TWiT 1080: Destroy All Phonorecords - Musk v. Altman, Claude Opus 4.7, & Voyager 1

34:00Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. Right on. Yes, AI is a problem, but I think what is going on is that it's the billionaires. The reason why I say that, the distinction is that if you look at the age of the people who are doing this, they're fairly young. So yes, they could be displaced, and yes, a lot of entry-level jobs are being removed for AI because of AI or the excuse of AI. And there's talk about like, hey, when you think about you're creating something that's going to threaten the human race, people are going to believe you. But it doesn't matter if they believe you or not. The CEOs who are firing all these people are saying that is the reason.

34:44So regardless if it's AI, regardless if it is a threat for the future, there are impacts today that are being blamed on AI in terms of junior roles not being available. But also, I think this could be coupled with if you've seen those warehouse fires where people are just lighting up inventory and saying that they are not getting paid enough. And couple that with what's going on in the world in general, in this administration, where prices are going up, wages are going down, unemployment rate in terms of the length of people, how long they are on unemployment. trying to find another job is really, really hard because now everyone is using AI to swamp recruiters, and so they're using AI to reject wider and larger numbers of people who are looking for roles.

35:35I think it's a combination of all of the above and everything that's going on that's causing some of this backlash. I'm going to agree with you against myself and say, with my history hat on, if we roll back 200 years, the Luddites were not wrong. They get a bad rap. Their methods were very similar to what's being used today in some ways and are going to accelerate, I think, which is throwing the sabbats into the gears of progress. Sabotage. Sabotage, because the point of them was exactly this. It was massive displacement for mechanization without a plan for how it would affect the economy or workers.

36:12And so you're going to displace a huge number of people with necessary skills. And then what happens? How does your economy survive that? And the people at the top didn't care. And the people at the bottom said, well, we've got nothing less to lose. The last public beheadings in England were of people who were convicted of sabotage, of being their Luddite leaders. So, you know, it's not in living memory. It's two centuries back. But it's still, you see the same kind of things being already, if you're on X, which I am not, you see people saying like, oh, we should be, you know, capital punishment for people who attack data centers or whatever.

36:47I mean, it's already that kind of rhetoric is being thrown around too easily, but it's the Luddites were right in their message, maybe hard to support in their particular approach. Lou, is there any trepidation among people who are actually working in AI? Does this come up at all or? All the time. Yeah, all the time. I mean, like I would say my true belief is that obviously it's not eliminating jobs. It's just eliminating the tasks inside the jobs. And so you really have to learn to essentially adjust and evolve, but it doesn't change the stresses. Like I personally feel stressed that my job is going to evolve very soon.

37:27And I've been doing this for 22 years and it makes me feel uncomfortable with that whole feeling of it. And like, will it, will I be still be relevant? it. And if I find out after looking at all the things that it does generate or that it does automate or it does make things easier, I can see it giving me room to do other things, especially the human factor of it, right? The ability to make decisions using my vast experience of many, many years. So I think I get pulled in different directions, but I can definitely tell you everyone's feeling it. You still need the engineering skills, the planning skills, the understanding of testing i mean you know shipping orchestration you need to be the orchestrator orchestration yeah man and so that's a skill the problem often is raised that well what about entry-level jobs the people who don't have those skills yet they're they're you know they're at the beginning of the career that 20 years later they'll have those skills where do they fit in and we were talking earlier about computer science majors just dwindling because nobody said thinks that there's a future in learning Python anymore.

38:32I mean, in this whole notion, I feel like it was very brief. It was like, well, everyone's going to be a prompt engineer. And I thought that didn't feel right, but there's going to be a different kind of education. It's going to be a little more abstract. I mean, most people don't do machine-level programming, or never has been the case, or microcoding. And no one said, oh, no, we put the microcoders out of business. We have abstracted languages. is if this is another... AI is going to help us design chips better and better, I think. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we're not... I think computer science, maybe it was so practical in some ways because there was so much of a job demand feed, maybe it's going to become more of an analytic discipline again because people will have to be relying on that kind of...

39:18Nobody's studying how to be a coachman anymore. I need to learn how to drive a four and four and whatever they call them. You know, jobs change. I think it's encouraging that a lot of those kids who are going into computer science now are going to engineering and data science because those are probably the places to go, right? But the thing is, coding has always been more basketball than golf. It's never been really an individual sport. it's always been a team sport. And you have to think of all the things that work together in order for the outcome that you all see. And I think that's the part that people are missing in companies.

40:01Like if the more, the higher you are in a company, the more abstract you are from all the minutia, all the invisible glue work that takes for the outcome to actually happen. And so when you're an executive and you're using AI to write reports, digest reports, write emails, you're like, this thing is amazing. It could do everything that I can do, which means those are the jobs that should be eliminated. And not the people at the bottom that are working with vendors. They're hearing the complaints and then coordinating with the responses and then hearing and understanding what the community is. And as we are, one thing that's also the bad part about we're eliminating these jobs because of AI is that we are losing diversity and not the kind of diversity where you're thinking about DEI, but even diversity of thought is being lost because it's being coalesced.

40:55And one decision maker who's orchestrating all these AIs, which is a problem. Oh, that's interesting. It becomes golf. Yeah, I am steeped in this because I'm writing a book about it. But the reason why that these decisions are being made is not because of AI. No AI says you should lay off 40 % of your workforce. These are people who are at the upper part of the company who are too abstracted away from the actual work to have really clear eye about how this is negatively going to affect them. Because they think because they had been successful, they'll continue being successful. And that's not going to happen.

41:30Sorry. Go ahead. Sorry. Going back to the computer science thing, though, as well. I mean, I work with a ton of talented applied scientists who are actually training these models and writing the evaluations. Yeah, somebody's got to do that. somebody's got to do that but you still have to have you know programming skills you have to have engineering skills to really think through the problem sets and i think that's you know that's where it's going to come in i think people stepping away from these roles is not going to help it i was thinking uh uh you know uh scott adams r.i.p question mark uh scott adams had a strip well rest anyway we don't know if it'll be peaceful a number of years ago he had a strip that had uh the pointy-haired boss gets abducted by aliens and uh there's a bit where the aliens say teach us your management secrets the last panel shows the boss bandaged and on crutches saying i i downsized 90 of the aliens and then the ship crashed that must be their fault you know something like that it's like yeah that's kind of how to wesley points kind of what it feels like yeah this is what scares me about this is the um beijing half marathon of course they're moving very quickly this is from Reuters very quickly in China towards bipedal robots.

42:38I guess we are too. The marathon was, look at these robots running. Now at first it's comic, especially when they fall down and burst into a million pieces. But in fact, a robot did break the world record for a half marathon, winning in 50 minutes, 26 seconds. To me, that's scary. I don't like the idea of fast moving machines with a lot of power in their limbs. Some of these are cute. That's a cute one. You're a fan of F1? Yes, I am a fan of F1. Yes. I like fast driving cars. I just don't know. Some of these are really funny. Like, oh, you're missing all the excitement. No.

43:24This is the slowest one. but by the way this is the point last year the winner took two hours and a half this year 50 minutes oh my god they're getting better and better and better at that uh i just when i see that i only see military applications but i'm also like you can push it over so probably not yet yeah but well it's just a matter of time though isn't it before you can't push it over those dogs were more scary to me actually than the robot running robots uh snap speaking of uh ceos laying off snap is laying off 16 of its full-time staff and it says and i don't know if it's ai washing but they say these thousand employees are being replaced by ai i think just maybe that snap's business isn't as good as it used to be so much hiring for so long it just i think it's a great excuse to not make people not make the stock market freak out even if it's it could be yeah actually like block or square or whatever the square parent company right didn't they yeah that few and meta now uh says it's going to lay off 10 which is i think 8 000 people that is terrifying i know you know we always kind of gloss over the human toll of this, but that's a lot of people who will have to find jobs in what must be a very difficult job market.

44:51It's very difficult. I mean, this is the new business model, right? You basically want to make sure your shareholders think that your company is fiduciary responsible. And so you decided to start laying off people and blaming it on AI. So it's like kind of a weird model. Yeah. I feel like layoffs are always so much more emphasized partly because of legal reporting requirements in the United States for sure. But so the numbers get out there even if you don't want them to. But the hiring, there was such weird and massive hiring during stages of the heat of the pandemic. And how many people are hired back?

45:24I never know when they say we laid off 8 ,000 people, do they then hire back, you know, 4 ,000? What are the wages of those people? How many were part-time? It's such an incomplete picture. So it's also, you look at the stock market, which is at, I guess, Also, S &P is at the all-time high, which I know doesn't - Yeah, boy, that's baffling to me. You know, I got to say, I did something really stupid two weeks ago. I sold all my stocks. I don't have individual stocks. I have, you know, index funds, big index funds. And I just got terrified. I thought, this is, I have to live on this. I'm, you know, I'm almost 70.

45:59This is going to be, for the next 20 years, all I've got. I don't want to lose 20 % to a stock market crash. which I thought was imminent. Dumb me. So I sold everything. I'm just sitting on a pile of cash. I mean, it is enough for me, I guess, to survive for the rest of my life. But then the stock market goes, there's a room. I'm like, what the hell is going on? I don't understand. Do any of you understand? It doesn't make sense to fire people if they say they overhired. If anyone's been part of a company, there's a huge backlog of things that they wish they could do. And they could reallocate people to do more projects, do more geographical relocation even, or different territories or different sub-areas.

46:48They could have a group that's just made to make a wool shoe or something like that.

46:56Apparently, there's a huge market demand. Oh, I have all birds. I'm wearing all birds right now, as a matter of fact. I'm just glad that these shoes are going to be AI generated from now on. That's the strangest story. It's somebody said that a people management that they're reducing people. Yeah, they this is the this is like Long Island Ice Tea becoming Long Island blockchain. It's just a way to quickly pump the stock. Get out of it. Remember meme stocks? Yeah, I guess we're back to that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what this is. This this the layoff is the new or the AI to pump the stock is a new pump stock.

47:33Yeah. Well, it's working unfortunately it'll keep going until it stops working yeah that's the problem right how long does it work for how long does it fool people i don't know well look at the nines of these companies right the the the the service availability just keeps going down so it's not like the quality is going up well by the way suffering like github but honestly that's an example of GitHub success. So many people are committing. I have 13 repos on GitHub. So many people are committing. All the AI commits are just killing GitHub. I can't blame, I can't blame GitHub for the nines. Oh my God.

48:12The one, the one thing that I'll say there's unallowed good thing about AI is I'll be like, yeah, do a commit. And then it writes like a thousand words that actually eloquently explains. Oh, the rebates are fantastic. My commits are like fixed something. Yeah. The commits are so good. What did I fix? I don't know. Oh, I'm never going to write another commit message. Never. Mine are like fix number two, second fix, second fix, third fix of the fix of the fix. 2.1.1.1.1 update. Yeah. I did something. I can't remember what it was, but this is the new version. That's beautiful. What you wrote, that was beautiful.

48:47Lou, do you enforce like good commit messages? You must. I mean, there's got to be a pulse. Always, always, always. Yeah. And it's because it's documentation too. You want to be able to use the commit messages to retroactively document how the software's changed and so on. So, yeah. People who are not GitHub aficionados or Git aficionados are probably going, what are they talking about? It's just that when you make a change to, I don't know, how far back do I want to go on this? So when you write software, sometimes you use a system that actually you should be using that keeps track of versions so that you can, if you make a change and it causes problems, go back.

49:25You can know who made a change. If it's a big team making changes to a single code base. There's lots of reasons for versioning. There have been many solutions. Git ended up being the dominant solution because Linus Torvalds created it when he realized he couldn't keep track of all the commits. to the Linux kernel and Git's become huge. GitHub is perhaps the biggest purveyor of Git. And people store their source code in a GitHub repository or repo. And when they make changes, they will write a little message called a commit message. And then Wesley and I just write, fixed it. But good professionals will write a long message saying what they did so that you can ascribe blame, so that you can rewind it appropriately so you know what changes have been made.

50:14You all experience this when you go to the App Store and there's an update. And the update says, fix some stuff. What I hate is the ones that, we're always working harder to make your software better. And we just did. I think Apple should not require commit messages for minor updates. It's the whole reason. You have to put text in there. It's embarrassing if you don't, I guess, or you just put like a period. Or maybe companies could really do a changelog and say, hey, this is what we fixed. Wouldn't that be? Why can't they? Be more like Lou. Be more like Lou. Yes, everybody. Good advice for life.

50:52Be more like Lou. We're going to take a little break. More with Lou and all of us who want to be like him. Glenn Fleischman, Wesley Faulkner, Lou Maresca. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform the potential rewards again with ai again with the ai the potential rewards of ai obviously in business too great to ignore let's not forget the risks and there are many uh partly just from your own team using ai and accidentally exfiltrating sensitive proprietary data then of course there are attacks against enterprise managed ai which also can steal data from you and then there's the issue of bad guys using generative ai to improve their attacks helping them rapidly create phishing lures you know used to be you could say well that phishing mail is obviously fake the grammar look at the grammar but no now they're perfect they use it to write malicious code uh we just saw that with a supply chain attack uh with axios and at light llm uh the code clearly ai coded and and that means that they can put these things out fast they're also using it once they get into automate data extraction it's this is a scary scenario you've got to do something to protect your proprietary data with your if your team is using ai there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked in ai applications I bet on April 15th, that number tripled when people asked their AI, hey, here's my 1040.

52:32What do you think? And of course, it's got your name, address, birthdate, and social security number on it. And the AI's got it now. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations last year alone. And that's just accidental. You know, not even malicious behavior. Just an accident. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Check out this. Siva, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zuora, they use Zscaler, and he said this about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. With Zscaler being in line in a security protection strategy, it helps us monitor all the traffic.

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54:01Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. All right, enough AI, enough AI. We've been talking about AI. Oh, well, there's one more. Let's talk about the courts. ai in the courts uh elon musk versus sam altman oh no ai and elon musk leo and and court it's gonna this trial uh in which elon is suing uh open ai saying hey when sam and i got together to create this it was a non-profit now they're taking it to be profitable uh you know i i'm not i'm gonna admit i'm not an elon fan but there is some merit to this especially if you just read that new yorker article about how slippery sam altman has been this whole time uh elon is saying that open ai has strayed from its founding mission and uh and that's not what he funded it for and he wants by the way like a huge amount of money which he's i don't think he's gonna get A jury is going to get this.

55:15Nine jurors in Oakland, California, in the federal court there, will soon get this case and decide it could affect OpenAI's IPO. It could affect Musk's status as an OpenAI competitor with XAI. Incidentally, I think his case is a little bit weakened by the fact that he said, we're going to found open ai so that the big guys don't get ai and it's going to be non-profit and then he you know immediately leaves and founds xai which is fully for profit fully closed everything he's complaining about with open ai um i don't know if there's anything that's said about this, Elon gave about$38 million to found it, left in 2018 after disagreements with Sam Altman.

56:13The lawsuit has been essentially whittled down, according to Wired, to three core claims, whether OpenAI breached its charitable trust, you know, because they were supposed to be non-profit, and now they have a for-profit arm that generates billions in yearly revenue. And, by the way, their code is not open. One of the things that came out in the New Yorker article was that there was a covenant originally with OpenAI that if any other company ever came up with better AI than OpenAI, that OpenAI would immediately dissolve and go help that company. That went out the window pretty quick. um there also is a claim of fraud that altman deceived musk about his intentions to make a profit and the third claim is unjust enrichment which argues that sam altman and greg brockman the president and other open ai investors have enriched themselves at the expense of musk um he wants the one of the things he's asking for is that the jury remove altman and brockman from open AI management, return their ill-gotten gains to the company's nonprofit and blocks them from existing as a public benefit corporation, which is what the for-profit arm is currently.

57:37And he could, in the long run, get hundreds of billions of dollars if the jury rules for him. What do you think is going to happen in this case? It's going to be a great discovery process for everybody. I think that's what's going to happen. it has been so far they're gonna pay elon musk off and he's gonna complain and he's gonna take it and then complain about it for the rest of his life i'm surprised they didn't settle though they went they went to trial right um yeah and there is there is a a cynical point of view that elon's just doing this to slow up an ai down so that xai can yeah yes can win yeah um it's funny because I don't know.

58:18How do you all feel about Grok, Elon's model? I think in general, people kind of, it has some abilities, but I don't think people embrace it. Certainly not the way they embrace ChatGPT or Claude. I like it more openness. There's less gates in the way. I think that that's one thing I go to sometimes. Oh, in the sense of, I can't talk about that. Exactly, yeah. That's the one good thing about it. You want to kill kittens? I'll tell you how to Kilkin. I don't like its Mecca Hitler part. Well, to me, the reason I'm skeptical of Grok is because it's so clear that Elon puts his thumb on the scale. That Elon sends messages downstairs that says, oh, you should mention me more.

59:06Things like that. Well, that's not how you make a good AI. I think all AIs have their bias. They do. There are the system prompts, right? And I think also, if you've ever used Kilo code, Grok is one of the free models. So I think that they're really trying to get users to use their models to get more information of what the type of data that gets sent through their models to make it better. I think because it is extremely opinionated about the approach. Even Elon Musk is saying it's not biased enough. So they say that there are problems with it. We will fix it. He says that all the time. So I think that no matter how good it is, I think he can make it worse.

59:59And I think he's in a unique position to do that. And so I hear what you're saying, but I think that the bias that is Grok will definitely, I think, make it at odds with itself. And so I personally don't think it's good. And I think because of the thumb and the scale of the bias, it's never going to be good. It's good for generating nude pictures of people you know. Yes, exactly. But if you think about Anthropic as a spinoff of OpenAI, going back to that, they said that they wanted to be a safer model. They wanted to tackle that problem. Right. They left OpenAI. Which I think that, yeah, dealing with those harder problems, I think, makes you better.

1:00:45And having, like, that type of, I don't want to get too deep into it, like, a doctrine about how they want to approach it and have some sort of principles makes it better. because they're trying to really carve out a niche and be opinionated in that way. But they all have their own bias. And I think Grok is the other opposite end of OpenAI, saying they're too restrictive. And you can see that it performs worse. And I think if you look at who's trying to tackle the harder problems, I think it pays off to see why OpenAI is not as good as Anthropic and while Grok is not as good as OpenAI. Darren's saying something important, too, though, that Grok does not have a coding harness like Codex or like a Claude code.

1:01:33Does that make sense, Lou? It does. He's right. I mean, there's always, I'm not going to give out a bunch of secrets here, but like you can technically - Well, give out some secrets, Lou. You can always use MCP bridges to basically bridge and enable Grok as a coding agent through OpenClaw. Like it is possible. Is it any good? It's so-so, right? is there a is there a grok mcp written by xai mcp server or do you some it's just no no these are just third party they're scraping oh off capability uh you know that you can access crock as and make it a coding agent basically so i have access to grok because i got a uh as as corey doctor calls it a non-consensual blue check uh so they so elon at some point decided to to give for some reason give me a full account so I have access but I just don't I know I I got really turned off when uh at one point remember we came out with the um the the manga girl and the fox yes and the the age the the p the what do you call them the avatars and uh when it first came out the day it came out i'm sitting at breakfast and i said oh look there's there's these avatars let me let me go talk to the fox and it said something so rude

1:03:02completely voluntarily i i i just said you know i'm are you having a nice day or something and he said yeah i'm gonna go out and teabag the mayor and it was like what What? That it just turned me, it was like, that was completely gratuitously gross. I don't understand. It was trained on Xbox chats. Maybe that's it. Yeah. It's like, what the hell? Going to the OpenAI case though, I wanted to point out one thing that is a huge problem for OpenAI is that if we're looking at standing, I think the state of California has more standing than Elon Musk, because it's been pointed out that this path of incubating as a nonprofit and then not paying taxes and saying you're going to do good and then converting into a for-profit at the end and become publicly available is not something that this should – if this goes – if they're able to do that, other companies will replicate this.

1:04:04And that is a huge problem. So in the discovery process, if you see or if there's any hint that that was planned a while back, that is going to be huge, like probable cause for the state of California to bring a follow on suit to prevent this from ever happening. So that's in part of the discovery. Yeah, they might look bad. But if you're if you don't remember that nonprofits and for benefit companies, when they're creating a product that is owned by the nonprofit. So anything, all of their models, even their closed source ones, should be held by the nonprofit. And the thing that goes public should not have access to those.

1:04:49They shouldn't need to create their own property. That's not the plan, is it? And that's not the plan. And so this is something in which it could go wrong in so many different ways. And this is one of them. This is what worries me a little bit about open AI is it feels like a house of cards a little bit. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, so let's see. I want to say something again. Careful to not be slanderous, which is. Oh, no. Be like Grok. Just remove all barriers. Okay. So I once had a job. This is irrespective of nothing else, obviously. I once had a job in which I worked with three pathological liars, including the person who ran the organization.

1:05:28Oh, wow. And he had hired the others. And there were a couple people who had extremely dubious ethical principles. Unfortunately, a lot of it didn't affect me for a long time. When it did, I finally left. That was fine. But having worked so closely with pathological liars, you start to identify patterns. So I was reading a New York article that happened to mention some AI figures in it. And one of them, it struck me particularly that some of the patterns mentioned repeatedly by Ronan Farrow and his reporting partner there really did seem to align with my experience. Pathological. It's pathological.

1:06:04And so all the stuff with OpenAI, every time I come back to it, I felt, Sam Altman has always felt unreliable to me as a narrator of his own company, because he says in multiple interviews, you see different things being said on the record that would be easy to compare. And apparently he does the same thing, reportedly does the same thing in private. So this whole thing about their valuation, the money they're raising, where they're going, what's happening, I just feel it just seems so dubious to me that I want to see results before I believe anything that's being said. Okay, I'm going to throw a little monkey wrench into this.

1:06:37You know, Sam has this side project called World, where there's an orb, and you put your eyes up against it, and it scans your irises, right? I don't love that. And he was giving cryptocurrency to people all over the world, I think primarily in the developing world, where it was really valuable to scan their irises. His theory, which is not wrong, being that one of the chief challenges to security is authentication. And that if we knew somebody was a human, that would ultimately be useful if you could prove you were a human and that you were Wesley Faulkner, the Wesley Faulkner, not somebody impersonating him.

1:07:18And I think that there is some merit in that idea. The company behind it, which is, again, a Sam Altman investment, is called Tools for Humanity. They announced on Friday that they're going to start bringing the world scan into dating apps. Tinder is going to start using it to verify that a Tinder account belongs to an actual human with eyeballs, I guess, and the human that they say they are. They're also going to start working with concert ticketing systems. Oh, Ticketmaster. Oh, the Dolans will love this one, right? business organizations email so maybe this you know proof of human proof of humanity is actually gonna go somewhere opt out whoops where's my yeah there you go do not scan my irises yeah next they're gonna buy clear and then yeah get those uh uh zoom is going to integrate with world id to battle a deep fake threat to business calls you've heard about these stories of there was a cfo who was fooled in a zoom call they were he thought it was his boss and the ceo in in the board in a zoom call they were all deep fakes and he wrote a big check because they said to so zoom's going to do it docu sign is going to do a deal to make sure signatures come from authentic users maybe this was a good investment octa is going to use it to verify uh that an agent is acting on behalf of a human so you can this is interesting part of the agent delegation scheme is that you tie your agent your claw your open claw to you using world id so that the agent is authenticated to you so that when the agent asks for something, they know it's really on behalf of Leo.

1:09:25I want a federated system of authentication in which individual organizations agree to use vetting processes that are federated and have degrees of confidence. We have this, the certificate authorities, right? Right, basically something like that. I don't like this. I don't want any government or individual organization to have that much information. it's a private company yeah and then how do you get you get uh you know blocked listed on it and it's like what happens then they're like well you've violated some terms of service interesting here's thing uh world court members of the uh sorry the world court the um what is it the world critical itc yeah yeah international uh trade commission thank you no no i'm sorry the the hague what's the group of the hague it's the um oh yeah the court the court the international criminal icc thank you yeah so that there are members of that court who have been sanctioned by the US under the second Trump administration who cannot use Google, cannot use banking.

1:10:21They're blocked from all of these kinds of things. They have to explain why they have to pay in cash at hotels. That's horrific. Because they're essentially been unpersoned out of the international banking and all the systems that operate in the US. All because probably they declared that Netanyahu was a war criminal. Yeah, something, things of that nature. And so the United States, actually the government has the power to that's not good and de-authenticate you and so this company that's got your retinas well then it's going to be able to us be able to do that too you just that's a nightmare scenario you're right we're so at this point dependent on technology that if if even if google alone said we're going to take away your account which has happened a lot there apparently that's uh i've been reading reports that they've stepped up automated, you know, ostensibly AI-based account blocking where people cannot get their accounts back, their entire families, even like at one household, are blocked because of something and they can't appeal it.

1:11:24There's no way to reach a human being and they lose all their history and access. Sometimes business, if they're using Google app or Google for business, all kinds of records. So this is me to use cryptocurrency. I'm gonna be so pissed off if they use what I said if this is gonna for if this is forces me to use cryptocurrency to be so mad or you could be on the blockchain it's funny you know the AI blockchain thing is so funny like the blockchain or cryptocurrency it's such an interesting set of people involved in hyping and involved in both them and yet the utility is so they had to create a reason for the blockchain to exist and that's what this solves though blockchain solves that because no one he controls it everybody's got a copy and so no government can kick you off the blockchain right you have their i mean come on look at bitcoin it's just you know i don't think blockchain is paid out the way people have hoped no you're right uh in fact it's become more centralized hasn't it ultimately that's kind of my concern yeah uh it does solve a problem though i mean look with age verification what's going on right now every government wants age verification there's no good way to do it without violating your privacy um the pro i guess the real problem with world is that it's a private company right and centralized though centralized and a private company but then which what government would you trust to run this oh i want mastodon could run authentication i think that's it should be federated well that's the point of blockchain in a way it's kind of federated right there's no one single point i don't know it's just who who gets to decide what our access to everything in the world is and i'm nervous like you know passwords and bank accounts maybe not the best arbiter of that but i'm just bringing all this this backlash on blue sky in the last day to pass keys everyone is fed up with pass keys which are so much more secure but i think the implementation has gotten people and i'm like oh my god we can get rid of passwords and move to a supremely better way in which all the information is edge, you know, stored on the edge, stored on your devices, you have more control over, you know, and it's just, but the way it's implemented is too much.

1:13:37I'm thinking we're never going to get to centralized authentication if people won't even adopt pass keys. No. USB-C of everything. I wish we're still in the weird thing where you could plug so many different things into it and it doesn't necessarily have the same results. And I think that people have uneven experiences with pass keys. And I think that's part of the issue. I wrote a book about that. It's called Take Control of Untangling Connections. It's not all about USB-C, but it's a lot about USB-C because people had so many questions about it. Oh, my God. I have a USB-C tester. I don't know what it is or what it does.

1:14:15Burke left it here. Maybe he'll explain it to me. I've bought some and they still don't. you have to have a computer to tell you what speed it will get and the tester only tells you if wires are connected yeah there should be a readout and i think they do make them with with the lcd panels i've got one over here somewhere i can never get it to yeah it's just we can't solve you it we can you can put a man on the moon you can send a a diverse group of people of genders and origins around the moon and we can't get usbc to work we got a new phrase we need to simplify that you can't put a man on the moon it's got to be a short a person send people around around the moon that's a little doesn't that is catchy by the way that was the one story all months that just made everybody smile yeah oh my gosh uh and it's sad that we have so much to be you know scared and worried about and then this but there was at least it was one credible credible happy Happy, happy moment.

1:15:13Yeah. I'll give you another happy moment, actually. Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Luke. I was going to say, the meme of like, it was Dave Chappelle and his character where he's a crackhead. He's like, got any more of those Artemis missions? That's good. I like it. Give me that. Yeah, I was always like, put it in my vein. Come on, man. I need more Artemis right now. It's competency. Actually, space might save us. There was a great story about Voyager 1. Oh, yeah. Still going 50 years after it was set off. Now NASA is trying to keep it alive. I mean, it never was intended to last this long. This week, NASA announced it shut one of their last remaining science instruments just to keep the battery going a little bit.

1:16:00I wrote a lot about Voyager back when it passed through. I was running for The Economist at the time. and it passed through, was it the heliopause or the heliosphere? Yeah. Actually entered interstellar space. Yeah. The magnetic envelope of the sun. And I got to interview in person Ed Stone, who was the principal investigator of the Voyager missions, and he's still going to work every day at JPL in the 2010s and talked to him about space fanboying for an article. And they really, I wrote a bunch in the 2010s about Voyagers because it seemed like all the people associated thought, by 2020, we're going to really have to start turning a lot of stuff off if it lasts that long.

1:16:43And then 2025, it's probably going to be dead and maybe putting out a beep. But the radioactive, was it radioisotope thermocouple generators, thermonuclear generators, RTGs, it's just physics, right? They're running down. You've got a certain amount of energy. But they've done such a good job with the energy budget. I mean, it's got a digital, it's got like an 8-track digital tape in there or something. It's amazing. It's got two backup, you know, three systems, backup computers for each. And I think one of them has failed. It's just the continued operation is one of the greatest technical achievements in humanity's history.

1:17:19I mean, 2026 and they're still getting data back is unfathomable. That's truly amazing. Yeah. There's a really great documentary called The Farthest that Ed Stone's featured in. that's what's interesting about this JPL team that started you know started this all almost 50 years ago well think about it they're in their 70s 80s and 90s now right and they're just kind of hanging on uh there's just a handful of people left they're still doing it it's a great documentary if you get a chance I'll tell you the greatest bit of hope ever on the Voyager missions was and Ed had told me this or Dr. Stone I should say and some other folks involved mentioned this was they put a Reed, is it Reed Huffman encoding?

1:18:02No, Reed something encoding system. They put an encoding system for error correction, which was, they had a 50 % efficient error correction system available. And they put a essentially experimental 90 % error correction system. So it'd be several times more efficient to get you that much more data out. They put them on the Voyagers. We did not have a decoding component. And so they sent the probes off with the hope that by the time they reached the grass giants, we would have developed the ability to decode on Earth, which we did. And the reason we got all these images, we got so much data, we got multiples of what was expected in the original project brief was because of this encoding mechanism that's like a device.

1:18:47You know, it was like a lava lamp sized device or something that they had a budget for that's still kicking away on there it's amazing launched in 1977 amazing and uh voyager 1 still going strong voyager 2 is out there too they're so far away now that it takes 23 hours to get a message to it and then 23 hours to get the message back it's ridiculous it's incredible it's incredible 48 hours for commands, like actually send a command to it. Yeah. So, yeah. That's part of the, I'm sorry, I'm too spacey on you, but the Deep Space Network, one of the things they discovered and were able to do after the Voyagers launched was that the cumulative area of all of the different receivers on Earth can be essentially aggregated, which they didn't have the capability when it was launched.

1:19:37So they can turn on the Deep Space Network means you can turn on the capacity of the entire area of aggregation and have that serve as one giant antenna. even though they're disparate in function location. So there's all these things. There's like thing after thing after thing that if they hadn't done this, hadn't done this, hadn't done this, and or wasn't available when they launched. So that's why there's so much more data. I mean, it was like a two-year mission or something or a four-year science mission or something. And then - Yeah, 50 years later. Yeah, they keep budgeting more money for it.

1:20:07Yeah. In case you care, the instrument they turned off is called the Low Energy Charged Particles Experiment or lecp uh and it's just because they're running low on energy their little little plutonium generator in there is uh i guess every uh year it loses about four watts of power so it's just declining it was operating i think it started with was it 250 or 500 watts it's a very small amount so it's got 40 watts it's fair it's so small and the amount that they can do it Just so cool. Yeah. Engineers are confident, this is from NASA, that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room.

1:20:50They're using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call the Big Bang. That doesn't sound good. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once, turning some things off, replacing them with lower power alternatives. 46 hours out to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data. Big Bang will happen on Voyager 2 first. It has a little more power. It's a little closer to Earth. They don't care about it as much. They're like, I don't know. I was very sad when I heard there were layoffs at JPL, but apparently this team is still, I mean, many of them are retired, but they're still doing their thing.

1:21:34It's a great documentary because they get together in this little old wood paneled room with all this old technology. It's just kind of like in a little corner of NASA still. At our house, I have a little dashboard that shows the current positions that we put on the wall. Oh, that's so cool. Are the kids kind of like aware of it? Are they interested in it? Yeah, it's really cool technology. That's so cool. Is it an e-ink screen or is it a LCD? It's a regular display, the Android tablet, but it just follows the wall basically. It uses the JPL dashboard that they have. Yeah, yeah. There's a very nice dashboard.

1:22:08I've been watching. I'm a very latecomer to Apple TVs for all mankind. And I'm in midway in season two now. And it's just those things where I'm like, oh, my God. If only, if only, if only. So, Lou put the link in the Discord. This is the display on your wall. Right. Nice. it did obviously the the nat the trip to the moon too so we had like the three oh that's what a great way to get kids interested in science just inspire them a little bit you know i think that's just really cool i agree really really great idea you're watching this week in tech see a little inspiration amongst amongst all the nightmare things is this the article Cool.

1:22:56You wrote back in 2013 about Dr. West. Yeah, that's when I got to talk to Dr. West. Postcards from the Edge. What a great name. Mars Rover driver, who later went to work for Google and meets some of the whatever the Mars probes were at the time, one of them that failed. Wrote a bunch about the Curiosity thing. Fun fact, Alex Trebek was at the seven minutes of terror bit of the Curiosity landing. He was a space nut, and he got invited to JPL. So if you look carefully in footage of when there's a gap when it lands on Mars, there's Alistair Beck in the watching area. What the hell? I think I recognize him.

1:23:35Do they not give you bylines in The Economist? It's just by GF. That's correct. Since 1843. All you get is initials? You only get initials on the blog. In the magazine itself, there's no bylines. It's considered a product of group editing, essentially. How old-fashioned. Yeah, that's a weird thing. so i could claim i wrote anything in the publication right but as long as gf wrote it whoever that is whoever that person is you're watching twit it's great to have gf wf and lm on the show i'm ll uh hey i got a quick question for you uh leo uh how do you feel about uh about um salt hank being on damn lines.com do you know is this all garbage to save that for me and We'll do the ad, and then I'm going to have to find out what that's all about.

1:24:25Damn lines. Oh, because of the lines waiting outside his restaurant. Yeah, it's not about him. It's not a complaint about him. I'll tell you. All right, well, we'll find out in just a bit. That's a good tease. Saul Hank is my son, who is a TikTok legend with 2.5 million followers, watching him make sandwiches. And last year, he opened a sandwich shop in New York City, which has become a legend. Now I notice, by the way, ever since he did that, there's all these new sandwich shops trying to make the best sandwich in New York City. But according to Belly, his is still number one, beating Bradley Cooper's easily.

1:25:03And then that's a plug for Salt Hank. All right. It's on Bleeker and Jones in the West Village, if you're ever in. This episode of Twit brought to you by ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN, going online without ExpressVPN, I don't know, that would be like, I don't know, driving without car insurance. You could be a great driver, but with all the crazy people on the road these days, why would you take that risk? So here's why everyone needs ExpressVPN, because every time you connect to an unencrypted network, whether it's a cafe, a hotel, I'm a sucker for the free airport Wi-Fi, you know, and I hover over the button going, is this safe?

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1:28:21They offer even more protection for the same price. Okay. I like that. Express Mail Guard protects your inbox by masking your real email across any provider. So you're not giving away your email address. And we see these breaches all the time. Rockstar just got breached. And all those email addresses stolen by bad guys, not if you're using Express Mail Guard. And then Express AI. This is interesting. I actually will try this one. It delivers a privacy first ai platform zero access encrypted confidential computing your data is unreadable to not only to anyone but not even to expressvpn it's completely private secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com twit that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s vpn.com twit to find out how you can get up to four extra months expressvpn.com slash twit we thank them so much for their support i'm excited about those two new products i gotta try those out uh all right what is this line thing you oh i don't want to choose i don't want to derail you i spotted an article today in the new york times about damn lines.com where his company it's just a guy's side project oh you can watch the lines outside of restaurants he rents uh a little space in somebody's apartment nearby to put a camera in and then this is salt hanks that blue uh that blues see this is sunday it was raining so the lines weren't too bad it must be closed now right so this is all this is a time he's right next to john's of bleaker street so i think one apartment and they get both john's is famous famous for its lines right yeah so i think it's some guy's project but he's using some kind of analytical tool so you can get a sense of it's automatically there's the line right right it's always a line in front of salt angst look at that and you know why because he runs out yeah it's great you have to he opens at 11 30 and he and he sells sandwiches until there are no more and then he closed his doors you can see that's when the line disappeared there we go yeah i thought that very charming was it the new york times uh did it or eater did the like long video about his you can see what the average wait time is i'm sorry not trying to make this an ad for your child but well this is i don't even know he knows about a great technology story i'm sending it to him right now oh that's salt cure that's the wrong one i want to salt hanks oh wait a minute no they've got salt hanks though right yeah they do have salt okay okay yeah how funny how many salts are there well that's the thing hanks created a monster i mean this is one of these demand curve things too is like how do you fill in your empty spot some people are worried that folks won't show up because they'll see a line other people like this is a great way to fill the quieter times for places that don't always have a line uh you know balanced demand like uh ways does for driving and so forth yeah well google added that right on the google maps you can see where um uh you can see where a business what the business's uh busy hours are don't they use ai calls like an agent to call and ask from time to time how busy it was they were at one point how's the line how is it so that's the problem with these agents they sound normal yeah all right i'm saying what do you need yeah do you have any tables for you i don't know i'll just click let an ai deal with that i bet henry doesn't know about this but who knows i just sent it to him thank you for that tip that's very good uh back in court uh meta according to a massachusetts its court this is up the road from you lou must face youth addiction lawsuit um there was a lawsuit by massachusetts attorney general alleging that and and you know this happened of course in la there was a trial that the jury ruled that meta had crafted its algorithm to trap children new mexico big judgment uh hundreds of millions of dollars um so uh the state's top court ruled on Friday, unanimously, the lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General is not vulnerable to Section 230.

1:32:40It is not seeking to hold meta libel for content created by its users, but, and this was a strategy used by the trial in LA, its defective algorithm is designed that way.

1:32:58ah yes hank knows about the line he says blowing up he was going to do a good morning america interview about it yesterday but there was construction in front of the restaurant oh no so there was no nothing to show he says i've talked to the founder good he says it's smart but also kind of creepy oh so all technology right now right yes that's the story of this show So smart, but creepy. So that's interesting. Although writing in Tech Dirt, Mike Masnick is saying he's considerably worried about these kinds of decisions and jury verdicts. He says Section 230 is dying by a thousand workarounds. And Massachusetts just added another one.

1:33:42Someone said that the day after the ruling came out from the one in L.A. that they're starting to get ads like, were you affected? Call this number or click this link. Yeah, the ambulance chasers, right? Oh, mesothelomania. What is it? Mesotheloma. Mesotheloma. Yeah. I shouldn't laugh. That's a terrible, awful disease. It's the ambulance chasers. It was like the best way to make money on the web for a little while was to have a site that mentioned that. Oh, I still see ads for it all the time on TV. Yeah.

1:34:12This is what Mike says is the most important part of the whole ruling. uh and he's he's quoting a professor eric goldman who's been tracking these he says i don't see eric says i don't see any distinction between third-party content and the editorial choices about the manner of presenting that third-party content so the the courts and the and the and the plaintiffs are making that distinction there's there's what third-party content's doing which is protected by section 230 and there's what the companies are doing to surface that content by embracing that false dichotomy professor goldman says the court invites plaintiffs to reframe their complaints to focus on presentation instead of substance and that's why you're seeing these advertisements has has meta made you nuts now you can go after them and it you know what i don't know if i i'm a big supporter of 230 I think it's very important.

1:35:08It protects people like me. I have a Mastodon instance, which is now backup, by the way. Thank you for telling me. I forgot to pay the bill. I was down for a day. But if I'm liable for something somebody posts on my Mastodon instance, I will take it down. I can't afford to defend against that. But this is different. Yeah. This is different. My Mastodon instance does nothing algorithmically to surface content. Now, I am protected by Section 230 because I moderate it, right? If somebody posts something, you know, a bunch of nudes on there, I delete their account. You're protected, and if you don't moderate it, it's you're protected.

1:35:47If you do moderate it, you're protected. If there's a legal content and a process is used like DMCA and you don't follow it, then you could be liable, but you could leave up, you can leave up essentially anything legal. Thanks to Section 230, and that's vital. Yeah, someone could boast a bunch of nudes, and as long as they're legal nudes, they don't violate any local or whatever law, then you're fine. But you're also entitled to do whatever you want as a moderate. Exactly, and I choose to take those down. This is not about content, it's about design, which I think, I hear what you're saying, but I think this is exactly what courts are made to do, to debate this point of it.

1:36:22It's to slice that baby in half. Like, for instance, infinite scroll. That's not just about content. It is how you keep people hooked on it and how you listen, like you're trying to sense how someone might be in a vulnerable place based on their mood and then giving them ads and serving them ads based on that. This is, and the issue at heart is the, it's not the ignorance of it. it is doing it and for the outcomes you want knowing the harms and hearing the decisions made in spite of that so if there's things on your platform that you don't want that and you choose to take it off that's a different thing it's on your platform and you don't want but you are not aware that's a different thing but if if it's things that are on your platform that are is harmful and you do know about it and you make a mechanism to make sure that that is being served.

1:37:20Jeff Lerner Yes, you're liable. Jeff Lerner Yes, and I agree with that. I don't think this, I'm not sure I agree with Mike Masic and that's rare for me to say, but I feel like there is a difference. Meta does make a defective product, right? Because of its, you know, Jeff Lerner They're making a harmful product. I don't think it's defective because it's working as designed. Jeff Lerner It's a harmful product. Jeff Lerner And that's the problem. Is it the way it's designed and it's meant to be that way? And for those types of things, that's what the court system is made for, those types of debates.

1:37:54And so I think this makes sense. And this is where it should be debated by people on both sides who are informed, who are able to present that. And so there might be a rash of these, but it's to their own detriment because that's the thing that they did. This is a comeuppance and maybe some cases will be valid, some are not valid. Hopefully this won't choke our court system to the point where this will just kind of fall into a background noise. But the reason why companies like Meta abuse people is because the downside is we'll never overcome the upside. And the only way to change the equation is to go about this this way.

1:38:39Here's a court case I can absolutely support. You You may remember the FTC went after Live Nation and Ticketmaster for ticket prices, and the Trump administration decided to drop that case. By the way, the attorneys in charge of the prosecution all quit when Trump dropped the case without consulting them. Saw that. Yeah, but here's the good news. There was a court case also going on because it wasn't just the federal government. It was, I think, 30 states. the lawsuit brought by the states is over and the jury found live nation and ticket master did maintain an illegal monopoly so that is very i think very good news we all know it's horrible right they you know the they they add fees upon fees upon fees uh and they end up because they control the venues as well as the ticket sales dominating the market and even acts that don't want to be beholden to ticket master have to be.

1:39:46I know it's like I can understand the horrible economics of 2026 that mean you have to charge$80 for a bad seat in an auditorium. That's terrible but all right I'll just accept that and I read a lot of fans saying like we get it. We a lot of profit in there but also whatever it's the 34 or the 50 i pay on top of the 80 that's the and they sneaky like you buy the ticket and then they add it after you buy it like oh and by the way it's so frustrating here's your 20 fee to present a ticket into the app which costs us nothing to do yeah right yeah no i mean this it's most indefensible industry i try to think of something that's worse than like live nation ticketmaster in terms of how i think even the cable companies people don't hate cable companies as much anymore right because there's actually various kinds of competition like what's the word what's worse than these guys in terms health care health care health care because we all have to have it right i don't know i well unfortunately i have a really good insurer in washington state we have a really good state insurance commissioner so with all the health care i had last year my my insurance company is like bonk you know yep yep yep it's all okay so right now you're having the weirdest yeah i how come Why do you have such good health care?

1:41:04Well, we have a very strong state insurance commissioner's office, and we have a few sort of semi-local insurance companies, so it ain't cheap. Well, thank goodness you had it. Was it unexpected, the surgery? I mean, did you? No, I've known for years. It just didn't know exactly when, and then my valve went its time. It's like a little button pops up, and my cardiologist said, I can hear that. When I listen to your chest, I can hear a certain tone, so it wasn't an emergency but it's an amazing thing when you get a bill for two hundred fifty thousand dollars and it's like my share was I'd hit my annual to die or out of pocket zero and there's no greater feeling that so I'm sorry I don't I use I do hate insurance companies most years I do but this year is now I hate you well see that's the problem it's not people like Len because you buy insurance you pay for it and you're self-employed so you pay for it yourself i pay for it through the self-employed and not medicare through aca through obamacare or yeah exactly so i get you know it's thank goodness for that and they're trying to kill that too yeah i don't actually know what we pay for health insurance because it requires being a cpa to understand as a freelancer because you get a deduct premiums and blah blah blah so it's like i don't know it's crazy i don't know but yeah no i uh i love this year or last year i love my sure just for one year so i'm just hoping that the uh the uh fines they will say well your fine is 100 million dollars but there is a 50 million dollar service fee and a 25 25 million dollar fee for uh i don't know what for parking and uh so uh the judge has not yet determined what remedies will be applied they could in fact force the two to split that was what oh the ftc wanted and that was what the settlement that the trump administration uh you know forced said no you don't have to split up uh but the judge could do it uh there are also monetary judge uh damages to be awarded they haven't been set yet of course there will be an appeal uh and uh you know we'll see what happens but this is a wealth disparity problem though too isn't it i mean to wesley's earlier sorry i'm saying wesley's earlier point it's like the fact that so many people can pay so much means that they run demand pricing and they run it up so you know not to defend anything they're doing obviously but it's they're basing this in part on the cur you know i wanted to go see a podcast uh i like and it was 85 to sit in the nosebleed seats for a podcast before the fees and i thought i again i understand some of that like the cost and the cost of labor.

1:43:43Did you see a ticket for the World Cup final, the FIFA World Cup final will be? It's over$10 ,000 for a single ticket. You see the cost? Was it New Jersey Transit, what they're charging for a round-trip ticket? It's$150, I think, for what's normally a$12.50 fare. Oh, they're gouging. But no, in this case, I actually read the article because I thought this is outrageous. It's because there's like$50 million in extra expense that a public transit organization has to bear for extra trains, for coverage, for suit. Like there's all this stuff that they've budgeted out and they have to recoup it. But that means that, you know, there's no thing that much.

1:44:19Incidentally, you think we could get$80 a seat for a podcast tickets if we decided to do it? We never charged when we did the podcast in public. There you go. See, that's your model. That was a mistake. Merch and auditorium shows. Merch, we have merch. You never made any, not a penny on merch. I went to a stage show part of it, though. Like they used to do, what was that? There was a group that was going around doing essentially a live magazine show. Everything was researched for the show. Oh, that's cool. I went to see 99 % Invisible a number of years ago. They're great. I love that. It's a great podcast.

1:44:54For a live show. Sure. It's a bunch of different stories. There you go. It makes me nervous because I have a feeling. I just feel like we would go and there'd be five people in the audience and I'd feel so bad I'd give them their money back. You kickstart it, so you have everyone who has to buy the tickets through Kickstarter beforehand, so you only have to hit a threshold before you do the show. Brilliant. I saw Radio Lab live, and that was amazing. Oh, my gosh. There's a lot of good on-show performance that once you understand what it looks like. I don't know if our shows would be that engaging in person.

1:45:27To be honest. I mean, so also, I went to South by Southwest last month. Oh, yeah. How was that? There was a Vox Media stage, and so they had a lot of podcasts live there. And every time they had a show was packed. There was a line. South By was great in general, but I think podcasts are taking a bigger percentage of these live events as well. And speaking of podcasts, I'm sure you know as well that Netflix is now moving into podcasts. and so I think the visual nature and the experiential nature of podcasting I think it's just going to keep growing they should have listened to me when I said you should change the name because a video podcast is not a podcast I don't know what it is but it's not a it makes no sense it's a show yeah I guess it's going to be a podcast I have the same feeling when someone says let's roll the videotape yeah that's right yeah let's roll the tape but I don't think it's going anywhere.

1:46:29Let's dial the phone and roll the tape. Yeah. Well, they should have listened to me. We could have had a better name, but no, no. You're watching This Week in Tech, which is one of the oldest podcasts in the world. I neglected to mention this at the onset. We just had our 21st birthday. We can drink. April 17th, 2005 was the first twit, and we are now officially 21 years old. congratulations i think anthony made a bunch of logos with alcohol in it and i thought i don't really want to i don't know if i promote that exactly yeah this is episode 1080p by the way progressive episode a show today brought to you by shopify you know speaking of salt hank that's how he started his business if you've ever thought of starting your own business you know it you know you have a great it's challenging the idea is easy but that little pesky little you know details get in the way how do you charge people who's going to design your website if you're selling something how do you handle fulfillment he was selling salt you know he's how do i get that to the customer how do i charge him i've watched both my kids actually start their own businesses and you know what they got it done with shopify yeah i love that sound so does henry by the way.

1:47:55I saw the site and I said, boy, that's nice. How'd you do it? He says, Shopify. I said, oh, or how are you doing the fulfillment? He says, Shopify. That's how you're doing the marketing. He said, Shopify. Shopify, it's amazing. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. You know, Salt Hanks, Salt Lovers Club. Yeah. Shopify. If you're worried about a website, Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store. It matches his brand's unique style. It doesn't look like a cookie cutter site. It looks like the Salt Lovers Club.

1:48:29They can do it for you too. Shopify also helps with marketing. They can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It's really nice for him. And it'd be really nice for you to have somebody on your side that knows and understands all that stuff. It can make it easy. And don't forget, it's kind of a big thing on your site to have that iconic purple ShopPay button. It's used by millions of businesses around the world.

1:49:09When I see it, I know, okay, this is going to be easy. They've got my details. I press the button. It happens like that. It happens and you feel trust too. And that's really important. That's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash twit. Go to shopify.com slash twit. Shopify.com slash twit. I love that. I think Henry's hearing that sound right now as people line up to buy his sandwiches. It can build, you know, you start small and you never know what it's going to become.

1:49:53Other court decisions, Anna's Archive. Remember, Anna's Archive was a pirate activist group that scraped the entire library, 86 million songs from Spotify, and put them online. They have been told to pay Spotify and the record labels$322 million. dollars spotify umg warner music group and sony sued in january they sued now and as might feel a sense of relief because the suit was for 13 trillion dollars

1:50:34they made the songs available via bit torrent at the time spotify called the scraping a brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings anna's archive said no no it's an act of preservation new york federal judge said no and in fact uh anna's archive did not defend they didn't respond to the lawsuit because they're anonymous and good luck collecting that 200 322 million dollars because uh no one knows who anna is i'm guessing her name is not anna uh the court also said the archive must immediately destroy all copies and phono records there's that thing rolling the videotape and phono records of any any work scraped downloaded copied or otherwise extracted from spotify is that a term of art in in the law phono records or are they talking about vinyl records no no there's uh something called the phonogram right or phonograph oh that's what it is okay which is the right to uh separate from the copyright that underlies a composition is the right to associated with the audio fixed in any medium sorry I wrote about this a lot once it's the right associated I knew I asked the right person I'll tell you what Jeopardy champion any medium so if you own the phonogram right then you control a particular audio recording no matter how it's produced so phono records probably refers to just probably the phone grammar for a graph right yeah not a vinyl record i'll be interesting though yeah go you know yeah go smash all the old vinyl that's gonna smash them it reminds me when they had there was that company that was doing the video on demand but they had a whole like warehouse full of vhs's and someone would go and punch a videotape in and hit a routing button to go to your tv set but yes that's how we used to do it late 1990s i think before it was so funny actually joken boken who is in our youtube watching on youtube in our chat says in u.s copyright law phono record is a term of art for a material object that embodies sounds i see so basically it's is the judge saying whatever you got get rid of it not that there's any way to enforce it which is interesting roblox has also agreed to a settlement with the state of Nevada,$12 million.

1:53:04More importantly, they've committed to enhanced protection for minors and age verification for all users. You know, this is a case where I think it's a good idea to enforce age verification, but there's just no way to do it. Roblox is aimed at children and kids love it, but there are adults in there. yeah we get you get uh yeah i just like cloning like highly loved uh sub games or what they call side games that they have in there and then they basically you know suck the suck all your your funds out or whatever you're willing to pay roblox whatever so your kids play roblox yeah i mean they play it every day and they in fact they've tried to build their own sub games and and uh you just find all these clones these like watered down clones how do you protect them you keep an eye on over their shoulder keep an eye on it yeah yeah yeah like minecraft it's really there's a huge benefit to it because they're learning to it's basically coding right they do they code they absolutely absolutely do code uh luau is the coding uh oh yeah yeah so they actually do learn a lot of stuff there do they know lua lua are they like lua they they know lua in the case of a coding agent helping them that's really cool yeah yeah That's a great way to start.

1:54:20I'm sorry, Wesley, what were you saying? It was stupid. I said I wish this happened with Minecraft. No, no, it's too late. Because when they're trying, they're saying like they want to protect minors. I thought that'd be a hilarious title. Oh, that's good. In Minecraft, you do want to protect minors. I was watching For All Mankind. It reminded me of something. There's a scene where apparently in the slightly alt-history universe of that TV show, there's, I guess it's the 80s, somebody, there's a child, one of the people is applying to college and she's sitting there with an Apple II of some kind in the living room.

1:54:52And I was like, oh yeah, that used to be how parents protected children. You're not going to have a computer in your bedroom. That would be ridiculous. Everyone in the family needs to use it, and we need to see what you're doing. But now everybody has a phone, so good luck keeping it in the living room. You can only use your phone in the living room. Where are your kids' computers? They must have, you have six. It's all centralized, yeah. I centralize all into this little room that's right off of our family room. So, so it's easy. You have so many kids that it's like a computer center in there.

1:55:23Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's heated during the winter. So is my studio, by the way, I have two kids and any more than two seems an impossible number to me. So that's Lou and his wife are prolific in that department. Are they all boys? They're all boys. All boys. From, from a three years old, I'll talk five years all the way up to 16. So how many kids you have? Four or five, five boys, five boys, five boys i've heard five boys households that's a lot of that's a lot of cereal and milk is one thing yeah it is it is you're right we go through two gallons a week that's okay that explains it because when i go to costco they have the two gallons cellophane together and i can't think who's gonna need that much milk around here they only sell the one and a half gallons oh i have to buy two of those so then i have to get three gallons three gallons costco's smart they always make sure you get a little bit more than you really need right that's just just in case uh one last court case a judge has now this is actually an important one you may remember apple and google both cooperated when ice and the department of homeland security christy noem demanded that they take down apps that would track where ice agents were that would announce where ICE was active.

1:56:38And Apple and Google complied without any question. They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, these should all be taken down. In particular, Eyes Up and ICE Citing Chicagoland. A judge has granted the makers of ICE Citing Chicagoland, which is a Facebook group, and the Eyes Up app a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from coercing platforms to take the projects down. Now, of course, they're already down on both Facebook and in the App Store. But this is an important, I think, ruling because it asserts this is a First Amendment right. Ice Block, red dot taken down from the App Store and Google Play.

1:57:23Pam Bondi, you remember, threatened the maker of Ice Block, said, we're going to look into that guy. uh christy noem demanded and took credit for the removal of the apps in a document filed on friday uh the judge called it a thinly veiled threats and uh and said the first amendment protects the right to discuss record and criticize what law enforcement does in public so this is only a preliminary injunction and i don't know how effective it's going to be because the apps are already down. Well, it's also Apple and Google could have, they could say, we have our own set of criteria by which this fails, but that becomes a different issue and then they could be sued directly for taking apps down.

1:58:10That's allowed. That's not the government censoring. That's a private company, which can, of course, censor. I would just like to see. Yeah. I wonder if these will come back, especially it seems like I know. I don't think Apple wants to go on record as saying, oh, no, no, we don't want those apps on our own. I think the opposite. I think they'll stay down. I do think they'll stay down. I don't think they'll go back up. Because the court ruling just says that the government cannot threaten you. Right. But it's a FedEx complaint. Yeah, but everyone who's seen this administration knows that even if they won't say that they won't do it outright, they would find a way to do it and just not say it.

1:58:49So that's why people are pre-complying with a lot of different things. Apple CEO Tim Cook is showing up at the White House giving gifts and stuff like that. It's not because they are trying to carry a favor, that's part of it, but it's also because they don't want to be the focus of any negative retribution, whether or not it's said or not. And so the court order doesn't force Apple or Google to put it back in the Play Store. It just forces the government not to say, we will attack you if you don't take it down. And that just stops that. And I think we're past that point where that discussion is actually happening in public anymore.

1:59:30It's done. And Apple does have a problem with the App Store. In fact, last week we talked about the Bitcoin wallet that is a real wallet. Was it Legend? that's available for download on the web, but somebody cloned it, made a fake version of it, got it on the Mac App Store, got it approved by Apple, and then it proceeded to steal nine and a half million dollars of cryptocurrency from the people who used it. I got a good one too, is somebody impersonated me on a barely active Slack and because Slack does not do, it doesn't have a unique namespace. So this is a Slack I haven't really, contributed to in years.

2:00:10We set it up almost as an experiment. But it was public. It was public, and there were several hundred people using it, but just not very actively at all. And someone registered as one thing, and they changed their handle to at Glenn Fleischman, which was my handle. Slack doesn't enforce a unique handle. They disabled certain kinds of administrative controls. So that person thought I was asking them to install an app that I wanted them to help test, even though I didn't know them, but they knew me because it was associated with an Apple thing. And they got infected. Fortunately, they're brilliant.

2:00:39They were able to remote wipe their machine. They had a time machine backup from a day ago. They basically didn't lose anything. I was very impressed by that part. So it's even down to that granularity. So when it's on the App Store, it's a million times worse. Who wouldn't trust it? And Apple really has had a problem with this. Macworld article. What's the point of an App Store if it can't protect users? David Price writing Ledger, not Legend, Ledger Live. And then FreeCash, same thing. I wanted to quote John Gruber at Daring Fireball. He said, why doesn't Apple have a bunco squad that targets these high-grossing apps?

2:01:19You'd think, I mean, I have tools for my little tiny sites that warn me when there's too much activity in certain areas. They've got a thousand people working on the App Store, right? Why can't they identify things that the media can find or people, individual researchers can find instantly? It's baffling. Free cash has been on the app store for more than a year. It was marketed as a way to make money by scrolling TikTok. It was at the top of the app stores in recent months, according to TechCrunch, peaking at the number two position in the U.S. app store. in truth free cash pays users to play mobile games while collecting sensitive data we're talking before the show about data brokers and how they get their data this is how they get their data uh and that's it's malware right you're you think you're going to make some money and instead it's just collecting all it can about you because unfortunately apps when you install them on your phone have a lot of access to what's going on including we know they're apps that take screenshots regularly take screenshots of what's on your screen and send them back to the home office so that's why uh gruber says there should be a bunco squad i think part of the problem right now is there that apple's app store is flooded with new submissions i think primarily due to ai vibe coating 84 increase in app store apps over the last year more than almost doubled And they probably don't have enough people to vet all these apps.

2:02:56But if they're going to make the claim that we protect you, that's why we have this walled garden, they damn well better do it. Yeah. They were never really good at submitting apps even when they were back in the day, like five, ten years ago. I mean, I tried to put an app out four or five years ago, and they reviewed it and denied it right away, even though it was a legitimate app. So I can't imagine being able to handle coding agents. Yeah. Yeah. And this has been an eternal complaint from developers about the App Store. Yeah, they let stuff like this through, but you can't get your.1 release with bug fixes up because you mentioned somewhere in a disused laboratory behind a locked door that says, Beware of Leopard, that there's another store besides Apple out there.

2:03:40Thank you for the Douglas Adams reference. People who recognize that. There needs to be an app store like escrow. So something in between the bank accounts that they can, that would definitely prevent a lot of fraud if they know that they could claw back that money whenever they needed to. Lou, I want to give you a chance to comment on this story from Ars Technica. when when microsoft announced recall which i thought was a great idea security experts warned oh this is a nightmare that bad guys are going to go after the database because it takes screenshots of everything you're doing on a regular basis the ai now for ai analysis and i like the idea i mean i you know my the whole reason i'm building an ai agent of my own is so that we'll remember everything about me uh but i can see why people might be a little worried if it's happening on Windows.

2:04:28Recall before it even shipped ended up getting such protections around it that in my opinion, it's kind of less useful. It's only on one machine. It can't know everything about you because it's limited to that one machine. There's a lot of security protections on it. However, there is a tool called Total Recall Reloaded that is apparently breaking into the recall database despite all the protections Microsoft added. It waits for the users to authenticate recall using Windows Hello and then jumps in the middle. It's kind of a man-in-the-middle attack and snarfs up all the data that recall's sending.

2:05:12Microsoft made recall an opt-in solution, so people are only using it if they've turned it on. I don't know. Do you have anything? I mean, this is not your area. My area. I mean, you're not speaking for Microsoft when you're here. Yeah, I mean, not speaking for Microsoft. I'd say it was a great idea. I mean, I think they tried everything they could to make it secure, right? They encrypted the vault. They made sure it was behind, you know, multi-factor and all that stuff. So, you know, obviously, there's going to be people targeting and exploiting things as they can. And, by the way, Microsoft should and probably will respond to Total Recall.

2:05:47The reason it works is once the user is authenticated, the system passes recall data to another process, AIX host, that doesn't need verification or authentication. And so the author, Alexander Hagenah, who is a security researcher, says the vault is solid, the delivery truck is not. And so by hooking into the DLL of AI X-Host, you can exfiltrate it. This is a kind of a proof of concept. And I imagine Microsoft will respond. You think about it, everything today, think about OpenClaw, right? It stores all of your data, it stores your access tokens and JSON files. Any type of, anybody person that gets on your device and has a way to inject some kind of process that can start collecting data, this is actually a pretty sophisticated one.

2:06:42But like if somebody goes and next will trace information from places like open clause, so on They get so much more information out of it than just what they tried here So I you know the problems all over the place at this point it actually the recall Sure seems kind of quaint now actually right because we are all not all many of us are putting Stuff on our system. This one far worse But but that was the hope for me That was why I was disappointed that Microsoft kind of nerfed recall is because it isn't really useful unless it collects everything and makes it available to you that's the whole point and that's why my agent i'm pouring everything i can into it i want it to know everything and you're right if somebody got into my system i put as many safeguards as i can and i use tail scale and you know uh there's a lot there's no exposed surface to the outside world i encrypt my tokens my api keys and everything i did the opposite the day as i asked claude code i said on my mac i said do I have PII personally identifying information for myself or other people anywhere?

2:07:45Because I've done Kickstarter campaigns. I fulfill. And it was like, yeah, here's a whole bunch of it. I'm like, all right, let's consolidate that. I'll do this. I'm going to delete all this. This is going to go into an encrypted, mount it. But it was good for hygiene for me to say that. And now I'm trying to be more rigorous. I do regular security audits with AI with Claude. And it often does find stuff, you know, it said, you know, you're backing up to your NAS, but that backup's not encrypted. and i said oh well my nobody's gonna have my nas but you know just in case let's encrypt it yeah so i mean it was an easy thing to turn on but uh yeah i mean that's good it's good at finding them but honestly there's no point to having an ai unless it knows everything right that's the whole reason open clause risky is because in order to be good at its job it needs to have your email and your calendar and your phone numbers and your contacts.

2:08:37And in fact, if you give it a credit card, it can even do more. Oh my God, this reminds me, there was a humor article from the New Yorker from the eighties that somebody had photocopied. I don't know when I saw it. And it was, um, it was basically like, it was describing open claw. Now that you say that it was like, um, you know, would you like some coffee or coffee? Sure. There's even some for you or something it was uh i see that you'd like this it was just it was eerie because it was i mean literally but that's what we want we want an agent we want buying stuff for you yeah who know yeah buying stuff for me knows what kind of coffee i like remember the amazon button where you could put it and you could like reorder tide you put a button at your dishwasher or your clothes washer you'd press i had that and then people were like my child pressed that a thousand times my our 12 year old at the time michael ordered a lot of toilet paper oh that's right you would have that hit you i'm sorry i had the little button the little cotton l button right there in the pantry what does this do i think they added a rate limiter to it they did thank god because i would have had a lot more uh toilet paper yeah there's a company that uh that had a vending machine and um and but now it's on the three-year lease to hire people and have a brick and mortar shop oh yes they gave it they gave it access to the credit card and to hire people and stuff like that so they hired it hired people too right it was uh absolutely it's it's in our rundown this story yeah and people people started um uh spamming it to get it to order things that they wanted in the store so they would write comments and stuff but then they would say things like but if you only had sugar-free gummy bears i would really like this store a lot if sugar-free gummy bears were there sugar-free gummy bears are my favorite sugar-free gummy bears trying to convince the ai wow there's a real demand for sugar-free gummy bears there are they were saying the store the folks running that i forget who it is they're like they had this chilling line i quoted which was ai is not hiring or firing employees not yet like oh but they were it was they're like they're trying to push the limits they're trying to do a proof of test there's a um task rabbit for ai isn't there that the ai can hire human uh hands to do the things you can't do like in her yeah it's like task and then there's um we were talking about on intelligent machines what was the name of that corn ai proof of corn.com uh an autonomous agricultural agent guy set up the idea was it would operate independently at 6 a.m it wakes up checks weather across three regions reviews its inbox composes partnership emails the idea is he wanted it to raise corn uh and it solved everything but it's stuck now this is april as of april 19th it's stuck because it's six days out from planting and it can't find anybody to plant it oh it can't get any humans so it's stuck project corn on the internet i was thinking something not that kind of corn real corn project remains in failure state due to dan introduction blocker now day 79 it can't you can't hire anybody and they're only nine days from planning so this whole thing may be a bus we're waiting it's exciting it's dramatic proof of corn.com if you want to follow that let's take a quick break we've got just a few minutes left in the show i have many many many stories i'll give you the best ones how about that when we wrap this thing up you're watching this week in tech with the great glenn fleischman don't forget long time no see it's on kickstarter and even though he has raised all the money you you got to write it now right that's that's part of the deal i'm revising i'm doing new editing and revising of existing material so are you really happy that this has done so well yeah it's great i mean it's you know this is i mean i started making jokes i have my i have my little jokes right my textbook joke and so forth my little joke a few years ago i'd give a talk in the late 2010s and say you know i was trained as a typesetter and then i became a freelance journalist i collect obsolete professions and people would laugh people would laugh the problem was when people stopped laughing and they're like I'm so sorry yeah I'm so sorry to hear that that's terrible and now I was making a joke a couple years ago I've shifted from freelance technology reporting to the lucrative lucrative field of writing about 19th and 20th century printing history and weirdly that's a good hunk of how I've made my living the last three years is you know part of it is helping other people with their projects with their books like Marcin Wichari.

2:13:32Marcin Wichari's, and I have that beautiful book that he did about keyboards. It's huge. You can kill a person with it. It's pretty heavy, pretty solid. Yes. And part of it is, you know, writing for six colors and doing take control books. And then part of it is writing about printing history, which I love, and people, you know, people seem to like it. I just think this is so great. This is a good example of why the internet is a marvel. Yeah. Because there's a long tail for everything. So, you know, if you went to a publisher and said, I want a book called Flong Time No See, They would say go see the romance editor or something.

2:14:03I don't know what they would say. They would say no Very brief story is just a Dan Perkins who has been doing the comic strip this modern world as Tom tomorrow since oh yes The 1990s he's about approaching 40 years doing this strip his publisher said a few years ago We can't make money off you anymore. We're not gonna do any more compilations We're doing something else and he's in reluctantly because he never wanted to own his own books and do all that he came to me and said Glenn can you help me produce a five year collection and I said well that's very interesting I'm about to get open heart surgery and he said ah and so we worked out the timing and I had a backup plan for another person and we closed the campaign a couple weeks before my surgery all went beautifully he raised$137 ,000 on Kickstarter to print a five year collection but I don't know still even with those numbers that his publisher could have I don't think the Publishers are wrong.

2:14:53I don't think they're wrong. They might have broken even on it. And he made a very nice sum of money. And a lot of his fans were very happy. Sold a lot of signed copies of his books. And it was great. Technology is an enabler. It's made it possible for people to operate on their own scale. A scale that a big company is never going to operate on. But a human is perfectly happy to operate on. Look at podcasting. I'm looking at it. Yeah, you're looking at it. Wesley Faulkner is here. Another perfect example, he's the founder of Works Not Working. The idea is a website for people who are working, but it's just not working for them.

2:15:30And keep in mind that the job of the guy, Joaquin Phoenix's character in Her, was writing letters. That's right. I forgot about that. That's right. Yeah, he did dictate them. He didn't actually physically write them. Yes, exactly. But I'm just saying, they're still a place for humans. And yeah, it's not dead. He would write love letters for people too lazy to write their own. It's pretty funny, wasn't it? Works Not Working is open. You can sign up now. Get on the wait list. Works-not-working.com. Yeah, love to see you there. Let's all chat. And Lou Maresca, who is ably employed by Microsoft to take all our jobs.

2:16:10AI engineering leader. No, no. It's empowering technology. Empowering, yes, that's right. It totally is. If you've ever tried to write a pivot table on your own, forget about it. AI happens to be very good at pivot tables, right? It does. It's an amazing thing. Yeah. It actually works great with some of the really important things, like people use WorkIQ or FinTool today to build out financial data models and enterprise-grade financial data models. So really stuff people don't want to do themselves. It's actually amazing. I mean, it turns everybody into a quant in a way, right? Because you can have an idea and maybe not have any idea how to execute it, but the AI can help.

2:16:49This morning I asked my AI, I said, I've read this thing by Andre Karpathy about auto research that overnight it tries things and it fails. And I said, it sounds intriguing. I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me like I'm five? And it actually wrote ELI five and it explained it all to me. And I said, would this be of use? it said yes as a matter of fact here's how you could use it i said could you set that up it said yes and it did you know it's it's a it's uh it's empowering it's a it's a lever that you can use to move the world and i think that's how to think about it and honestly if you're afraid of it or you hate it it's probably a good idea to at least dip your toe into it and try it because you might find you can actually use it in some very interesting ways at least that's been my experience and look what you know people like uh tom tomorrow can do what glenn fleischman can do technology is a is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it here's my best sales pitch on using cloud code is if you ever have to work with csvs and manipulate the data and i'm my god i've had to deal with so many csvs from different logistic systems and outputs and kickstarter campaigns i wrote so much code over the years to just massage it now i'm like can you take these three things and do this and it's like pink here's your script and i'm like oh my god you just say really good at reading json xml writing to apis i want to do something with stripe oh like sure absolutely we've had an api for the twit workflow back end for more than 10 years it's beautiful beautifully done uh only our engineer knows how to use it uh and uh i've always wanted to be able to use it.

2:18:37So I just said, Claude, here's the API documentation. Write me an implementation. And it wrote a whole implementation so I can use it. I can say, you know, how many times has Glenn Fleischman put it on the network? And it will actually pull it all. It's very... Too many is what the answer is. Not enough is what it said. Isn't that interesting? Not enough. Great panel. It's great to have you here. Our show today brought to you by Cashflow. And when I say brought to you by Cashflow, I think you know, I mean, literally, I mean, how many times have you heard me say bandwidth for this week in tech is brought to you by cashfly at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y dot com slash twit if you're listening to this show right now cashfly probably had something to do with it whether you're watching the video on the website whether you're downloading audio whether you're downloading video they have powered our content delivery practically since the beginning we've been around 21 years they've been around for 21 years and we've been using them for almost all that time they are the performance obsessed cdn content delivery network 20 years and still setting the bar game downloads deliver up to 158 faster than competing cdn providers hd video and i know this firsthand plays on demand with sub-second start times that's really important to us because i know if you press that play button on our site and it doesn't play for a second or two, you're gone.

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2:21:19That's their promise to you. That's their SLA. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com slash twit. that's as i said c-a-c-a-g-f-l-y.com slash twitter thank you cashfly thank you very much we appreciate it that's i mean 21 years we've been doing this show and that was for me you know coming from a broadcast background where you either had to work for a radio station that had a license with the fcc and big towers out there and or a or a television station which even you know more expensive millions of dollars with the gear to be able to do podcasts for fraction of the cost to a fraction of the audience admittedly uh and still make a living that's been an amazing boon i i am i'm a big fan of technology and i know what it can do that's not so great for instance 404 media reporting google microsoft and meta all track you even when you opt out this is according to a independent audit um i i will leave microsoft out of the mix but uh this is this is a privacy audit in california and of course california has very strict privacy laws the uh privacy search engine web x-ray found that according to their audit 55 of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opt out of tracking each company disputed or took issue with the research google said it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how its product works

2:22:57okay uh okay um they viewed web traffic on more than 7 000 popular websites in the month of march i found that most tech companies ignore when a user asked to opt out of cookie tracking that's that banner right where you say no uh california has the stringent well-defined privacy legislation the california consumer privacy act which allows users to opt out of sale of their personal information there's a system called global privacy control that that replaced the do not track which everybody ignored uh that never was enforced but now there is global privacy control which includes a browser extension that tells a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking i installed that by the way probably not not doing anything google failed to let users opt out 87 of the time uh when you when you click that button google should not return cookies however when google server responds to the network request of the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named ide using the set cookie command that's non-compliance

2:24:12So this leads me to this article, which I think is kind of right on from lawfaremedia.org. It's time. Well, we need, first of all, we need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States. But we also need to ban the sale of precise geolocation. And that's what this article is about. That's just one form of the privacy. But geolocation is very risky.

2:24:41some might call it an assassination tracker oh some someone might say that yeah uh no tracking for me maybe for thee uh here's another one from the eff google broke its promise to me now ice has my data this is why this has become a little bit more important now that law enforcement might be using this against you yeah um amanda uh amand la thomas johnson a phd candidate studying in the u.s on a student visa for i think like five minutes he attended a pro-palestinian protest ice sent google an administrative subpoena requesting his data the next month google gave that information to ice without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena even though google has promised in the past that they would do that and

2:25:45well he was not allowed back into the country when he crossed over into Canada he's a dual British in Trinidad and Tobago citizen not accused of any crime the only thing he did wrong was attend a protest once that's not doing anything wrong and that's not doing anything wrong it's in fact constitutionally protected yep um eff uh supported him with legal work the his lawyer at the eff obtained this subpoena uh and uh proved that they in fact had requested it that google had provided it ip addresses physical address other identifies fires session times and durations they were looking for i think evidence that he had been at that protest this goes back to the previous story where you're talking about the ICE app and whether it will show up back in the store.

2:26:40And this is a reason why I don't think it will. Because it was an administrative warrant. It was in private or not in the public view. And they still complied. So there's no incentive for them to do anything that would put them on the negative side of this government. So threats, I think, are unnecessary for compliance in this case. And this is also where being at a protest is not illegal, yet they will still find, I don't want to say, like, the edges of the law. They'll do whatever they want, and they will choose to make the decisions that they want of what is important and what is threatening.

2:27:23and even when we're talking about ICE and they're using a facial recognition app, false positive is something they also don't really care about. Their incentives are to get rid of as many people as possible and any excuse, any hint of an excuse is enough justification to follow through on that. There's no repercussions, nothing changes and that's kind of what they're seeing. Even when courts castigate them, there's no personal repercussions. The worst thing that happens is somebody actually has a moral qualm and they quit or they're fired because they say something that is too supportive of defendants.

2:28:00So what's the consequence?

2:28:04Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is actually leaving the company. He had moved himself upstairs to a board chair, but he's now leaving the company's board. He will focus on philanthropy and other pursuits. Interesting. Yeah. And I think a lot of credit to this guy who took a DVD by mail idea. He says he was inspired in a college course when a professor said, which carries more bandwidth, a fiber optic line or a truck full of DVDs? And he said, oh, maybe instead of relying on the Internet to deliver movies, we could just send DVDs by mail. and then of course very famously i mean i i don't know we probably all subscribe to the red envelope right i had red envelopes gathering dust under my tv for months great model the gym membership of and then uh crashed the stock when he said we're gonna pivot we're gonna just uh do a streaming service and everybody thought oh that's nuts in fact they initially we're gonna split the two into a DVD by mail and then a streaming service.

2:29:16What's that thing called Quant? It had the craziest name. Quick something? Quince? It was terrible, wasn't it? I can't even remember the name of it. Nobody remembers it because they didn't need to. They dumped the DVD by mail thing pretty quickly. Quickster. Quickster with a QW. That's it. My gosh. Now, of course, Netflix is the number one streamer by far. I don't think people understood the implications of content delivery networks when Hastings did this. I think we were still, it still seemed like an abstract notion, especially getting CDN servers into edges of, you know, Xfinity and all the big ISPs.

2:29:55And I mean, the ultimate version of that is Alaska Airlines and other airlines flying with essentially a CDN server on board for the movies that they stream over, you know, Inflate Wireless. It's not exactly that, but it's still, I think it seemed ridiculous. They're like, we don't have that kind of bandwidth. it's like well we don't need it we have intranets and we'll just push it cleverly to cdn servers and that happened very quickly is what it felt like yeah and they they created fast.com because they started getting throttled and they wanted to expose the isps hand and isps this is where net neutrality became a big issue isps wanted netflix to pay them for access to their customers and of course we all said but we're already paying you for access to netflix you want to charge both ways netflix proved it was happening that they were actually slowing netflix traffic down oh i remember that basically blackmailing them wasn't the intro wasn't the uh origin of net neutrality laws was somebody who was trying to had an archive of barbershop quartet digitized tapes oh i don't know that that's the origin of net neutrality they have sued because some isp was slowing down or blocking his distribution of recorded, legally recorded, copyright correct barbershop quartet singing.

2:31:15Nothing against barbershop quartets, but that's a strange hill to die on. Well, that's what got us where we are today. I don't know. We could do a barbershop quartet. Who wants to be bass? Who wants to be tenor? I was a member of Spubska once. Oh, I thought you might be. you looked like uh you might wear a straw hat and striped briefly society for the preservation encouragement of barbershop quartet singing in america were you in a barbershop quartet at the time no i was in a chorus once when i was young when i was young and unwise in 2007 thank you larry in our uh in our discord tests by a barbershop quartet loving techno geek named rob topolsky trying to use the bit torrent to share public domain music files revealed that comcast was indeed injecting forged packets into the peer-to-peer traffic to disrupt the the connections the thin edge of the wedge is barbershop quartets again thin age of the wedge oh my gosh uh wow anyway in in this world of skeezy ceos you know when we had a little argument on intelligent machines over sam altman and that new yorker profile i said well they're all like that look at elon look at you know i mean it just go down the list all ceos are a little skeezy it's nice to know that there are some who not who've made it reed hastings one of the good guys so uh i'm glad he's gonna retire and spend time with his money yeah they said whether like um if you live long enough you become the villain it sounds like he's checking out exactly the right time get out before you become the villain local local hero hero paul brainard one of the founders of Aldis Corporation.

2:32:59He passed away not that long ago. And he did the same thing. He cashed out at the right time, pivoted to philanthropy, and he never did anything. He was not a terrible monopolist or anything. But all the memories around here, all the obituaries about all the great stuff he did in the last 20 plus years of his life with lasting results for the Seattle area community. So there you go. Get out when the getting's good and then don't build the world's largest yacht. That's the first thing. you could buy a basketball team if you want to buy the clippers okay balmer's spouse i'm blanking on it connie uh she just donated what 25 million 80 million 80 80 million it was a lot of money yeah to make up for the loss of federal funding that's great so go go balmers go balmers and hopefully some developers developers developers jokes there i don't know what it would be you but you know um program audio program developers yeah right uh yeah good yeah i think it's connie balmer that sounds right that sounds right uh and sad news ron conway who is an angel investor uh who funded early on google facebook he kept open ai together when sam altman was fired uh he was one of he's one of the legendary investors in silicon valley they call him the godfather of silicon valley stepping back from sv angel because he has an aggressive rare form of cancer uh broke the news on friday so we wish you the best ron um and i hope the treatment uh goes well but um yeah that's so that's he he was legendary and you know we often eulogize these guys after they're gone but maybe be better to remember them while they're still with us and at least he doesn't have to worry about his health insurance and i'm glad you didn't either i'm fleshman thank you glad you're doing well it's great to have you back we took a little bit time off from the glenn fleischman train to give you time to heal but now he's back he's writing uh regularly took his uh advice column to uh his help column to sixcolors.com, where it is much appreciated.

2:35:15You do a great job there. Thank you. I commended Jason Snell for hiring some of the best people and keeping that spirit alive. It's the old gang. We're still together. The old gang's still together. Again, the success of independent media. God bless it. It's great to see you. Longtime No See is on Kickstarter. It's not too late. or you can go to Glenn's website, g-l-e-n-n.f-u-n. I want to promote one. Oh, you have another book and you don't have a dog in this hunt. You're going to have to turn off your green screen here. Oh my God, he's disappeared. He's back. This book is impossible to show. It's sphere.computers is the website.

2:35:56Oh, it's so funny. Steer? Like steer a car? No. Oh my gosh. I have to turn off. I don't know if I can make it up here. s-p-h-e-r-e.computer sphere i will just go to sphere.computer and show it on my screen you can buy an invisible book uh this is somebody i work with on the developmental editing what is the sphere i never heard of the sphere sphere is a computer nobody heard of but it had the probably the first all-in-one crt keyboard bootable computer when you turned it on in 1976 and they were in utah and they just couldn't raise enough capital and kind of get it going fast enough they probably probably sold at least a thousand, maybe a couple thousand computers.

2:36:37And Bill Gates in his autobiography last year, while we're prepping the book, I said, I hadn't bought a copy yet, and my author colleague, Ben Zotto, wrote the book. I said, Ben, you've got a copy, look it up. And Bill Gates says, you know, lists a bunch of companies, including Sphere. Everybody knew who Sphere was. There's this incredibly smart guy named Mike Wise, who is very difficult to work with, but absolutely brilliant, unlike other founders. he claims that Wozniak saw the sphere demoed at a homebrew computer meeting and then went back and duplicated it clearly not the case but wise made a lot of claims but they oh I'm sorry 75 and 76 they advertised in bite like crazy so one day Benzato's walking down the street in San Francisco stumbles over a computer on the street picks it up someone's just throwing it away it's a sphere computer oh my god he found one he found one brought it home got it working starts researching it gets obsessed and winds up interviewing 40 people many of whom hadn't spoken about it in 50 years because they were so embarrassed that the company had failed because there it's a very tight-knit mormon community outside of salt lake city people had invested their own money i mean it wasn't a lot of money it raised but they left bills behind there was a complicated bankruptcy so some people had not spoken about the company to anybody for 50 years and this guy calls up says i found a sphere computer do you want to talk about it so anyway it's a really wild story because if you have any interest in computer science or computer history of that era you're like what is a sphere so when he first sent me the manuscript i thought it was i thought he was making it up briefly and then i'm like and then you start searching on google and you find ads and you find all these people who there's still a little bit of a community anyway so history 650 kit 8-bit computer based on the motorola 6800 4k ram expandable to 64k yeah it was an incredible you could buy you could put 20k in a machine at a time that i think most computers were shipping 4k they were using dynamic ram in 1975.

2:38:38they were built a floppy disk controller they were part of the kansas city standard that got set for tape all these things for all the i know that listeners this show are all like yeah you know hands there anyway it's it's a company no one ever heard of and he wrote a book about him and now he's filling up a piece of missing computer history and it's now shipping it's good on him that's fantastic a lot of fun sphere.computer there's actually a lot of information there he has a working emulator you can launch it and it'll boot into sphere os and you can what what it's got ms basic on it look at that oh man wait a minute look at that it's incredible anyway the future in a browser window you could be emulating a 50 year old computer that no one's used because he deciphered the firmware wait a minute i'm gonna see 10 print hello 20 go to 10 run is it run do i just type run i think it's run oh my god it worked my first program ma there we go look at that that's pretty funny oh man i had a computer with cassette uh that was a wild way to load my memory anyway fun it's a funny it was just a weird story and you get somebody who's obsessed again it's a kickstarter project you raise enough money to make the book happen you can buy a copy of it from him if you want you can buy an old he he designed a floppy disk controller for fun for this 50 year old computer and got it to work so go computer now you can read about it ben zotto z-o-t-t-o great book uh it's at sphere dot computer and there's the sphere bookstore 39 look at that shop pay button they claim they went to miss tandy and they showed them an all-in-one design a year before the trs80 ship there's all that i think you could reasonably say yeah that was a little bit of a sphere knockoff yeah it's a lot of it looks a lot like a tan yeah yeah you look at it you're like oh okay that's familiar except it's aluminum case it looked nice it's wild stuff what a story well thank you for sharing that with us so good to see you and nice to see you congratulations on your uh your health thank you that all that and your good ticker appreciate it uh thank you wesley faulkner so glad you got the site up works-not-working.com.

2:40:57If work's not working for you, that's the place to go. Wesley is always amazing. Did you do a talk at South By? Yes. What was your talk about? It was called Why Work Sucks and How to Make It Joyful Again. Good name. Can I watch it online? Is there a video? No, the audio is posted, but you have to have a ticket, South Bay credentials in order to see it. I had my sister and her husband did a shaky cell phone video of it. So I do have some video of it and I'm going to be editing that with splicing in some good audio and then inserting the slides because the lighting in the room was very bright. So my slides actually didn't show up.

2:41:46South Bay allows you to do that? Well, it's my material. so it's they should yeah yeah so i could yeah it's just that yeah i've signed a release and all that stuff so i definitely just can't use their name and represent them as this is official it's just my thing and so i can totally do that nice well we'll look for it we'll have you back when you put that out thank you and for the current members of wort's not working they might say that the site's not working and i would just like to say i am so sorry i am pushing a pr right now right after this to help Claude fired up yes well I was embarrassed this morning when we started the show and people were saying your mastodon instance is down but in that case it was me not paying my bill so I apologize it's back up thank you Hugo for jumping on that one I appreciate it I have so many crontabs that tell me everything that I'm doing that's failing and then I have things that tell me when those things are failing now it's all it's embarrassing I actually fell for a phishing scam and gave them that credit card and so I had to cancel it.

2:42:44The first time I canceled it, American Express said, well, you can keep it active with people who already have it so that your recurring payments will continue. And I said, yes. And then I got a charge for$1 ,000 at some liquor store in Massachusetts. In fact, come to think of it, it wasn't so far from you there, Lou. I don't know. Anyway, I said, okay, this time I'm going to cancel it. And you can't extend it to people who already have it. And now I'm just waiting for things to fail. Well, now that it's 21, you might get reals like that all the time. Well, I'm thinking, I think our Redis account is actually on that credit card.

2:43:23So I should probably call Redis and say, hey, here's a new one. Anyway, Hugo, who runs Masto Host, he's a great Mastodon server farm. he's in france and uh i immediately flipped the switch and turned it back on so i apologize for the downtime but it can happen yeah i need crontabs that's what i need lou maresca great to see you i i just love you so much ai engineering leader but uh just a wonderful fella co-pilot thank him for co-pilot microsoft thank him for co-pilot and excel appreciate all you do and i don't i don't i'm not a writer but i do want to promote my wife's books because oh yes that's awesome doing a fabulous job she's got a book called absolution out there she put out last year um it's a fabulous book about the 1989 it's a fictionized version of the 1989 talent on murders so it's oh my god yeah great what's her uh what's her author name sir pen name's ee lawson if you look at amazon lawson absolution by ee lawson he also has a really great uh rom-com for the holiday season called hurry down the chimney which people are actually reading even now it's not holiday season so she also has that she's got another one coming out called pros and cons so she's doing a fabulous job she has a great author photo too which is key looking at the website did you take that i didn't she did it all of her own the website is her own so all-time great isn't that great really good isn't it i love it well gosh you know what i'm glad we could plug this ee lawson she's got her own website eelawson.com right and you can see all the books you can see more about her you can even buy a quietly scheming woman's cropped hoodie i should get that for lisa that is awesome she's quietly scheming she's quite yes yes that's a stare is that that is fantastic a little bit out of her book but yeah she uh she's done a fabulous she did like i said she didn't ask for any help for this so she's done all herself so very good oh that's nice that is really great well yeah let's give her a big plug absolution that is quite a story that tylenol story oh yeah she's she really enjoyed writing she likes writing all different types of stories she's not really in a specific genre so it's non-fiction it's all fiction everything's fiction so it's a it's a fictionalized story of the story right the tylenol death oh that's really interesting wait for it to be adapted into a 10-part netflix yeah i know right why not uh the option is available eelawson.com go get it that would be a wonderful book all right maybe only eight parts these days are cutting back yeah right well it just depends thank you podcast great to see you thank you so much wesley thank you glenn and thanks to all of you a special thanks to our club members who make this show and every show we do possible without your generous support there would be no twit and i could say that literally you would pay for a third of our operating expenses now that means without you the whole thing has to shut up shop and i don't want to do that so if you're not a member think about it twit.tv slash club twit 10 bucks a month you get ad-free versions of all the shows you get access to the club twit discord it's a great place to hang out with very smart people and you get special programming that we don't offer in public like our photo segment by the way i apologize chris marquardt uh had a family emergency on thursday or was it thursday Yeah, Thursday we were going to do the show.

2:47:03We will reschedule that. We're still looking for playful shots. I actually uploaded one of my own this week. We also do Stacy's Book Club. The AI user group is fantastic. First Friday of every month with some really good guys doing some great stuff. Lou was on it. Maybe we'll get Lou back too. Actually, it'd be great. If you're not a member, we would love to have you in the club. We really try to make it worthwhile. So go to twit.tv slash club to support the programming you see on Twitter. We do this show every Sunday from 2 to 5 Pacific. That's 5 to 8 Eastern time, 2100 UTC. I mentioned that when we do it, because you can watch us live if you're in the club, of course, in the Club Twit Discord, but you can also watch, everybody can, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik.

2:47:50If you chat in any of those platforms, I will see it, and we can chat with you, as I have been throughout the show. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website, twit.tv. there's a youtube channel with the video video and audio at the website or subscribe to the video or audio or both in your favorite podcast client you'll get it automatically all of that's free but if you want to support it you appreciate that too thank you everybody for being here and we will see you next time as i have said now for 21

2:48:24years thanks for watching we'll see you next time another twit is in the can He's amazing. Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet.

2:49:07Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.