an aviation IT magazine, and it's the worst time to fall asleep because 85 % of accidents occur in the first three minutes. Wouldn't you rather be asleep when that happens? No, I'd rather have my shoes on and to be ready to run to the nearest emergency exit. You know, they always know when there's been an airplane accident because the shoes rain out of the sky.

2:13:48You lose your shoes. It's the first thing you lose. Oh. Did you know that? No. No. I didn't see that on Lost, so I don't know. The very first question. closely they're all getting off the plane are you sure it's not just that people took off their shoes so the shoes fly out but the people who do have their shoes are ready to run like we should investigate we need to investigate you're supposed to take your shoes off before you jump on the thing though you're supposed to take your shoes off before you are you're supposed to take your shoes off because you don't want to puncture you get people who get yeah but oh heels and puncture the i will never forget the first trip i took with my publisher and i was just wearing standard running shoes or trainers as we call them and i sort of i've been i was going to be sitting next to this guy for 14 hours on a flight to jakarta and he took one look at my shoes and he went big mistake in you always wear leather on an aircraft because those things will stick to your feet if you've got to run through journey burning jet fuel oh my god oh for goodness sake this guy's planning man he's thinking ahead yeah oh my god but those are terrible for burning jet fuel it's so great what kind of disaster mentality is that it sounds like a pleasure to sit next to for oh he was a very unusual person i'll put it that way uh congratulations uh to uh uh which sounds like a french name to me uh ibm scientist who great chap yes he figured out a way to create current well he was looking for a way to create currency that could not be forged decided to use quantum physics uh actually i'm sorry gil brissard was a physicist who was swimming in a pool thinking about this when a guy named charles bennett a physicist from ibm research swam up and came up with this notion of using quantum computing this is a long time ago before quantum computing really was even in a twinkle in the eye.

2:15:50This was in 1979. Anyway, Bennett has now won the Turing Award, the 2025 AM Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, along with Gilles Brassard, who is actually a French-Canadian professor at the Université de Montréal. A$1 million prize, like the Nobel Prize. First time the Turing Award has recognized quantum research. so I don't know is that like cryptocurrency what is this for what's this about no I don't know uh the idea he pitched as they swam would eventually become the only practical method for sharing encryption keys with security guaranteed not by mathematical complexity but by the laws of physics itself this is according to IBM I don't know what it means it's over it's beyond over my head i mean brissard was also editor of journal of cryptography and i've seen him speak at a conference and he's really good oh okay all right um in 1973 uh bennett wrote a paper that showed that computation could in principle be carried out reversibly run forward then backward without any net energy cost i don't know what that means either.

2:17:10Anyway, congratulations. I mean, we have to, we have to report it. I don't know what it means. We have to report it. New York Times says there is now something called Chromebook remorse, tech backlash at schools, extending beyond phones, uh, to the fact that all these kids have laptops and they're watching YouTube and playing games on them, even though they're Chromebooks, digital distractions that the school gave you. They talk about a Kansas middle school that asked all 480 students to return their Chromebooks. The school keeps the laptops in carts parked in classrooms. The children take notes by hand and the laptops are only pulled out when there are specific activities from the teacher.

2:17:58I feel like this comes back to that problem of how much do you have to keep things away from people um or how much do you allow them to use these tools that have become indispensable everything should be kept away from kids in middle school they're just there's no there's no good especially school lunches everything yeah right food fight right everything nothing they should not be allowed anything i i think it was a a good thing to try and it was very natural you know they're stuck and we're going to make things remember one laptop Laptop per child? Remember when we said that? One laptop per child?

2:18:33Was it specifically for education purposes? Yeah. Or was it so that kids would... Okay. But I mean, it's a natural idea to think you're going to do things and you're going to get them used to computers. And maybe one laptop per child was before smartphones. So it was like, you need to know how to use those tools. That's a good point. It was before smartphones. Yeah. But also, when you notice there are issues here and there, and these things don't work as well as we thought they would for this context, then we walk it back a little bit. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, Google originally pushed Chromebooks as the perfect school tool because they were really easy to administer, pretty secure because they got their security chip in there, and there were no games for them at the time.

2:19:23Well, obviously, the latter point has changed, and they are still very easy to administer. But there's been a lot of interesting research that children who, or anyone, in fact, who's learning something, if you actually physically write it down, it stays in the memory a lot longer than if you just type it into a keyboard or look it up on the internet. Yeah, that makes sense. I felt that even in college. Even as I was taking notes on my laptop, I was like, I feel like I'm not retaining information the same way that I did when I was in middle and high school taking notes by hand. yeah i feel that now i don't remember anything what what were we talking about like just now i don't i don't know you should be writing this down patrick clearly with with a pen and paper yeah definitely should i've i've completely eliminated my brain from the equation now i use obsidian when i'm seeing an article i obsidian clip it to my obsidian notebook i have my agent distill it put a make a wiki with all the details and the summaries and i never look at it so it's it's perfect i i have a complete knowledge system that i never have to touch and so i never have to be worried about knowledge i can just ignore it finally sad story remember zombo.com no to be honest no idea what it is oh i'm so sad it must be an american thing i am so sad uh so it was a early website that was just kind of flash and it just god i don't know how to describe it it was a joke it was a zombo.com when anything is possible zombo.com and it would just go on and on and on and dancing around well it got this i know jammer b you're right how can anybody forget zombo.com anyway the the domain got hacked and uh uh hacked or sold hacked and then the hackers didn't do anything with it so it reverted and this guy bought it on go daddy he's got a message on the new zombo.com welcome new management uh this domain was purchased openly on go daddy we come in peace and with the wallet we'd like to purchase the right to the former site's content to help revive the infinite until then everything here is new and unique i don't know what's going on with this oh you know what good thank you jammer b has a thank you youtube a video on youtube this so for those of you who don't know this is the great zombo.com that once was welcome to zombo.com this is some good lord this is now you may say who cares that this guy i can totally see how this would be a great like this is in the era of the hamster dance right peanut butter jelly time oh badger badger badger badger badger badger it was in that era i don't know it's just sad to me that i'm sorry for your

2:22:46lost i like it no but i can i can i can see how it would be it was it was early internet cultures as it was a more innocent time you know it's it was a time of goat sea and various other things go see i don't mind if we don't ever see that again it's burned into my brain i'm sad to say so anyway if you were the original creator of zombo.com please contact the new owners let's bring zombo.com back the unattainable is unknown at zombo.com i feel like this was a uniquely american experience because when i saw it i can't believe none of you know about zombo.com when i i looked at it when the link was on the list and i was just It's like, what on earth is this?

2:23:33And then I guess it's the same thing as if an American watched Badger, Badger, Badger, or various other things. That was international. It was a purely cultural moment. Everyone knows Badger, Badger, Badger. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Mushroom, mushroom. I did love the one they did for the European Cup, I think, in 94, where it was like football, football, football, football. It was. do you think we we are so fragmented now and the internet's so ubiquitous that we will no longer have those kind of communal moments where everybody knows badger badger badger or the black dress blue dress i mean memes have taken that over surely yeah yeah but they're fragmented like um yeah it depends on whether you're on tiktok or whether you're on you know even then there's different parts of tiktok people always exactly i mean some of them transcend right some of them every now and then but it's getting rarer in the same way that we don't all watch the same tv shows anymore or watch the same movies anymore um so it becomes hard we all find things that we're more interested in but we have a harder time finding people to talk to about those things yeah it's true it's maybe maybe it's because everyone's on the internet and before it was still kind of a smaller community yeah yes yes it was kind of cool to know about these things with your in group and then yeah you know when this shows right go ahead sorry patrick oh sorry i was like you were saying jokingly and it was a simpler time i think there's some of it as well like we have less uh i don't know naivety or tolerance for just fun stupid little things now like now it's it's listen you're you tell yourself or your mind tells you we have real problems like we have everything is life and death now yes yeah but the other piece of that is yes and whenever somebody posts anything there's always going to be all these really bitter negative people in the comments so that's the other problem is like they make false problems about things that don't actually matter where like somebody can't even post a home renovation without being dragged on Instagram.

2:25:44Everybody's so miserable where it's like, why can we not just have whimsy and joy and laugh about things anymore? That's true. You know, I heard it's a little bit more local version of what you're saying, but I was watching a video of Alana Pierce, who's a video game content creator. She used to work at Santa Monica, which is a Sony-owned studio that made God of War, among other things. And she was talking about something about an old God of War movie. And she mentioned that some people were expressing a specific opinion about that controversy-ish topic. And she said, you know, I've quit Twitter for like a couple of years.

2:26:29And there are some things that some people tell me that are issues or problems. And I have never heard anyone express that opinion. ever like it's not a real opinion yeah it is a twitter thing yeah and people go on twitter and get really mad and think that it represents anything but if you're not specifically on twitter it is not a real problem you know and it really spoke to me because i've been in that like mail it's a twitter thing you just wouldn't understand yes yeah i mean we've had the same problem this week with the great marmalade scandal in the uk um tell me more is patty Yeah, I'm interested in it.

2:27:09Well, I mean, it's basically... Well, I'm glad we finally got to the most important story of the day. Thank God. That's only been three hours. Well, I mean, a story went out at the start of the week that the UK was going to have to change the name of marmalade to citrus marmalade in order to comply with EU regulations. No. Well, it came from Reform UK, which is our up-and-coming and hopefully dying political party, and it turned out to be complete bollocks. This is from the BBC. Yeah, I know. Marmalades may need to be relabeled under post-Brexit food deal. I mean, Paddington would not approve, nevertheless.

2:27:47That's the first person I thought of, yeah. Yeah, I mean, when you actually look into the details of it, it just says you have to qualify what type of marmalade it is. Now, 90 % of the marmalades sold in the UK are called orange marmalade, but Italy and France and Germany all have their own marmalades and they generally call themselves citrus. But this is a completely manufactured scandal, which is coming back to our earlier point. For no good reason whatsoever. And, you know, sometimes Tim Berners-Lee must have wanted to cut his fingers off watching some of this stuff. Apparently, in Italy and Spain, sometimes they make their marmalada or marmalata with figs, shockingly enough.

2:28:31So it's important that you understand if it's made of bitter Seville oranges that it is orange marmalade so wait the whole thing was that there was some regulation that said you have to say what's in the thing that's what the issue was like you have to say what's inside the bucket they need to be distinguished as a separate type of product will have to be sold using the new legal name citrus marmalade I feel like if it's orange which you can tell like i don't know i feel like yeah you say orange marmalade or fig marmalade isn't this that isn't the the the subtext of this this is why we left the eu oh that's the subtext right yes yeah absolutely you see these nutty eu people making us don't get me started on brexit i mean i can rant for this on this for hours but you know greatest act of self-harm and whatever but you know it's just it comes back to the the whole you know outrage is the thing that sells and marmalade is a very British thing and it's got a lot of coverage and then it turns out four days later that or two a couple of days later it really wasn't a big thing at all and I do I regret what the internet has become with these kind of things you know it's just or rather what social media and then leading into the internet has become and i hope we can get better in the future well i'm just glad that you brought this up at the end of the show because now i have a name for the show the great british marmalade scandal i would click on that approved yeah wouldn't you want to when you want to hear that show a thousand percent and i like to get those names from the last part of the show to force you to listen to an entire two and a half hours just to find out what the hell they're talking about.

2:30:19It's like putting milk at the back of the grocery store. You got to work your way through to get there. It's good marketing. Exit through the gift shop. You bet. Abrar, you get it. You get it. See, we're on a wavelength. I'm telling you. All the time. Keep peeping through people's windows, you know. You'll find Abrar's great work at CNET, where she's a senior technology reporter. And of course, here on Tech News Weekly. And whenever we can get her on Twitter, too. Thank you so much for being here, Abrar. Thank you. I appreciate you. Yep, absolutely. Ian Thompson, of course, you must subscribe to, what do you call it?

2:30:52The View from the Valley. Yeah, View from the Valley. Yes. On Techfinitiv. If I go to techfinitiv.com, I should be able to find it there. Yes. Yeah. Yes, absolutely. It's, I mean, okay. My name is spelt rather oddly, but View from the Valley will always get you there. That's a little easier. Yes. I-A-I-N-T-H-O-M-S-O-N. yes a scottish spelling i but no p is how i always remember it oh yeah but i never spells ai in english and in french yes yes it's although we get lane a lot over here and i've never met an american i could be an l it could be an l it doesn't we don't know i i miss serif um you know i know you need serifs you need something yeah you need something thank you Ian.

2:31:37Great to see you. And Patrick Peja, thank you for being the contrarian that you are sometimes and it's always appreciated. I try my best. I am glad to have you on. Make things spicy. Staying up late, no less. You'll find his French and English podcast. He's brought back the affiliates club at notpatrick.com and Le Rendezvous-Tec, if you like the French stuff. thank you patrick great to see you thanks since 2009 i was going to actually ian figure out when your first show was i think it was 2010 but i'd have to check let's see it's fantastic uh i looked like the picture doesn't you know well we were audio i think in the uh maybe in the early i know patrick's first show was audio only oh right now i came up to the studio for the first time but um how do you spell your name again i a i n thank you leo just that's it lane that's it uh let me see if i can oh look at you young young man you oh wow you really need to change that picture holy no no no don't change the thing there are 11 pages of Ian on here.

2:32:53Holy cow. And that first one was Tech News Tonight from 2014. Oh, 2014. As late as that, right. Yeah. So, Patrick wins the prize for this one. Okay. Yay. Your first Twit appearance was 493 on January 18th, 2015. And that was video. Yeah. You were there with Up in the Brickhouse. Yeah. Yeah. That was looks like veronica belmont and uh well that other guy looks so familiar is that ben thompson it is ben thompson yeah it's serenity calwell and ben thompson yeah and some strange guy in a hat thank you so much you guys it's great to have you we do twit every sunday afternoon two to five pacific five to eight eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live as we stream the show uh youtube twitch x.com Facebook LinkedIn and kick and of course if you're in the club you get behind the velvet rope access in the club twit discord after the fact get the shows at twit TV or wherever you get your podcasts there's a YouTube channel too dedicated to the video there's audio and video of every show please subscribe though we'd love to have you back on a regular basis and now as I have been saying for 20 long years thanks for joining us we'll see you next time another twit is in the can bye-bye hey there it's leo laporte host of so many shows on the twit network thinking about advertising in 2026 we host a network of the most trusted shows in tech each featuring authentic post-read ads delivered by micah sargent my co-host and of course me our listeners don't just hear our ads they really believe in them because we've established a relationship with them.

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