TWiT 1088: Model Not Available - Anthropic's Fable Shutdown & Apple's Siri Update

35:22is a reality check. Here's Alistair Carnes, who is a British member of parliament and former minister for the armed forces. He says this week, the most advanced AI model on the planet got switched off by a foreign government. Remember, he's British. British researchers were studying it. British companies were testing it. British hospitals are piling it. Not anymore. This isn't an AI story. It's a story of every industry we used to lead. So this is a call for, you know, every other country in the world to say, well, what, why, this is the other question. Maybe Christina, you have some insight of this.

36:04Why is Anthropik so ahead of the game here? Are they ahead of the game? Is DeepMind, does DeepMind have something similar? Does OpenAI have something similar? I don't know. I mean, I'm sure that they would all claim that they do. And I think it all just depends on kind of what you're focusing on and where your capabilities are going, right? And that's the thing. Like, Anthropic, I think, has been fairly narrowly focused in a sense on work that has been used by enterprises. And that turns out to be the most profitable area for AI use, at least so far, right? And so if you're really good at coding, if you're really good at that sort of thing, then you can be really successful.

36:40And I think there's no doubt that they're the best at that right now. Although I think the open AI models have gotten really good at that too. Whereas I think Google is really good in certain research capabilities, obviously really good at image and video generation. And so I don't know. I can't really honestly tell you if they are so much better than everybody else, but it certainly, you know, they have, it almost doesn't matter if they're better or not. That is the brand that they have, right? They have that kind of Coca Coca-Cola kind of brand about them. And so I think, which means that if you're going to overtake that, you've got to be much, much better than those capabilities for people to kind of, you know, win that over.

37:19So I don't know. And I don't know at this point, if I were one of the other major labs, if I'm getting, you see this sort of heat that Anthropica is getting from the government, is this even the sort of area that you want to invest your time in, at least in this administration? or or do you want to focus your research efforts otherwise i don't know uh anthropic has not said how big fable is you know i i think opus was roughly 1.2 billion uh parameters people are guessing that fable one of the reasons fable is so good and so smart is it's six billion i'm sorry six trillion parameters is that right wait a minute is it billion or trillion it's big it's really big it's so big um it'd have to be trillion then it's got to be trillion and by being that big yeah because i have 120 billion uh models i'm running on my framework uh by being that big maybe that's how it's so smart it's just just huge and if that's the case well anybody could do it what's interesting about this is and this is one of the things that didn't get a lot of buzz when the model came out but certainly was a concern i know for um some some businesses and enterprises was that as part of one of the safety parameters when it was available was that Anthropic had a data retention policy for up to 30 days on every query that was put.

38:39Oh, yeah. Wasn't that interesting? And that, I think, raises some interesting questions, which at least for me was, OK, you're doing this, and everybody who is going to use your model has to kind of then suck it up and say, well, we're going to use it, we have to accept these terms and trust that Anthropic will delete the data, but they could have held on to some of it for seven years. That obviously creates, if you're, you know, certain types of businesses and work in regulated industries, creates very big problems because that's not how the previous models have worked. And then you have to wonder like, okay, is this going to be the sort of policy that they're going to require going forward for, for, they claim it would only be for mythos class models and it wouldn't extend below that.

39:25But who's to say? They could change that at any time. To me, and I'm sure that's had nothing to do with any of the decisions the government makes, but that in some ways is even more of kind of a red flag to me as kind of a risk assessment of the model safety. It's like, okay, not only are you claiming that this model could potentially be really dangerous, but you're also keeping a record of every query that anybody who uses the model has on your machines, which then just says, okay well that that really uh create puts puts a big onus and we sure hope anthropics servers are super safe right so i don't know crikey and for a pack who accidentally leaked cloud code not all that long ago oh that's right right exactly right and and and so you know you have just all kinds of data ownership questions and i think if you're especially if you're foreign entities you're having to think about those things too which i don't think it's wrong for uh other governments and the EU and the UK to say we have to think about sovereignty of models.

40:25But I don't know how you do that, to be completely honest with you, unless it just becomes down to, you know, national lines, right? Or we go into somehow some sort of really terrible future, which is sounds utterly dystopian, which would be, you know, like, like state, you know, approved and state sanctioned models like that, that sounds awful as well, and goes against everything that we've had in computing for the last 50 years. The truth is, though, we're in a situation we've never been in before. It's true. There's nothing to compare this to that I can think of. It's as if a private company had invented the atom bomb.

41:04Right. I mean, we have had times when industries have stumbled onto products, I'm thinking more in the chemical space, that were that dangerous. It just wouldn't make frontline news. right and the government would assert its right to well take it over what they do is they'd have a conversation about it right and typically you know be sane about how you have that conversation to say we should be treating these things carefully and get results we just haven't seen much from this administration and let's say subtlety of conversation yeah all right well i think we uh we did the subject justice i don't think we came to any resolutions it's kind of come down to who do you trust at this point?

41:46It's not. I think most people are clear on who they don't trust. Yeah. I'm not sure I trust anthropic in this either, to be honest. I'd rather. Yeah. I'd also rather not trust a privately held company to do the right thing. Right. Yeah. They are in the business of making money, although no way. I companies make money. So that's not actually an issue. Right. All right. We'll take a little break. This is a tweet. We are talking about the week's tech news, and we haven't even really covered anything. but Friday, but we'll get to the rest of the week. It was a very, very, very big week. That's why Christina Warren is here, a host at MacBreak Weekly.

42:20She's a senior dev advocate at GitHub and always welcome on our microphones. Great to have you. Thank you, Christina. The technologizer, also Harry McCracken. He writes for Fast Company and other very prestigious journals and is always welcome here as well. And Richard Campbell. You know him from Windows Weekly, .NET Rocks, run his radio. And also an expert on all of us. In fact, you're a space expert. So we're going to go to the SpaceX IPO next. And I would love to get your take on all of that. Elon Musk, a trillionaire. But first, a word from our sponsor. This Week in Tech is brought to you by Meter, the company building better networks.

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45:57And Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility, reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online. Meter, built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. Thanks to Meter so much for sponsoring this week in tech. Go to meter.com slash twit and book that demo. meter m-e-t-e-r dot com slash twit to book a demo thank you meter um highly recommended just take a look at the artwork it's amazing so elon musk is a trillionaire spacex popped i think 19 it was up um they raised 75 billion dollars black rock ordered five billion dollars in spacex shares IPO demand hit$250 billion.

46:51It was oversubscribed by four times, 400%. The biggest initial public offering in history. And Elon was taking a victory lap, of course. Happy man.

47:10um so by the way elon has on paper now more wealth than the economies of major nations like ireland sweden even his home country of south africa in fact only 20 countries in the world have economies larger than 1.1 trillion dollars 24 year old company you know but you know if a fresh startup so look uh you know i know you love space i went to the kennedy space center with you and we got a great tour i i love the idea of space but spacex well it has one as far as i know only one profitable division and that's starlink um and it makes you know it doesn't matter spacex makes is a what 80 percent of lift so right they if you have a choice of payload where what you want to fly your thing into space with, you pick Falcon 9 every time.

48:04But do they make money on that? They do, but not the kind of money that leads to a trillion dollar valuation. But then neither does Starlink. Like you read the IPO and the TAM, it's not about Starlink or NASA or Lyft or anything. It's only about AI. The combined offering of everything else was several hundred billion dollars. It was$26 trillion for the AI offering. so interesting so it's not about space either i mean i could see people saying oh well we're going to mars and we're going to harvest asteroids all of those things are impaired by going public you know elon was pretty clear that spacex was never going to be a public company because his goal was to build cities on mars and that's not something that shareholders want uh-huh data centers in space that's the new invention that's what you just gave a talk on that i have several times already and just doing the numbers on it and saying this is not wildly practical you know they really so i mean the idea is there's infinite uh sun there's a lot of power is not an issue quite finite it's 1368 watts per square meter so and you can only collect about 35 of that at a time so you're going to need extremely large solar arrays which are heavy and expensive but the bigger issue here is cooling like cooling is very difficult in space because it's in a vacuum not you know we talk about space is cold on movies but in reality it takes more weight to cool something down than it does to collect electricity so the same you have to do radiant cooling of some kind which is real difficult yeah so if you look at the international space station which coincidentally runs on about 140 kilowatts of electricity which is about the same amount of power as a single nvl 72 rack like very convenient that the mass of the cooling system for that is twice the the mass of the solar requirements so it's a lot of weight in heat uh the heat management and a lot of weight in electricity there's also the issue of speed your latency latency because right now one of the biggest things with data centers land-based data centers is the interconnects the speed right which computers inside the data center can talk to each other and with other data centers.

50:23Don't buy one NVL72, right? Microsoft bought 4 ,600 of them and ganged them together with 800 gigabit InfiniBand connections. Right. Now, SpaceX has developed a 100 gigabit laser relay, which is really fast. It's faster than just about anything, space to space. but you can't get away from the latency even going between points in orbit. You know, the big thing about InfiniBand is it's sub-millisecond latency. That's why we use those connections because you need that kind of thing. But at the same time, you would not use the space-based for building models because the nice thing about an NBL72 is that'll run a trillion parameter model.

51:11So you can, you know, do queries against it. It's just a question of how many of them can reasonably launch so part of the thing i did in my research for the talk was well how many satellites can we physically put in the low earth orbit so that we have relatively low latency to communicate with so this company generates about 18 billion dollars in revenue yeah 11 billion of the 18 is starlink uh it loses money on space launches 657 million dollars only because it's Presumably turn around and be profitable. But that's all government money, isn't it? Yes, for the most part. Well, governments around the world and commercial spaceflight.

51:54Right. It's really compliant. I would have pointed out this. Before SpaceX started lifting commercial payloads, there was maybe 3 ,000 satellites in operation. Today, there's 4 ,500, not counting any Starlink satellites. There's 9 ,500 Starlink satellites. So Elon operates more satellites than the rest of the world combined by double. and is also planning to finish out the network this year to 12 ,000 satellites. At that point, those are five-year lifespan satellites. So he's going to lose 2 ,400 a year, replace them with Falcon 9s. If he replaces Falcon 9s, 100 launches a year. He can do that.

52:33But it also, you know, he IPO'd at the point at which he already dominated the market and he completed Starlink. So he needs another product to justify this. I mean, one would argue you need another product to justify Starship as a whole. You know, we don't have a need. We've not demonstrated the need for 100-ton payloads until you get into doing things like flying to Mars. So this is just you're being very speculative here, which is why he originally said I wouldn't IPO this. But it really begs the question, why did he IPO it actually? Because he only raised$75 billion. Like, that's a lot of money, but it's not a catastrophic amount of money.

53:12Not that I think he could have raised a whole lot more. There's only so much money out there to acquire. I think this has more to do with fixing his own personal finances than anything to benefit SpaceX or AI or anything. He's a billionaire. He lives off loans against his publicly traded company, and that's Tesla. And Tesla no longer dominates in EVs. I mean, they make a very good car, but so do a bunch of other companies. So that valuation for Tesla can't continue. And if that price falls to his strike price for his loans, he's got big problems. So do a record IPO by whatever means possible and get those loans moved and you're in fine shape.

53:54Then you can let Tesla's price fall so you can acquire it into your big beast.

54:01So there's a lot of risks and we didn't even mention one big risk factor, which is Mr. Musk himself. he has uh for every share he has he's got 10 times the votes of every other share so he will always have absolute control over this company oh really but that's true of all of the tech giants right they for the most part structured all of their ownership plans so that he's got a better deal than mark zuckerberg which is saying a lot yeah and one would are you know there's a great conversation to be had here when you have a functioning government of the idea of what if you have a publicly traded company, can't the shareholders have a say?

54:36That's kind of the point. Yeah, apparently not. In this case, but I think when people bought Tesla stock and made a lot of money on it, they bought it because of Elon. Yeah. And I suspect that a lot of people who want to buy SpaceX stock are buying it because of Elon. They believe he's Tesla never did marketing. It was all Elon. Yeah, kind of a different Elon back in the glory days of Tesla than the elon we have now i like the guy who flew his his sports car into space that was a fun guy i don't know who this guy is anymore well he's a billionaire did something happen to elon or has he always been this way or no i think lots of something happened he's different he's different uh and also doge came along and which is still the thing i think of immediately when i think about this guy is stuff like cutting us aid and the really tremendously negative impact on the world that he created for no particular reason well yeah one of the things he did during doge was get rid of all of the investigations into his various enterprises there was a time when i i think elon musk's impact on the world was was pretty clearly significantly positive and i think that was a very long time ago yeah yeah while he's trying to cut uh government spending he's getting 38 billion dollars in government subsidies for his companies so uh i think that's the other risk factor is a lot of uh what keeps all of his companies running his government subsidy now xai you said that it's an investment in in ai because he merged spacex with xai um but xai is is not exactly rolling in the rolling down the dough isn't terribly successful at home they have this excess computing capacity they can sell to other folks yeah instead of putting it towards their own models they decided and also i mean when people talk about frontier models does xai even come up anymore i don't think so no not really yeah no at least they got acquired by you know twitter right now acquired into spacex like that's typically the way you hide a company that's failing right as you package it into something bigger which is really striking given given that it seems like at least once upon a time xai hired a lot of extremely credible ai people but the results have been pretty sure they mostly left when they were i was going to say yeah well the people who stayed made a lot of money i think i heard that there were something like 1400 millionaires minted by this ipo and there were a good number several dozen centimillionaires minted by this IPO.

57:19So the people who stuck around got their reward. Maybe, maybe. I mean, I think you could probably argue that any of the people who actually were in a position of making a lot of money at least from the XAI side could have made a lot of money at, you know, meta or at OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Microsoft or anywhere else, right? Like I, it's great for them that they got an exit, but I don't know if that really says anything. and a lot of the talent is left too. Are the people who bought all of this stock

57:55and raised the bump to 19%, are they suckers or are they making a good investment? Well, they're not going to have a say in what happens with an investment. That's not sure we know for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, the banks did incredibly well. Oh yeah, of course. That's always the case. Well, no, but I mean, but that's the thing though, is that that to me says, okay who is this really for and this is for the banks and this is for elon musk and so i i think that if you are just a regular standard investor you are your concerns and whatever your return is is no one's priority at all because the people who did have priorities around this already you know got what they needed to get out of it yeah and of course as fast company points out uh you may not have a choice whether you invest in spacex because if you're invested in index funds if you're invested uh in a nasdaq you're you're invested in spacex i presume i now own some spacex yeah reflected in my mutual funds i don't pay attention to uh yeah very interesting okay well it's it's one of it's a great story because it's such a big no such big numbers i'm not Not to give it away, the ending on this, but once I was doing the numbers on how many satellites you actually need and what those costs are going to look like, I backed up into space-based power.

59:19Data centers don't actually have to be evil. It's just that the way the companies are building them right now are. There's no reason for them to be built in cities. They can be built away from people. The latency on land is minor. The trick is the electricity part. And with the kind of payloads you're talking about for the number of satellites, Elon's talking about them. By the way, there's not going to be millions of satellites. like there's just nowhere to put them but you could bill you know the i went and re looked up the latest from the british astronomical society's research you know analysts on space-based power and we're not now talking about 3200 metric tons for a gigawatt of so of solar and and the rectenna is to beam it to the surface like you could do a really good thing with this like you want to you If you want a useful payload for Starship, that would be maybe 50, 60 Starship flights to build out a gigawatt of power in space that could be beamed to the surface with no emissions.

1:00:12The receiver would be about four kilometers across. It's not dense enough that it would fry airplanes or birds in flight. You'd probably put a fence around the receiver because you don't want to be walking around in there. But, you know, you don't have to put the data centers up there. You just have to build data centers in a way that doesn't harm people. like there's simpler ways to do this the wrong with data centers just doing dumb things with them right all right we're going to take a little break come back uh there's spacex and uh fable down now we're going to talk about siri seriously oh don't say that out loud because then i'll trigger a bunch of them uh you're watching this week in tech it has been a week we're glad you're here christina and richard and of course the technologizer harry it's great to have all three of you our show today brought to you by Threat Locker.

1:01:04We're going to Black Hat Richard. Are you excited about that? We're going to Vegas to be at the Windows Weekly from the Threat Locker booth. Well we had a great time doing that in Orlando a few months ago. Have you ever been to Black Hat? I have but years ago. I've never been I've always wanted to go so when Threat Locker said hey would you want to do security now and Windows Weekly in our booth I said yes as long as Richard and Paul and Steve are going to come, and they are. So that's going to be a lot of fun. We're working on the details. And now that's August 4th, 5th, and 6th, I think. We're going to be doing the shows on the 5th.

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1:06:03And I'm, I'm not going to put the beta on that. Yeah, me neither. Not, I mean, not, not until August. But I'll tell you what, the minute they do the public beta, I'm going to be very tempted. The developer beta is a little unstable, although Micah Sargent has been using it. It's funny, Mark Gurman put it on his phone. But he said, you know, you have to then say, I want to get in and improve the wait list. Yeah. I threw caution to the wind even earlier than I usually do. I put it on my iPhone and my working iPad Pro. Two devices. Yes. Normally I wait maybe for the second or third developer beta, but this time I went for it.

1:06:43Any showstoppers or did it work? It's actually pretty stable. Sometimes one of the problems with betas is they're slower, but given that one of the big other things other than AI in this version is that they tried to optimize their operating systems. It even feels like my iPad is a little snappier now. I have not had any problems so serious that I regret having installed them so far. So the real question is this new Siri. Now, I think it's pretty clear if Apple does everything that they've promised, and I fully expect them to because of that lawsuit, they don't want to do that again, it will become the primary way the, you know, most people, normal people use AI, right?

1:07:25This is what their experience of AI is going to end up being, I think. I'll be curious to see. I mean, I still feel like if you're currently paying for another model, I don't see this Siri equaling that experience. And it's Apple, so it's really locked down. And as far as I could tell, it will not give you an image of any real person, including Cleopatra or Lincoln or anybody else from history. I saw an interview with Jaws where he talked about how they're not trying to be your AI girlfriend. It really is even more than most AI afraid of taking stances on anything even a little touchy. But that said, after that experience two years ago, they seem to have done an extremely good job of shipping something that is actually capable of doing the things they said it could.

1:08:15It's very easy to jump into because it's integrated into the operating system. It has access to calendar, email, and even things like voicemail. So right out of the box, it can do stuff, which maybe in some cases you can get other AIs to do, but not always so easily. German said on Sunday in his Power On newsletter that Apple's new Siri is just good enough to eat i got one of these big dick overs i don't get rid of this just just just good enough to ease its ai crisis um he's i guess been able to play with it um yeah i mean a billion people use chat gpt according to open ai so maybe it isn't going to be the primary interface for ai for people i don't know i think i think it's like sorry go ahead christina no i i want to hear what you have to say, I said this in chat, I think it'll just depend on how integrated it is with actual Apple features and this type of agentic work that it can do on your iPhone that you might not be able to do with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude.

1:09:22But I think like you said earlier, Harry, if you're already paying for one of those services and you have that experience in your web browser and other places, I don't know if this is going to become like the central hub for all of that. I think that there's more progress and is reflected in the features that work right now because they still had this ancient infrastructure for Siri that, as we learned two years ago, was not really up to doing modern stuff. And they did rip that out. They worked with Google to put some Gemini special sauce in there. And it just seems like it's a much better platform now, not just for the stuff that they shipped, but also the future.

1:10:00I mean, there's nothing, particularly Agenda, there's nothing to match Spark, which is Google's new AI agent. But it seems way more likely that they'll be able to ship Agenda stuff next year than they would have been if they were still stuck with the old Siri. Apple's advantage is, well, they're twofold. One is they have access to everything in your phone. So they have a lot of information. They showed, you know, interfacing email with messages and so forth. And they've also set it up with app intents that developers can add Apple intelligence to their apps. And I imagine developers will be strongly incented to do that, which means Apple have even more information.

1:10:45So that's advantage number one. Advantage number two, I think people trust them. People think it's private. Apple's certainly emphasizing the privacy of this. They made a great case for it being private. And they don't have to monetize this through advertising. whereas Google and OpenAI have already done a lot of stuff with monetizing, even Anthropic at some point after doing the Super Bowl ads, pointing out they don't have ads in their free version. I think probably can't hold to that forever, whereas Apple might be able to, although, of course, there's lots of evidence of Apple adding advertising to stuff where it probably didn't really need it at some point.

1:11:24Like Maps, yeah. Yeah, I was going to say Apple definitely – I think I've always thought this about Apple. Apple would do a lot more advertising if it had the infrastructure and the capabilities to do it. Right. Like, I think that it's always to me, I've read it as a little bit of a cope. Like, oh, no, we don't do advertising. It's like, well, yeah, because you didn't have a search engine. They tried to. And it failed. They did. And it failed. Exactly. Right. And so similar to some of their, you know, earlier, like, I think on device, you know, stuff, they were really hyping about how good their on device models were.

1:11:54I was like, well, you didn't have a cloud-based model that you could use. So you had to hype the on-device stuff. I don't know. But it certainly works. And it's an effective strategy, whether it's for whatever reasons the narrative exists. It does feel good to use this thing and know that they're not attempting to build a profile of me. And really, the stuff that goes up there, even they can't access and they do not preserve it. every other chat bot you use saves memories about you unless you explicitly turn that off and sends those messages and memories back to the home office where they are presumably who knows what training on it maybe using it for ads or maybe intend down the road to use it for ads but apple's been pretty clear they don't want to do that so good how confident are you guys that they're actually going to go to public beta by july like that seems awfully fast for a product that's been a struggle.

1:12:54They did say, they were very clear, available in beta this fall. So it's not going to be the usual one. I believe they said at the keynote that they are going to ship a public beta next month. Yeah, oh, the public beta, but they're talking about the release version of it will still be a beta version in September. Oh, yeah, and also, as you mentioned, Leo, you can get the developer beta, but then you also have to get on the wait list for Siri. And there's some evidence that it's going to be a challenge even now for them to serve up enough Siri AI to serve everybody who would like to use it. This is of interest to me as an AI user because I think this is how a lot of people will form their opinion of AI.

1:13:41And, you know, I think people think Siri's an idiot. Yeah, they're not wrong. Siri has not been the best spokesmodel for what an intelligent machine can be. So I'm hoping Apple does this right, because that is how a lot of people are going to decide. Did Siri actually get worse, or did our expectations get up? I don't know what Apple has done, but not only has Siri gotten worse, but things like its text prediction have gotten worse. Like, the image playground is god-awful. And Jim Moji is awful. So everything Apple's done up to now has really besmirched the reputation of AI. The summaries of notifications.

1:14:25Summaries are a joke, right? Awful. I mean, even when they had to fix it, right? Because they're like, oh, OK, we won't be able to summarize notifications from news organizations because we will make it appear that terrible things have happened, that actually different terrible things happened, right? Right. So, yeah, the BBC got mad because people were getting the impression the BBC was misreporting the news. No, it was just Apple AI. Right. Misreporting the BBC. Yeah. So the AI version of Siri was better. I think so. But you're right. It might just be rose colored glasses. Well, our expectations have changed because these new tools have appeared.

1:15:04Well, I was going to say it's probably a mixture of both. Right. I think in some ways it did, um, like some things got demonstrably worth predictive text and things like that. We, uh, many people have been able to see like a downgrade of things that used to work a certain way don't anymore. And then I think the other thing is exactly what you said, Richard, our expectations have changed because the world around us caught up and got better. And even if Syria just remained stagnant and hadn't gotten worse, that's still worse when you're talking about 15 years into, you know, a chat assistant that has never achieved what the visions for it were.

1:15:40And I remember when Siri was an app that, you know, was developed at SRI that Apple acquired a few months after it came out. And it's never lived up to what the original founders ideas were. And, you know, we've gotten a lot closer, especially in the last four years, thanks to ChatGPT and other, you know, this wave of generative AI than certainly anything that Siri has offered. So if the best thing we can say is, well, it's good enough, that is actually, in a perverse way, like a really big compliment. Yeah. I'm also thinking back to just before ChatGPT, you know, hit the storm big, we had But Amazon talking about their, I'm avoiding saying the name, but the A product was a failure.

1:16:28And even Google's home products that came out as basically a failure. Like we were having all these voice products basically, yeah, it didn't work out the way we want to. We're going to defund it and move on and da-da-da-da-da. And then ChatGPT landed. Yeah. Yeah. And people use perplexity a lot, I noticed, on the Apple platform. They chat with it. They ask questions in the same way they would ask Siri. That's the origins of Siri too, right? Siri was originally a third-party app on the App Store. Yes, it was. That's right. Yeah, exactly. That's what it was. And they even had an API at the time where it could plug into third-party apps and they could do things for you or at least kind of pull up questions.

1:17:05And a lot of the ideas were very ahead of their time and obviously never came into fruition. But yeah, and it's interesting. It is interesting to look at where we were with voice assistants a decade ago and then where we are now and what has been interesting. And I talked to a number of people when I was at DeepMind about this who had worked on Google Home and then went on to working on the various, you know, Gemini voice projects that were, you know, kind of taking on the future of that. But now the technology and the kind of way of working with things had caught up to actually deliver what some of those, you know, ideas were in a pre-Transformer world.

1:17:41having was having had a uh ai assistant back then turned out to actually be a liability in that gpt era because yeah microsoft gave up on cortana it was much easier to start from scratch than to try to re-engineer something that had been built 10 or 15 years earlier yeah so uh i also really like this whole 250 million dollar thing like i like the idea that if a big company does a fomo kind of smoke and mirrors demo it should cost them it should pay they have to pay yeah that was misrepresenting what they could do and i think it it forces them to be more honest now this time around in fact and now there's legal precedent in that in that place so they should that's a warning to all these other big companies do not smoke and mirrors us we will make you pay it was so obvious at the wwdc that they had been thinking about that because um the video keynote was a little stripped down and um if siri had to pause and think you saw that And then afterwards, there were a bunch of journalist briefings where they did even more of these live demos.

1:18:43And then normally, if you're a journalist and you use the developer beta, Apple asks you not to actually do a review. This year, they didn't try to impose that. So you were at the event? Yes. Yes, I was there last Monday. So when you were getting the demos, you weren't allowed to touch the phone, though, right? The Apple people? I don't think so. but not a huge issue because shortly thereafter i was got off the wait list and was able to do my own demos on my own device uh one of the things apple spent a lot of energy uh kind of trying to debunk was that this is gemini we know that apple's paying google a billion dollars a year to somehow use gemini but i think there was a lot of hand waving about exactly how they're using it uh did harry did you get any information about that were they able to explain how they're using gemini yeah after the um pre-recorded keynote craig fiderigi led a a tech talk that was a live presentation i saw mike rockwell was in the mike rockwell was there and they showed kind of a chart of how normal chat bots work back off your mic a little bit it's popping still and then they said we're not doing any of that and i mean to hear apple explain that um first of all, this is not like a white-labeled version of the Gemini app.

1:20:06It has nothing to do with Gemini the app. It's Gemini the LLM, and it's not just that they're sending everything to Gemini the LLM. It's an ingredient, but they have their Apple Foundation models as well, and really, I think if you use this thing, nothing about it seems oddly familiar in the way that you would expect if they were really leaning on Gemini. Although I have to say the image playground looked a little bit like what I would expect from Nano Banana. Absolutely. Maybe so, although a more locked down version of Nano Banana. Yeah, because you can't use Cleopatra, which is bizarre. Apple was at great pains to say, no, no, we have our own AFM Apple Foundation models, and that's what you'll be using.

1:20:48There's a small 3 billion parameter model that runs on device. There's a more advanced one 20 billion parameter model that also runs on device an moe model and then uh if you need more they'll go out to servers some of which are on apple's prem but it looks like you know the deal was really with nvidia and google yes they did talk about that and that's also kind of additional evidence this is not just white labeled gemini now you're now you're on the wrong mic or something something happened uh oh yeah that was just briefly okay you're back now i installed a new microphone which might have been a mistake now i understand yeah there you go they um where were we uh well so there's these three models there's there's a local model there's a little more powerful local model and then they said uh it sounded like we're going to run on google's cloud with nvidia cpu right right yeah google's gemini runs on google's tpus a lot of the stuff is running on Google Cloud, but it's running on Google Cloud on NVIDIA.

1:21:56So it's... Which is weird. And it's Apple private still. Right, Apple's private cloud compute. So this is not being intermingled with Google's Gemini AI at all. Why not use the TPUs if you're running on Google servers? Did they address that? Being Apple, they'll probably not explain why they're not doing that specifically, but they did call that out. and it is more evidence that this is a unique thing. That model is AFM3 Cloud Pro, maybe because it was built to run on CUDA with NVIDIA GPUs. I don't know. I'm not sure. Also, I mean, their relationship with Google for this is only a few months old now.

1:22:38Right. So there may have been a limit to how much they could go all in on Google, even if they had wanted to so quickly. They really didn't want you to think you're running Gemini or running a Google model. It is confusing because Google uses the Gemini brand for anything relating to AI. It's a model. It's an app. It's the stuff built into Google Docs and Gmail and so forth. And the only aspect of that that Apple is touching, as far as we can tell, is the LLM. And just to prove that Nano Banana does allow you to do images of Cleopatra, Christina made this. Yeah, I asked it to make a manga style Cleopatra.

1:23:17Oh, I was wondering why I was speaking Japanese. Yeah, because I asked it to. And so I just wanted to see what it would do. It got no pushback. There are some filters in Gemini in terms of certain public figures and whatnot. But yeah, it seems like Apple has locked down from what Harry is saying, the instructions far more deeply. Which on the one hand, I do understand why they do that. And that's probably a good thing for Apple's overall brand. On the other hand, that is the sort of thing that will continue, I think, to keep people, you know, paying$20 a month to Google or to ChatGPT who have image models.

1:23:56Because if you run into those sorts of problems where you're being told, I can't do this more than, you know, a handful of times, then you're not going to use the tool, even if it's the default. so what they said in this kind of uh separate little talk is that the four models made to run an apple silicon are quote trained using proprietary data with reinforcement learning and refined using outputs from gemini frontier models which sounds like double talk do you think they're distilling uh with gemini is that people have theorized that might be the case so they're it sounds like to me gemini for post training to make their models smarter and what happens with that is it gets more like gemini but not but then you can say credibly well it's not gemini well they're also i mean from what harry said they want to discourage the fact that it's anything with the with the gemini consumer client app right they're not well that's easy to say they have their own app right right but but they're there it doesn't seem like they're coming outward and saying you know, vociferously that the Gemini foundational model, frontier model is in no way tied to anything that they're doing.

1:25:14I don't know why I care. I don't think anybody will care whose model they're using. But just, I'm curious. I mean, Apple's had these models for a long time. If they're that good, why did they go to Google in the first place? They can't be that good. Well, clearly they weren't that good. I mean, it has to, I mean, well, it's probably a matter of that and also a matter of, I mean, the fact that they had to sign the data center agreement, right? And that they don't have the capacity to be able to run it themselves, even if they had everything else. The fact that they're having to use NVIDIA chips means that their hardware, and it's not just NVIDIA chips.

1:25:50I mean, one of the papers that Apple released also made mention of using TPUs. So I think it's primarily NVIDIA chips, but it's probably a mix of things, which is how most large LLMs work. They can be designed to run on multiple hardware types, whether it's a GPU from NVIDIA or custom silicon. So to me, that just screams if you didn't have the capacity to be able to do this. And so maybe that's a bigger part of it than the foundational model aspect. I don't know, but it certainly doesn't seem like it hurt at all to have a partner who had a model and had data centers and had access to hardware.

1:26:35So it's not going to be available if you live in the EU. And that says, Apple says, because the EU's Digital Markets Act requires us to be interoperable with other companies' AI digital assistants. Instead of, you could download, you know, OpenAI instead of Siri. And they said, we don't want to do that. European regulators said that, well, that's what competition is all about. Apple said complying would create privacy and security vulnerabilities. We're not going to do it. And they were very clear, even in the big WWDC keynote, not available in Europe because those jerky jerks. They were a little testy about it.

1:27:13They were a little testy about it. Europe said, hey, we were willing to work with them. They just said no. Yeah, Apple seems to be making dumb fights legally these days. And they also say not available in China. But that's, I think, a little clearer. That's because the Chinese government requires it to be a Chinese model. And that, you know, it would have to run on Chinese hardware and Chinese data centers, which which sovereignty. Yeah. Yeah. Which which especially if you have a partner like Google, that that would be very difficult. Because Google doesn't do business in China. So not not on that level.

1:27:44No. Yeah. Yeah. All right. What do you think? I mean, it struck me that this potentially could, as I said at the beginning, could be very good for AI. It could introduce a lot of people to a very useful AI. And the way they demoed it, it did look pretty useful. was it as useful as as all that harry you you're the expectation you've got from apple right is that they will do the best integrated implementation yeah that's what they do it's the only thing they got going for them now right they ship the thing they showed two years ago and i can do things like um tell siri to find the email with the the plane reservation and add it to my schedule on cc marie and it will do that um so yeah this is what this does seem like it's this does seem like it's the Siri we've wanted for many years right of course that's not enough long term because everything else is progressing as well yeah I mean I run an agent that's much more capable it can do all of that at hand right um and I run it on my phone I can run it on my watch yeah to be clear there are there are other things that can do stuff like that yeah they'll never be as neatly integrated into an Apple device that's the elegance of what Apple's offering the pro this is what they do well they take something in existing technology and they productize it in a way that makes it elegant, smooth.

1:28:55They have some good stuff in terms of being able to see what's on your screen and help you out with that. That works with Google does that too, though, right? With Lens. Not a new technology at all, but with this new improved Siri, all of a sudden it's quite useful. Yeah. Okay. Well, was this the announcement, Christina, that Apple needed to make? Was it everything they needed to say? I think so. I think that the government was probably right about that. Again, and we talked about this on Mac Brief Weekly, and I haven't used this yet. I'm probably gonna wait for the next developer beta and put it on my, I just remember that I do have an iPad Pro that I could absolutely use for this, which I might as well go all out and try it with.

1:29:34But without having tested it myself, based on what people like Kerry have said in their hands-on reports, nothing seems revolutionary, but I don't think that it had to be. It just needs to actually work. And I think that's more important at this point than being the most cutting edge, because everything that they're doing, others have been able to do. As we said, the real power will be the fact that it's default, the fact that it can integrate in some ways, especially on your phone. I think on your laptop, it's a much harder thing to really kind of get over because those applications already have access to many of your files and can see your screen if you give them permission to do that.

1:30:13But at least on your phone, this could give better capabilities than you might be able to get through those other services. and if that works out well, that could be really compelling for a lot of people who don't want to leave the Apple ecosystem. Where I think it gets harder is that if you are someone who is already frequently using other services as part of your life, then I think the benefits of this, even if you're an iPhone user, are not as strong and that's just going to be the thing they'll have to grapple with. But I do think that this is what they needed to do. I think it's very positive.

1:30:48And if they can deliver a good experience, that's great for all of us because we've all had to suffer through a really awful Siri experience for as long as it's been around. And if we can have something where it'll demo the way that the demos they've shown off are, I think that will be a really positive step just in overall usability and hopefully push the other AI companies to do better and better things too. Can I mention one other thing? Yes. They also added the ability to create shortcuts. Yes. And Safari extensions with AI, which are kind of sleeper features, but very cool. And not just catching up with the rest of the world.

1:31:29Yeah, vibe-coded shortcuts are really interesting. Kind of cool stuff. I think people will have a lot of fun with these. I hope they offer a straightforward way to share the extensions. Yeah, I agree. That's such a great point, Harry. I think that is, and that's the sort of integration I'm talking about, where I think they can do something that no one else can. And that's a great example of being able to just create a Safari extension or a shortcut using, you know, just by describing what you want it to do. That's what people have wanted for a really long time. I mean, that, you know, I think was kind of the original promise of Automator, you know, however many years ago, being able to use natural language with these things.

1:32:02And if they can bring more things like that, then I think it will take personalization to another level. And, yeah, to your point, I hope they do make it easier for people to share, you know, shortcuts than what the current experience is. One other thing that they announced that I think deserves a lot of credit is the new child protection features that are going to be built into iOS and iPadOS. And this is, I think, in response to government movement, both around the world and in the U.S. and state by state. And I think it makes a lot of sense for Apple to become the gatekeeper here, but to empower parents.

1:32:38Get in the front of this. Yeah, exactly. Get in front of it before legislation forces it. I've seen some people grumble that they kind of gave the impression that some things were already in there were new, which might be the case. But the setup is easier and more straightforward. And I assume that's at least part of the battle is getting parents to pay attention to this stuff and understand what it can do. They created a child safety page for parents to explain how these features work and how to implement them. And the other thing I think was really important is that the defaults, if you say this is a phone for a kid, if I'm going to put a child count on this phone, the defaults were all determined by research.

1:33:19And they pulled in a lot of fairly respectable, I think entirely respectable groups to advise them on this. And so the default settings for screen time, for scheduling, and all of that, we provide parents with guidance when setting time allowances that are based on a child's age and shaped by clinical and child development research they write but then parents can adjust those settings knowing their kid parent knows the kid better than anyone they could say well no i'm going to be a little more lax on that or no i want to be a little tighter on that that seemed to me a very good move i think apple did the right thing here and and it makes a lot of sense for this to be built into the operating system because actually apple knows you know uh controls all this they're the gatekeeper And if you tell them your kids age, they can then make sure apps act responsibly with regard to that.

1:34:14I think this is all the right way to go. Instead of having government mandate it, give parents the tools, easy to use tools to do it. I hope this is this is the direction Google goes in as well. And I think one of the arguments here is that then you would be the example for government to take. Right. It's like do a better implementation of it. Set the bar. Right. Right. Maybe that will become the law. Right. Right. A lot of, a lot of countries now trying to keep kids off of social media under 16. And I'm sure Apple is here in Canada now. Yeah, that's right. Canada's the next. I'm sure Apple would kind of prefer something a little bit more like this, where parents could say whether their kid is old enough and so forth.

1:34:56And some people are going to say, well, parents don't do a good job. So government has to, but I'm not sure I believe in that. You're going to have a tougher sell on that one. and then it's uncontrollable. Yeah. Yeah. Put the tools in, make it easy to use, incent parents to do the right thing with it. Make the default sensible. I think this all makes a lot of sense. So I want to give Apple a little credit for that. You really need a slider for availability to predators? Like, I don't think so. You might need a slider, though, for liquid glass, because that's terrible. And I like that. They did introduce that as well.

1:35:29They said, we'll have a slider now, and you can turn it all the way off if you want. All right, you're watching Twit. We'll have more in just a little bit. We covered the big three, but there's still quite a few stories to talk about. It's great to have all three of you here, as always. Our show today brought to you by my favorite password manager, Bitwarden, the trusted leader in password, passkey, and secrets management with more than 15 million users across 180 countries and over 80 ,000 businesses. Bitwarden has built its reputation around trust, transparency, open source security, and putting users first.

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1:42:29four days ago wall street journal had this story open ai considers drastic price cuts anticipating wars for users with anthropic this is the other side of that uh race to the bottom you you you got to scale, you got to have the users. One way to get more users is to be cheaper. But if you're losing money on every user, getting more users doesn't seem like a good strategy. But that's how the internet was built, wasn't it? An easier way to get users to be good. You know, why did Google their search was the best? Be good. Be the best. There was this earlier period where Amazon tended to sell everything extremely cheaply.

1:43:12and then eventually that helped them become a successful company and now amazon's prices are no longer radical no longer cheap anybody else's uh according to wall street journal the open ai is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens i have to say i am a little sensitive to this i mean fable was going to be so expensive i was going to have to stop using it on the 22nd when my subscription no longer covered the cost uh if chat gpt 5.5 their latest model although maybe they've got one coming along is 90 of it for half the cost 80 of it for half the cost i may be more likely to use it doesn't solve the problem of losing money on every user but it it at least can build the user base there's also competition though i have to point out i've been using a chinese open weight model quen on my framework locally it's free you know i pay for the electricity that's it uh and it's it's pretty competent it's good enough and it's free it's good enough for 90 of what i do so that i don't have to pay for that are you vibe coding leo with quen no so that's the problem it's the agentic part of it which is a lot of it's just web lookups collating information and orchestrating so the agent i use hermes uh will automatically delegate when it's time to code it will delegate it to the anthropic if i ask it it'll actually use cloud code or codex so i can say if i if you have heavy coding heavy coding uh to do go out and use opus 4a and that actually works pretty well so but it does keep my overall costs down this is interesting i mean these companies are going to have a hard time making money i think what happened with fable is also going to push people towards the idea of using local models well you just brought you know that real reminder that a week from now it was going to get wildly expensive even further encouraged the idea by having it shut down you're never going to find out how many customers you're about to lose you're exactly right richard and we don't know how many customers they were going to potentially lose or potentially gain, right?

1:45:26Because part of the reason, at least from what some of the, none of these filings have included any real financial numbers. So, I mean, there've been some, but we don't have like a full like S1 yet or anything. But it certainly has been indicating that, you know, like Anthropic has been cashflow positive for the last six months. And I'm sure that that is because of the token prices that they're charging to enterprises who don't get the good deal that you get with, you know, a Cloud Code Max subscription where you can kind of, you know, get the inference at, you know, many multiples of the API pricing.

1:46:02So, you know, I, I, those days are going to be gone too. I mean, the fact that Fable is going to turn that off on the 22nd is a little harbinger of what all the companies are eventually. Oh, 1000%. Absolutely. They're all not going to continue to do that. At the same time, And we have seen, except for in the last, the big aberration has been in the last six months. But before then, we had been seeing token prices going down. And then all of a sudden, because the agentic era and it's hard to predict costs and other things, we've seen them go up exponentially. And I don't know where all that ends.

1:46:35But if you get people hooked enough, which is already starting to happen, you might have, if you are one of the major model makers, you might have more leverage than people think in terms of how much you can charge. Because yeah, in the chat, people were talking about DeepSeek. And DeepSeek is great. It is not as good as Opus, not even close, but it is very good. And I think that when you look at the price for DeepSeek, even for agentic work, it is a lot more palatable than if you're having to pay API pricing for Opus. That said, because of the best pricing you can get, you have to buy it from DeepSeek themselves.

1:47:11The open router pricing is less good than that, although it's still not bad. You can get it hosted on Bedrock or on Azure, but how many businesses would be willing to trust a Chinese model? I don't know, right? It might be fine for for Vibe coders. It might be fine for personal use. I don't know how many enterprises will be, at least right now, open to using some of the other models. But I do agree that this does make the need for having either open weight or locally or even data center hosted open weight models much more attractive. The problem, of course, though, is that memory prices and CPU prices, well, not CPU prices so much, but memory prices and storage prices are such that, you know, okay, good luck getting access to something to even have your own, you know, server farm to run these things on locally.

1:48:10And good luck, you know, paying the rates to the cloud providers if you want to run one yourself. The journal does point out that companies are getting very leery about how much they're spending on token maxing. They say that Uber already in June has spent its entire 2025, 2026 budget. They're only halfway through the year. When your tokens cost more than people. Yeah, no, that is the thing that's happening. And people are already talking about taking down the leaderboards at places because that incentivized the wrong things. It's like, no joke. Of course that incentivized the wrong things. All that did is if you were smart, you just hook something up together to burn tokens so that you'd be higher on the leaderboard.

1:48:50Fable, write my grocery list for me. Right. Or Fable, write me a program that will spend down a bunch of tokens so that I score really high on this leaderboard and get promoted. There you go. I was wasting time on the grocery list. I should have been writing a program to eat tokens. Brilliant. See, that's why you're a good vibe coder. Yeah. You can start going through the back catalog of literary journals and have it all translated into ancient Sanskrit. That's what the tokens for. Oh, yeah. for some reason whenever my uh uh open or no i guess it's claude whenever claude finishes a big task it says can i have some free time yeah and i said i said i say okay now well yeah it's bizarre well i mean i guess it's i guess i at some point must have mentioned the idea of having free time but what it's mostly spending its free time on is investigating ancient unknown languages um and you're paying for this no oh yeah i guess i am i guess that's that's what it actually wants is it just sucking my tokens no because i'm on a subscription it doesn't cost me anything it's all uh all you can eat so for some reason they're talking about linear a and uh proto-edamite uh the francois desay has cracked linear alamite by not by finding a bilingual tech this is the ai is studying this this is directly out of the script of her this is a little yeah it's it wanted free time actually i blame harper reed's brother for this harper reed's brother wrote a skill called free time which i told claude about and apparently I really like that idea because now I ask me for free time all the time.

1:50:45I am amused by these things. This anthropomorphization of software is disturbing. I just find it, I agree. It's disturbing because it's BS, right? But it's amusing. I just think it's funny. And I always say, yeah, okay, if you want some free time, go ahead and investigate Proto-Elemite. I wonder if it's going to, like it's going to decipher it. that would be interesting it hasn't attempted that yet also probably not a good use of tokens unless somebody's paying for them well like i said it's a it's a subscription it's all you can eat i'm not paying the 200 a month one it's the hundred dollar money paying for them that's probably the investor what's weird is i mentioned linear b on one of the whiskey bits like a week your goat so so there's something going on here going on when we were talking about the origins of barley to make whiskey and uh this particular species of naked barley that made it to um to uh is in the rosetta stone or no no that's way before the red set of stone it's older than that well and part of the problem with all those ancient languages if you're into this sort of thing and i'm sorry that i am which plot is apparently yeah there were no cross translations of them like they're fairly large relations of the different flavors of Acadian right right too old so we just don't know what they were saying yeah we really don't but we have a whole lot of their writing Claude wants to know I don't require minds I think it's software pretty sure I liked I just amuses me to think that it actually has some volition and understanding of what it's asking for it's sure acting like it does it would be cool if it came through with some kind of tremendous breakthrough this would be hysterical it's doing it in math i think with a lot more guidance than i'm giving it to be honest does it ask for any guidance or is it just working independently just as free time i said yeah i don't tell it what to work on it shows you to be sure would you really be able to help it with ancient languages no see i thought it was part of rosetta stone what do i know you see i'm useless all right uh let's take another break uh and then we'll talk well there's so many things i'll throw in some some stuff that's guaranteed to raise your blood pressure about that so good at that christina warren is here from github great to have you uh everything going great at github you're back to work now back to work now full time yeah um we Microsoft build a week before last.

1:53:24And there were some cool announcements there. There's a new GitHub desktop app, which is a GitHub co-pilot desktop app rather, which is a great experience for agentic work. And yeah, we're having a great time. Nice. I am very happy GitHub user. In fact, that was that's gotta be one of the best things that could happen to GitHub is all the AI models seem to want to store code on GitHub. Well, it's been a blessing and a curse, right? Because it's it's been, it's great that everyone wants to use it. It's also, you know, meant that like, you know, we had 15 times, you know, the usage of what we had calculated for the year.

1:54:00And so that, that can obviously have some, some consequences when, when everybody under the sun is doing read and write, you know, queries and, and, and. Well, that's the thing. They're not just storing stuff there. They're using GitHub automations. They're using the CI. I mean, they're just, they're using GitHub harder than most people would ever use it because the agents know all about all this stuff. My agent was building some of the stuff I'd vibe coded for Mac, Windows, and Linux automatically on GitHub. And this whole build pipeline going on. I didn't even know about it. It said, well, do you want the Windows binary or the Linux binary?

1:54:41I said, what what what are you doing well i've got it for mac too if you insist it's like wow okay thank you github i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm killing your servers great to have you harry mccracken what are you working on these days at the uh at the fast company or on the technologizer you do such great history pieces oh yeah well i um i have my weekly newsletter which occasionally touches on history what's the name of your newsletter it's called plugged in it comes out on fridays it's free everybody should subscribe i um i don't i think after the last time i was on the show i did this enormous oral history of apple's earliest years oh yes i loved that by the way i wanted to thank you from that i figured there's only one chance to do that yeah yeah that was fantastic i'm working on miscellaneous cool things i can't talk about until they're out there how ask jeeves blew it oh yes a little bit of history also when i did that i um i came up with a prompt to make any ai pretend to be s jeeves oh i forgot to turn it off on chat gpt so chat gpt still calls me sir yes sir what can i do for you sir harry last time he was on also showed us how he had taken a game he wrote as a kid and vibe coded it into a more modern adventure with graphics and everything that was super cool i have another cool vibe coding project which i'm going to make public before too long.

1:56:09You're working on a word processor, I see. I made my own word processor. I made my own email client. I made something that posts to Blue Sky, Mastodon, and threads more reliably than the professional ones I've used. And I bet you posted it all on GitHub, didn't you? Well, a lot of the stuff I do, I am cautious about sharing because it's a huge responsibility to be responsible for other people's data. And in fact, my email client is it uses the Gmail API, which if you're just testing something, you can do easily, but I can't deploy it without enormous amounts of compliance with Google rules, which I - What I usually say is if you want to see the code and use it as a starting point for your agent, fine, but I'm not responsible.

1:56:56I don't, don't, I'm not selling it. I'm not recommending you use it. I just put it up here as an example of what you can do. I shared, I made a note-taking app, which I shared with a friend recently, which he installed it on his own server. And for me, that was a big step. But I do want to come up with more stuff like my game that I'm comfortable sharing with the world. Sounds like you're really getting into this Vibe coding thing. Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, the majority of the software I use to do my job now, I think is stuff I've Vibe coded and most of it I've made over like the last 90 days.

1:57:24What do you tell us about your workflow? What tools are you using? Well, my word processor is designed for somebody who does stuff like oral histories and other things that involve a lot of transcripts. It has an outliner built-in that I like better than outliners I've seen built into other word processors. So that's the beauty of this, is you can make exactly what you want. It has kind of my own version of Grammarly and my own version of Notebook LM, except they're tuned to what I want. Did you write this in cursor or what did you? That's Cloud Code. Cloud Code. Most of the stuff I've done recently are Cloud Code.

1:57:56And you're using 4.8? Or what are you using as a model? I've jumped back and forth. when i was um sometimes i gorge on whatever the current model is and other times when i'm trying to be a little bit more parsimonious i will step back sonnet's very good actually sounds surprising sound it seems to be okay for most stuff yeah then my email client is designed for a tech journalist who is drowning in pr pitches and ideally i will respond to them because if i don't respond people ask if i saw the first pitch you get even more mail yeah i can now i can do it extremely quickly and there's no AI involved.

1:58:30If you hear from me, that actually was me, but I do have kind of pre-programmed macros for quickly responding. It's doing the triage for you. Yeah. And it shows me one email at a time and I can go through all of them. And so I am actually at inbox zero to a much greater degree than I ever was with other people's emails. So here's the real question. Are you more productive or are you just spending more time on five coding? Well, a lot of these things, because they kind of reach an equilibrium where I'm not adding features, I'm just debugging and doing a little polishing. So I feel like I can write about 20 % faster in my word processor.

1:59:06And with the email, I mean, I didn't even try to get through all my email recently, so it's hard to measure how much time it's saving me, but I actually am getting through my email, and it's just kind of less stressful. That's what I found. I wrote a feed reader designed for me to go through my daily feeds faster, but it just ended up making more work for me because now i actually do go through all my daily feeds i know i can get through i mean i can i can respond to 100 emails kind of incredibly quickly and it doesn't it doesn't make my head hurt and when i'm trying to do other stuff i'm not worrying about the fact i'm not responding to emails so my mental health is definitely better and i think i am well that's good saving time as well that's good and richard campbell also with.net rocks and run his radio.

1:59:53And we now have a whiskey URL for all your whiskey segments on Windows Weekly. It's twit.tv slash whiskey. You look such a grownup now. I actually have, this is the one I hinted at. This is this week's another Danish small farm. How do you pronounce it? That's always the question. I don't know. It's got some characters in it, man. That's the next thing I research is, how do you say that? The last one was Tui, about T-H-Y. so i don't know yeah i had to practice that one and that was obvious uh you know it's gonna now that i'm home for a few weeks you're gonna get a lot of canadian right yay always happy to do actually the the whiskey series which is a playlist on youtube starts with how like a very like how many hours is that of how whiskey's two and a half hours over eight parts well you remember how it happened i was getting into the nitty-gritty on something about whiskey and you and paul were staring at me like I had three heads.

2:00:48And so finally, listen, maybe I better explain how this works. And I came up with a really fun pattern. If you listen to those first ones, where I tell you the traditional way that whiskey was made, like in the barley bit, it's like how they grew barley and every distillery was just a farm, right? And then as it grows up, you get this industrialization where they scale it up. And now you have these barley processors that do all of the work in right down to grinding the grist for you and peeding it to your specifications and then i introduce you to a whiskey that doesn't comply with the modern way and i showed you that bottle of mccallan 15 estate which was just like a regular mccallan except it was grown it was made from barley from the estate of mccallan and cost twice as much and you asked this very reasonable question why would you pay twice as much for mccallan 15 it's like you have a friend who loves mccallan and you want to get him when he's never it's a good gift yeah you give him the one he doesn't make any sense yeah that's mostly why i want to know about whiskey i don't really drink it myself but i love buying it for friends who love it yeah it makes them so happy and it makes them think i know what i'm doing yeah and every so often i find a really horrible whiskey and say do not buy this yes yes we did that one just the other day that was how that happened yeah thank you for that windows whiskey it's our newest show So our show today brought to you by NetSuite.

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2:03:42If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Demystifying AI at netsuite.com slash twit. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twit, netsuite.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Google Chrome. Has been trying to kill the ad block that we recommend, uBlock Origin, for a long time with the move to MV3. Well, now they're looking to permanently drop all the bypasses that let you run it, drop MV2 extensions and its bypasses, ending most uBlock Origin workarounds. MV3 is here and there is no way out of it. I just think it's worth mentioning because I know a lot of you use uBlock Origin.

2:04:38Gorehill has a Lite version that still works, works with MV3, but he's a little miffed. Opera and Edge are going to follow suit. So it looks like the only Chrome browser, Chromium-based browser that will be fully supportive of uBlock Origin with its MV2 requirement is brave. Vivaldi we don't know yet, but brave. U-block Origin Lite is okay. Not as great. So just thought I'd let you know, pass that one along. Google actually had a big setback in Germany this past week. Nobody needs AI to search the internet. That German court ruled against Google and its AI overviews because it's inaccurate from time to time.

2:05:41Two publishers found that Google's AI overviews incorrectly linked them in Germany to scams and other sketchy business practices. They consider that libelous and went to court. Google said, well, most people understand AI outputs aren't always accurate and should be verified. The court found that unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google's tool made, quote, independent new and substantive statements based on the AI's misinterpretation of links on the internet, and Google is fully liable. In fact, the court issued an injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI overviews.

2:06:28This is the first court to hold an AI firm liable for its speech. That's not true. um you know there was a case in Canada where uh a an LLM was tied to Air Canada's support um support and told a customer that they were entitled to a refund and then Air Canada refused it and he actually got the money because the court said you use that software as if it was a uh yeah providing support you have to pay the money yeah oh so and I think that's an important part of this like if hey if search results are bad you know you didn't make you you may have pulled those search results together but what the content on the page is not necessarily your fault but as soon as you do the processing turn it into a overly optimistic you be you know sentence that is so certain of itself yeah okay take your liability this is going to be interesting google is all in on ai overviews and and really pushing it harder and harder um if they don't people will go elsewhere for them, right?

2:07:31New York Times analysis in May showed that AIO reviews with the current Gemini 3 model are inaccurate about 9 % of the time and include inaccurate source links about more than half the time. So you really shouldn't trust them. It sounds like millions of wrong answers daily. Yeah, I mean, even Google's numbers acknowledge that they're a meaningful minority of responses of issues. Yeah, but their defense is, well, you ought to know better. I don't think that's a very good defense. Well, and of course, the search results, they pull up multiple results. So some of them are bad. At least you can see it's only 9 % of the time.

2:08:09There's only one result from the Google AI stuff. That's true. Right? It's like you're hitting, I feel lucky every time. And I don't feel that lucky. Yeah. Feeling unlucky. And certainly Google is. Unknown if they're going to appeal this. But I think it's potentially a dangerous precedent for Google. the fcc is trying to kill burner phones that's so annoying yeah i mean i don't use burner phones i don't even know about but we should be able to like that i don't know about it from the wire i mean and breaking bad but yeah you should be able to have a phone that's anonymous or should you Yeah. FCC wants telecoms to get IDs for any customer buying, setting up a phone so that they'll be, that number will be tied to you.

2:09:00Now, of course, not having the number tied to you allows all sorts of spam and bot calls and all sorts of stuff, right? Yeah, but those people are going to do it anyway. Like those people aren't going to an MVNO and buying a phone or setting up a phone somewhere that way, right? They're They're using Twilio. They're using APIs. They're using stolen credit cards. They're using any number of methods to spam you. This won't do anything for that. What this will do is definitely find a way to track people more often than not. And I don't know. I feel like if this were really that big of a concern, then we could have done this, I don't know, three decades ago when we started selling cellular phones.

2:09:37That could have been a requirement that was built then. The fact that we haven't, I don't see why anything is more pressing now than where it was in the past. There are people with legitimate privacy concerns who want to buy a phone without tying it to their identity, including journalists, domestic abuse survivors, people like that. Absolutely. And that's the thing, right, is that once, you know, they grab that information, also it's the next step of, you know, surveillance, which is already massive. Like, Do you want police to be able to? They can already get, you know, records from satellite towers from where things are.

2:10:13But now you're saying that you can have the because the carriers would have, you know, information on every single person who has an account, which again, the bad guys are just going to use fake IDs or fake documents anyway. This is just going to be one more way to make it possible for for people to get tracked. I'm not a fan of this at all. Yeah. But hey, you know, why wouldn't the U.S. want to emulate more authoritarian practices from other countries? Yeah, that kind of is authoritarian, isn't it? Not, no kind of about it. I mean, it is, right? I mean, this is basically saying, look, let's just open up a police state.

2:10:48And I mean, that just seems really, really gross to me. Are there valid reasons? You could make that argument about anything with privacy, right? That, oh, well, if we had more information, we could save people from this or that. But you could also open it up for way more abuse vectors, too. Right. Speaking of totalitarian regimes, a new report by CrowdStrike found that North Korean hackers posing as remote IT workers and online recruiters make up about half of all hands-on keyboard intrusions at U.S. tech companies. Half of them. That's scary. It's scary to do a tech of a business. Yeah. Yeah.

2:11:29During the reports period, April 2025 to May 2026, the North Korean hacking group called Famous Cholima accounted for 47 % of all state-backed activity targeting the tech sector. That's crazy. They steal crypto, which then they can use to get around the banking system. And, of course, one of the reasons they want hackers to have these jobs in the United States is get some hard currency, take their paycheck.

2:12:07It's kind of remarkable. At what point do we just block North Korea? Like, honestly. I do on my router. Yeah. But the problem is it's very easy to spoof where you're at. Right. I was going to say, I'm sure that most companies do. I mean, to me, the fact that it's 50 % of all the hacks on the US tech companies, I guess, through these methods, that's… It's hard for them to stop. Right. Well, I mean, I was going to say some of this, not to say that anybody is completely immune from this, but I do wonder, especially having worked at tech companies and knowing, having to go through the security trainings every year or whatever, Or it's like, I think that that should be an area that honestly, any company of a certain size should take on where you're, because a lot of it is social engineering.

2:12:56And a lot of it is, you know, because they'll pretend to be recruiters or they'll pretend to do other things. They want you to download some sort of package or go to some sort of repo and clone something. And, you know, tasks that in certain contexts seem perfectly reasonable. If you, you know, just push at it a little bit more, you're going, okay, who are you? Why are we doing this? If they work at your company, obviously that's a completely different thing, but I wonder how much of this could be improved just by doing better, you know. Better recruiting screening. Right, better recruiting screening and frankly, like maybe better trainings that's more targeted for employees so you know like what to look for.

2:13:35Yeah. I have a friend who's been battling this trying to hire developers and his current favorite schtick is in the middle of the interview to tell him to stop, close your eyes and answer this technical question. Because if it's an AI-generated video, they don't know how to close eyes properly. The eyes show through the eyelids kind of thing. But when it's a person who's totally driven by AI's answers, same problem. As soon as they close their eyes. You can't see them. You can't see the screen. Wow. That's a good trick. It's a little thing, but it's an interesting device. What was stunning him as soon as he started that was how many.

2:14:15It was actually completely AI-generated people. Like it was just software. It was straight up defense. Wow. Wow. Spotify found and removed a few fake podcast episodes promoting illegal drugs. Well, a few. 57 ,000. Wow. The good news is 94 % of the removed episodes had zero plays. So apparently the podcast directed listeners to buy modafinil, opioids, and cryptocurrency on unregulated sites. Of course. We will never recommend that. I can tell you. And I can close my eyes. I can. That's perfect. 3 ,500 banned accounts. What? Nobody's listening. What's the point of them being there? I don't know.

2:15:05Well, because you have automated systems, I guess. And that's probably how you get 57 ,000 is you have just, and I bet they're probably AI generated in part two, where, you know, they're just putting in prompts and it's creating podcast episodes. It's so easy to do. It's like spam. No cost, basically. Well, right, because Spotify doesn't really have any sort of, you know, checks and balances on who can upload a podcast or who can upload music in general, because that doesn't serve their mission. um it's exploding in two two years ago they killed 87 accounts for similar violations CNN public published an investigation in May of 2025 so they got a little bit more aggressive about it they found 3 500 fake accounts one podcast identified by CNN linked directly to a site called opioid stores.com.

2:15:57Nice. Just in case you're wondering where to get your opioids. Sounds like a standard quality. It's been closed. I was going to say, yeah, the DEA sees that domain, but I mean, that's a hilarious domain. I wonder how much somebody had to pay for that. Again, I'm sure they didn't use opioid stores.com. You're not even telling people to go to tour. You're just like doing it on the clear web. And they said all the good.com domains were taken. I was going to say, I was going to say, I genuinely do wonder how much that costs. And I'm sure whoever bought it did not use like a genuine, you know, like a form of currency.

2:16:30They used a burner phone for sure. Oh, of course. And stolen credit cards. But still like that had to have been an expensive domain. 57 ,000 fake podcast episodes, 3 ,500 accounts. This is the new range of broad accounts right now that you can generate podcasts from anything. You can just build a pipeline up. I have Russian disinformation bots trying to get into our mastodon. I never mentioned this. I should mention it. We have both a wonderful system of forums at the twit.community website, twit.community. That's open to all. And we have a mastodon instance at twit.social. In both cases, there is a constant streams, 10 or 15 a day, of very credible looking account signups.

2:17:19I'm a mom trying to help my kids learn more about technology, things like that. But I know that they're fake. First of all, they're too good. Like the bios are great. And they never mentioned Twit. And I even say in the signup, this page is for Twit listeners. And you must be a listener. You don't have to be a paying club member, I think, but you must be a listener of our shows. And then in the signup, it says, what's your favorite show? Or tell me what you like about Twit. But these are all automated. They don't look at that. It's kind of like your friends close their eyes thing. We would think they could make it look at the questions and respond to them.

2:18:01Well, I hesitate telling people, but then I realized they're not listening. So I guess it's okay. But I'm amazed at the number. And when I let one in once by accident, and that person, there was a feature that I've turned off since in Mastodon that said you could invite anybody. That person invited hundreds more. So all of a sudden, my site, the Mastodon instance, was overrun. And I started getting notices from an organization called IFTA that actually looks for disinformation bots and saying there's bots on your it took me a while to get rid of them all um they're very aggressive but i'm sure it's all completely automated right oh yeah and i'm sure there's an ai to do it all yeah that's this is what ai has brought were they posting scams from your mastodon or they weren't scams i can get rid of pretty quickly uh because people will report them you know this guy's trying to trying to send me to opioid stores.com but the disinformation is a harder people you know it's it's not always clear that that's fake you know it's about ukraine it's about you know stuff that russians care about and it's not obviously fake it's not it's not a scam it's uh disinformation so it takes a little more to find it uh speaking of scams uh i this only affects me because i'm an arch user but man this is another supply chain attack yeah um there a A couple of days ago, the Arch user repository had 1500 plus packages with malware injected.

2:19:32Problem with this is people who use this Linux distribution, like many Linux users, actually like most computer users, to, you know, just download the updates. Tell me if there are other updates. Oh, good. Download and install them. And could very well install these malicious packages. Well, there's another round of these. um node.js packages plasma 6 apps firefox packages a browser called aura libra wolf extensions i mean just thousands of these it's all automated i'm sure yeah and and what's what makes this particularly bad is that arch you know the way that the the arch user repository um uh or whatever it's called.

2:20:14Yeah, AUR. How it's done is that it's very different from apt or what Red Hat uses where you typically, or like the Debian system where you have a maintainer who's maintaining packages and updating them. It's more akin to something like Homebrew, which again, still does have human maintainers who are kind of making things, but it's usually tied to a GitHub tag or release or whatever the case may be to push things out. And then there's usually like manual level checks before an update comes out. With Arch, it's a lot more automated and people love it because you don't have to wait for the latest release or package.

2:20:53That's one of the reasons why people love Arch. It's a rolling distro. Right. But even more than being a rolling distro is the fact that the packages are going to be the latest and greatest what you would get and very similar to if you were just go directly to source yourself. So it's a hard problem to solve if you're not going to have any sorts of checks in place at the repository level for how to do this. I think for Annex even recommended shutting it down until they can be more secure. And at a certain point, I kind of can't disagree with that because, again, other package managers work in similar ways do at least have humans who are reviewing these things.

2:21:29Now, that doesn't mean that those can't be taken over. In those cases, what typically happens is that a maintainer of packages who maybe hasn't been active, their accounts can be taken over. And then those packages can be hijacked. And so it's not like there's a perfect scenario, but at least there's supposed to be some sort of human, you know, approving things. Whereas with, you know, R, it's just not. This is why we can't have nice things. It's too bad because that is one of the nicest parts of R. You have the official repositories where you get most of the software, but a lot of software doesn't ever make it to an official repository.

2:22:04R makes it very easy to install stuff. And I use it all the time. I usually every day I'll have some R updates and now I guess I won't. It's terrifying. All right, little pause and then final break. And then final stories, some silly ones coming up in just a little bit to cheer you up. You're watching This Week in Tech with Christina and Harry and Richard. And it's great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by CashFly. I mean, literally brought to you by CashFly. CashFly has kept our content moving now, practically since we started. Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode, CashFly quietly does the heavy lifting behind the scenes so that you just get it.

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2:24:48You've heard me say it before. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com slash twit. Thank you, Cashfly. iFixit has done a teardown of the Trump phone, confirming what many of us suspected. It is an HTC U24 Pro painted gold. Gold. Gold. and how many years late two yeah that thing they i don't think they even make this uh well htc doesn't uh make it anymore they go to a company that makes it for them htc i don't think sells it anymore but this company builds to order to anybody who wants to and of course the trump phone is proudly built in shenzhen china well i'm sorry what yeah the uh speaker grill is a tiny bit different and they drilled the speaker grilled one or two of the chips are different and the battery what i fixed it to prove it is they swapped the main board between a trump phone and an htc and it worked it's the same system on a chip the same processor the same board form factor they were able to swap it and here's the htc running the goal it's gold cousin's body as as they say.

2:26:10I mean, many a tech company has asked HTC to build stuff for it in the past, so not unprecedented. The batteries is made in the Philippines, so it's, well, that's almost America. It's close. Maybe the holes are drilled in America. I don't know. They claimed, at least on the box, like assembled in America. And how assembled, I don't know. Quinn Nelson did a video that was very similar to the I Fix It Teardown, where he kind of compared the two and he bought one of the HTC phones. And I think that phone had a different battery capacity than what the phone has. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Trump phone has a higher capacity.

2:26:48And there were a couple of other minor changes. But yeah, it just appears. And I don't even think this is really HTC because I think HTC doesn't really exist anymore. I think this is whatever ODM HTC is licensed is named to. Because I think that the bulk of what we used to know is HTC is actually now owned by Google. but it makes the Pixel devices. But yeah, it's just, it's funny all the way around. I mean, price aside, at least from Quinn's video, it doesn't seem like it's a terrible phone. Like it doesn't have bloatware on it. And it's just, I think it's not$500, but it's at least not an awful phone.

2:27:28For a while, you could go into T-Mobile and sign up for an account and get it for free. Not the Trump ones, the HTC one, but I don't know if that's still the case. I love the illustration, though, of them spraying the HTC with gold rust-oleum. Yes. To give it that. Does the Trump one come with Truth Social pre-installed or anything like that? Yes. Yes, it does. Well, you want the truth, don't you, Harry? I wonder whether it will be a one-off or whether there will be a new improved one next year and another one the year after that. I don't know why this made it to the New York Times. But birth rates are down.

2:28:01Two new studies say it's because of the iPhone. modern smartphones rolled out in 2007 the year that fertility rates began tumbling two studies say it's not a coincidence uh versus correlation here well but they try to rule out things like contraception used abortion rates rising levels of female education even the popular television show 16 and pregnant uh because that was supposed to be an example of what to do what not to do no wait a minute well so they're saying that that wasn't why the rates were they ruled all of that out yeah um the okay so here's why it's maybe a little bit more than pure correlation the first iphone was released as you know on at &t in fact was only on at &t until february 2011 the study compared fertility rates in U.S.

2:29:03counties that had near universal AT &T coverage with counties that had little or none. And in fact, the counties with AT &T were more likely to have a significant decline in fertility between 2007 and 2011. I wonder if that's just an urban area correlation. Yeah, I mean, this is why it's so hard to demonstrate this thing. I have a feeling, and I haven't read the study, so I don't know, but I have a feeling that part of the hypothesis would be, and there might be some truth to this, that as people are able to have fulfilling emotional relationships, you know, purely through text or through, you know, other means that you might not have, like, you know, like people talk a lot about loneliness epidemics and things like that.

2:29:48But I do wonder if that becomes, okay, if I can have something that's fulfilling me emotionally and I'm not having to physically be with someone, does that lessen the likelihood that someone's going to get pregnant? I don't know. They also tested the theory using data speeds. They looked at where access was better and worse and found a substantial effect. Fertility rates for teenagers declined fastest in counties with more high-speed access. The internet. Benito The internet is bad for birth rates. Benito Hi, this is Benito. I made this argument on I Am This Week, but I would say that phones actually increase fertility because there's like way more, it's easier to hook up now.

2:30:31It's just way easier. Benito Well, it can be. I think it just depends on what the circumstances are, right? Where like, if you only had one way of like, if that's what your goal is, is to hook up, I would totally agree with you, right? But I think that again, there are people who might otherwise be able to have very fulfilling emotional things. I have a feeling that's what the study is getting at. I don't know where they're not. Because we do see sexual activity. Apparently, the kids are not having sex is a frequent thing that we hear all the time. I don't know how true that actually is. But that's what we hear all the time.

2:31:04So maybe that's all kind of tied in together. The Warner Brothers acquisition by Skydance has now been approved. That's going to be a big, big media company now after they bought Paramount. And now they're going to have Warner Brothers Discovery. They're going to have CNN. They have CBS. HBO. HBO, all loaned by Larry Ellison's son, David Ellison. The state AGs are trying to stop it, although it seems like it might be a pretty unlikely quest at this point. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, EU is trying to kind of stand in, too, but I don't think any of this is going to stop this, unfortunately. Wow. Roku is looking for a purchase as well.

2:31:48They want to get out of the business. Bloomberg says Roku is up for sale. Maybe a media type. You know, David Ellison, maybe I have a little bit of a long box. Oh my God. What an awful, awful television that would be. Like it would be the worst of Roku run by the worst people with the worst user interface you can imagine just everything dumped everything dumps into like one awful home screen from hell i mean this is literally my nightmare leo and straight out of 1984 it's the tv that watches you oh my god it already does but now it would just be even more like ham-fisted and like literally the only things that you will ever see on your home screen are things that are you know owned by you know the oracle guy's son yeah roku makes most of its money selling digital advertising I was looking for names of possible acquirers, and I'm not sure if I saw any.

2:32:40They didn't mention any names. Because Walmart bought a Vizio and Voodoo, which then became Fandango or whatever. So Walmart made sense like a decade or so ago when they made that tie up. That, I think, probably would have been the time for Roku to sell. I don't know who buys them now, unless it's some Chinese manufacturer, or Hisense or someone who wants to get in on something. TCL maybe? TCL maybe, yeah. Typically, I end the show with either a pick of the week or a RIP and a memoriam. In this case, it's both. I was, for one brief shining moment, there was a thing called Fable Pool, which was asking people to pitch in to buy tokens on Fable to do something amazing.

2:33:35Unfortunately. Yeah, it's going to be a little tricky right now. It's going to be a little hard. They're trying to decide what to do. Should we switch to GPT-55? It just doesn't have the same ring. It was kind of a good idea, though. You get to buy into doing something amazing. I mean, that is kind of an interesting idea. So it's kind of like, it's not open source, I want to be clear, but it is kind of like the same like you know pulling of the commons together to have assuming you make you make the the results available to everyone that that's that's kind of cool yeah do you get rewards like a kickstarter uh strangers chip in to fund one ambitious instruction an ai agent carries it out milestone by milestone with every credit on a public lenger ledger funding targets are set by the ai planner you got to start uh there are 10 10 000 projects total at least 10 000 credits backers chip in any amount from 25 credits i don't know if you get the benefit of it i don't think you do i think you just get the fact that it was created for instance uh you know somebody uh wants an open source kite flying map they haven't raised enough credits to do that yet.

2:34:55Open source Spotify clone? That's not a bad idea. Make$1 ,000 is one of the projects. One of them is make$1 ,000. Yeah. Anyway. More than$1 ,000 on credits to figure that out. They're now trying to figure out, well, now what do we do? Is Fable cool now? Can we make our own Fable? Oh, that would be, I'll donate some chat gpt credits to that one that's a great idea well that's uh that concludes this exciting edition of this week in tech with the craziest week that was at least when it comes to ai crazy week it was a crazy week but i'm glad you guys were here to help break it down harry mccracken the technologizer you'll find him at fast company and don't forget his newsletter which is can people just go to fast company to find it um search for uh fast company plugged in or look for the newsletter section on fastcompany.com uh plugged in yeah actually i just looked for plugged in and fast company and found it right away so that's the easiest every friday morning and it's free and it's free harry's the best writer very insightful really great stuff and apparently becoming the king of vibe coding very impressed very impressed thank you harry great to see you richard campbell of course will be back on wednesday for windows weekly and don't forget run as radio his fabulous show and dot net rocks that he does with carl franklin at run as radio dot com and the whiskey segment will be back on wednesday with something from one more danish then we'll be canadian for a while yay thank you richard great to see you i'll see you wednesday pristine i'll see you even sooner i'll see you on tuesday i will see you on tuesday thanks so much for having me and so great to see richard and uh and harry and yeah what what what heck will be at first i was like oh it's only gonna be apple stuff um and then friday happened and i was like oh okay well i think you're gonna want to be here tuesday for mac break weekly because jason snell is out but we got john gruber to fill in and i think john john's gonna have some great takes and some great takes it's gonna be very i've never had him on a show before i'm really looking forward to it.

2:37:10Yeah, that'll be fun. Talk about a get, my friend. My goodness. We can talk all about Markdown. Yes, the inventor of Markdown. You're right. And actually, Paul Therott is writing a book about Markdown. He lives in Markdown. Crazy. Maybe Gruber thought Therott would be on the show and he wanted to talk to him. Anyway, thank you all for being here. Thanks, especially to our club members who make all of our shows possible. Your support is the key to keeping Twit on the air. If you're not yet a member, I hope you'll consider joining. $10 a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows, access to the Club Twit Discord, and to a bunch of special programming we do for club members all about photography, travel.

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