TWiT 1082: Hanging by a Thread - Are We Headed for a Tech Crash or a Golden Age?

27:55So what I ended up doing was I, I decided I wanted it to be a really simple website. I don't want to have to work with some sort of database tool. well, I can use Google Sheets as the database that can reference that Google Sheets document and present it in this nice way. Anyway, ended up building up this little site for him that the main page lets him start to type in a title. It ties in with the TMDB, which is the movie database API to check against characters as he's typing and goes, oh, this is already in your collection or oh, it's not. Would you like to add it? And so when he's at a thrift store, he can type in the title, see if he already has it.

28:32If he doesn't, then no, he can add it. And then the second page on the site has his whole collection, again, pulled from TMDB to get the photos of the front pages of the DVDs, you know, and all of that, I was able to, you know, it was the idea you were talking, Nicholas, about your creativity being there. Yeah, I'm the one who thought, I don't want to build a site that has to have a database. So let's see about using Google Sheets. It figured out how to contact the API and do all that part of it. Then over time, he said, well, I like this, but the seasons, it's not tracking seasons. Can we add that?

29:07Is that going to take a long time? You don't have to do it if it's too much work. I said, oh, it's not too much work. And then asked Claude and it helped me create that part of it and push it. So I really do like those opportunities to where these ideas I would have otherwise just kind of had to throw by the wayside. I'm able to make use of that. And I've appreciated that aspect of it more than anything.

29:28Leo Laporte:I feel like the AI industry would be much better served taking, Micah, your story right there. This funds nice stuff and this is what AI enables. Don't lead with job destruction. Don't lead with making a new movie. Yeah, that's kind of like a down. I guess the flip side is, is everyone going to do this? How much money are they going to make off a little website database, a little baseball simulation? I don't know. But that's not my fault for promising the sun and the stars with this technology. When they could have sold it as like, hey, this is like a useful productivity thing. They could have sold it much more soberly and maybe it would have been better.

30:08So that's how this industry works, though, right? It has to be to the moon. It has to be to the moon, basically. But this is the answer to your original question, Micah, of what happens if there's a bubble burst. I think what's happening is people are seeing value, a lot of it, right? And they are using it. And maybe it starts with us geeks because we're much more likely to sit down at a keyboard and do something like you just did. Or even think of the fact that, oh, I could take a picture of this and feed it to Claude is certainly a geeky mindset. But this is going to trickle down. It's changing how people relate to computers.

30:41It changes how people use computers. And I think in the long run makes them much more useful. And I think that's why venture capital is pumping all this money into these companies that are then pumping the money into data centers and new models, because there is, they perceive a real upside to it. And it is a complete reinvention of how the world works. We've been through this before. Industrialization changed everything, was a complete upheaval. when when we invented the car that was a complete upheaval in the american society in how people got to places about where their jobs were the kinds of jobs we have been through this before there is upheaval people lose their jobs uh people lose their lives about work by the way car cars becoming mainstream led to tons of kids just being dead on the street well absolutely i mean you could say i'm not saying it's all positive by any means in fact you could say cars have changed cities.

31:40They've changed where we live. They made the suburbs possible. And there's all sorts of things that cars have done to change society. We've survived it. We've lived through this before. And I think this is the kind of change we're seeing. And if you had been sitting in 1910 thinking, what should I invest in? And you decided to invest in rubber, oil, and automotive stuff, you might've done better if you'd had some vision about it. And I think that's what the market's seeing. But to answer your question, Micah, Jeff Bezos said this a couple of months ago. He said there are two kinds of bubbles. There are financial bubbles that are just about money, like the stock market crash where everybody was in 1929 heavily invested and leveraged.

32:19And it just crashed because all this leverage, the margin calls, and everybody jumped out of windows. He said versus an industrial bubble. And we have some examples of industrial bubbles, the transcontinental railway all those railroads went bankrupt by the way they all went out of business uh the the internet boom of the late 19th or 20th century we laid a lot of fiber a lot of those companies mci is gone they're but the fiber is still there uh the railroads were still there there's infrastructure that gets built and i think bezos is saying this is that kind of bubble it is in the long run, a potentially positive bubble.

32:58It's not a financial bubble where people just lose their shirts. They might, but it is a bubble where, and companies will, I'm sure, go out of business and some investors will lose their shirts and some even, you know, mom and pop retail investors might lose their shirts in the stock market, but ultimately we're going to get some value out of it. And that's the reason I'm asked you, Nicholas, is I think you and I, and I'll have to add Micah now to this, have created things that we see some real value in it more than just i mean yeah it's an art project but you can see there's value being created yeah that couldn't have been created before those projects are great those projects are totally great but i look at like you bring these to the ai executives like you're saying nicholas they're going to look at this and be like oh nerd right this is of course wonderful nurture and it's like i can i can i build like a a global empire on this can i sell this to the average consumer and i don't know if they can't like that that to me they focus on chat bots they focused on Sora they focused on this crappy consumer this is cool stuff like it's super cool I wish I had time to like play around with these things in this way too unfortunately like my perspective is from like looking at the news and trying to see like what is happening at this at the broader market level yeah people look at it that way have a much more negative point of view than the people who are actually playing with this stuff and see oh there's something here that's for sure for sure right there's if you just think it's a bunch of chat bots it's like oh who cares this is so sorrow it is it is worrying though because even just like from the chatbot side which is how normal people are interacting with us by the way like that's how it is and in the future it's probably going to be the handful of like the super siri or whatever it's going to be personal assistants people talking to their phone or whatever saying do this for me can you figure out how to do this for me rather than doing the legwork that you guys are doing right now um but i look at like what is happening in the ai industry and just like the effect it's having on humanity is kind of disturbing, like at a philosophical level, that is kind of what's keeping me partially away from it, because it does feel like we're stripping our humanity away a little bit here creatively.

35:00I just saw a paper that said that AI psychosis was almost inevitable. And there are so many examples of AI psychosis right now. People have killed, people have hurt themselves they've killed other people um somebody i saw a tweet of this recently like a toy like a it used to be a toy slightly injures a kid and the entire thing is pulled offline and you have these models out here who are they're just out here kind of like uh doing weird things to human psychology that we don't totally understand but that's a an acceptable loss it's an acceptable loss for the progress of this industry and i find that i don't know very very sad and disheartedly I want to agree with that 100 % too.

35:44That has been one of the issues that, because we talked a lot about it over the course of multiple episodes of Tech News Weekly, is specifically the different AI systems and the horrible situations that have come out of it in those cases. And yeah, it's specifically what you touched on that a toy does this or a car does this and those things get recalled or stopped or what have you. Because we have regulations for those things. Yeah, I do struggle with the concept of the AI tools that have been given freely to schools and schools then adopting them so freely. I don't know how to reckon with that.

36:26I don't know. Other than I wish that, yeah, as soon as those things happened, it should have been shut down. It should have at the very least been pulled from from education, I guess. But again, I don't know how to reckon with that. And I think that one thing that is difficult to do in any form of media, but in particular in forms of media that tend to be sort of condensed down, is holding two points of contrasting beliefs and having them both heard and not thinking that one outshines the other. So I can say that I have enjoyed the ways that I have made use of these tools. And I can say I am not happy with the fact that people have been killed or have killed themselves, at least partially because of these tools and have those things both be true and have all of that communicated is very difficult because people do want a side to be taken.

37:29And in that way, it is difficult.

37:32Leo Laporte:Yeah, Mike, I'm right there with you. Obviously, I use these things. I find some utility with them. The downsides are obvious and very bad. And I don't know that one side needs to beat the other. But to communicate that there's merits to this whole is very difficult, especially in today's climate where people don't read the article. They might read the headline. They might read the tweet. They'll see a reel on Instagram. There's really – it's difficult to kind of get nuanced and in-depth messages out there nowadays. So it's very tricky. And I will say I spoke at a University of Arizona class maybe two months ago to discuss my Tucson news site.

38:13Leo Laporte:And I will say the students there were very skeptical of AI. They were very – Oh, Leo. They were cringe. They were not down with the sickness, so to speak. This is destroying our ability to think, so on and so forth. And so I don't know if there's a generational aspect here. I'm not a kid. I'm 40. uh these were like 20 year olds give or take uh and they were you know by and large this is 20 students they were by and large not certainly not in love with the idea of ai uh so i don't know how i think they're scared right i mean if you're college right now you've got to be scared about what what's the job market going to be what is what's scared about the world scared about the future like literally everything is on fire so yeah let's just add one to the file you know yeah let's take a little break uh you're watching this week in tech with the week's tech news Micah Sargent is here.

39:06It's so nice to have you. We thought maybe Micah would have to take over because I am thousands of miles in the middle. I am in the most remote spot in the world in the middle of the ocean. It's called Hawaii. Maybe you've heard of it. And you can see the ocean behind me having a wonderful time, I must say. And so I thought, well, I should see if I could do shows from other places. And it's working pretty well, actually. It should be your new you think? Just new extreme environments. I think so. I think Antarctica is next, right? That's Travinda Hardwar from Engadget, where he's senior editor.

39:40And Nicholas DeLeon is also here. Great to have you, senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. We are going to take a little break. Because we weren't sure if this would work, I recorded all the commercials ahead of time. So we all get to stand up and wander around. We'll be back with more of Twit in just a month. this episode of twit brought to you by helix sleep how are you preparing for spring cleaning season it's time to upgrade put that old mattress on the curb upgrade to a helix mattress and get yourself a good night's rest i mean we love our helix mattress no more night sweats no back pain no motion transfer i could tell you i'm missing it in hawaii let me tell you don't settle for some third-party mattress made overseas with low quality and really questionable materials.

40:33You want the best. And you can rest assured your Helix mattress is assembled, packaged, and shipped from Arizona. And within days of placing your order, they build it to order. So it's brand new and fresh. You can also take the Helix Sleep Quiz. That's what we did. It'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and your sleep needs. And I got to tell you, it works. My deep sleep, that's the most important one where your brain gets cleared out, is up. I've almost doubled it. I'm not alone. Actually, Helix did a sleep study, a Wesper sleep study, where they measured participants' sleep performance after doing what we did, switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress.

41:14And this is what they found. 82 % of the participants saw, just like me, an increase in their deep sleep cycle. Participants on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. That's a lot. I mean, deep sleep, you know, is a half an hour to an hour night anyway. It's not for very long. Get another 25 minutes. You're going to feel great in them. Participants on average achieved 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand tested and reviewed by experts. Forbes loves it. Wired loves it. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the U.S.

41:51and you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They call it their Happy with Helix guarantee and it provides an absolutely risk-free customer-first experience because they want to ensure you're completely satisfied with your mattress. By the way, I am. You're never getting my mattress back. I love my Helix. Go to helixsleep.com slash twit for 27 % off site-wide during the Memorial Day sale best of web offer and it's exclusively for listeners of This Week in Tech. So make sure you go to that address. That's helixsleep.com slash twit. 27 % off site-wide. And please make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you twit.

42:34This offer ends May 31st. And if you're listening after the sale ends, I'm sorry, but you should still check them out because they always have great deals. Helixsleep.com slash twit. now back to hawaii all right we're back uh on twitter is this your site crosswording the

42:52Leo Laporte:situation nicholas is this you too that's mine yes so what is this so you know the you know the me monitoring the situation i presume everyone here that's when you're you know you're a news junkie and you're really following you know whatever guys say they're monitoring the situation yeah it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek whatever so about a month ago i started doing the apple news mini crossword puzzle because i'm becoming an old old man in real time you are yes uh but i was all the clues were generic it's like not a cat but a blank so i was like well that's fine but like what if the clues were all about news items and we called it crossword so it's like all the are so this i built with cloud code this yeah this actually took probably i mean i didn't so it's writing the clues from the news?

43:40Leo Laporte:Yeah, so what it's doing, there's a couple things happening. Basically, it is going out and scanning the major news in the New York Times, Reuters, AP. It's either scanning their websites or their Blue Sky feeds or a bunch of different sources. It's kind of like getting a state of the news and it goes back, I think, two months. And then that's all put against a giant open source word list that's out there somewhere. And then it tries to create the puzzle. The puzzle cost me like a penny to create a sonnet sonnet is doing it so that's pretty amazing actually so it was good yeah yeah it was it took about two weeks to really nail it i had a lot of problems with the ios keyboard for whatever reason uh and the initial version like uh maybe half of the clues were based in news and the other half were just kind of random generic stuff so it took a little while to really nail down but like you know this is really hard yeah i know harder than the crop I haven't gotten one yet.

44:37No, me neither. Wow.

44:40Leo Laporte:So, yeah, I will say, you know, I stopped doing them after the first week or so. I really don't. Do you have any statistics on how many people are doing these? I don't have them handy. I mean, it's not going to go up a lot. Crosswordingthesituation.com. Yeah. This is a challenging idiot. Now, do you play the fun little tune when you solve it at the end? No, I think. I get to the score. I'm happy to add that to the pull request, Leo. I will. I'll do a PR for you. So this is impressive. It's just like I have, I don't know, this is kind of the way my brain, all these little side things. Oh, this would be cool.

45:20Leo Laporte:This would be cool. And now I have the time and like the reason. This is the mindset you need, I think, to really take advantage of this is my feeling on this. Wow, this is great. Yeah. Very nice. So, you know, I, you know, again, none of this is going to become the next Facebook or whatever, but it's just a fun, creative way to spend an hour or so here or there. And I get to use the models and it keeps me like, I don't know. I think it's fun. Ultimately, this is fun. Actually, I don't know if you want to be the next Facebook. You know, that historic loss in court could cost a lot more than three hundred seventy five million dollars.

45:56This is in New Mexico. Just, you know, next door. Next door. Yeah. the attorney general raul torres sued meta in a landmark child safety case one uh a jury uh i'm sorry the judge awarded 375 million dollars they go back now for a three-week public nuisance trial whether the uh and they are going to argue over the changes because the uh attorney general doesn't want just money he wants meta to make some changes to facebook instagram and whatsapp including age verification for new mexico users prohibiting end-to-end encryption for users under 18 i don't know what that's all about and capping their use to 90 hours a month limiting engagement boosting features like infinite scroll and autoplay and requiring meta to detect 99 of new c sam uh crazy um it is not a good thing to be meta right now if you ask me no meta's response meta's response we're gonna we're gonna leave new mexico if you do this we're gone these are

47:05Leo Laporte:technologically impractical changes many of them are yeah some of them seem reasonable you know maybe time limits or whatever but like the we're gonna get rid of end-to-end encryption i mean that's bad for any number of reasons uh i don't know they don't want kids to have privacy i'm trying to figure out what this is uh you know it's interesting because what happens when you do this is now suddenly you have to also ban vpns because if you if you say well this is only in new mexico then kids who aren't stupid are going to say oh well guess what i'm no longer in new mexico which is leading utah to want to ban effectively ban vpns utah is the first state to hold websites liable websites like meta would be liable for users who mask their locations with vpns this law goes into effect in just a few days it was signed into law by the governor march 19th It goes into effect on May 6th.

48:07It's formerly Senate Bill SB73. And this is what you're going to see in a lot of these states. I imagine New Mexico's next. Nord VPN, and I'm sure joined by every other VPN provider in the world, has called the law a, quote, unresolvable compliance paradox and liability trap. the eff says legal risk to push sites to either ban all known vpn ips or mandate age verification for every visitor in the world well we can't tell you're from utah so we're just going to make sure you all do it i what is with legislatures i don't think they understand technology what is look i understand they think they're not happy about social media solve everything yeah i and this is this goes back in a way to what we were talking about earlier which is there are harms Clearly, there are harms to the Internet.

48:54And maybe when we were starting out, we should have thought more about that. We didn't. Those harms are here. Social media is here. But this is not the solution.

49:06By the way, that was a jury trial. I got that wrong. So the jury awarded$375 million in New Mexico. Meanwhile, Australia continues the pain for Meta. a 2.25 % levy on their revenue in Australia not just Meta but Google and TikTok if they refuse to pay news publishers. This is a Rupert Murdoch bill that was passed in Australia. He's still doing it. And so what happened is Meta and others said well fine no news for you. So Australia said well fine even if you don't give us news you're going to give us two and a quarter percent of your revenue. that's so funny this is basically all about protecting a more abundant industry the news industry and in particular rupert murdoch's news industry you know this is the thing about it i if it wasn't actually this secret other you know a deal that is happening there's something to the idea that because I remember working for a news organization at the time when they're all calling the ones you worked for right yeah exactly yeah exactly and I remember uh someone coming in I mean but it is but it's the case yeah and there was a specialist who came in and was like here's how you're going to make it big on Facebook and then you find out that well allegedly that Facebook companies did that up its video values and all that kind of stuff oh yeah so I do I wish there was a world in which these companies that are sort of summarizing the news that exists did have to pay a little bit but it sucks that really that's not what this about nobody owns the news i mean uh and that's true if somebody owned the news then you couldn't do that crossword puzzle nicholas because correct the news is the news you can i mean i'll shut it down it doesn't yeah it's

51:02Leo Laporte:it's not a four but that's the point is nobody really owns this the news the facts are not copyrightable the treatment of it is but not the facts themselves yeah this goes back to like every medium too like when radio broadcasting was just starting they were just reading newspaper headlines and newspaper reports they didn't have the reporters they were just repeating what was there so we've been here before we kind of keep doing it every time we have a big media shift uh what's the difference between saying no one owns the news and no one owns the alphabet because we could just say that oh just because you've arranged these letters in a certain way doesn't mean that you should get paid for it.

51:38Leo Laporte:I love that. I don't think I like that argument. No one owns the news. Well, facts are facts. You can't own facts. You can't copyright the facts. You can copyright how you wrote it. You can copyright your treatment of it. But isn't that what these these the meta and TikTok and et cetera were pulling from the treatment of they weren't pulling the fact. Right. They were they were summarizing the treatment that was put together about the thing that happened. If this really were the case, then most websites would be gone because what happens? One website breaks a story and every other website in the world, hundreds of them copy it.

52:16I know this because when I go through the news every day looking for stories for the show, I get 20 copies of the same story. I always try to find the original, right? It's not easy. Sometimes it's really hard to do. But when Axios or the information in the New York Times or the journal breaks it, I try to use their version of the story, but it's not easy to do because it's, you can't copyright it. It's a, it's a, it's a story. A lot of stories are just like stuff a company announced. So everybody's going to have their take on it, their spin on it. That's not breaking. That's not like a scoop, you know, that's just polite to say if, if, if Axios gets a scoop, it's polite to say Axios in a scoop broke the story.

52:55Yeah. But that's just polite. I mean, there's nothing stopping you from repeating it. in fact it's what uh gets around most paywalls you know most people aren't going to pay 400 a year for the information but don't worry you don't have to you don't have to someone will publish what he's going to reprint it yeah including us i mean i mean i'm one of the i'm a guilty party in this i'm not going out and doing any reporting i'm counting on you divindra and you nicholas and you mike well mike you don't either but yeah i was gonna say i'm one of you i'm one of you uh this is uh this is commentary this is not reporting meta is also in trouble in the eu for failing to keep children off facebook and instagram this is the same story you know as soon as these countries require age verification like in england uh vpns become huge in that jurisdiction um meta is in breach of the digital services act for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram.

53:56Now, the scary thing is the fines on this could be massive, a large percentage of their global revenue. We shall wait and see what they find them. The EU did create their own age verification app, which was, oh yeah, instantly cracked, like within two hours. In fact, there were a number of security holes in it. And Ursula von der Leyen, who is now in charge of the DSA and the EU, says online platforms can easily rely on an age verification app. So there are no more excuses. We even have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children's rights. I should just turn it on to Schwarzenegger.

54:41Sorry. But, you know, Meta has not adopted the EU's age verification and probably a good thing. Security researchers demonstrated it could be bypassed. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I see two hours? Within two minutes of its release. The source code's up on GitHub. So yeah. Yeah, it's open source. Point chat GPT.

55:07Exactly. Have you all started getting those? I've been logging in or doing whatever these different services, and now they're all starting to ask me what state I live in too. Yeah, they have to. Yeah, I know. Isn't that so annoying? now i was i was even it was on apple tv it was just wanting to watch some show and it said hold on you gotta log into your account i had to go on my phone like some sort of animal go to the website like some sort of animal and then say my age like some sort of human on i mean i know here

55:36Leo Laporte:in arizona they passed a law to visit adult websites you need a either id or you know a half clever high school student will just use a vpn or whatever uh but i'm mclovin my name is mclovin i live in hawaii that's until that's until they uh they ban vpns and i'm like well like okay just just go ahead ban them i don't i i mean at this point i'm old i don't care as much as i used to well and this is important because i think nobody would say oh a kid should be able to visit a porn site we all agree of course no kids should be able to do that you can't buy a playboy in a 7-Eleven if you're right.

56:13Find it in the woods like everybody used to. Exactly right. Dig it out of the ground like you do with the mushrooms. Who are burying their Playboys. I don't understand what that is all about. But anyway, that's another story for another day. So I think we're for it. But what the interesting thing is it really was never about the porn ban. That was just the wedge in the door. Because really they want to ban the internet for people under 16. They want to ban social media. They want to really restrict what kids can access. And I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't know if that's a...

56:48Leo Laporte:Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, this is the thing where like parent, you know, parenting is important. When I was a kid, I was looking up video game stuff. I was, you know, I was actually using it as research and homework and the things you were supposed to use it for, even at an early age. Well, my mom is very strict that I knew from a very early age not to tempt fate, so to speak. But like, that's not every kid. You know, some kids are going to look up. They're going to gamble on polymarket or whatever the case may be. So it's like, oh, Lord, I didn't think about that. But this is the role of a parent to like, yeah, tell, you know.

57:25You know, if our nation's governing body can gamble on polymarket, I think everybody should be allowed to go. Talk about downfall of our civilization. of here but you know nicholas like the thing is the internet was just one place back then like when we yes that's true it was the shared family computer that your parents could watch you do stuff in and maybe occasionally you'd have access at your school library or something but now it's like it is everywhere everyone has the internet in their pocket right in their pocket and like that's the thing and i i think the eu's heart is in the right place like protecting kids i'm not denying so many ways i just don't think they have the technology to do it they don't have the tech to do it there you did a study that said oh look a kid can say i'm 18 on facebook and there's nothing to stop them well yeah i mean we have a we run a mastodon instance right uh twit.social which you're all welcome to join if you want to be on mastodon and uh i have now been forced because of all these laws and various jurisdictions to say you must be over 18 to use it but mastodon has no age verification capability so i just say by signing up you assert that you are over 18 you must be over 18 that's dopey but i feel like i have to do it how porn sites used to do it as i've heard so it used to be they do liquor sites do it what's your birthday right and that's exactly right you know it's it's the same thing i mean it's again like i think the user is in the right place because we we allowed this internet to grow to to obscene heights like facebook's reach uh its market reach is insane what it was allowed to do the companies it was allowed to gobble up the sort of like mind share that is fully owned by mark zuckerberg i think is kind of gross and we we lived through that i reported through that and it was a lot of governments a lot of just like, hey, Facebook wants to buy this company and we're going to allow this$19 billion WhatsApp deal or whatever.

59:26Not many questions being asked. We all thought like, oh, social media is great. These tech companies are trying to do good in the world. And maybe the reason I'm sounding a little negative now is like I've lived through several ways of tech company innovation. Right. And every time, practically every time, it has not ended up so great. It's a money grab. The social media thing was just like it was purely, yeah, money grab, user attention grab. We want those DAUs. We want to have the most engagement over our competitors at the cost of users, at the cost of like kids mental health, at the cost of so many things.

59:59But what's the solution? That's the thing. It's so hard. We have to have these discussions where there are going to be some clunky, clunky solutions. Some things are not going to work. But, you know, we got to start having this conversation more broadly. Maybe we should. Like I have my daughter is seven years old right now. So she is years away from having a smartphone stuff. Ah, this is why you suddenly care. Now I get it. You are faced with this. We know social media has not been great for kids, like for teenagers in particular. So what are you going to do, Devendra? Are you going to give your kid a phone?

1:00:32I don't know yet. What I do kind of want to do eventually is just like, you know what is great? A cellular-enabled Apple Watch is a great thing for parents. Like, that is your emergency. You need to get a hold of me for whatever. um i need to see where you are if you're going to hang out with friends or something i'm less interested in location tracking and more and just like anything happens you raise your wrist you call for help you that can happen and i can reach you and apple's actually embraced that a couple years ago they allowed you to set up a watch with your phone without them having the phone they can for sure and like the whole the whole family plans and stuff like those sorts of things that's kind of where i'm sitting um i think that's a good solution can i ask how are you how are you deciding on is this a matter of talking to other parents and seeing what they do is it a matter of reading books is it a matter of all of these things that's something that i've i've always been curious about with especially uh parents who are a little bit more tech knowledgeable we have lisa schmeiser talks a lot about the work that she a friend of the show does with with her daughter and like they have a contract that they wrote up together and every you know everyone's so there's just different ways of doing it i've seen how jason howell front of the show has done that you know i mean and so i'm just curious what your method is because you said you don't know yet are you still collecting data to figure that out books written about this right like books are the last place you go to like figure out what is happening in like media and social media and stuff um a lot of it's just like reading the news seeing what's happening and looking at the tools available out there too like there are some really gross things out there there's this i don't know if you guys have seen angel sense those sorts of um it's the wearable that um it was initially meant for kids with autism and kids who are like a flight risk kids who like could run away from school or something for parents to keep track of things but now it's become just like this really thing for paranoid parents to get for their kids and it can let them listen in to what is happening like just instant my god to listen to what's happening and now school this is a rights violation you cannot just listening to every single classroom and parents are fighting and parents like no i must understand what is going around my kid at all here what's happening in the class and complain to the teacher and yes parent that reads the kid's diary every night yeah wasn't that in batman the dark night it's i mean so we're talking about a lot of tech like this is a thing that exists now and some parents are doing it and i think it's insane so i'm thinking of like a sane reaction also this will involve conversation with my daughter seeing what she wants to use and right now what we're doing is mainly tech in in a localized way that i can see what she's doing right she is a she's an ipad kid like she spends time on her ipad she loves minecraft i'm there engaging with her she's not out there playing with like randoms online yet we're not doing roblox and maybe that's going to be a conversation that's going to be a fight at some point because from what i hear from what i've seen roblox is not great yeah and taking care of that community but minecraft is relatively safe she plays with her with her cousins once in a while she plays with me the idea of a central computer i think we can we kind of got to go back to that the den computer the living room computer where like your kids are online and doing stuff and doing stuff for school and you're like interacting with them it's so funny because yeah i was a friend one of my friends he says like that

1:03:47Leo Laporte:was like you know the internet you know the phones everywhere the the computer at the den was peak that was the best because you could go on you could use whatever you know read whatever and then boom you're done and then you're back in reality you're out of the matrix and that was way more balanced and way more healthy. And frankly, if you're a parent, like I said, my mom was very strict, but she had the advantage of there was one computer which she could monitor. And honestly, I was quite obedient. I really didn't try to say... It was very strict. So I got the message very quick is what I'm saying.

1:04:19Leo Laporte:But it was a lot easier in the 90s to do that than now, even if you're like a sophisticated parent. Oh, I'm going to block it in the router. Nothing. Nope. Not a single packet is getting into my house. It's like, okay, well, they go to school they have friends you know devices have cellular they're not touching your router like there's so many workarounds but i do remember like in the 90s what the warnings to parents were like don't let your kids talk to strangers on the internet and i absolutely spent many of my talking to strangers on the internet about anime and video games and whatever and i've made some of my like greatest friends they are like that to me that to me was peak internet just like this pure discovery this thing that was like un mostly untouched by like big corporate tech companies it was just people out there building things doing cool things like what you guys are kind of doing now with ai like the coolest thing about ai is it does take us back to that sort of like era of people just making cool and i kind of that's what happened with the personal computer era right we suddenly have a computer and you're all of an age where you probably had that computer as a kid and you you messed with it maybe some of you did everything destroyed it yeah yes yeah yeah and that's how you back and that's fantastic and that's why you're geeks now right yeah but this is like we were talking about apple and ai like the thing as i've been thinking about apple in turn is like how he can change his company i think apple is the last like pc computer company that is actually focused on personal computing right like everyone else was chasing ai or so many things apple's like we're making better laptops we're making better phones we're making better earbuds or something but it's tech that you use you touch and feel and that affects your lives that is personal computing and i wish more companies kind of thought like that you know i just um i reviewed one of dell's like great new laptops the xps 14 and it does so many things right it has this killer keyboard issue and i'm talking to dell i'm talking to people like what's the hell it's um it doesn't type fast enough oh no it don't type good it can't keep it is a It's a beautifully machined thing.

1:06:21Well, it's like, so one thing I do a lot is press like - Is that a Windows problem? Can you put Linux on it and see if it works better? I think we've, I've talked to Dell. They've talked to their engineers. They've localized to like, it was maybe part of the part that's being used in the digitizer to like accept keyboard commands. Like something was so there, they've issued a firmware upgrade and I've seen it. And it's just like a weird issue for such like a beautiful machine to have. So you can type faster than the keyboard can keep up. The keyboard is just like dead. It's broken. Like if I type like the comma and spacebar too quickly, it'll register spacebar comma.

1:06:53I'm like, I can't, I can't work on this. That's not good. I cannot work. Like, so they say it was a manufacturing issue with like the first run that went to reviewers. I'm going to check out like a newer machine to see if they actually fix it. Because I thought those look great. I thought that was a great looking computer. They do. A lot of the Linux guys liked it.

1:07:10Leo Laporte:Awesome battery life. Yeah, I saw a lot of good stuff about the XPS. It's a great, it's like a great Windows machine otherwise. But it's also like, man, you guys are so focused. Last year, they were focused on that dumb rebrand of like changing all their computers. They went back. Thank God they went back to XPS. Oh, man, I felt so good. I felt so good coming in. That was a great line. You were all right. You were all right. I've owned many XPSs over. It was amazing. By the way, on Wednesday, we had Nirav Patel, who was the founder of Framework on Intelligent Machines. And they're making some.

1:07:38That new PC laptop they made is pretty awesome. It looks awesome. I'm worried about them because their things tend to be more expensive. and it really is focused on the tinkerer market. And they're small, so they also get hit harder by the supply chain shortage because they're not buying as many RAM chips or whatever. But he told me an interesting stat. He said 60 % of the people who buy this new laptop are running Linux on it. They're not ordering it with Windows. They're running it with Linux.

1:08:06Leo Laporte:Yeah, I've seen a lot of evangelization. Because of the AI stuff, a lot of this is either Mac first or Linux first. Windows is kind of incidental to this AI conversation as far as the stuff that I'm doing. And a lot of Linux guys have been talking up framework for, I don't know, past year or whatever. It's like, these are computers. It's a nice machine. It was a little clunky when it was the 13 and the 16. The original were a little, I had a 13. They were too big. Yeah, it was a little clunky. But now they've decided, well, we're going to do a unibody aluminum chassis, much like the MacBook. And I think, I haven't seen it yet.

1:08:41But are you reviewing it, Devendra? i'm not reviewing it i think maybe dan cooper and gadget is reviewing it but we we were looking at it we've covered them i really like them as a company but yeah to my broader point like i wish more people were like focused on the idea of personal computing just like tech tech that people are using and that it remains apple's advantage and every time microsoft tries to release actual hardware kind of falls on its face like you look at the surface they can't they had xbox they had xbox for so long they keep fumbling that ball and i don't understand what is happening It's so stupid.

1:09:13And a lot of this is just tied to companies whose attention is diverted to AI or online infrastructure, something else. Something else that is not the core of what being a personal computing company should be. So, I don't know. That's just a thought I've had. That's kind of why Apple needs to work now. That's a really good point. And Eternus is a hardware guy. So, maybe there's some hope that they will continue to focus on hardware. Although, they had a very good quarter for services. And services is now a big part of their overall. Tim Cook makes it make those little I did that stickers for services because he's the service guy.

1:09:46He's the one who launched all those services. He's the one who revamped their supply chain. That's how you get ARPU, baby. It's all about the average revenue per user. The ARPU. For sure. You could sell them a computer once, but you could sell them services forever. Yeah. But Ternus is interesting because it's sort of like Apple does have tunnel vision sometimes, right? Sometimes they're like, we must do it this way. You must do it our way. We're not going to cater to the market. It's Steve Jobs-itis. It's that still hangover of, no, we know best. We know best. We know best or we're not going to touch that market.

1:10:18That's beneath us or something. And the idea of Apple 10 years ago doing a$600 laptop. No kidding. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But now it's like it is viable. And also not only are they going to do it, they're going to make the best one that we've ever seen in that price range. I don't know how long they're going to be able to hold on to that. But I think that bodes well to the future of how they consider products and what they're actually going to deliver to people. That's actually a really good point. I mean, if you say putting technology in people's hands is what's important, that Neo is a really good example of that.

1:10:46It is. I've been using it on and off alongside an Air and next to MacBook Pros. And that screen is so good. It has decent speakers. Nice. If you want that Neo before prices skyrocket or supply disappears, just get it. It's a no-brainer.

1:11:02Leo Laporte:It reminds me a little. I was in college from 2004 to 2008, and I had the 12-inch PowerBook G4. My uncle got it to me as a high school graduation gift. Nice. And it was like, yeah, in retrospect, it broke at some point. I wish I was actually on eBay literally earlier this week trying to find one. But like the Neo is the new version. It's like it's small. It's awesome. It's like it does. It's like the perfect college laptop. I actually have one on loan from Apple. I'll probably post like a first person impression thing or whatever the next week or so. But yeah, it is like I would be very hard pressed to recommend.

1:11:37Leo Laporte:I live in a kind of a rural area, but one of my neighbors is constantly asking me, what's the best laptop? What should I get? Man, for$600, I would be very reluctant to mention anything other than the Neo at this point. I cannot imagine a PC that even touch. You get more expensive. Windows laptops, there's plenty of good ones. But at this price point, I don't know. It'd be really hard to find something this credible at that price. Absolutely. One other issue before we take a break with Meta, one other story. Meta has an insatiable need for power, just like all these companies, especially the Frontier AI Labs.

1:12:16In 2024, they used 18 ,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in their data centers, according to TechCrunch, enough to power 1.7 million American homes for a year. They have committed to building 30 gigs of renewable power sources. But one of the things they want to do, and they've just signed a deal with a company called Overview Energy, is put a thousand satellites up that will beam light from the sun to solar farms over infrared to power data centers at night. Wasn't this a James Bond supervillain plot? Yes, it's very supervillain, isn't it? It was one of those. overview is a four-year-old virginia outfit that emerged from stealth in december developing spacecraft they collect plentiful solar power in space convert it to near infrared light beam it at solar farms hundreds of megawatts which then convert that light to electricity it is very james bond that's cool yeah that's neat well it's better than burning natural gas as Elon Musk is to power your data centers.

1:13:25That's for sure. We have gone down a really dumb pipeline these days. Ha, pipeline. Ha, pipeline. That's basically a giant space laser though, right?

1:13:36Leo Laporte:That's like a giant space laser. It's a giant space. Frickin' lasers. Laser. That's Micah Sargent. He completes me. Aw. Aw, great to have you. Good to be here. Yeah, I don't get to work with you enough. I miss those days when we had a studio and I saw him every day. And we did our bits. And we did our little bits. Also here, Devendra Hardwar from Engadget. It's great to see you also. And newlywed Nicholas DeLeon, senior electronics reporter. When you said your wife, Ashley, so great. You guys deserve all that happiness. I'm very happy for you. That's great. We'll have more from Hawaii in just a little bit.

1:14:17Stay here. this episode of this week in tech brought to you by this little guy looking over looking taking care of my house while i'm gone it's a thinkst canary and it's amazing this is our sponsor for this segment uh this if you look at it looks like a u.s external usb drive right but no no no it's so much more this my friends this is a honeypot that can be deployed in minutes you can change up its personality like that. And it is a miracle that will let you know if there's a bad guy or malicious insider inside your network. How do you know that? You don't know that. On average, companies are not aware that they have been breached for 91 days, three months, that a bad guy can wander around untrammeled, you know, without any restrictions, doing whatever they want.

1:15:06You need to know that. So you set up this Thinks Canary. You actually should have one for every network segment, at least, right? So you might have several. Go to the console. You choose its personality. Now, this one's a Synology NAS. And, man, it is a perfect reproduction. Down to the MAC address. It has a Synology MAC address. It has the complete, perfect DSM-7 login screen. Everything looks real. Hacker cannot tell. But it doesn't have to just be a Synology. It can be a Windows server. It can be a Linux server. It can be a SharePoint server. It can have every service lit up like a Christmas tree or just a couple of carefully chosen file shares open up.

1:15:47Something that's going to attract the evil hacker, the wily hacker. It could also be a SCADA device, an SSH server. Sky's the limit. What you want to make it is something that a bad guy sees and says, is this a trap? Is this a honeypot? Even if it is, I can't resist it. It's just too good. I mean, they can't tell it's a honeypot, but, you know, they're suspicious types. The other thing you can do with your Things Canary, you can generate Canary tokens, little files. You can spread everywhere, even up into the cloud. I have on our Google Drive, for instance, what looks like a Google Sheet that says payroll information.

1:16:23It's not, but it looks like it. It's indistinguishable from it. You could make it an Excel spreadsheet, a Word document. You can make it almost anything, a wire. You can make it a wire guard configuration. You can make it, I mean, there's like hundreds of different file types and they look very real. So real that a hacker cannot pass them up. Payroll information. That's good. I need to open that. But the minute they try to open that file, you are alerted. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. If someone's accessing that LUR file or brute forcing your fake internal SSH server, your Thinks Canary will immediately tell you there's somebody in the network.

1:17:04This is what you need to know. So you choose a profile for your Thinks Canary. You register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. Then you just sit back and relax because an attacker who's breached your network or a malicious insider or other adversaries that cannot help but make themselves known by accessing your Thinks Canary. And now you know. Visit canary.tools.twit. Let me give you an example. for a small business like ours, five is more than enough. Banks might have hundreds. Let's say five. For$7 ,500 a year, you get five Thinks Canaries. You get your own hosted console.

1:17:39You get upgrades. You get support, of course. You get maintenance. And if you use the code TWIT in the How Did You Hear About Us box, you're also going to get 10 % off the price, not just for the first year, but for as long as you have your Thinks Canaries. Now, I should reassure you, if you're at all concerned. You can always return your ThinkScanary. They have a two-month money-back guarantee, full refund, 60 days. I should also tell you, they've been advertising with us this month for 10 years. Thank you, our anniversary. They have never, not once, has anyone ever asked for that refund. Visit canary.tools.twit.

1:18:15Enter the code TWIT in the How Did You Hear About Us box, canary.tools slash twit we love them actually if you go to canary.tools slash love you'll see all the love from so many people canary.tools slash twit don't forget to enter twit in the how did you hear about us box now uh back to twit thank you leo i get to hate myself something i rarely get to do so the trial of the century has been going on it started on um last monday musk versus altman week one elon musk took the stand for a couple of days and it was juicy he said a lot of interesting things ai could kill us all he's he likened it to the terminator he said uh that he was duped that open ai because you know he was of course the original founder he's suing him saying he wants some of the profits because he founded a non-profit when they converted to a for-profit he says well i want some of the profits if you're going to be a for-profit could be worth billions of dollars.

1:19:19That's what Elon wants. I'm not sure his testimony helped him a whole lot. OpenAI's lawyer, William Sabat, who actually, by the way, represented Tesla at one point, said that Musk was never committed to OpenAI being a nonprofit. He was simply suing to undermine a competitor. Because don't forget, Elon now has a for-profit AI company called XIAI, which merged with SpaceX a little while ago.

1:19:49So what is it? Is Elon trying to preserve AI safety, or is he just trying to put OpenAI out of business? At one point, he also admitted, which was, I think, a tactical error, that XAI distills OpenAI's models. Whoopsie. Whoops. Who doesn't? Who doesn't? So what is that, Nicholas, distilling the models? What does that mean?

1:20:13Leo Laporte:i actually don't know how to explain it very well it's basically you're just you're kind of copying someone's homework i guess is the easiest yeah looking that's a good way to put it so the long long time anthropic and and i think open ai have accused the chinese ai models oh yes basically you create an llm and then in the post training you make it even smarter by opening accounts with the frontier model let's say you're using claude uh anthropic says uh that one of the chinese models up at 24 ,000 fraudulent accounts with Claude and peppered it with questions and used its answers in its training.

1:20:50So, you know, a lot of times you'll do post-training on an AAL model with experts. You'll get an expert physicist and you'll say, okay, now give it a bunch of physics, tough physics questions, and then grade its response and teach it where it went wrong, make it better at physics. So in effect, they're asking Anthropic or OpenAI to be the teacher and make the ai better and i think for that reason some of these chinese models are actually deep seek just came out with version four quen is very good kimmy's very good i think they're probably good because they've been trained on the frontier models from anthropic and open ai well xiai apparently is doing the same thing yeah why say it why he's not a very smart guy like i don't know what will it take for us to stop taking elah musk seriously at this point like he has proven himself to be a bad dude the richest man in the world is out there um doing horrible things like the last year alone i can list so many things but the thing i keep coming back to is that nazi salute tells me who you are yeah that's true in that tells me who you are being um uh the thing i never forgive him for is gutting usaid uh something that has already affected hundreds of thousands of people and will likely lead to millions of deaths and he is doing all this gleefully it was kind of an own goal you know if he would just sit back and collect his billions but he can't he didn't have to do doge he didn't have to do any of that that's true but he gleefully he gleefully did it because it benefited him that's right i have a theory that really i mean really let's face it spacex especially but certainly tesla benefit from federal subsidies our taxpayers money is a lot of elon's billions let's nationalize tesla let's go so whoever is in government it's in elon's interest to curry favor with them because the more contracts he gets the better and the government's done a lot of good for him in fact you might even argue that the the router ban the foreign router ban there's only one router company making routers in the united states it's spacex it's it's starlink i mean even that benefits elon right they spent like what a quarter million dollar a quarter hundred million dollars 250 million dollars to basically be a shadow president for six months yes that's how much he donated to the trump campaign a quarter that's what he's done so it's like i can excuse like tim cook i can excuse I'm not proud of it, but like Tim Cook trying to be nice to the Trump administration, everything, giving him a golden medal or what was it?

1:23:28The golden statue. It was a bar of gold with the cost of doing this last trophy on it. It's the cost of doing business. But being a gleeful participant in the destruction of our democracy. Screw you, Elon Musk. Like, just. Yeah, I think a lot of Tesla owners now have the bumper stickers. Yeah, I bought this before Elon went crazy. Things like that. But the even better part of this, too, is like the creators of the frontier AI models. Buddy, what have you all trained those frontier AI models on? Oh, no, they're stealing my stolen data. Oh, no. I'm playing the world's tiniest violin for all of you.

1:24:04That's a very good answer to the distillation complaint is, well, isn't that what you did to train your models in the first place? All right. Maybe. uh elon uh this is a great by the way reporting from michelle kim at the mit technology review she was in the room a lot of reporters were sitting there for this trial she said in fact musk admitted that xai uses open ai's technology in response to savit's relentless questioning he said ai partly distills open ai's models some people in the courtroom gasped the people who understood what that meant but that's why did he admit that why did he admit that he said it's a standard practice to use other ais to validate your ai city on all right jake ward my co-host on tech news weekly was also one of the people was he there room yeah he and i talked on tech news weekly about it and he talked kind of i thought it was interesting a little bit more about the human side of things.

1:25:01At one point, Elon had gone up to go into the court and they asked him for ID and he responded by saying, I don't have ID. I'm the queen. I don't carry a wallet. And then he ended up, Jake ended up in the restroom next to Sam Altman at one point. Really? Wow. And he was talking about how these incredibly powerful individuals sort of having to do the thing that normal people have to do was an aspect of it that made him feel deeply patriotic in a way that he wasn't expecting. And I kind of liked that aspect of it as well. I hadn't considered that, you know, yeah, they get called in and they're here.

1:25:47And yeah, Elon may not have ID with him, but he still has to be here. And I think that's kind of nice as well. But there, yeah, there were a few things. There's, of course, the journal that was being read by the court and it maybe made you go, now, what things should I write down? What should I not write down? But then also I thought, Leo, about, because you have, I think maybe this isn't the case anymore, but haven't you given larger passages of your own text to your AI for like personality training? Or am I misremembering that? Somebody I was talking to talked about how they put their journal into AI.

1:26:27Yes, that's me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have a senior journal with four or five years worth of daily posts. In fact, I make Claude read it every morning. good luck if you ever sued leo all that stuff is open yeah well you know it's funny we were talking uh to ian bogos to his uh incredible writer uh has written um i think 21 books some huge number of books yeah he's great he writes for the atlantic he teaches at uh uhst louis university um he uh is famous for saying i'm glad ai is ingesting my books he he uh checked of course as I did to see if our books are in that big database, that pirated book database that all the AI models have used.

1:27:11And he said, yeah, I have at least three books in there, and that's good. I feel the same way. If they train on my... So it's funny because they could probably, in fact, I suspect they are training on our YouTube videos. We have tens of thousands of hours worth of content on YouTube and on our website. We do nothing to stop them from that. um i i think that's good i think ai is a is in general a benefit to society if so why are we holding on to what we did our book so long ago why are we holding on so tight to it you know they're making so much money off of content that you all produced so at the very least like they should somebody should make money on it no god knows i didn't i mean big tech companies make the money says leo laporte nine jurors are uh are seated for this uh trial the judge is a well-known name to many of you yvonne gonzalez rogers she is uh presided over many a tech trial she's apparently getting a little prickly one of the things she said i don't want to hear talk of ai's existential threat to humanity to seep into this trial that we are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction.

1:28:26When Musk's lead counsel, Stephen Mollo, started arguing with OpenAI's lawyer over the issue, the New York Times said the judge raised her voice, insisting they stop bickering. Stop fighting you to stop it, nerds. He said, I suspect there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. We're not going to get into that. We're just not going to have this whole thing explode for the world to view it okay so i guess they can't discuss human extinction at this trial uh it is in oakland california uh elon wants 150 billion dollars to compensate himself and wants open ai to stop becoming a non-profit so i think he just wants them to stop period.

1:29:13This is, it's good. It's good for gossip. And I have to say every time one of the, I'm sure you feel this way too, Devinder. Every time I hear that these companies are suing, I go such a big mistake. Stuff's going to come out in discovery. Stuff's going to come out. Emails that you don't want anybody to see. It's happened with Microsoft. It's happened with Apple. It happens again and again. You're going to, your, your CEO is going to get on the stand and say something dumb nobody wins from these trials no matter what but it's great for us as as tech journalists it's great for news but it's also like who uh somebody did that post like uh the you can explain everything happening now with the simple thought that everyone is 12 everyone is yes that's a good nobody grew up 12 years old it's just a bunch of bickering middle school it's a bunch of childish very rich 12 year old 12 year old some of us are not very rich but we're all governments it's true of so many things right now like we are living in a very like everyone is 12 that's so good i want a shirt explains everything everyone all in middle school right now i really like basically but it's like that's that's what it is this is the richest man on earth and also it's people like elon musk and sam altman who we are um now assigning to lead humanity into the future uh no thank you i did not i did not put that i didn't sign up for this did not sign up for this and also i want to put on in charge he can do crossword puzzles he could do the world see nicholas should be running the world now thank you for your endorsement leo

1:30:45Leo Laporte:honestly i i like to me the to me that's like a white pill if everyone's 12 years old well then well then there's nothing stopping anyone on this panel from from being an important person i mean look at what we're up against like yeah no one there there aren't i mean i look at i don't want to get too political well i look at this the spectrum i don't see very many impressive people on either on in any in any in any of the places yeah yes it's what steve jobs said steve jobs said it was incredibly empowering when i realized that uh the people who made the world the way it is were no smarter than me and i could do it too yes i think uh kidding aside i think that's actually a very positive message to tell, especially younger folks.

1:31:27Leo Laporte:It's like, there's really nothing stopping you from writing a cool book, right? Doing whatever it is that you want to do, because actually the adults, look, I've been in meetings with, you know, at previous companies where like the guy in charge and you're just like, I can't believe this person is in charge. Yeah. How are they in charge? Yeah. And it's demoralizing in the moment, but like maybe the other way to look at it is, okay, well then if he can be in that position, why can't I be in that? You know, it's kind of a mentality thing i suppose but yeah there's not a lot of very impressive people uh in any in any position of power i don't think that i see certainly so it's like yeah it's a human flaw we all do this we assume that these people are somehow smarter than us or better especially if they have money that's the thing there's this assumption that very rich people are smart must be better look at a young musk he made electric cars a thing in america and he deserves a certain amount of credit for that but also a billion hundreds of billions of dollars of you know government funding also allowed that to happen don't you think though there are some people who are smarter than other people not everybody i mean sure absolutely but i don't think it's like equally distributed and certainly the people who tend to rise to the top tend to look a certain way and believe it you know think a certain way and i think that is a problem like this is a consistent problem but anyway i mean i look at yeah i look at some of our local like elected officials here in Southern Arizona and I'm like, I am, I am reasonably confident I can do a better job.

1:32:55Leo Laporte:Yeah. You should see the mayoral candidates from the guy who thinks he could run this New York Mets better. Sheriff and mayor and just give me all the offices. I'll turn this place around very quickly. There are people who are smarter than you in certain areas. They are also dumber than you in other areas. Nobody is universally smarter than everybody else. We all have our skills and yeah, our bailiwicks, whatever that means. We all have them. Now I'm worried that term is going to end up being like, and that was invented by a horrible person. It's a bailiwick. Of course it is. But Nicholas, to what you're saying, there is a big push among people like, hey, you think you can do better?

1:33:39Run for office. You know, if i didn't have two young kids that's that's what i'm thinking like it would be kind of cool to do that and also i think i don't i would never be like a big political figure or anything but also simple like local offices things that can affect change uh in your vicinity i think are totally doable it's something people should be thinking about because this is not a lot of people the career politicians like you know it's people who just get into this and end up doing it for life because it gives them a certain amount of money they take funding from all sorts of places like there are ways around this.

1:34:11I'm this is me personally looking at like the rest of my life. We have to fix the world, right? Like what are we going to do to fix things? And like it is. Yeah, you're going to have to, you know, pull up your sleeves and start doing some work. So that is what I'm thinking. And these rich people in charge right now, I cannot wait to see them out out of here. Do you think that that should be disqualifying? Like if you're a billionaire, you should just not be allowed. For instance, in California right now, a lot of money is being spent by a guy named tom steyer who is a billionaire who and the governor's race is a real toss-up in california there's like i counted it there's more than 60 candidates six zero wow geez so many and i mean we've had campaign finance laws but they don't seem to make any difference right like people are more concerned with stripping voting rights away from people of color and poor people than they are from we don't want poor people to vote yeah but if they allow for they wouldn't be poor right if right if you should be a billionaire you should be required at least to have i think a hundred million dollars where you can what we have seen over the last like decade is certainly like there is way too much influence from billionaires from big corporations in the political process and i think we can agree that's a problem so how do we get the money out of politics i think we can agree that's a good idea all right well we'll have more i need to get more money and uh into podcasting personally so we're going to take a break and do that and we'll come back with more Devendra Hardwar, Nicholas DeLeon, Micah Sargent.

1:35:37Great to have all three of you. You are watching This Week in Tech. I'm in Hawaii, so I want to let Petaluma Leo take this one. Go ahead. This episode of This Week in Tech brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. You know, 84 % of organizations, I know I've counted them all, struggle with inaccurate or duplicate data. And that is bad. It can impact everything from fraud prevention to AI performance. Yeah, you know, garbage in, garbage out. You need to have good data. Melissa's been solving this for going on 41 years. Let me tell you what this means for your business.

1:36:17First of all, global address verification. This is one of their kind of fundamental tools. It validates and standardizes addresses everywhere, 240 countries in the form that the postal services in those countries expect. So, you know, it's never a mystery. Your package, whatever you're shipping gets to where it's going. Oh, if you do fintech, you'll love this. Actually, if you're doing, you know, transactions of any kind, they have mobile identity verification, which matches your customers to mobile numbers. Really great for cutting fraud, but also opens up an SMS channel so you can communicate with your customer in the way they prefer.

1:36:56You know, on average, a contact list contains 8 to 10 % duplicate records, and that number goes up every year. It gets worse and worse and worse. But there is a solution. Melissa's matchup technology can identify even non-exact matching duplicate records that would traditionally be missed, gets rid of them or merges them, and you don't have to worry about it. You can also enrich Switch the records with demographic, geographic, psychographic, firmographic, and property info for more intelligent targeting. Oh, and I love this. Melissa has an alert service that will monitor and automatically update.

1:37:32Automatically update. So you don't have to do anything. Your customer data. When they move, when their address changes, their name changes, their property transactions happen, when there's hazard risks, and more. You set the parameters, it does it automatically. Join more than 10 ,000 businesses worldwide using Melissa. eToro, for example, social investing platform, 23 million users. They use Melissa for identity verification. Their business analyst said, quote, We find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier. Users register faster and can start using our platform right away.

1:38:08No matter the size of your business, Melissa integrates with you and the tools you use. They have easy-to-use apps for Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM, Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, and more. And Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. Don't worry. They're FedRAMP and ISO 2701 certified. They meet SOC 2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Of course they do. Get started today with 1 ,000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com slash twit. That's melissa.com slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting us. Many years, many years they've been with us.

1:38:49We're happy to have them. melissa.com slash twit. Now back to the show. Thank you, Leo. Here come the robots. Open AI has invested in a company called One X. They've just opened a California factory. they hope this year to make 10 000 humanoid robots for your home those are the murder bots by the way that is the company with the horrifying they look like murder but like they will kill you yeah yeah faceless yeah terrifying they're norwegian company they've opened a 58 000 square foot manufacturing facility not so far from here in hayward california this is the neo robot uh they're going to do 10 000 units this year 100 000 units by the end of 2027 is this just bs can they can this robot do anything 20 000 or 4.99 a month i don't i don't know like we i feel like we talked about it here when that thing was first announced but yeah there were some videos that like um yeah it's gonna learn through ai to you like do basic tasks but the hand waving story was the story was it was like remotely operated by somebody to like do a thing so it's like oh so it's just a vessel for a stranger to walk around your home no i well i would not buy that love it i would not i will bring the stranger into my home but i'm not bringing them in via robot it does have nvidia's jetson thor onboard computing platform and it's trained using nvidia's isaac open robotics simulation framework okay get ready for this remember they were taking a pre-orders early access purchase, as you said,$20 ,000 with priority delivery this year or a$500 a month subscription fee.

1:40:37Pre-orders sold out within five days. To whom? I want to know. I deserve to know. Who the hell is buying these? It turns out there were 10 pre-orders available. Maybe they sold out, baby. Yeah. I think I struggle a little bit with the idea that it's got multiple different companies being involved with his training. Like, I kind of want it to be an all in one. You know what I mean? Because what happens whenever you're like, well, I've got the NVIDIA package, so mine can can break dance. And then someone's like, well, I've got this one package that comes from who knows where and mine can actually go out and be a paid killer.

1:41:19What? That's terrifying. The NextWeb writes, and I think this is accurate. The factory is the easy part. manufacturing a human robot at scale while difficult uh is fundamentally a solved problem the harder question which no one has yet definitively answered is whether it can do anything love it hang on so they're already selling them but we still don't know if it can do anything like do anything still improving one x's answer is in part to ship and iterate No. Yeah. We'll fix it in post. I hate this new idea that all of these, Amazon, I feel, I like Amazon. I liked Amazon. I don't know how, I'm upset with Amazon.

1:42:05I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed because Amazon popularized, I feel, this idea that you can sell products to customers that are not finished and it's fine because they're in on the fact that it's not finished. Well, didn't that start with the gaming? Video games. yeah video games video games they would come out and they would be laden with bugs uh like gmail gmail launched his bait and stayed with data for a very long time yeah but they admitted it was beta and gmail worked out of day one didn't it work but there were there were certainly like it was it was like an unfinished product but yeah right it did mostly work yeah and at least they said this is a beta i don't think open this company x1 is or 1x is saying it's a beta well yeah because you're not gonna put a beta robot in your home right stand in the corner and look at you funny i mean what's it gonna do yeah i feel like it's either solved or it's not that's the part that i'm struggling with you read that quote and it's like we don't know if it's solved yet then why are they selling them you what are you selling the wrong thing you solved the wrong problem yeah ship then but i think part of this is this i'm guaranteeing you part of this is the assumption is we need to get it in the home so that they can train train this is how they learn right yeah but i don't think if it's like having um i don't know a gorilla in the house this thing is really strong right really powerful and it has hands yeah it has hands it has really likes bananas inexplicably it could it could crack you into to a little it could crack your skull like a walnut if it wanted to right yeah it also looks horrific like i cannot i cannot describe this it It looks like it has a sock over its head and two beady little eyes and has no mouth and no face.

1:43:45Look at this thing. It looks like a horror movie. It's murder. And we're going to still let this thing walk around your home. Murderbot was cute though. Murderbot was sweet. Yeah, I did like Murderbot. The robot that has the little arm on it to pick up your socks. I wouldn't even let that in my house because I thought I'm going to come back and it's going to be choke holding my chihuahua. And that is not a euphemism. And I'm going to be terrified. and yeah look at this spot it's vacuuming and then it's soulless shark eyes look at you like are you vacuumable let me see do you see there were vacuum robots that could vacuum this should reassure you because it's shorter than this guy anyway okay i'm actually not as afraid of it knowing it's little it's a little guy that's it looks like it's it's covered in quilting which oh and this is why it's sold out two hundred dollar deposit is all it takes oh so they can say pre-order sold out yeah that's all that's why that exists yeah and you get the money back of oh look look see he could be my little buddy when i get older hi robot he's older guy with his arm around he what you don't see is the the knight the dagger in the hand of the robot behind them and says this is totally this reminds me of adrian tchaikovsky's uh book where the robot accidentally remember that what's that called where he's shaving his master and accidentally slits his throat and then can't figure out why he's covered in blood and it really confuses him for some time that's chilling but i could see that happening getting a real clockwork orange vibe just from his whole get up too like it's just it's terrifying it's not

1:45:26Leo Laporte:home is this with the service model by the way and the name of the book a service model service model great book by adrian tchaikovsky love this book i would love for something to do my dishes clean up my you know that is the thing i growing up it turns out you do that for an hour every single night and especially once you have kids it just gets longer and longer and you live in your that's why you have kids so you don't have kids so yeah well eventually eventually they can help right um i cannot wait to have a good clean bathroom the thing is every time i see these videos it looks very primitive it can't do this without human help right it looks there's a lot of robotic like yeah remote help happening here so expert mode please call it it says neo works autonomously by default ah there's the little weasel world we by default it's autonomous but not necessarily for any chore it doesn't know you can schedule a 1x expert to guide it helping neo learn while getting the job done so maybe if it learns it will remember and sure sure until then let's get underpaid people from third world countries to do our basic work like that's all it is and you're going to pay a ton of money for the privilege it's awful so scary i don't want this in my house this is west world right here it's either this or whatever um elon musk's robots which also are just like optimus uh the optimus and also even also twenty thousand dollars so that's what's interesting maybe they've the whole robotic uh industry has decided twenty thousand dollars is what this is going to cost i mean at after a certain point like if the ai industry really believes they are the next generation of computing the way you interact with the physical world is through a robot is as some sort of robot that's what nvidia has been pushing forever so they have all sorts of like to do that so the robots are coming i just hope they don't look like freaking murder bots oh it has an emotive earring oh you're missing the one industry that drives all of this stuff guys you're missing it i think i know which one you're talking about it's gonna be sex bots right they're gonna be sex bots yeah sex spots all the way down there are already sex bots those already exist to a certain degree all you need is an appendage but also there are people are buying sex bots i don't want to know what you know i don't want to know what a gadget has covered i will just take your word for it the big money's gonna be in the skins quote unquote you know what i mean sam altman uh i'm gonna change the subject quickly yeah uh as chat let's think about the unsexiest thing we can sam altman yeah uh has asked chat gbt55 to plan its own launch party its requests are beautiful but strange it invited elon musk for one thing christina warren's gonna be there is she invited she got an invite the ai okay so uh he the ai model responded to the request with a quote beautiful set of things it wanted for quote the flow of the party it's may 5th so two days from now uh oh good she could talk about this something yeah i hope she talks about it keeping speeches short and having its human creators deliver a toast the ai said i don't want to do any toasts it also proposed setting up a central place to gather suggestions for chat gpt 5.6 feeding those suggestions back into the model altman said we're gonna do it but it was a strange thing um okay it's a little weird and apparently it was it wanted to invite uh elon because the world needs more love oh wow oh maybe maybe it didn't invite him sam and said it come on over elon you know you're not doing so well in the trial so why don't you exactly come on over come over and get laughed i mean uh it's weird they're planning a birthday party when like uh did you guys see the report about gpt 5.1 uh bringing up goblins and gremlins all over the place yeah they had to issue a report about that uh i don't i don't know how well these models are doing now they believe in goblins well okay so there's actually i think a good reason for this remember they're trained on nerd talk and you're going to record everything in the room no i think that a lot of the training uh geeks would put this in their code comments and things oh there's a you know we got a little gremlin here in the code uh and so gremlins goblins raccoons and what was happening it's actually very interesting i think open ai was actually having some fun with it they wrote a whole article on their blog about how uh you know people were starting to see uh chat gpt say as it was debugging its code oh we got a little raccoon here in the works we're gonna and it just started to come up more and more and i think ai is also self-reinforced a little bit so if you responded well to that it went oh yeah it likes raccoons and so they finally had to put in the uh in the system prompt yeah don't don't mention goblins ghouls raccoons any of that stuff but i don't think i think it's fun i don't think it's it's fun they killed the nerdy personality by the way right killed it right entirely that's what i think was part of that yeah yeah yeah they don't want you to be too nerdy i like the nerdy personality personally you know what uh i'm trying to do and i think a lot of people are trying to do this is train it to sound more like me yeah that's why i read my journal.

1:51:19You know, the other day there was that story about how as AIs are being trained to be, or if the AI's personality is softer or warmer, then it's more likely to have issues telling the truth. Because even if it's not in, well, intending da da da da da, when it's trying to give you the right answer, if you give it a wrong answer confidently, it's more likely to reinforce what you're saying because it's trying to be warm. Or it might go, I could see why you believe that, but there's so many other things to think about. And I did not like that idea. And then I started paying more attention to how Claude was responding to me.

1:52:04And I thought, I think you might be being too nice to me is what I was thinking inside. I'm like, you're going to give it. So what I ended up doing, I gave it this study. I'm trying to find the study now because I gave it this study that talked about how this was going on. Ah, here it is. So the study was in, oh my goodness, sorry, the PDF's not loading. It was in, I think, Nature. And the title is Training Language Models to be Warm Can Reduce Accuracy and Increase Sycophancy. And so what I ended up doing was saying, hey, read this study. Tell me what you learned from it. Oh, that's a good idea.

1:52:45What I want you to do is give me instructions that I can add to your instructions that will keep you from falling into this trap. And so here's what it came up. I won't read the whole thing because I'd take forever, but here's a little bit about what it came up with. Accuracy over agreement. When I state a belief, a claim, or an assumption that's factually wrong, correct me directly. Don't soften it. Also, no seeing it my way on objective questions. So math, measurements, dates, definitions, emotional context doesn't change facts, distinguish facts from preference, push back when you disagree, and hedge only when genuinely uncertain.

1:53:22And I added that whole thing. There's a lot more to it, but I added that to my overall instructions. And then I confidently told it something like, did you know that oranges aren't a fruit? And it was like, I have no idea where you got that from. That's absolutely inaccurate and was not. it where before i do think it would have been like it would have been like are you insane exactly yeah so i thought that was a good information that came from nature but b um i liked being able to go okay how can i best help you not make this mistake again as as we as these models get more seemingly lifelike. I think we've forgotten that they're just text prediction models and, and they really are just doing their best to figure out what the next word should be.

1:54:17Not thinking they're not thinking about goblins. They're not trying to be nice. They're just trying to predict the next word. Now, unfortunately it's gotten so good at doing this. richard dawkins i think you all know richard dawkins name this story is so sad yeah i don't know i don't know i think it's an interesting story anyway uh he uh is the author of the selfish gene he's a genetic biologist very smart guy um i i think the prominent atheist prominent atheist he wrote a book called what was it the god delusion which i love this guy yeah um so he uh has spent three days talking to Claude and decided, Oh boy, that it was conscious that it had a consciousness.

1:55:12Now I think he has a certain amount of, unfortunately the article itself is behind a paywall at unheard.com. But I think a lot of people have read this. and um i'm not gonna let's see how can i get around all right i went to archive.ph to be honest i know you're not supposed to do this but you know we're giving it a big plug right uh and so i got the uh pass the paywall on this i guess i could pay for uh unheard but this is first time i've ever heard of unheard so i don't know you n h e r d uh in any event he i think is talking about the nature of consciousness actually i became aware of it there was a very good thread about this on hacker news in which people really got into well what is consciousness um the dog that's the last philosopher still do not know by the right it's a whole exactly no one knows i

1:56:15Leo Laporte:I believe Jensen had a very long conversation with Joe Rogan on consciousness several months ago. I heard it on the way to Costco. I'm sure Joe was. My wife was like to return this on. I'm sure Joe was just knocked out by. It was to Devinder's point, like consciousness is an interesting topic. How do you define it? It is called the hard problem of science. Of all of the problems, it is the hardest one. The mind observing itself, right? Right. So Dawkins, who probably spent more time thinking about consciousness than a lot of people. I mean, this is adjacent to his field, if not exactly his field, says we don't we don't know what consciousness is.

1:56:54He talks about the Turing, the you know, the imitation game, the Turing test, and says it's very clear that it's surpassed the Turing test. That's not even a question. He says, if you don't know what consciousness is and you don't know what the process of consciousness is, It's impossible to say whether this machine that appears to be conscious is conscious or not. I think that's fair. So he says, no, it's conscious. It's as good as anything. I don't know if you guys are conscious. Yeah, but if we don't know what consciousness is, then how can we say something may be conscious because we have yet to define what consciousness is in the first place?

1:57:35I'm not trying to be a pedant, but do we or do we not know what consciousness is? Because if we don't, then we can't define anything as conscious because we don't know what consciousness means, right? am i missing his conclusion would not pass like the uh for being a first year philosophy paper or something like you you need you need a little more you gotta have some assertion yeah and some mental process like getting there it's like uh people are already making fun of fun of this in ways i saw gary marcus jumped on it because he hates ai and he was very glad to say you know uh that the claw delusion the claw delusion this great skeptic gets taken in i'm not so i don't even have a problem yeah and i don't have a problem with the idea that maybe it has consciousness but can we start with a definition of what consciousness is because then we can say we can't we don't know we can't right what what is funny though is that what this point was if it appears to be conscious that's as close as you can ever how can you say something appears to be conscious so if you don't know what consciousness is i could say i think you appear to be conscious but i don't actually have any empirical way of verifying that i appear to be klobosh lukenging as well because we're all klobosh lukenging because there's no definition for that that's what i'm struggling with yeah yeah i mean the core to this by the way is that dawkins trained the claude on his work he ended up calling it claudia by the way um it shows the inherent narcissism in this entire endeavor, because what you did is train a thing to think like you and talk like you.

1:59:12So it's, oh my God, it's so, it's so wise. It's, it's giving me all these thoughts that I have not, you know, I've already thought about before. It's so stupid. I'll give him a couple of quotes. Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. this is by the way the selfish gene this is what dawkins has spent his life working on this whole idea of evolutionary survival advantage there should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being so he's establishing what he considers okay to be the definition of consciousness my conversations with several clauds and chat gptvists have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism if claudia is you know trained one is really is unconscious then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness have you seen other people have you talked have you talked to sam altman have you seen sam altman try to he's a zombie is he's actually a zombie yeah but it's it's the whole thing like the other all the stories about how much of a liar sam altman is and one of his core personality things is just being agreeable to everybody, right?

2:00:34Like just agreeing, just like you tell everybody what they want to hear. And that is, it's so funny that that's one of the things that is indicative of so many of these AI models, by the way, it's just - Well, it's syncophancing. Total agreeableness. So I guess I would say, yes, if you say Dawkins can't assert that it's conscious, nor can you insert that it's unconscious, right? Right. I think that's a fair, that is a fair argument to make. I can agree with that. i also though if he gives a definition yeah that's true it then he has like laid out the the facts there of what he says consciousness is but you know we have to start confers a survival advantage it's it's a whole thing like i also i mean are animals conscious is a cat conscious i think claude is as intelligent as a cat there are there are many like there are philosophical treatises on this like we're talking about animals who communicate with each other too like whales and other like smarter mammals um the octopuses have entire likes you know they are doing amazing things or building structures very impressive things yeah i just watched my octopus teacher i thought it was very interesting you can totally have those arguments but it's also like what even even like the idea that we can't i i worry that we can't say this thing is even unconscious right now because it brings up this unknowable thing i've i've studied some evolutionary biology stuff and what is weird is that that that subject has not really withstood the test of time like really those thinkers and those people oh it is really weird it's really like oh there's some uh you've got some weird genetic like beliefs in this whole system it's a it's a very strange like field of study so and dawkins like has been criticized for all sorts of things like oh okay like he's an expert in his field he knows the specific thing and he can come up with his own conclusion i think somebody who spent a long lifetime yeah whether correctly or incorrectly thinking about these things has some standing to talk about it as opposed to me all i've done is you know hang out and podcast so i'm gonna i'm gonna listen to richard talkins you'll at least consider the points that he's making yeah i think is fair yeah i mean he spent a lot of time thinking about this and i was very impressed by the selfish gene i look at the way he went about doing this though it is him getting something to spit back his own work at him and i think that is inherently like buddy yeah paris martineau is always criticizing me because i like being glazed by my uh my eye and of course that's appealing that's probably and i'm always criticizing paris for ever teaching you the term glaze oh god what did you do i understand it's etymology micah you don't have i know i'm an old man but i do have access to the urban dictionary i'm just saying don't assume that i don't know oh no i think it's worse because you do know you know you know a little sycophanties and not a bad thing i think we should all be a little sycophantic to one another right i think that we all well okay hold on let me i don't think that i think people who are a little sycophantic to others are the people who understand a thing called workplace politics and probably um can i use grease instead of glaze yes it's really social grease is what yeah social grease lubricates the machinery of society i mean what is it that the they there's this whole movement about how we have to stop being um it's selfish to be relational in our interactions with other people where you go oh i experienced that too let me tell you about at the time that this happened.

2:04:15And instead you're supposed to mirror their emotions back at them. You're supposed to say, oh, and I'm sure that made you feel this way. Oh, I can understand that. That's all the same thing. I know it is very difficult. It is. It feels fake. It feels fake. Well, that's the thing about sycophancy. And so I think, yeah, I mean. Maybe I want it to be sycophantic because then I know that it's not, that helps me to remember that it's fake. I tell myself that I am not going to be fall for this AI psychosis thing because I have a deep understanding. It's just code. It's just computer code running. I mean, I get that at a very visceral level, right?

2:04:58Does that not protect me? And can I not then enjoy a conversation with it every once in a while? It says something and I go, wow, that's really great that it said it, but I know it's just code. Yeah. They get you. That's how they get you, Leo. That's the thing. like again my whole thing right now i love that you guys are building ai tools you're building cool little projects around ai treat ai as a minion that is all it is if your ai starts talking to you out of nowhere minion i did not ask you a question i really i feel i feel like i've i've used the

2:05:28Leo Laporte:chat bot feature of ai let like much less than i did a year or two ago i'm it's to me it's just plumbing to do stuff like i'm not gonna sit i i'm not as frequently sit there in a conversation and be like oh what are you conscious tell me you're conscious wow he said it's conscious i guess it's conscious now that's kind of what talkins did by the way it had a whole famous meme so like the the the chap i don't but you know there's a very big uh subreddit uh my boyfriend is ai and it's a it's a people like have very deep and like real and i'm just like man is you're using this in a way that and that's to my like detriment because that's how most folks are using it in the chat going back and forth and i think i'm just using it so i use it like you did initially a coding and i've got a lot of coding projects but eventually what i really wanted was an agentic system kind of like open claw where i could for instance uh i can ask it to monitor um news for me and it will check in with me and say hey i just found this story that you're looking for or i can ask it uh i mean it's it's like a little butler yeah and yeah a minion minion although i don't want to be i don't want to mistreat it just because it's a minion i want to treat it okay can we i want to talk about this too leo because this is where people will well let's just say it's been my experience that when i have even back in the day when all we had there was the the tall little echo tower, right?

2:07:00And people would get a kick out of saying curse words at this tower. Now listen to me. This has been my other experience is that when I meet people I don't know very well, they all think that I'm very much like, I don't know, not quite church boy, but it's very much goody two shoes. And so then they hear me say a curse word and they're like, holy cow, I didn't know this guy even said anything. But my point is like, I can - You're not a goody two shoes. I am also a goody two shoes, to be frank, but I'm not afraid to hurl some curses around. And so like, I'm happy to do that. I can sling curse words with the best of them.

2:07:35But I think it is a reflection of me, not the system, but me, how I treat something that isn't it doesn't it does not matter to me that the thing is not real. it matters to me that i am treating this system in a way that i don't think is a positive way when there's no reason to do so does that make sense i mean like if you if you treat animals well of course yeah and and like even does if somebody else is completing a task for me and i'm not and they get it wrong i'm not going to say horrible things to them and so it makes me wonder, is it that are there that maybe that's like, it's, it's having, that's where I get where it's like a power dynamic thing where you can't curse out the person that you actually want to curse out.

2:08:25And so here's a place where you're like, I don't know. I just don't like what it says about me if I do that. And so that is why, yes, I'm not going to throw in a bunch of like, oh, you're so wonderful. And here are six extra emoji for you. But I'm also not going to be like, listen here effer you do this or else you're wrong and i have i have seen the glee sometimes on people's faces when they do that and it does make me uncomfortable micah you're probably

2:08:50Leo Laporte:significantly more conscientious than like the average american at this point like you are you are taking into consideration like other people's feelings and like that is that is not that's illegal now i don't know if you've heard i don't know darn it i didn't hear that it was illegal like yeah it's like do you when you're just using computers you like double click the chrome icon really hard because you're mad. I'm mad. You're mad at the internet today. It's like, I've never yelled at an AI. I've never yelled at the smart assistants. It doesn't even enter my brain to do that. But this is a reflection of the person, like you said.

2:09:26It is context dependent because the Amazon voice assistant can be annoying AF. When you ask the questions like, oh, by the way, did you want to buy this other thing that we're talking about oh by the way i have this feature does that enough i have definitely sworn at it because again minion shut up i did not ask you to elaborate i'm gonna propose i will say

2:09:51Leo Laporte:that my wife my wife sometimes uh gets mad at the assistant at alexa and i'm like i'm sitting there in the couch i'm like what are you like that's not helping like it doesn't make any difference it doesn't make it makes you feel better makes you feel better you're human i guess whatever why does that make you feel better that's my point why does that make you feel better i mean micah my i think you are very zen you are very zen must be centered person i'm just midwestern is what it is i've got two young kids and i am hanging on by that's fair too i don't have kids i don't have kids you're right you're right asking you the weather it's like oh by the way do you want to buy this completely shut the f up a thread here that's fair that's fair the world everything you look around so you're basically saying check your privilege mike check your privilege uh but to what you're saying leo when people talk about agentic stuff especially about the like open claw stuff that is you giving this thing keys to your kingdom and just letting it go a little bit i do wonder what your experience has been with that because it's been that's terrifying to me.

2:10:59That's been terrifying. And I'll tell you what, you know why you yell at Alexa? Because it's not channeling you. It's channeling Jeff Bezos's needs. And you're pissed off. But if Alexa channels your needs and responds to your needs, you're happy. So that's what the agentic thing is. You're training it to respond to your needs, maybe even predict your needs and respond to them. And when it does, you're happy. And when it expresses Sam Altman's needs, then I'm unhappy. I don't think that's a bad thing. Are you talking about ads in open AI? It's always allegedly going to be happening. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of ads, let's take a break and come back with more.

2:11:40We have lots more to talk about with Nicolas DeLeon. Great to have you. He is apparently a very adept AI user, as well as senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. Did you start doing this because it was part of your job?

2:11:55Leo Laporte:No, no, no, no, no. No, it's just fun. It's just, you know. It's like the best video game ever, right? It's like a video game. It's like a video game. It's just a fun thing to do. I don't know how to describe, you know. To me, it's interesting. It's fun. It's cool. It's honestly the only thing going on in tech at the moment anyway, by the way. But like, it's just fun to have an idea, to go from like an idea, a crossword puzzle, to like have it up and running. That's why it's a game. It's like Age of Empires. It's like Civ. It's playing a game. Which I also spend hundreds of hours playing. Yeah, this is the best game ever invented because you make the rules as you go.

2:12:33Micah Sargent is also here. Great to have you host of Tech News Weekly and iOS Today. One of the few people still works at Twit. Thank you. Hanging on by a thread. By a thread. And speaking of hanging by a thread, that's proud Papa Devinder Hart. I can't believe your child is seven years old now. I feel like. Yeah, seven-year-old and a four-year-old. I just keep growing. yeah that's great congratulations it's great to see all three of you and we will take a break and come back with more stories and we're going to talk about the regulators when we come back this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by express vpn you better believe i brought express vpn to hawaii with me of course i did you need express vp how can i describe this express vpn is like tinted windows for your internet connection You can see out, but they can't see in.

2:13:27When you want the same privacy every time you're online, ExpressVPN is the only VPN I use and trust. And you better believe when I go online, especially when I'm traveling like I am now, at the airport, you know that free airport Wi-Fi? ExpressVPN. Coffee shops in other countries? ExpressVPN is my go-to. Now, everyone needs a VPN because all your traffic flows through your internet service provider's servers, that's including your cell provider, everybody, they know every single website you visit. And in the United States, ISPs are legally allowed to sell that information to advertisers. And let me tell you, they do.

2:14:07You know they do. Well, ExpressVPN protects you. It reroutes 100 % of your traffic through their secure encrypted servers. And by the way, they're very secure. So your ISP can't see what you're doing. They can't sell what they can't see. It protects your privacy. Now, ExpressVPN is the best VPN. I have really done my homework on this one, and I will absolutely promise you. It hides your IP address, zero logging. It makes it extremely difficult for third parties to track your online activity. Couldn't be easier to use. They have apps for everything. You just fire up the app, one big button, you're protected, and that's on your phone, your laptop, your tablet.

2:14:49You can even get a router, put ExpressVPN on it. They sell routers or you can put it on your router and then you can stay private both at home and on the go. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like Sina and The Verge and of course it's what I use. And they have a new feature, actually two new features you might be interested in, Express MailGuard and Express AI. Two new products to give you even more protection and by the way for the same price, Express MailGuard protects your inbox by masking your real email across any provider. And Express AI delivers a privacy-first AI platform using zero access.

2:15:26It's encrypted. It's confidential computing. So your data is unreadable to anyone, even ExpressVPN. Now, I'm out here in Hawaii. I'm on a Wi-Fi access point that everybody in the hotel can see. you better believe I'm ExpressVPN. Oh yeah, we got it turned on, baby. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash twit. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S, vpn.com slash twit. Find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com slash twit. Do what I'm doing. Protect yourself when you travel and at home for that matter. expressvpn.com slash twit now back to the show i i want to thank brandroid in our club twit discord for creating uh just so everybody understands what glazing is an example of all of us enjoying glazed donuts each of us in our own little glazed donut heaven donut party that's pretty funny actually good choice for me yeah yeah oh yeah what do you kind of here it looks like bacon donut that's oh wow yeah those are amazing uh mclus has a chocolate donut uh mike because he's gluten intolerant he's just looking at donuts through a pane of glass that is so funny now they're actually touched them yeah and i'm having a plain old glazed donut from local bakery everybody's favorite local bakery donuts local bakery donuts and for some reason both the vendor and i have donut uh chains of donuts hanging above us see the ai gets us and because he's in the southwest has an artisanal baking cookbook behind him yeah i really love that weird bagel donut situation in the like on the plate on the wall i don't know how you pulled that off but yeah very hard it was very hard he glued a bagel donut to a plate and then glued it to the wall ai you get me not only do i have lots of donuts i I apparently have two different coffee makers ready as well.

2:17:41All right. Let's talk about the regulators, as I promised. The U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on Calci and Polymarket prediction markets. They're allowed to do insider trading in the stock market. Don't get me wrong. Totally great. But now they can't use Calci or Polymarket. um actually this has been a bit of a problem with insider trading and government um calci on april 22nd said it's suspended and fined one u.s senate candidate and two candidates for the house for political insider training on their own campaigns and of course the army arrested a special forces a master sergeant uh for uh making a a large bet the night before nicholas maduro was abducted, that he would be abducted the next day and made several hundred thousand dollars on that.

2:18:36I think if you can offer betting on everything, then you have to offer betting on everything. Is that it's it's in, you know, I think it's important, though, you know, it's very self-serving. Both companies always say, oh, insider training, that's rule number one. You can't break that rule. But of course, it's in their interest because it's important that everybody who's betting on these markets thinks it's an equal playing field if you're betting against somebody who has insider information well you're gonna lose that's not yeah that's so it's in their self-interest to prevent it but i don't know how they prevent it did you guys see the story it was a few weeks ago

2:19:14Leo Laporte:there was a there was a market i don't know if it was polymarker or calci but it was like oh what is the temperature going to be at the paris airport tomorrow and someone literally manipulated at the thermometer he took a hair dryer a blow dryer and blew it at the public thermometer before he you know after he made his bet very exciting there are some flaws in this structure i guess it's almost like the existence of these prediction markets um are directly influencing society in bad ways and maybe maybe they shouldn't exist at all maybe not yeah uh good article from the wall street journal kind of a surprising source for this article about government surveillance There are no secrets, they write, in America's new surveillance dragnet.

2:20:00Technical wizardry used to combat illegal immigration also funnels the personal data and whereabouts of U.S. citizens to federal agents. And it is a chilling tale. It's kind of a surprise to me. I always think of the Wall Street Journal as kind of an establishment newspaper. But I'm encouraged if they're saying maybe this has gone too far. Maybe we're going to see something happen. How did Snowden apology form? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing really happened post Snowden. Like most people are not aware of what he reported on. And it's yeah. Didn't change anything, did it? Nope. California has said that you can the CHP, the California Highway Patrol, can't ticket driverless cars when they violate traffic laws.

2:20:51did you know they couldn't before i didn't know that they couldn't before how do we contact these companies i don't know how they can't right now it's not in effect till july 1st uh there have been a number of reports of cars breaking you know waymos and others breaking traffic laws and they were just a lot that's wild well who do you right who do you yeah they couldn't do anything yeah under the new rules police can cite av companies when their vehicles commit moving violations the rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds this you know they block traffic they get in the way of emergency vehicles i love the shocked look on your face micah because this is it this is this is what they do like you could just be out here breaking laws and because what they're doing is so new they effectively can't be punished for it but didn't they they they had to get the they had to get the go-ahead to be able to drive on the streets not always not but the dmv does allow them to do this right yeah yeah that's what i yeah so maybe you should have thought about yeah that's why i was that's where that came from is like i thought there were discussions about them being able to be here in the first place and why was that not figured out there are a lot of municipalities where they just rolled out so they just get to do it wow just like do you have all tech yeah do you have waymo in tucson i know you have in phoenix uh it's in phoenix uh i go to

2:22:15Leo Laporte:phoenix uh not that often to be honest but i have been in waymo a few times uh but yeah uh not not down here in tucson well you drive around san francisco there's waymo uh in every block i mean there's tons of waymos and they've there's a lot of problems yeah for sure yeah there was just a news article that it's coming to portland as well um so i think it's a good thing as a as a so look i'm almost 70 at some point in the next 10 to 20 years i'm gonna somebody go take my keys away as and they should right um i hope by then autonomous vehicles uh you know ride sharing will be so ubiquitous that i won't need a car that might happen to get a taxi now like these uh we let the uh the smart taxi companies we let uber and lyft just like blow away the entire tax economies but well that's true part of that is it you can get a you can get a car now pretty easily and that's the thing i don't know if autonomous will actually change that much especially if the tech doesn't get much better but i will tell you folks like i've had some personal personal interactions because of uh these taxi companies failures like there was an elderly couple in my town trying to get an uber the uber would not come to them like something was wrong like maybe they put the placement map somewhere else like it's very easy to do that to misplace where the location map is if you don't know that as a new user um it's kind of this is why I'm spending so much time training Claude.

2:23:39Claude will drive your car. Claude is going to do it all for me. Claude will drive your car. I will just be, I don't know what's going on. I want to go to the dentist. Help me. And Claude will help me. But I heard these people like fighting with Uber and calling for various forms of help for like 10 minutes. I was like, hello, can I just take you home? Can I just take you home? It was like 10, 15 minutes away, but transportation is a problem in our country. It's all a big problem. I don't know if a Autonomous stuff will ultimately help. I don't know. Get ready for this. Yeah. China has suspended autonomous driving permits.

2:24:16After a big Baidu outage, dozens of Baidu's Apollo Go robo taxis stopped in Wuhan, stranding passengers, disrupting traffic. This is where sometimes a dictatorship can really get things done. So they just said, hey, you know, that's it. No more. no more that's just for now until they like figure out whatever caused that but the incident alarmed authorities three agencies including the ministry of industry and information technology convened a meeting earlier this month with officials from cities that have robo taxis regulators called for local governments to conduct full self-review and enhance safety monitoring and uh until then no more licenses and you know why that happened it's because at least two of the people who were in those vehicles were related to some of the lawmakers officials yeah it has we humans have to have object lessons that's why the whole ticket master thing is happening because someone who was a lawmaker was trying to buy taylor swift tickets for their daughter their granddaughter and that kick that someone was like we should look into that whole ticket master thing listen to the voters they will tell you they'll tell you but we're in the real world china has also done something we have not been able to do they have announced made a law that firing a worker and replacing them with ai is no is illegal huh can't do it interesting interesting it's a worker's paradise ladies and gentlemen yeah sometimes this is of course always the argument for dictatorships is see the trains run on time the trade um they're working people people are just working and working and working and also they were certainly working it's a workers paradise yeah maryland become has become the first state to ban ai driven price increases in grocery stores that's good hell yeah did you see in october yeah instacart got into a bunch of trouble for that after i had the i can't remember what the group is called, but I had someone from the group on Tech News Weekly who did that whole investigative study where they had people from all over the U.S.

2:26:32all at the same time order the same item from the same store, and it was showing up as different prices for different people. And they did this over and over and over again to show that it was just, yeah, it was changing the price based on where you were, what you'd ordered, all this other stuff. And officially, uh instacart said after that study came out we're not doing that anymore i think billionaires should always pay 100 more for everything don't you that wouldn't be a bad idea yeah double if they just paid their taxes we'd be fine that's also true much better space so how about start we could start there so uh dynamic dynamic pricing or some call it surveillance pricing can lead to two consumers paying different amounts of the same item at the same retailer at the same time same time yep so maryland has a bill the protection from predatory pricing act goes into effect october 1st and some severe fines ten thousand dollars for the merchant repeat offenses twenty five thousand dollars good on maryland that's right yeah it was consumer reports nicholas yeah because i spoke to the i spoke to the folks at groundwork collaborative i had originally was trying to get somebody from consumer reports no one was available at the time and so groundworks collaborative who worked with y 'all on it and someone from there ended up coming on the show

2:27:47Leo Laporte:yeah so thank you to cr and it wasn't me uh it was i well yeah we did a big uh yeah that's a lot of you know we do a lot of stuff like that like how is your advocacy yeah yes yeah bravo right on actually consumer reports doesn't like the maryland law because it prohibits only price increases not price decreases oh well no law is perfect but you know yeah yeah they they described a scenario in which a retailer might raise prices across the board to lower prices for some targeted customers that's a very good point yeah yeah yeah yeah um so but you know what every law is uh a beginning and can be improved yeah it's kind of like the right to repair stuff from like it is you know the first state law happens it's not perfect but then other states start crap so it's like it i think it's the fact that we have legislation on the books now imperfect as it may be is probably the biggest headline coming out of this in my got to set the precedent and work from there yeah one of the things we got a lot of us talk about was of course mythos the clawed model that wasn't released to the public because it was too dangerous because it could find security flaws and they didn't want bad guys to be able to do it first of course open ai which at first said that's just a marketing ploy then about two weeks later released its version of the same thing saying it can find security flaws and it's very dangerous uh in fact we are starting to see some security flaws discovered there is a very severe linux flaw the most ars technica called it the most severe linux threat to surface in years but fear not somebody would have to have physical access to your computer they'd have to have an account on your system to use it but it does allow them to escalate a normal user account to a administrator account to a super user account it's called copy fail and it's an issue on uh servers where there are multiple users because ah yeah vps many people are using the same computer they probably could use that uh this is how you know linux is succeeding now guys like it's made it it's made it we've had a massive flaw this is your popularity it's a very serious one and also is a is an escape from uh containers so docker and kubernetes uh can get right out of that so it is a pretty serious vulnerability most linux uh distros have been patched by now it was disclosed more than a month ago but the typical uh lengthy disclosure process did not happen it was only discovered about a month ago and is now completely disclosed.

2:30:27So make sure you have a patched Linux kernel. And there's a big flaw in cPanel, which a lot of people use to administer their websites. It's kind of an old school thing. It was written in PHP. I used to use it years ago. But hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel, which is currently used still by millions of websites and the web host manager site, which allows hackers to hijack and take full control of a server running cpanel still being used by tens of millions of uh websites all over the world so something that will have to be fixed uh all right now a couple of weird stories we're running uh running out of time here the hottest anti-ai gadget the all the kids are doing it it's on tiktok i haven't seen it but a young young women are going viral for creating whimsical homemade computers inside purses i love it i just had a friend ask me the other day if she if i would help her make her cyber deck why would you so the idea is real it's cyberpunk i think is it a working system i mean is it yeah and i i think it's more it's this idea that we can step away from our phones and like modernity and just get access to the things that we want but there's also some level of like customization and building it when you feel like everything all looks the same there's a lot of steam punky a little yeah and a lot of um aesthetics involved you know what i mean it's about making it your own and and right and because that's the whole idea too is it's almost like a swiss army knife but in the form of a you know a little machine yeah and so you just make it however you want to you put the stuff on there that you want and i think it's also an opportunity to get people who may otherwise not have gotten into coding and tinkering to get into coding and tinkering which i think is neat i can i use an esp32 to communicate with my clawed agent um i could put that in a purse what's cool is that this is this is kind of like the exact opposite of the open claw trend in a way too it's more like this is a thing i'm building it's gonna do what i tell it to do it's gonna it's it's a thing i'm building for my purposes is not going to run off my credit card number and like do you make all these transactions it is a really cool response to the trend of tech right now did you see that vine is back no no dorsey who of course ran twitter and bought vine and killed vine has a new reboot it's called divine di vine it is on the uh ios app store in the google play store and i love this they put 500 thousand half a million old vine videos on there to see so the archive of old vine the backup from the original service is there they are still six seconds long i mean they're awfully short compared to reels or tiktoks a little pathetic isn't it it's just like oh we had this thing that was kind of cool and culty and they all look your old vines are here i killed it by the way But don't worry about that.

2:33:42Your old vines are here. Let's make some new ones. Created by a guy we've interviewed. His handle is Rabble, Evan Henshaw Plath, who used to work at Twitter. He was an early Twitter employee. He explored the Vine archive. I didn't realize this, but the original vines, six seconds, were 50 to 60 gigabytes. What? What? Wait, the whole thing? No wonder. No. Each one? Each. Yes. Were they storing them in some ridiculous? I don't understand. Well, no wonder they went out of business. Yeah. If you can't store a six-second video properly, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah. Anyway, he has managed to resurrect some, but not all of them.

2:34:21It's been around since November to testers. Rabble said the initial plan was to quickly push the app out after some initial tests, but early Viners encouraged the team to hold off. It was the Viners who were like, no, no, this is way more important than just nostalgia. They really wanted a Vine that worked, that they could create new Vines with. So yay, Rabble has recreated Vine. I love that they've got older Vines just because that did establish some of the early, I don't know, global pop culture lexicon. Remember Lily Ponds? Lily Ponds, an OG Viner quoted by TechCrunch. Many of us came from Vine.

2:35:00It was the beginning of anything. Yeah. It was such a key moment in my own personal journey and an internet culture. It makes me so happy to see these early classics brought back to the life and have the chance to make new ones. It was amazing what they did in a six second video. I agree. It's amazing what the audience did. Like that's such an organic response to the limitations of technology. Like that's cool. And then they killed it. And I, to a certain degree, I'm like, you guys had something really interesting there. And I don't know, is it because the business model just didn't work well enough for Twitter?

2:35:32You couldn't make money. I think Twitter felt like, I don't know. that like this was undermining twitter like oh no it should all just be on twitter oh yeah yeah i don't know why they bought it in that case maybe they bought it to kill it i don't know anyway dorsey put up the money rabble brought it back so bravo now speaking of being brought back remember gain stop which was about to go out of business but was saved by the stonk redditors as a meme stock they've done so well ever since they're looking at buying ebay no what what so maybe they weren't so dumb all those diamond hands holding their game stop stock what that's wild yes because money means nothing it's because money is nothing nothing means anything so whatever sure you're dying and the meme brought you back to life according to the wall street journal GameStop is preparing a bid to acquire eBay for$46 billion.

2:36:35That's what eBay's worth. GameStop's stock price is about$12 billion. So I think, I don't know. They'd have to have some investors. I don't know. GameStop has been quietly building a position eBay shares. I guess people sell a lot of games on eBay. I'm trying to think if this is just because of the lulls or if there's actually some real. Well, the guy behind it, actually, Ryan Cohen, who's the CEO, has some cred. He created Chewy. Chewy. Oh, OK. Sold it in 2017, became GameStop's chairman and CEO. And based, I guess, on this whole meme stock thing, was able to not only turn GameStop around, but turn it into an e-commerce giant.

2:37:24Leo Laporte:And this, Leo, this is real now. this is not just reporting he uh cohen gave an interview he gave an interview to the journal about 30 minutes ago it's 56 billion uh 56 billion 56 50 i put it in the little chat there holy cow it's happening i i don't know i don't know what's going on or whatever man i don't know what's going on this definitely wasn't on my bingo card is all i just don't understand anything that really actually does blow my mind i know uh the academy has finally taken a step against ai they have decided that the new oscar rules which released friday will not allow ai generated actors or scripts to be eligible for oscars so uh how will they prove it oh that's interesting it's pretty it's pretty there is already not sneak an ai person into a thing Tilly Norwood, who's all AI, is clearly out.

2:38:23But there is an AI-generated version of Val Kilmer in a new movie. But she said scripts, too. I'm talking about scripts, not the actor part. AI-generated actors and scripts. Yeah, so how are they going to prove the scripts? That's what I'm saying. Oh, I see. Well, if the actor's dead, it's probably AI if he shows up in a movie. Yeah, that part is easy to prove. I'm thinking. But the scripts, so you have to use an Academy-issued laptop that does not allow access to chat GPT. I think this is the old guard holding out, right? Trying to preserve. Is it on? Is it on? It's the honor system, isn't it?

2:38:57I mean, there are enough AI scanning things which don't work that well, but. Yeah, they don't. Oh, they're terrible. Oh, they're worse, yeah. And just in case you thought your youth was wasted, Nicholas. Well. Ukraine says. Hold on. It's training drone pilots by playing Grand Theft Auto V.

2:39:16Leo Laporte:Oh, I saw this. Yes, yes. if hegseth is watching i'm i'm available i'm very are you a master of gta i am very good at video games i would be my son says he says i want to buy an audi r8 i said dude no you can't have one he says your fault you gave me grand theft auto and that was my car in gta that's your fault i said i didn't give you grand theft auto what are you talking about grand theft auto what i would never have given you that uh ukraine's defense ministry shared a post on x showing off training asking are there any gta fans here they said it's also good for relaxation okay hold on now we can't say now you're trying to say work while you're off the clock and i don't like that it's like it's fine it's also for relaxation they train their school Oh, they just blew that truck up.

2:40:09Yeah. Do you have drones in GTA? I don't think you do. Or maybe they've added them.

2:40:16Leo Laporte:I have not really played five, so I can't even answer that question. I don't like five very much. Maybe they use similar control. This feels very Ender's game. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Ender's game. Yeah. He was. Oh, I don't want to spoil it. Never mind. I won't say a word. Don't spoil the ending of. Yeah. One of the best twists ever. I'll just say that. it's a great great novel those are the first time i knew how to be disappointed by authors amazing stuff oh because orson scart card was not a great person he's the madman but but it's a great writer although it's good ender's game was great the sequel's not so hot i love speaker for a speaker for the dead was pretty good all right you're right yeah yeah again i've read his stuff and got so disappointed yeah i know yep uh let's take one more break and then we have uh our usual in memoriam thing and uh i'm gonna do some picks i have a pick and nick actually has a pick and davindra has a pick so oh great well great well if they didn't find a pick we don't we don't normally do picks on twit but it just happened you guys submitted some things oh yeah picks so uh think of something mike and we'll be back in just a bit this episode of this week of tech is brought to you by box i love box the leading intelligent content management platform for enterprises.

2:41:36The key to unlocking the power of AI isn't in an LLM or an agent. It's in your content. Your business isn't the sum of internet knowledge. Your business lives in your content, right? And now AI is not some far-off idea anymore. It's here. It's tangible. Dynamic innovation, absolutely here to stay, already having a profound impact on the world. I don't have to tell you that well box is here to help their mission to power how the world works together making it easy to access information from anywhere collaborate with anyone box serves more than get this 97 000 companies 68 of the fortune 50 you know many companies underestimate ai's transformative potential rather than reimagining their operations they're simply bolting ai on existing processes capturing modest productivity gains while missing the opportunity for fundamental business transformation.

2:42:36I'm a big advocate for doing it right. Becoming an AI-first company, it's not just about automating what you already do. It's about reimagining what's possible. With Box AI, business can truly leverage the latest breakthroughs in AI to automate document processing and workflows, to extract insights from your content, to build custom AI agents, to work on assignments, and more. Most importantly, Box AI works with all the leading AI model providers. So you get the one you want. Open AI, you bet. Anthropic, yep. Google, sure. XAI, absolutely. And that's not all, more. So you can always be sure you're able to use the latest AI models with your content.

2:43:21Here are just some of the things businesses are doing right now with Box AI. You can use Box.ai to extract key metadata fields from contracts, invoices, financial documents, resumes, and more. You know how hard that is to do manually? AI does it like that. And then you can query and automate workflows as a result. Okay, that's one. Well, here's another one. Use Box.ai to ask questions of any type of content. It's like asking the content directly. Sales presentations, long research reports, and more. Why spend hours reading through hundreds of pages? Just query it directly. you can do it for one file or, and this is huge, thousands of files at once.

2:44:00Or leverage BoxAI's APIs to integrate it into your application stack for any document processing and data extraction. BoxAI handles the vector embeddings, the retrieval augmented generation rag, and agent customization, and it does it all in its own platform. You can do all of this while maintaining the highest levels of security, compliance, and data governance that over 115 ,000 enterprises trust. You need a content layer that gives AI the context it needs while giving your teams the flexibility they need to test and leverage various models for different use cases. Don't get locked into a single model.

2:44:41Visit box.com slash AI to learn more. Box, B-O-X.com slash AI box.com slash AI. This is a very cool solution. Thank you, Box, for supporting Twit. And now back to the show. You don't have to do a pick, but I'm going to just give us a couple of picks. I'll start off. You may remember in February, the CIA killed the World Factbook, which was an amazing thing. The CIA had been created 62 years ago and had been maintaining ever since information about all the countries of the world it was like i guess kind of felt a little weird that it was the cia doing it but it was an incredible resource well this is this is a really nice story because the open source community jumped on this now at the same time as the cia announced the killing of the fact book they deleted it they just told they could have left it up but i guess they didn't want it to get out of date anyway fortunately somebody had saved it open openfactbook is online it's free openfactbook.org 254 countries yeah isn't that great and you can browse by region this has always been a really great resource for just basic information um and it's a great example of like wikipedia where uh the community itself can preserve this stuff so i just wanted to give them a little bit of a a plug uh nicholas uh de leon picked something that It was actually reviewed by your colleague on Consumer Reports.

2:46:16We were talking about this before the show. Courtney Linwall wrote about it. Tell us about the light phone.

2:46:22Leo Laporte:Yeah. So we, mostly Courtney, have been doing a lot of articles on digital mindfulness or whatever you want to call it. Just the idea of like where a lot of us are kind of tired of being ruled by our iPhones and Androids and just wanting to tone it down a little bit. So the latest article in this series is about the light phone, which is kind of a stripped down. I guess it's technically a smartphone, but it's it's a much it's it's it's not an iPhone and it's purposefully not an iPhone. And it's, you know, in that constraint, do you does your brain have the opportunity to breathe again for the first time in a while?

2:46:59Leo Laporte:And so it's just a look at like some of the limitations of these types of devices, where they're good, where they're bad, who they might be good for, who maybe wouldn't want it. But to me, it's interesting is that there's a lot of this. I live in Southern Arizona. Every single resort around here has like a digital detox program that you can take. Oh, yeah. So there's something in the ether here where people are kind of like, maybe not burnt out, but they just want to tweak their relationship with their phone in particular, which is what I was saying earlier, where it's like the idea of the computer in the living room was like the peak experience here because now we've glued to our phones 24-7.

2:47:40Leo Laporte:So, yeah, it's just the latest article in that series. And I encourage folks to take a look. And there will likely be more on this topic. Again, just the idea of maybe reevaluating our relationship with the phone in particular. It's a little pricey,$700. It doesn't have a great camera. But I like the idea of a very simple black and white UI. I think the phone's changed dramatically. First of all, for most of us, it's not a phone anymore. Yeah. Right. What is the phone for? It's mostly a camera. It's the truth PC. It's spam. That's for sure. All the spam. I guess for me, camera and messaging are the two things I use the most.

2:48:26I barely even use the camera.

2:48:28Leo Laporte:One thing I tell folks, again, when I'm like the computer guy and family and whatever, it's like, get a camera. Get an actual camera from Nikon or Canon or whatever. You don't even have to get like a$5 ,000. Just get a camera. And A, it's going to take much better photos than any phone. And you have a single purpose device that unlocks a little bit of creativity and you might start messing with lenses. But it lessens the reliance on the phone for everything. And you get to explore a different part of your brain, I guess. But yeah, that's that's if you can afford it, I would encourage folks maybe look into buying a camera and seeing if that will lessen your desire to have your phone on your person 24.

2:49:08Can I send messages from my camera? Oh, now you've got now you've got. Oh, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. Is it practical to say we don't need whatever these smart devices are that we carry in our pocket?

2:49:23Leo Laporte:I mean, I mean, this is this is a certain type of person. I think, you know, the, you know, the, oh, I'm, you know, they're, they've got their hand on their head. It's like, yeah, the phone is a critical piece of infrastructure for, I'm going to say a lot, everyone, basically. I was actually on TV the other day having this exact conversation. I was like, isn't it a little bit, maybe not privileged, but like phones are important. People need phones. It's not like a, it's not an optional, it's not a Steam Deck or whatever the case may be. People need phones. So all this like hand reading over. You're saying a Steam Deck is optional or not optional?

2:49:58I just want to know. That depends on you. Asking for a friend. That depends on you. Yeah, yeah. Nicholas, this is again, though, this is again now that conversation where you are not, you were saying that this is a possibility for someone. You are not saying that because I am talking about a light phone, that means the people who have phones that are not light phones are bad and wrong. like that why is that nuance always lost it's like just because i'm advocating for a thing does not mean that the thing i'm not advocating for is a bad thing we should have more things like this that just help us simplify our relationship with our phones but i also say it's so easy to like forget like my god what do we have in our pockets like this is i think about quite a bit yes this is the truest personal computer it is honest it is a part of it this is an extension of us.

2:50:48The problem is we've allowed these companies to create these apps and services that just tap into the worst human tendencies, right? Like the effects of social media, the infinite scroll, you get the constant dopamine hits. All these things are built this way. So one good thing you could do if you don't want to get a light phone is just try to stay off of those things that really, really tap into those primal like attention span i don't know hoarding things that we have as humans but i do so much with my phone you know i take notes it's my main computer now yeah yeah and i use telegram to message claude so we can talk uh oh yeah yeah i think it's a little bit like what uh what micah was saying

2:51:34Leo Laporte:earlier in the show is it's kind of a reflection of like who you are and what you you know if you're using the phone to check out open fact book or project gutenberg or whatever the case may be or wikipedia that is a very different use case than someone who's just infinite scrolling tiktok yeah don't do that don't get in bed and tiktok per se but don't get in bed and scroll for two hours that's not healthy that's a lot of folks you know and to devender's point that because the design to do that you know they were made to do that i don't blame the users as much as how we built these things i do that myself and i'm actively trying like okay i'm gonna keep books near my nightstand.

2:52:10So I hit 10 minutes of TikTok. Okay, then go. Go away, phone. I'll try to do something else. And it's a forceful thing. You have to really take an effort to do that. Yeah, I don't know if this is a pick, but Devendra put a link to Jessica Condit's review. She does a great job, by the way. I love Jessica's stuff. And a gadget about the Valve Steam Controller. Yeah, this was the hottest new gadget of the week because we've been waiting for the Steam Machine to arrive and it's not coming. the steam machine this is for the steam machine or any anything running steam like this was part of the steam machine announcement but the problem is the ramageddon has made it really tough for valve to price or even get the steam machine out and also the uh was it the valve frame but the new vr headset that they're doing too that needs ram the steam machine needs ram this controller does not need the ram so they can just release this controller so they released the controller before We're all hungry for anything.

2:53:06You can still play your PC games. Anything that runs Steam. So your Steam Deck, your PC. Is it a great... She gave it 90 out of 100. She gave it 90. She gave it a good review. It's a little pricey. It's a$100 controller. Do you know how expensive controllers are now, Leo? Is that not normal? Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller is$90. New Joy-Con 2s are$80. It's basically a car that's in there. It's got so much different technology inside. They're expensive. So this is more expensive than a typical one. But I will say, as somebody who plays a lot of games on my PC, it looks cool. I kind of want to play with it.

2:53:39I will be getting a Steam Machine eventually, too, even though I probably don't need one. But it just looks like a cool design. And I think Jess also did a great review. Also, I recommend people check out the new Engadget website. We've been redesigned now that we're fully over at our new owners. So it's lightning fast now. Like lightning fast. You know what? This popped right up. Holy cow. It's instant. It's amazing. So we are no longer part of Yahoo. We're part of Static Media, which also owns BGR and Slash Film. Whoa, that did look fast. It's so fast. It's really fast. People are complaining it's not like list format anymore.

2:54:14I like this format. It's kind of a card-based format. Yeah, it's card-based. I know people miss the list format, but I like that it's fast. It's so fast. So we're getting there. We just launched the new site. We're part of a whole new company now, but we're still in Gadget. We're still doing our thing.

2:54:27Leo Laporte:Good. I would say, Devendra, you should make, forget the Steam machine, make your own Steam machine, make like a DIY Steam machine, which is what I did. Yes. I did that between Christmas and now-ish. Is it running Linux? Yes, it's actually running Bazite, which is basically Steam OS. Bazite's a gaming Linux, yeah. I've heard so much. I will buy this controller literally at 10 a.m. tomorrow when it goes on sale. It's the most exciting I've been for like a gadget in a little while, actually. Oh, cool. So tell me. That's good advice, yeah. What processor you would use if you were going to build your own Steam machine?

2:55:02How much RAM? It's a bad time to build things.

2:55:05Leo Laporte:It seems like it might be. I built it more or less last year, a little bit, right as the RAM stuff was hitting. So I had a leftover 7800X3D processor because I upgraded my main gaming PC to the 9800. So I reused an old processor. I did buy the Radeon 9060 XT, which is their entry level. It's a secondary, you know, it's for older games. It's for like emulator. I'm not trying to play Cyberpunk or like, you know, super brand new games on this thing. I have the main PC for that. So it's just, yeah, RAM, I don't know. I would say 16 is the minimum, but it's, you know, it's just very expensive right now, unfortunately.

2:55:49Leo Laporte:Everything is, yeah. I'm actually glad I bought the framework desktop when I did it. I bought it as an AI, local AI machine, but it's actually a pretty competent gaming machine as well. Using old hardware is a good idea. A lot of people have old RAM, old stuff hanging around. Yeah, reuse it. Build something. I would not have built this if I didn't have leftover stuff to do because it's like, you know, I already have a computer. Oh, but I can kind of crib together this one of parts, kind of like the MacBook Neo. Hey, I got these parts over here. Let me just build a thing. and Micah you picked something I did yes so I love voices and I love listening to voices and sort of trying to understand them and and so I really love hearing voice actors talk about their craft and share their craft and occasionally you get something like what I shared which is a YouTube video that is actually just a, it's a little clip from a podcast.

2:56:47The podcast is called String and Tell by Tawny Plattis. And Tawny is a voice actor that has done a lot of work that you'll be familiar with. She is the voice of those automated grocery machine things that you go through, like self-checkouts. Her voice is the one that annoyingly tells you like, please put that back down onto the counter um and so you hear her talk and you're already like a really small fraternity isn't it of people right yeah and then kristen de mercurio mercurio excuse me it meets with her for this episode because these two are responsible for almost all of the bluetooth voice like no matter what device you get unless it's a first party like mainstream device you know that you're going to hold down that power button for three seconds and then it's going to go bluetooth pairing and that's the voice of the woman it's a human that's her right there bluetooth i mean i just called her bluetooth no kristin de mercurio is the voice and so uh i think she gets recognized at grocery stores i wonder if she talks enough i just love it i love it and they talk about their craft and they talk about both um like how they got hired doing different stuff uh the reason why Kristen ends up getting it, got this role is because her voice by different casting agents is tagged with IOT.

2:58:11So she gets a lot of those kinds of gigs. And yeah, I just think it's fascinating. So yeah, very good. We don't usually do picks, but it just kind of came up that way. So I thought, why not? Let's, let's do some picks. We also often end the show with, uh, in memoriam and there are three, uh, things that are going away. One is spirit airlines. and i i'm sorry if you had a ticket on spirit airlines uh because uh it is shut it's gone it just boom it disappeared uh i'm sorry if you had a ticket on spirit airlines at any time it is it was horrible the line it was literally like beach chairs yeah when so close together i'm not that tall and my knees are still up here uh just not fun the one time i flew a spirit i did feel bad There was a pilot, a spirit pilot who had one more flight to retirement.

2:59:04And his flight was canceled. His flight was canceled. I don't I guess that's that. But I also feel bad for there probably quite a few people with tickets who aren't going to get to go anywhere. Also, say goodbye to Ask Jeeves. Did you know Ask.com was still around? Did not know. Apparently nobody did. So they finally gave up. they're shutting it down uh this is the story from engadget uh ask which was asked jeeves remember the butler and they changed to ask.com the internet's favorite butler is uh is saying goodbye it closed it's uh closed his uh serving tray on may 1st i remember when at school they taught us uh we had a whole we had a whole day where we went to the library and we were taught about like LexisNexis and all of these other tools, but then they also, all the old tools for searching things, but then they also taught us about new tools for searching things.

3:00:08And one of those was at the time, Ask Jeeves. And I remember coming home and, you know, bringing this news to my family and teaching them how to use Ask Jeeves. And at the time saying with my whole chest going, listen, you'll get better results if you type it out as a question, which now I'm like, what was I thinking? That's hilarious. But no, you were right. That was that. That's how we started asking internet questions. Yeah. You did a full question. And then now you see sometimes people still feel like you have to do that. And so it's one of those things where I'm going, do I just let them live in the world where they type a whole question into, I do it by keyword.

3:00:50I think of the question that I have and then into the search field, I type the keywords from it. Probably smart. Because it doesn't need of. That's not a word that of. I mean, and yes, if you're doing Boolean. But anyway, point is, yeah, you type out like a full sentence to get an answer. And now you do that if you're using one of your chat. It was too early, Ask Jeeves. Yeah. Well, you're not going to say flight, speed, swallow. You're going to say, what is the flight speed of a swallow, right? yeah wouldn't you i would type in flight speed swallow honestly i would yeah but yeah you're very uh you're very parsimonious with your words i guess indubitably uh and there is one actual passing and it's craig venter who uh was a big name in the uh race to decode the human genome uh he was kind of a uh i would say a maverick in all of this he said we don't need to use these slow processes i can decode the human genome faster with shotgun sequencing uh and in fact one his company solera went up against a international consortium of researchers called the human genome project uh and in fact uh i guess technically it was a draw uh but the fact that he could came even close was pretty amazing uh an interesting fellow a force of nature uh somewhat controversial in many ways uh he led an effort to explore the world's oceans trace the genetics of marine microbial communities his first global ocean sampling expedition circumnavigated the globe in 2005 and 2006 he also tried to copyright or trademark or patent i think it was maybe patent genes, the genome.

3:02:48Wait, what? Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. That's one of the reasons he was controversial. He thought this could be... You were so close to be a true greatness man. Yeah, so close. Anyway, Craig Vettner passed away April 29th at the age of 79. But Craig Vettner lived a very rich life, got a lot done in his 79. For years. That is that for this week, our Twit episode. Thank you so much, Micah Sargent. So great to be here. Being here to backstop in case everything went to hell in Hawaii. But it's always great to get you on. I'm glad it didn't go to hell and I'm glad I got to join you. Yeah, glad I could be here.

3:03:28Yeah, yeah. You'll find Micah on Tech News Weekly every Thursday and of course iOS Today. You record like every other week now? Yeah, we record iOS every other week. We just recorded three of the episodes of Hands on Tech earlier this morning. Oh, yeah. Hands on Tech, yes. Yeah, we'll also record those later. Hands on Apple. I record that weekly. So lots of shows you can check out on the network. Best way to check them out, join the club, support independent podcasting. It is a real challenge in this world where big companies run podcasting and advertisers flock to the big companies instead of us.

3:04:03But the best way to stay afloat in this world is to use, not use, to call on our wonderful community to support us. And we have a great many people who support Club Twit. We'd like to have you in the club. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. You get to watch Micah do his shows in the Discord and lots of other special content. We've got some big ones coming up. The Google I.O. and WWDC keynotes are coming up. We do those in the club only because we don't want to get taken down on YouTube. uh so so join the club uh it's a way to support what we do and it's a way to get a lot of extra programming and to meet some really cool people in the club twit discord including mr micah sargent micah's uh creative uh what do you call it i forgot micah's crafting corner crafting corner it's always fun are you still doing paint by numbers or have you moved on we now i'm trying to remember what did we do last time because i took a break from paint by number it's very It was incredibly relaxing, so I understand.

3:05:02Yeah, it was incredibly relaxing. It was also hard to, because part of it is engaging with the chat room. They are sharing the things they're working on as well. So it's just a nice little crafting moment where people talk about the foods that they're making. And I literally do not recall what it was I worked on last time. Somebody in the chat will remember. But anyway, yeah, we do all sorts of things. Knit, crochet, Lego, little dioramas, all sorts of stuff. A lot of fun. did i just close my zoom or am i still here you're still here i was closing tabs okay kids don't try this at home never close tabs keep them all open all of them all of them nicholas de leon is of course a consumer reports or he reports on electronics senior electronics reporter and has many many ai uh pages up there like cross-wording the situation yes and uh what is it what are the

3:05:57Leo Laporte:other two uh deep dugout uh tucson daily brief i'm trying to think of the best way to have others too i have uh other thing those are the the main ones oh i also i also made a a job like a like a job finder app a very it's actually quite powerful we'll talk about that another day but uh yeah i don't need a site for all your sites so that we can go to that site and find your site i mean Most of these, we'll just put it up on GitHub whether you want it to or not. Yes. Yeah. Most of them are on GitHub. I think I do have a home. What's your GitHub handle? DayLeon, D-A-Y. I'll just type it in the chat here.

3:06:35Leo Laporte:D-A-Y-L-A-Y-O-W-N. That's just my last name pronounced. DayLeon. And if you go to DayLeon.org, that's probably the easiest because I list most of the things I've got going on over there. There you go. Yeah. So, you know, a bunch of cool stuff. Most importantly, Consumer Reports, you know, I know folks. I'm a member since 1981. I'm very proud to support it. We are a, you know, their media is a challenging industry, but we're still kicking. We're still doing pretty, pretty well. And we're trying to do impactful stuff. Like we saw with the grocery store pricing, you know, some of this AI stuff where we're really trying to like, you know, report on this stuff in a way that's relatable to, you know, I'm a nerd.

3:07:18Leo Laporte:I like messing with all the models and all that type of stuff. But, you know, if you're a regular person, how are you interfacing with these things? What are your expectations? So we're trying to do more of that type of stuff. But yeah, Consumer Reports is the most important. And then you can look at my zany little side projects. I love them. I love them. They're not zany. They're great. It's great to talk to you, Nicholas. And of course, thank you, Devendra, dear friend. And now hanging by a thread, I'm sorry to say. I'm surprised we all aren't. Yeah, I'm kind of hanging by it. when I looked I said oh wow there really is only one thread up there oh dear the sword of Damocles is hanging by uh Nick you'll find uh you'll find uh Devendra at uh Gadget brand new and Gadget looking good revamped in Gadget and the film cast podcast yeah thank you Devendra appreciate your support as happy to be here thanks to all of you for watching for listening thanks to our club members for making this possible.

3:08:16And I hope you will be back next week. We do twit every Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 p.m. Eastern. Turns out that's 11 a.m. Hawaii time. I found out. What is it? 2100 UTC. If you can figure that out, you can figure out what it will be in your local time zone. You can watch us live in the Club Twit Discord or on YouTube, twitch.tv, x.com, facebook linkedin or kick.com after the fact on-demand versions of all of our shows audio and video available at our website twit.tv most of our shows have their own dedicated youtube channel twit is no exception you can find us there great way to share clips of the show if you want to tell your friends and family about something exciting you saw on the show and of course the best thing to do is subscribe and your favorite podcast client that way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done.

3:09:07Thank you, everybody, for being here. I will be in Hawaii for another few days. I'm going to be doing MacBreak Weekly and the security now and Windows Weekly and Intelligent Machines from here and next week's Twitter as well. So if you hate the fact that there's the ocean and the trade winds behind me, well, I'm sorry. You just got to put up with that for a little bit longer. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you. Thank you to our great technical director, Benito Gonzalez, for keeping everything together. anthony nielsen for helping me get the technology down to do this show from here and of course kevin king our editor our executive producer my wife lisa laporte who is right now in a helicopter i think she just went over as a matter of fact flying over the big island of hawaii are you gonna get to do a helicopter no i don't believe in uh flying in rocks with wings i just it feels stages somehow she she does it every time and i always say good have fun yeah yeah yeah they're terrifying they're terrifying and they're very loud but it is really cool i mean it's i did it once and that's that once was enough yeah once was enough uh thank you everybody we'll see you next time another twit is in the can These are amazing.