TWiT 1090: Flock of SQLs - Apple & Microsoft Grapple With Soaring Hardware Prices

33:47so jennifer you make an interesting point if this is so dangerous i mean shouldn't the government protect us from it i mean well the government's protecting our kids from social media right like there is so many there is such a fine line between what we think the government should protect us from what it shouldn't and it also depends on who you are whether you think they should or shouldn't but this does you know yeah to my point about the fear there is a fear amongst regular people about ai um whether that it's founded or not there is a concern that this technology is going to go somewhere scary i mean we've all seen the movies And we've seen that these, that the tech companies, I mean, just from in my space, when I talk to tech companies about LLM powered smart voice assistants, and I'll ask them questions like, would it be capable of doing this or this?

34:40And they're like, that's a good question. Why don't you try and we'll see. so you don't know like you don't know what this is going to do in my house yeah you know i get that this is a powerful and exciting technology but before we unleash it on people it need we need to know as as the technology companies need to know what it's going to do and what it's capable of and be able to control it and it feels like we're in a moment and dan i mean you're much better you know positioned to speak to this than i am but i would love to know like is that a moment that we need, that's ever going to change?

35:13Or is this technology always going to be a step ahead of us that that concern? Yeah, I think to your point, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jennifer, but I just want to agree, especially with something you said earlier, that there is a top-down and a tech clash. We saw this with untested technology, just like you've experienced with consumer products in the home. We saw this with consumer products like social media, where they began as fairly simple news feeds. We saw this algorithmic testing on the general public and the expansion of social media into ways that the public is generally or appears to be generally uncomfortable with.

35:53And now perhaps we are seeing a very similar effect happen with the advancement of artificial intelligence where these products are incredibly powerful and the effect that they have are very similar to what you said about smart home devices where will this be good will this help here's my issue with this for one is let's assume that uh you know like i don't know atomic bombs that ai has all this potential for danger uh and so that it's not unreasonable for any government to put some restraints on it. The question, unlike an atomic bomb, AI is very amorphous, you know? And the question is, well, who is going to judge it and how are they going to judge it?

36:43There's also the issue, this is raised by Dean Ball, who teaches AI policy at Yale Law School, is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Society. He, in his hyperdimensional sub-stack, says there's also the issue that there's a side effect when you do this. For one thing, if you take a month to approve an AI, this is moving so fast, you may have actually killed that AI. They need to get to market fast and build an audience because the next AI is coming about a month later. so there you're you're throwing a monkey wrench into a very fast moving machine there's also a much larger issue which is that you might do this in the U.S.

37:38but China and other countries are not holding back the one of the results of the fable rug pull and I'm going to call it a rug pull is that France with its mistral China with DeepSeq and ZAI's GLM model released better models GLM is very very good glm 5.2 uh all of a sudden people are saying oh well you know if the american government can just stop any model i guess i better not use american-made models there's plenty of other choices it's also taught companies uh to not count on american ai like well just like many other things in the united states we don't know what's going to happen next um so there's a real risk this i i it's a it's a very difficult thing to answer because i agree with you jennifer you know maybe these things aren't dangerous i just don't know how we can count on a government especially this government which doesn't really seem to think much of science to determine what's dangerous or not it almost feels as if it's an economic restriction uh as opposed to a technical restriction I don't know.

38:52What do you think? This is a hard one to solve. Ball writes, frontier models are trained at an enormous cost and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the first few post-released months that they're broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work. so that's problem number one you're undermining this entire industry now maybe if you think and as many do uh ai it's bs we don't need ai we'll be better off without it that's you don't see that as a problem i would submit that ai is a very significant technology and its advance is very important to us and we don't want to let others do what we could do better leo are you making i I hear this argument frequently and I don't know where I come down on this argument, but are you, are you aligning with the argument that if we don't allow our models to be the frontier models and the cutting edge models, then we seed that to China and other competitors?

40:14Yes. Yeah. Okay. that's exactly uh you're basically undermining an american industry right it's kind of the opposite of what they're doing with the auto industry they're protecting the auto industry by banning chinese cars well what would happen if you banned american cars you would have a lot of chinese cars in the united states we're that's what we're doing we're banning american models there's also a larger question of can you even prove a model's safety no one has yet made a model it's not jail breakable. So let me ask, you know, something else. Much of our conversation is centered around consumer AI, or at least B2B, in the way that when we talk about AI right now, we think, you know, it evokes companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others.

41:08But earlier in this conversation, We also talked about another use of AI in frame gen in gaming, right? And AI has machine learning applications. We use artificial intelligence at Blackbird in a number of ways that are not consumer focused at all. So is this conversation about AI simply around these somewhat consumer facing and business facing frontier models or is there a broader conversation to be had well there is absolutely i mean this is a very intractable problem to go back to the garage model of technological advance unlike anything we've seen before ai requires huge capital investment and you've got to you know make all these gpus and you've got to build all these data centers there's nobody developed Well, maybe there is, but so far, there's nobody in their garage creating the latest Frontier model.

42:09It's not like Biz and Ev coding Twitter using Ruby on Rails. Right. It takes billions, some might even say trillions. The Fable model, we don't know how much it cost or how big it was. It's estimated it might be 10 trillion parameters, which means it probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars to create. and they don't stop by the way it's like you don't just make it and now it's done you got to make the next one it's that's also that's the the weird issue with all this which is fundamentally is the architecture even the correct approach because all this is is large language models and you just keep throwing more and more power at it and it's this idea that like somehow if we keep doing this, we'll reach AGI.

42:57But we haven't defined AGI yet. We don't understand consciousness. We don't understand intelligence at that level. And so there's a lot of questions about, you know, is this even the right approach, right? There's different views of AI, including more semantic analysis. There's visual analysis. There's all these other components. People like Jan Lacun and Fei-Fei Li say, oh no, you've got to do, you know, you've got to do physical world stuff. And all of that should happen. i'm not saying that shouldn't happen all that and some of that may end up in somebody in a garage coming up with this great new way of doing it but we haven't reached the end of what by the way i don't you don't have to stipulate that we're going to achieve agi or anything it's just that as we have continued to make these models bigger they've gotten better and better and more and more capable and they and i think they've changed a lot of things uh they've changed how chips are made nvidia's uh who is it isn't just announced that they're releasing a chip that's designed by ai and that as that gets better and better it will get better and better as it develops better chips business processes are changing people saying the sas marketplace for business tools is going to die because all of a sudden everybody's writing their own every business i know of is is implementing an AI strategy of some kind, rightly or wrongly, this is fairly important to the economy.

44:22And this is another thing Ball points out. You might actually be bringing on this AI bust that everybody's so worried about. Simply by undermining, you might be creating a market panic. Well, the prices will go down at least. Here's the good news. I think that consumer B2B business and conflict is very real, though. And I think that, I mean, my generation, my children's generation is the sort of loudest voice right now against AI. Like we saw all of the college commencement speeches with people booing the tech CEOs. And my daughter is like violently opposed to anything AI, mainly because she's very creative and she's very opposed to the sort of artist, the way it's potentially stealing artistic jobs.

45:12And she, you know, there is I think there needs to be a distinction here. And I don't know how this comes about, but it's important to I think what's happening in business and technology in terms of how this is helping with processes and helping us develop and create more powerful, more useful tools for technology and business is very different from how it's being unleashed in the regular world. how it's affecting people's regular jobs and what they're doing on a daily basis and and and how they're interacting on a daily basis like use these these llm chatbots that people are now relying on for all their information um and you know some becoming like friends and this is like their main connection to to society is is those types of things that are a different that consumer focus, that consumer-facing implementations of this AI feels very not well thought out yet.

46:15And we're unleashing on people who don't understand it and who are like, wow, suddenly I can do all of this stuff. And where is that going to lead us versus companies and businesses that are implementing this as tools for creating a better workflow? Those are two very different use cases of this technology. I can hear people, some of our listeners, I get emails every week, enough with the AI, who cares? I can hear people saying, good. Yeah, I mean, your average consumer has not seen any improvement from this, right? They see AI slop on Twitter. Right. They see a lot of fake news kind of stuff happening.

46:54Like when AI solves cancer, and of course that's a, you know, broadly speaking, isn't going to happen, of course. But once it starts solving diseases, right, which is what's the promise, then people, I think, will start to come around to it when it starts to actually make your life easier and solves problems for your regular consumer versus, oh, by the way, everybody's going to lose all their jobs in like five, 10 years. We don't know what we're going to do. Like, that's what, you know, from your average consumer standpoint, this is happening to them, not with them. They haven't seen any benefits.

47:28and all they hear is, you know, oh my God, these models are so strong, they're going to completely undermine everybody's jobs. And, you know, we don't need radiologists anymore, right? That famous example. Which didn't happen, by the way. We need more radiologists, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, but I think that's the concern. It's like, wait, are we supposed to be believing these people, right? Or should we not believe them? No one knows how to react. So I think that's the issue. There's a lot of confusion, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah. And these companies benefit from hyping up their models. Like, it's so powerful, it's too dangerous.

48:02We need the government to, like, regulate it. Like a movie trailer. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's the superintelligence AGI hype, right? That we are going to achieve some sort, like, no, what we've really done is build Adobe Creative Cloud. Like, it can replace some tasks and make them a little more efficient. but like we it's not going to cure cancer at least not yet it's not going to do a lot of the things that it was to your point daniel and yours too jennifer it's it is simply happening to people and there is some utility but the hype certainly exceeds uh the capabilities right now and if you look at realistically it's photoshop i would say we'd see we've seen a lot of evidence that some really amazing things could happen which we may never get now because of this fear and that it you know there we won't we may never know because we're just going to end up shutting this whole thing down uh do you really think we will fear i don't know that i think your point daniel about how it it's it's a peak and trough like where people are scared because it's happening them is is very true like i mean this is very a big tangent but it's interesting like what would you say is one of the most hated companies in the this country right now i i would say drug companies have often been at the top list of like we don't like drug companies interesting you say that because that's a similar situation where it takes huge amounts of capital to create new drugs so there was a really interesting article and i want to say it was in the wall street journal and it was about the history of Eli Lilly, which is the company behind Zetbound, one of the GLP drugs, GLP-1 drugs.

49:43Which I am on, I should say, so I will shut up. Well, and the interesting thing was the CEO was saying, you know, we have gone from being, from getting hate mail because there was a big issue around diabetes, around insulin at one point where they had a really low, they had a shortage and it was hard for people to get this life-saving medicine. And so they were getting hate mail from people. And now he says, we get literal love letters from our customers who are like, what you have done has saved. You hate big pharma until it makes the drug that saves your life. That really works, yes. And I feel like that's where we will probably go with AI on an individual basis, as individual people find real value from it.

50:26That will slowly, there'll be a groundswell, if that happens, a groundswell of more popular opinion. and then on a broader scale that's been my experience i've used i as part of my job i've gone heavily into using ai in a lot of ways and it's found it incredibly useful and it constantly impresses me by doing things i never would have thought a computer could do and uh i'm not saying it's alive or conscious or intelligent i'm just saying it's very very effective it's the same big pharma is a really good example because it does take you know you could invent a new drug in your garage it happens all the time but you could never release it because you have to test it you have to manufacture it at the scale there's all it is a capital intensive industry uh there's negatives to that uh salt which turns out to be a really good disinfectant isn't isn't widely uh promoted because nobody makes any money on it that's a simple example but uh there are many examples of that uh you know so but at the same time i don't think we want to shut down farm farm pharmacological research we might be scared of it but we don't want to shut it down maybe the solution is to is to regulate it in some way um but i don't know right which brings us back to our point right What we started here is the government was trying to stop AI, but in a ham-fisted way, which wasn't really helping.

51:57Oh, well, we haven't solved anything, but we had a good conversation and that's what I hope for. And we'll watch with interest. I mean, it's all complicated because we have an administration that really is anti-intellectual, is very anti-science. And so it's complicated by all of that as well. um so and also it seems to be uh that the any company that kisses up to the presidency sufficiently is going to be favored and the big mistake that anthropic made was saying no the military can't use our models for autonomous killing machines or spying on americans and that pissed off the administration so much that now we are six months later basically shut down yeah so is this political or is this technical is this a smart technological move i mean it's political right but it sure looks that way it doesn't mean that there doesn't need to be some it might be the right thing to do sized yeah they might have done the right thing for the wrong reason i don't think so yeah i want my fable i want my fable back uh we've had In fact, I interviewed Alex Stamos last week, a very highly respected security guy who says Fable wasn't and isn't doing anything that almost any other model couldn't do.

53:18That this particular horse has already left the barn. We already have models that can find security flaws. And this is, that's technology, that's the biggest problem with government and technology is they're always two years behind what's actually happening. So it's impossible really for them to, for government to regulate it. It sounds very Star Trek-y, but ultimately, I think this has to become a global solution. This has to be something that needs to be managed by all of the countries, not individual countries. Because it is, like you say, if one country regulates it, it's not going to stop another country.

53:50I mean, someone was mentioning this in the chat, comparing it to like the atomic bomb. If it's really that dangerous, you know, this needs to be something that has a global answer, not each country. Yeah, I agree. It needs to go through the UN, but then to Leo's point, it's going to slow down everything because government is really, really bad when it comes to technology in general. And it's going to be even worse with this because it's so complicated and so technological. And then you have things like, we're so skeptical of China. Would they really develop this and abide by any agreements? How do you enforce that?

54:32right at least with nuclear it's like you can there's centrifuges right there's uranium there's like there's physical peaceful uses of atomic energy and and non-peaceful and we've attempted to not very successfully but we've attempted to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the same time as we've encouraged the proliferation of atomic energy that might be a good that might be a good analogy for this that there are safe uses of ai and unsafe uses of AI. I think it's a little clearer what the unsafe use of atomic, of fusion and fission is. That seems a little clearer. AI, it's a little bit more, a little bit more muddy.

55:12I don't know. You know, it puts me in an awkward position because I agree a lot of technology is dangerous. Technology, I would say itself is agnostic, but it can be used by humans in a dangerous way. I would hate to see the American government decide which chips American companies could make and which they couldn't. That would be a mistake. Do you guys think that there's going to be some sort of AI catastrophe? Like the AI does something where something happens because of AI? AI will never do anything bad by itself. There will always be a human actor who either said, hey, maybe we should let AI control atomic weapons.

55:54I don't know. No, I mean, the whole thing with the terrible situation with the young man who killed himself because his chatbot basically told him how to do it. The anthropomorphization. Yeah, that felt pretty awful. Like, felt like that was, you know. Well, it's a terrible outcome. Yeah, but it was. But he could have done a Google search, too. No, but this, but it was, I mean, he really was focusing. I know we've talked about it on the show, but it was escalating the situation. Yeah, I understand. And that was AI doing that. There was no human behind that doing that. You know, Daniel, it might be like frog in a pot, much like climate change, where a number of smaller, seemingly innocuous components stack up and we find ourselves in a challenging situation.

56:43But, you know, Jennifer, to your point, that is a tragic occurrence. And we can maybe find analogs in the social media world. In fact, some of the recent rulings about social media and the obligation that social media companies might have in terms of regulating access to it. And here's the question. do you regulate a technology because of the edge cases yeah right to protect the edge cases and by doing so defang it for everybody else it's like okay let's eliminate children's playgrounds because some people hurt themselves on them you can try to make them safer that would be a reasonable thing but you don't it's it's it's it's a dangerous precedent to regulate based on the edge case we wouldn't have cars if if that were the case right uh we wouldn't have a lot of things we have in modern the problem here was that it wasn't there were no guardrails there was no safety in place and and i don't think this is created i don't know if you can create safe this is right which is to my point is like they don't we even the people creating this don't know how powerful it is and that well that is a reason to be scared of for every zipper there's gonna be some guy who gets his penis stuck in it but it doesn't mean we shouldn't have zippers is all i'm saying right there's a title of the podcast no it's definitely not i guess let me take a break right before i get myself in any more trouble i'm not saying it necessarily ever happened to me i'm just saying it could okay but we shouldn't ban zippers because of it it does feel like everything about ai is inevitable like we just have no choice like technology has always felt like that hasn't it like even weapons development things like that as soon as we could figure out how to do it we're gonna do it we can't stop it yeah and i don't know if that's true so yeah it does feel that way though like if it's if if we if man can invent it A woman can't prevent it.

59:10I'm sorry, Jennifer. Let's take a break. That's okay. I will be the lone female voice of reason. That's what I'm saying. Boys and their toys. That's all I'm saying. Actually, along those lines, Leo, I think a better analog here would be guns. Because guns are readily available, easy to make. but you know around the around the world around the rest of the the rest of the world it's harder to buy than it is in america right right yeah uh let's take a little break jennifer paterson tui senior reviewer for the verge we're gonna talk home home automation something a little safer you cannot hurt yourself with in just a little bit well maybe you can we'll find out make any promises uh daniel rubino from uh the editor-in-chief from windows central great to have you and of course dan patterson of blackbird.ai our show today brought to you by box this is really uh talking about ai this is a really interesting technology if you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with ai you are probably facing a very common challenge most ai tools are great at public knowledge right when when can i get tickets to see taylor swift but they don't know your business well unless you're selling tickets to taylor swift but but if if you're not they don't actually know your business they don't know your product roadmaps they don't know your sales materials they don't know your hr policies or financial models they don't know about the stuff that actually makes your company run but ai could be so much better if it did right that's where box comes in box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era.

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1:03:05Box helps bring that content securely into the ai era this is perfectly timed visit box.com slash ai to learn more that's box.com slash ai we thank him so much for supporting this week in tech box.com slash ai okay we're going to move on from ai enough ai let's talk about the smart home now i have to say my little ai buddy quicksilver is connected to my home assistant green server and I can tell it to open shades, turn on the lights. I can have it, you know, when I get home, do things. It's very nice to have an AI connected to your home. Yeah, and actually, you know, to your point earlier about the different use cases here, as this is so true with technology, it's not that AI bad, it's that some elements of AI could have concern, but some elements of AI have great use cases.

1:03:56And actually the smart home is one of them where I think we've already seen some really interesting innovations. that help run your smart home because it's the most the key one is cutting through complexity because the smart home is complicated what you just said is not a sentence that most normal people would understand running on my ha green and yeah it's but you did though right you speak you speak home assistant i do speak home assistant yes and i've used my i used claude to help me exactly code my home assistant instance and that was super helpful incredibly helpful yes um because yeah it actually might be the missing link because all this time we've had this home assistant it's like the tower of babel nobody can talk to it it doesn't no one thing doesn't talk to another maybe ai was is the solution or maybe matters matter yes love that segue thank you leo well i will say this i've been lobbying everything i use should have an ai interface we're just talking about box how it has mcp servers and sdks and cli uh as a home assistant has an interface that an agent can use and understand everything should have that maybe matter is that layer i don't know there's a big matter conference yeah so a couple of weeks ago a week ago i was at this conference it's called unify and actually to our previous conversation about how maybe technology companies need to work together to figure out this, how to control and responsibly deploy AI in the world.

1:05:32Matter is actually a great example of how competitors are coming together and working together to make a better solution. There is no risk of, you know, the end of the world through home automation, but it's definitely been interesting to watch. And this was what this conference was. That's because home automation isn't as powerful as it ought to be. It should It would be good enough to end the world if necessary. But it is a good example of like a technology that has so much value, but has been so hard for people to use because of competing standards, competing protocols, confusion, complicated setups, having to have little boxes running AI in your house to get anything to work.

1:06:14And MATA is a newish interoperability standard that's basically designed to make all of your smart home devices work with each other rather than being in like siloed ecosystems or walled gardens. And what this conference was, was put on by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, who runs MATA and Zigbee and Allero and a few other open standards. But the company. There's, by the way, there's the problem right there. There wasn't enough just to have one. We had to make more. So you hear this all the time. And it's not. So it's a misnomer, but I get the joke. Like it's the XCD, XKCD comic. Am I saying that right?

1:07:00Sorry. XKCD, yes. The comic, you know, there's 14 standards and none of them work with each other. We need one standard to make them all work together, protocol to make them all work together. and then that protocol comes along. And now, yay, we have 15 protocols. So we've been talking about matter for, it feels like years. How many, a couple of years now? So it launched four years ago. Four years, okay. Three and six months. And it had been announced in 2018 by Apple, Google, Amazon, and then quite quickly after Samsung. So all of these companies have been working together. They all had their own walled gardens, didn't they?

1:07:40Yes. They all had their own standards. And everyone used different protocols, different ways of connecting devices, different radios, different hubs. It was confusing. It was complicated. And this, but it has Mata launched, but it has had a bumpy road. And what this conference was all about was really sort of bringing everyone together. I mean, they all talk with each other. This is what they say. They have these meetings, but, you know, three or four times a year where all the companies come together. But this was their first public-effacing event where they were like, look at what we've achieved.

1:08:14Here's where matter is. Now, it's still not where they promised it would be day one, which was you just buy a smart home device, you plug it in, set it up, and it will just work with any smart home platform you want. We're not there yet. But what I saw at this conference was really quite inspiring, not to be too sort of twee, but that these companies actually have been working really hard to make this standard better and to fix the problems that we've seen. And most of those problems are that just it's still complicated and it's still confusing. But what came out of this is the launch of MATA 1.6.

1:08:59So we're getting, I mean, and standards, you guys, you know, you've been in this industry for a long time. Standards are very hard. They're not it's not easy to move an industry. It's not easy to get rivals to agree on anything. It's not easy to get them to implement something that could potentially mean that their product and their service could be superseded by their competitors. But I think that what has transpired over the last few years is that it's really clear that the smart home is at an impasse because of how complicated it is. And sorry to bring this back to AI, but AI coming to the smart home has suddenly opened the monetization strategy for these companies, which wasn't there before.

1:09:43We are now, you know, we heard about Amazon losing billions on its Echo smart home division over the years. And Apple has been very slow in this space. Google has also had kind of a bumpy ride with its Nest and speaker, Google Home speaker division. They just launched their newest speaker, which is all focused on Gemini AI. Oh, is it? Oh, interesting. Yeah, so it's built for, so Gemini for the home is their AI model for home automation and the smart home. And what does AI need? What does AI need more than anything else? It needs good data. And what are you going to get good data with? Well, interoperability.

1:10:28If everything can talk to everything else, then you can use and build a more reliable smart home system that's potentially going to start doing the sort of the holy grail of the smart home, which is being able to actually manage your home for you. so you're not the one with the uh the raspberry pi on the shelf trying to fiddle and all the different apps and trying to you know home assistant's very great and powerful but you can spend a whole month you know diving into it so i still haven't connected everything to it i've had it for a couple of years now so i mean and the idea and so one of the other things that the matter 1.6 came came up with this which should have been there at the beginning something called joint fabric.

1:11:16And basically what this means is when you buy a device from a smart home company and you add it to your smart home platform of choice, say Apple Home or Amazon Alexa, prior each ecosystem would set up their own network in your home called Fabric. So you'd have your Apple Home Fabric and you'd have your Amazon A Fabric. Now with joint fabric, you're just going to have your own smart home network that every ecosystem you would like to control it. So if you want two or three, because say you use a Google Pixel and your spouse uses an iPhone, they will now talk to that fabric, but they won't own that fabric.

1:11:56And that sounds like a sort of small change, but it's a significant shift for the standard because it means that these companies have all agreed to give up control. So they don't own the fabric. Have they really, though? Have they really? So everyone says they are on board with this, but the other problem with standards is you get a new spec, and then when does the spec actually appear in the product? So this is wait and see. But it was an exciting sort of... There was a lot of momentum, I guess. That was what I saw at this conference. I mean, I was talking to the engineers. I was talking to the people developing this rather than, you know, the PR and the management people.

1:12:42But if engineers rule the world, this will work. Yes. But that's a big if. That's right. Because engineers want it to work. They're the ones using it. Yeah. So what's the takeaway for a consumer? Is there, should you not buy anything that isn't Matter certified at this point? it so it's a hard one to say because there are not enough matter certified devices i would say to be able to do that at this stage but yes if you're looking at a device that if you're looking at buying smart home devices i would highly recommend exploring the matter versions over all other things be equal look for the one that has matter because and this is the point of my next story that i wanted to touch on um one of the great things about matter is it is a local protocol or it's a local standard and it uses local connectivity protocols so thread and wi-fi and if you buy a cloud dependent device and that company goes out of business your cloud dependent device no longer works and we have seen like the level lock time again well yes so the level lock to be clear the level level lock has not gone out of business but it has been had a significant restructuring which causes some concern about the long-term business model of the company and and also level lock is they recently did an upgrade to matter so um if you're if you have a level lock that has a matter upgrade if in the future something happened to level servers your device would still work and this is where that becomes a very important excuse me it's okay it's okay um this is where matter becomes a key part of the smart home experience is that it is local and you control it if your company goes out of business that if you weren't watching the video uh jennifer's son just walked through and unplugged the router it looks like i just froze sorry about that and she froze in horror yeah it wasn't quite like the bbc presenter whose kids rolled in but it was a moment but yeah so the level lock isn't is this is so level freak out did asset abloy buy them or did they was it their product to begin with so asset abloy bought them level lock was actually made by um a couple of iphone of apple engineers originally yeah startup um and i don't know if anyone if you're familiar with it but it's a really cool piece of technology they basically if you've ever seen a smart lock or if you've use a smart lock they're normally big kind of techie looking giant batteries on the back of your door they're a little cumbersome uh smart locks are great in general like i love them as a concept they're really good but they don't look great yeah the level lock goes basically puts all the technology in the the battery goes in the little deadbolt there and all of the smarts are built into the deadbolt mechanism so it looks like a totally normal deadbolt lock That's so cool.

1:15:53It's such a neat concept. I'm glad I didn't know about it or I would have bought it. It's very expensive. That's the other downside. Like$350 for that lock that we were looking at there. And so there was a startup similar to like August, the August lock you might be familiar with. And both of those companies were bought by Asa Abloy at different times in their process. If you're familiar with Asa Abloy, it's one of the largest multinational access control companies on the planet. Like they own. They were famous for their excellent deadbolts, though, right? They're not a cheesy company. No, no.

1:16:30I mean, it's a very well-established Swedish company. And so they also bought, they bought Yale and they bought August. And then they wanted to buy Quixote, which is the other large lock maker. and the government said uh-uh that's too many that's too many locks um and so then they sold their stake in yale in august and then bought level so this company's been kind of on a lock buying spree but what happened this last week sadly is um they basically laid off the majority of the staff at level and so the concern amongst the staff and uh for customers of the lock is that without any engineering, an engineering team there anymore, this is a very technically advanced lock and will the lock continue to be made?

1:17:29Hopefully it'll continue to be supported, but there is a concern that it may just go away, which would be very sad because it's a great piece of technology. And they were working on an ultra-wideband version. And I think I've talked about this on the show before, but this is the next innovation that's coming to smart locks is complete hands-free unlocking. So you use using UWB radios that your phone will transmit to your lock as you walk up that you've come home and it will unlock the door for you automatically. I love this, by the way. I don't have one because I bought a Schlage just before they came out.

1:18:07So Schlage just launched its newest UWB lock. I'm sorry. But I love that idea that you just walk up the door and it's unlocked. I mean, my car is like that. It's a really nice. It's the same technology. Yeah, same technology. And it knows if you're coming or going, like if you're walking towards it or walking away. So it doesn't unlock as you're walking away. I mean, just really kind of cool. It's a great technology. And it's much better than the current. So if you have a smart lock, you may already have this experience. And there's some like Bluetooth GPS sort of magic that some use. but that's not very reliable because you're using a number of different radios and there can obviously be a number of failure points, whereas this is a local direct radio to phone technology.

1:18:52And really, I've used, I've tried it and I've been very impressed with it. I have the new Schlaglock actually somewhere right here that I'm going to be testing hopefully this weekend. Test it on your teenage boy. Yeah. I think I've talked about how he doesn't, he's never used a key. I don't know how he's yeah i don't have i don't carry keys anymore the only thing i carry a key for is my post office box because of course the u.s social service they're never going away never stop using keys but but i don't i used to have a key ring i don't have a key ring anymore it's just a weird experience but i'm gonna make it i'm gonna make a bet here we got two other high tech guys on the show daniel do you have a smart lock yeah do you have one daniel a smart lock yeah i have a eufy he has a eufy okay how about you dan do you have a smart lock um so i live in brooklyn and we have less choice about this yeah my and and right there's a number of security concerns with that however the the the apartment complex i live in yes we have a smart lock we have that option but i think almost everyone opts to use a a key and i for my apartment i use a key um however Or, excuse me, were I to not live here?

1:20:09Yeah, I almost certainly would have a smart lock. Sure. All right. Well, then I take it back. They make life. It's like the video doorbell. It's one of those things that a lot of people use. Everybody gets. Yeah. But I should just mention on the Asa Abloy level thing, Asa Abloy has said level lock is stay in a business and no worries. Don't be concerned. Don't look behind the curtain. The fact that there's no one left at the company. so we'll see we'll see what happens um but it's it was a great a really great piece of tech and i really do hope that the innovations that level developed and brought to the market will continue because i for one do not like ugly big smart locks i want sleek nice looking smart locks that don't that don't look like a smart lock um but still will automatically open my door for me as I approach.

1:20:59Well, with any luck, they'll fold it into QuickSet and it will be in every hardware store and it'll be everywhere and it'll be lower cost. And that technology, I mean, they must have bought it because they liked the technology. You hope, you hope. I mean, one of the concerns is that Asabloy's been having, is North American residential sales have taken a big dive because no one's spending any money in this country anymore, it seems. No one's buying houses because the interest rates are still so high. So, yeah, I think they're having some financial problems. So that could have been related to why this had happened.

1:21:33But yeah, they haven't. We don't know for sure. So it's all speculation at this point. But fingers crossed, the technology continues. But it is really sad that the startups, basically all 80 employees and the founders were laid off. So we will see what happens in the future here and watch this space. But they did the same to some extent to August. I mean, I think most of your listeners and viewers will be familiar with the August Smart Lock, which was one of the early smart home sort of babies, darlings. And that was bought by Asa Abloy. And there hasn't been a new August Lock in six, seven years.

1:22:11I don't think we're going to ever see another August Lock. It's not the first company. There have been quite a few companies, former Apple engineers. That seems to be a common thing. the apple engineer you know get some design skills some engineering skills and then starts their own company tony fidel very famously uh was one of the designers on the iphone who went off to start nest you as speaking of nest have a very good podcast yeah that you are part of if everyone anyone's not gotten bored to tears by my smart home chats um there's lots more where this came from um we have a new podcast at the verge called version history well new that we're in our fourth season but uh this this season is all smart home and we have a episode that went out today all about the history of the nest thermostat oh what a great story it was it's a very fun story um a lot of you probably would be surprised by by a lot of the the background there and then we also last week we did uh the roomba which was a fun one and then we've got phillips hue light bulbs coming up And of course, the Clapper.

1:23:19Everyone's favorite. The Clapper, Clapper. The original home automation device. And we did the Logitech Harmony a couple of weeks ago too. Ooh, another good one. There, so lots of fun stuff. I'm going to have to listen to this. If you want some more smart home lore, please go listen. Can I ask you an inside baseball question? Sure. So Vox is being split up into little tiny pieces. uh the vox podcast company got sold is but the verge that's it's very confusing it's very confusing i like your new owner by the way i think the verge is owned by penske now are they going to keep version history who gets version history so it's a bit of a misnomer and understandably confusing but the vox media podcast network doesn't actually as far as i understand it make the podcasts oh they are they are like a platform to help market and advertising i couldn't understand because verge cast without the verge isn't is cast right so like i know famously cara swisher and her podcast is part of the hugely valuable but she owns her own podcast as far as i understand it and like but they have like a partnership with fox media podcast for sales primarily right primarily sales i think infrastructure that kind of stuff so our our verge cast and version history and decoder which is the other podcast yeah that is all staying with verge and no longer part of vox media podcast network um which is going to uh um a murdoch um which one i can't remember is it lachlan i think it's No, I think, no, is it?

1:25:02I think it's the other one. Yeah, I think it's Lachlan. It's Lachlan. I think so. Yeah, it's not the other one. I get confused by the Murdoch, sorry. Definitely not Rupert. Yeah, it's very confusing. Not Rupert, yeah. But yes, so we're going to Penske, which this was just announced last week, a week ago. Penske, which owns all the Hollywood magazines, plus the Rolling Stone. And the Golden Globes. So I'm like, if I get tickets, you get tickets to the Golden Globes. I want to go to the Golden Globes. It's going to be a very exciting time. Jennifer, I have a quick question. What happens to subscriptions?

1:25:33Maybe you don't know. Yeah, I'm a subscriber. I care about that. I subscribe. Everything, as far as our fearless leader, Nilay, has explained to us, it's everything will stay exactly the way it is. Like we are, our company is The Verge as a company, which The Verge founded with Fox Media originally. Like it was The Verge and Verge was like, oh, we need a company. So they created Fox Media. right um so and that now that verge which has always been its own business within vox media is just staying its own business with a different owner um so nothing changes josh and everybody were regulars on twitter at the time and i remember when they started my what was it called my next my next thing this is my next this is my next that's what it was yeah and i remember when they they left uh was in gadget i can't even i think it was in gadget yes and they started that and uh and this they've had great success and i'm really glad and as a result we don't get them on the show anymore because they're far too big i'm sure i'm sure nila i would love to i would love to get nila on but all right i'll i don't even you know i i act like they're saying no to me i'm too embarrassed to ask ask i'm sure he would love to come on it's like oh you're big shot now same thing with kara kara used to be on the show all the time she's now you just get me i'd rather have you if you the three people on right now the people who are on the show are the people i want to have on the show um but i do admit that sometimes you know people get you know big time and we don't you know you don't get to have them on anymore they're just too big for us this little program we're glad to have you don't worry about your subscriptions and keep subscribing yes i will i love the verge we quote the verge constantly and especially jennifer patterson too and her smart home coverage we also quote windows central all the time daniel rubino editor-in-chief their great windows coverage microsoft coverage really uh and of course dan patterson of blackbird ai doing his best to stop the ruskies in there so you have to at some point explain the difference between disinformation and misinformation yeah what is misinformation is wrong it's uh disinformation is intentionally misleading contents or narratives.

1:27:54We call it a narrative because it's not just one deepfake or one piece of content. It's the story around it. Yeah, yeah, right. But it is intentional. Misinformation could be like, well, my neighbor said it's going to rain tomorrow and everybody's saying it's going to rain tomorrow. Right, gossip. Or, you know, one great example, we've been spending a lot of time looking at the World Cup because at least in Brooklyn, everybody's looking at the world. Like, it's huge. It's fantastic. It's a great event. But there have been some narratives around, let's say, empty stadiums, right? Right. Nobody's going to these games, which is ridiculous.

1:28:30It's not true at all. You're all sold out. Oh, my God. I would like to complain vociferously about the World Cup. Can I do that now? England won. What are you worried about? They're going on. So I dropped this in the notes right down the bottom. I tweeted this. I went, I was like, yay, England won. Yay, they're playing in Atlanta. I'm just going to see, because I live in South Carolina. Yeah, it's just up the road a piece. Maybe I could go watch. Yeah, England, Congo. Ten thousand dollars for two tickets. Well, that wasn't the face value. Who is responsible for that? I'm sorry, but$500 for a ticket was ridiculous.

1:29:08$10 ,000 is insane. Jason Snell went to a game. He went to like the dumb game or whatever. He said a game nobody wanted. It was still 500 bucks. But you're looking at the real resale price. But that's, yeah. Why? And who do I? But no, this is all through the formal channels. Like this country is the only one in the world that does this. And is it technology's fault? Who do we blame? I know we blame Ticketmaster. But is it because of tech? I feel like this. So here's what happens. It is scalpers, by the way. Somebody buys it at face value and then goes to the same site. sometimes they go to a third-party site and says yeah i'm not going to make it so sell it for me but by the way it's going to be four thousand dollars more than i paid for it that's i think that's still scalping isn't it maybe they maybe they're maybe their aunt got sick and they can't go maybe why are there no laws against this i went to a taylor swift concert in london and i paid 60 pounds yeah i should point out that taylor hates the whole thing too i know let me point out on on your blue sky post the price is 9 000 there is then a 1 350 fee on top of it i know that's i mean it's insane but why why the answer is we don't we don't enforce antitrust here is the answer we need regulation here because this isn't this is ridiculous who's gonna is someone actually going to pay that much for a ticket i bet it was an eye-opener for a lot of people come to this country to see their their country play in the world cup and then not only they have to pay that for tickets but they have to tip the waiter this is insane how does this country survive have you seen the memes on online it's been wonderful like it is really fun how much but yeah and people sort of discovering that america is actually really cool yeah yeah the guy that guy who's been flying around who uh i can't remember his name something or other yeah it's wonderful he's like yeah his eyes wide open wow and i love every four years this happens but normally not in america the whole world comes together i agree and it's just a great example of how we really can all come together there's something you know it's not the people that are the problem perhaps it's the politicians that the problem i don't know but as a as a as you know a global society we exist in we exist the people are fine and the world cup is a great example and now that ron playing finally woken up america's finally paying attention because you finally are doing okay only because may i point out you have an english striker oh yeah who is here is only playing with you because of birthright citizenship so do you know that story it's fantastic so he's he's he's english his parents were english but they were living in the united states when he was born no his mother is a is Ghanaian i believe or Nigerian and she was visiting family or friends in new york and she tried to get on the plane to go home to england where she lived so she's Nigerian but lives in england and she was and this is something that does happen.

1:32:24If you're too pregnant, they won't let you get on the plane. They don't want you to go and labor on the flight. So she had to stay in Brooklyn a bit longer. And so she had her baby before she went back home. So he was born in New York, went back home with her when they let her fly back, grew up in England, went through all the English soccer training, football training, played for one of the big development teams for, I don't know if it was Arsenal. My football law is a little fuzzy because I'm living here now. But yeah, he played for England under 21s. He was a big star. And then he could also have played for his, I think it's Nigeria, but his family's from, one of the African countries.

1:33:09And then he was going to play for England because why wouldn't you play for England? We're the best soccer nation in the world, football nation in the world. I'll be rooting for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that match? I'm just going to point out. But apparently, the American fans got like in his DMs on social media and were like, we want you, we want you. And he was like, okay. And he decided to go play for America. Yay. And now you finally have a good soccer team. So you're welcome. By the way, if you are born on a flight, birthright citizenship to American Airlines? What is your...

1:33:44I think it depends where the plane is when you were born. do they still love there was one do they still do the thing where if you're born on a plane you get free flights on that airline forever i doubt it very very it's probably why they don't let you go on the plane that's right very heavily pregnant my favorite response to your blue sky uh skeet about the ticket prices uh is wonkish who said matter fixes this so he knew me he knows my thing he knows he knows it's all gonna be fixed by matter all right sorry for the diversion there No, it's a good diversion. No, no. And I don't know, though, if I'll be rooting for England.

1:34:20I might be rooting for Congo. They've had such a rough time lately. This is something that gives them hope. I hate to say it, and I shouldn't, because it'll just wish it into existence. But this is exactly the type of game that we're going to lose. I mean, you just know it. The underdog. I know. I know. I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry. Don't put that out in the space. we'll have more with our fabulous panel in just a bit i did see i have to say i was watching the f1 last week or no i guess it was the qualifiers this week and there were norwegian fans doing the row in the f1 stands which cracked me up that's my favorite new move they row in unison in the stands that's that beats the wave by a lot i just love that everything beats the vuvuzelas from five World Cups ago.

1:35:10Do you remember those? I happen to have. Those were terrible. America needs to come up with something, though, signature. South African World Cup. You have one? I hate to do this to you, but brought me back. No! No!

1:35:28Oh, we'll have more. Oh, my ears. We'll have more this week in Tech. I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that. But, you know, I don't get to play the Vuvuzela very often, so when i get a chance uh it's like beetlejuice you mentioned it now it has to happen our show today brought to you by meter the company building better networks company founded by two network engineers who know who feel your pain if you're a network engineer oh you have my deepest sympathies you know all the problems and legacy providers within flexible pricing everybody's got this IT resource constraints stretching you thin. Then you've got these complicated deployments across fragmented tools.

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1:38:34Meter's built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank them so much for support in TWIT. And we invite you to go to meter.com slash TWIT and book a demo now. M-E-T-E-R dot com slash TWIT to book a demo. uh so here's some interesting news about elon musk's uh brand new very successful on the stock market anyway company star link spacex plans to launch starlink mobile service in the united states would you buy a starlink based cell phone i don't think it would be just satellite obviously it couldn't be because if you're inside it wouldn't work so they'd they'd also have to have terrestrial wireless as well.

1:39:28Gwen Shotwell told investors during a recent IPO roadshow the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial U.S. mobile network. The move would require Starlink, this is from Ars Technica, to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers. now i use starlink it's my backup uh internet for these shows and i and i think starlink's great it's not cheap i don't know if it would be better cell service or not analysts caution go ahead wasn't he also supposed to be doing his own phone at some point it's a couple years ago right yeah that sounds that sounds familiar yeah yeah so i wonder if it'd be tied to that yeah seems an odd move to launch a smartphone unless it's like an android based phone of course but if it's not i don't know i think the analysts say the biggest sticking point is going to be terrestrial radio because you can't just like in here i i can't see the sky i couldn't use a sat phone um so this will be this will be interesting of course remember a lot of what elon has been saying is just to you know become a trillionaire to get a good stock price which it worked um won't iphone customers become satellite and starlink customers at some point well uh sort of so right now um most modern iphones can get satellite connectivity if they They lose cellular connectivity through Global Star, but Global Star just got sold.

1:41:13And Apple's stake in Global Star went along with it. So there has been some noise that maybe they'll switch to Starlink. I don't know. And what does T-Mobile use? Because you can add satellite service. It uses Global Star right now. I'm using Global Star right now. Yeah. So who did Global Star was bought by? I bought them. I forgot. No, boy. It's funny. That long ago. Oh, Amazon. That's right. So, so Amazon, I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I have a feeling that this Apple's not going to do an Amazon deal. So I've, and since they lost their 20 % stake in it. So yeah, it makes sense. I've heard rumors that they were going to use Starlink for the future, but that doesn't replace your cell service we're talking about full cell service from starlink which presumably you could use on any phone if it's like a regular cell service um let's talk about windows because uh benito wins a a wins his bet he said oh no i'm gonna hang on i'm playing chicken i'm gonna hold on my windows 10 uh microsoft had said last november okay one more year actually it was october wasn't it october 14 2025 when they ended support for windows 10.

1:42:38you better explain this to me daniel so are they extending it another year they are and part of it honestly is the ram stuff again. It might be different if you could buy a new computer with Windows 11 on it, I guess. Yeah. I mean, part of the, I guess you could say problem with Windows 11 is that there are hardware requirements with it based around security. And so a lot of companies would need to buy new laptops or desktops that meet the security standards. And this, of course, has angered people, but you can't have both ways. Because if they don't have this security built in and people upgrade and all this kind of stuff and they get attacked you know it's a whole issue so but obviously buying laptops now and pcs it's become very cost prohibitive right and so they're extending it by another year although i don't know how much that just gives companies an extra year to save money i guess to buy new computers because we don't expect those prices to necessarily drop but that seems to be a part of this as well as you know they are involved in the k2 project right now which is this effort to address a lot of concerns and complaints that people have with Windows 11 so what do I need to do if like Benito I'm still running Windows 10 come October do I what do I need to do do I have to do anything to keep it alive is that my just gonna get updates without doing anything.

1:44:12Yeah, actually, I'm not too sure about that. Previously, you had to just register and just make sure. Yeah, you had to pay, sort of pay for it with Bing points. Right, right. That's right. Or had to use OneDrive. There were some weird little things. I'm looking at your article, not your article, but I'm looking at the article on Windows Central Insider by Kevin OCamwa, who says, all you have to do is be signed in with a Microsoft account. yeah so it looks like it's just a basic extension without any loopholes to jump through which is good because mark itself gets a lot of flack for that obviously yeah you know we knew that they had technical requirements but we also knew you could still you didn't have to have tpm2 for instance no you could bypass it there were definitely it's windows at the end of the day there's always gonna be a workaround some way right right well good news if you're a windows 10 user the clock keeps on ticking i guess this is where apple differs from microsoft right because apple could just snap their fingers and make everybody jump microsoft tries to do it and everybody loses their mind so it's uh well apple makes its money in hardware uh and so they can give you a free operating system because it you know you bought their computer to do it uh microsoft you know you didn't necessarily buy a computer from microsoft to be using windows in fact most people don't yeah um we were talking earlier about a mythos microsoft has its own model um m dash and uh last this i guess was this month's patch tuesday had the largest number of fixes ever microsoft said at least 10 of them were generated by m dash its own security model and i would suspect that mythos which it also had access to had so had some of those patches also could be attributed to it.

1:46:05That's a huge, oh, more than 200 fixes. That is probably one of the more interesting aspects of AI in terms of software, right? It's his ability to find weaknesses in systems, find bugs, and actually do advanced work. And I think that's, but conversely, of course, it could be just as dangerous if it's in the wrong hands because it could also be used in probe networks. Finding the bugs is the first step to exploiting the bugs right that's the risk right and and that was what people were complaining about with mythos is it would write it would find the bug patch the bug and then write a proof of concept to test the patch but any proof of concept that tests to see if the bug is still there can also be used to exploit the bug it's the you know you're getting the code that for exploitation and the fact that it could do that in a single prompt reasonably uh is a little bit scary i don't i I don't think Anthropik overhyped that.

1:47:01I think it really is dangerous. But on the other hand, if you can do it with other tools now existent, what's the point in stopping it? There's going to be a big update. We were talking about this on Windows Weekly with Paul Therat on Wednesday, coming July 14th. Huge number of updates coming to Windows 11, so you might want to upgrade. Is this to celebrate America's 250th? No, it's not. But yeah, this is part of that K2 project I was talking about with introducing features, the ability to move the taskbar, right? Whoa, wait a minute, what? Yeah, it seems trivial. And I think only 1 % of users probably do this.

1:47:48Microsoft took that feature out in Windows 11. So they didn't really take it out. It's a little more complicated than that. They rewrote the taskbar for Windows 11. It uses a different technology now. It's written differently. And so they recreated it. And so to the end user, it feels like the same start system almost from Windows 10. Looks the same, yeah. But they completely rewrote it, and they didn't write into that feature to move it because very few people actually do move it. Most people do keep it on the bottom. Probably less than 1 % actually want to move it to the size or the top. But those 1 % are loud.

1:48:27They're very loud. And, you know, you can make a good argument that, okay, they didn't have it on launch, but, you know, maybe they'll do it later. But they never said they were going to do it at all. And they were sticking to their guns for a long time. But now new team is in place and they're addressing and, you know, delivering a lot of fixes and improvements. For instance, you'll be able to pause Windows updates basically indefinitely. What? Yay. Yeah, so that's been another thing that people have talked about because it is annoying to get that pop-up saying you need to restart your computer now because there's never a good time for it, right?

1:49:04But people will be able to pause it now. There's also the point of time restore. Basically, this is almost like an older system where it does a snapshot. And so if something goes wrong with your system, you can roll it back to the previous version. Oh, we used to have that. That's, didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. System restore. Yeah. They need to take some tips from the smart home here, because now when you get a smart home device, when you set it up, it says, would you like to have automatic updates? And you say yes, because you do. It's slightly different with smart home than your computer. You do. You absolutely do.

1:49:38You absolutely do. And then it'll do it. And then it sets the update time and it'll say, OK, I will update between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. every whenever this happens. You could do that. I know you can kind of do that. I don't think most people go ahead and do it. It's always at the wrong time. Like it pops up at the wrong time. Do you want me to do it tonight? Well, I do, but then I'll, but yes, just stop. Just don't tell me and just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Do it when I'm not using the computer. And speaking, and it's also the AI models, like the chat GPT and the claw desktop apps constantly wants to update.

1:50:14Every day, it seems like. Yeah. You know why? For those curious. Sorry. Sorry, we have a hands-on Windows episode to show you how to do all of this if you wanna do it yourself. And also all the new features, I believe, if they haven't done it already, that's coming. That actually is, get ready, gonna be the new normal because AI is so fast. And the reason these AI's updated every day is because they're using AI to develop it. And as more and more software is developed by AI and maintained by AI, the updates are gonna come fast and furious. is sorry and he can't get away from ai you can't ai's with us well you could try there's a huge backlash now against these flock cameras oh yeah yeah every every every community uh has people saying no flock cameras uh i understand why the police want them it so this i think it all started with red light cameras where people were running red lights so they'd have a camera take pictures after the red light came on and people went through it and it stopped that.

1:51:20But then they thought, well, you know, what we could do is put these automated license plate readers in and we could catch all kinds of malefactors. Well, the problem is these databases are getting bigger and bigger and it's essentially a way of tracking. And now there's new companies coming along that can be attached to your Flock camera, which the Flock camera is an automated license plate reader it just keeps track of all the license plates going by you're using public thoroughfares you know i mean you know i guess that's part of the deal but now they're also putting bluetooth sensors on there so that they can capture you know as you drive by they capture your phone's name your car's name they capture all the blue because our bluetooth devices are always broadcasting their names uh they're getting more and more sophisticated and there's this issue of flock having a nationwide database of license plates and of law enforcement from time to time using it uh to stalk people to track people down have broken a law in their state as they go to other states um so there's a big backlash there's a big there's a huge ring cameras to ring cameras yeah that was i mean so ring had announced a partnership with flock um and then they then they had their Super Bowl ad, which caused an awful lot of consternation, which was advertising their pet finding feature, which actually showed this still image of homes with sort of radar, like searching rings coming out from ring cameras.

1:53:02And that one look just said, that one shot just said surveillance state and they just splashed it in front of everyone. If you can find Fluffy, you can also find me, right? Then like an email leak that basically said that that was your next step was... So he's always... Jamie Siminoff has always said that his goal with Ring, pretty much since its inception, is to prevent crime as much as possible. Safer neighborhoods. Create safer neighborhoods by... And he is passionate about this. And he really does feel like the more cameras equal more security. There are lots of evidence that more cameras does not necessarily equal more security, but does equal more surveillance, more of people knowing what everyone is doing.

1:53:51And then the biggest concern with this was it was so before Flock, they had a partnership with another. They have a partnership with Axon as well, which is the company that does all the body cameras. Yeah.

1:54:35Flock cameras, Flock Safety was saying, no, they're not. We only have partnerships with individual jurisdictions, local police. We do not have partnerships with ICE. But ICE could come. And there was actually recent reporting about this where it was shown that ICE did actually access some Flock Safety cameras through a local authority. So, you know, ICE comes to your local sheriff's department and says, show me your cameras. they do it. And there's a subpoena. Yeah, I don't know that there was even a subpoena. I think it's more like partnerships between police. And so - People aren't stupid. They know if the cameras are there, they will be used.

1:55:18And so whilst Flock and Ring and Axon say, you know, we had no partnerships with federal agencies, that the concern is you have partnerships with the local police and local agencies. And then what about the partnerships that they have? Or what are they willing to, what are they going to do with the data that they receive? So Flock and Ring and Flock and Axon, their partnerships were not about these cameras. Their partnerships were more about back-end integrations. But the fear, of course, is, and it comes back to AI, you know, if you can identify something in with a camera, you can identify a dog, you can identify a person.

1:56:02And at the same time, Ring launched facial recognition for its cameras. What is the next step? And while Ring may be very clear in all its messaging that we do not use, we do not access your cameras without your permission. This one feature did allow the cloud to process your camera data to look for this missing pet with your permission. But that tool now exists. And we, you know, can it be, could it be misused in the way that ICE apparently, allegedly was misusing the access to cameras like Flock Safety. So you can connect all those dots, even though everyone was saying we're working by the books.

1:56:47It rightly caused a lot of concern. Can I show you what my ring camera told me earlier today? It says. Oh, you've got the AI descriptions, have you? Not that one, this one. It says a cat is walking on the wall. A cat is standing on the wall. A person is walking on the porch. A cat is walking on the porch. A cat is sitting on the wall and looking around. A cat is walking on the porch. A cat is walking on the wall. This is all today. Two people are bending and moving at the entrance. It needs AI to sort all that. You need to turn on. They do actually have a really good new feature called, off the top of my head, I've forgotten the exact phrase for it, but it is only urgent alert.

1:57:24So it uses AI to determine whether you actually, unusual events is what it's called. So that would get rid of all the cats. An Amazon delivery person is delivering a package at the entrance. Sometimes it'll say a guy in brown short pants is delivering a package. It's really funny. I love it. It's quite useful, this stuff. This is where AI is actually useful in the smart home, but better than motion alert, which is what you got before, right? Right. Yeah, all it said, yeah, we just go, somebody, something's going on out there. So do show this, Benito, you showed this article earlier, Peter Diamandis, who is a former Google guy, he was the founder of XPRIZE, you know, widely considered a genius, says, humans behave better when they're being watched.

1:58:11I think we all know that. The problem is, is we've been conditioned for the last 20 years that China as a surveillance state. And when you walk around there and anyone who's been in China, I've been there before. You know, as soon as you go through security and you check in, like they take your photo and it's just cameras everywhere. And we're told that's bad. There are bad people over there doing that. We do. And now we're doing it. But it's like, well, it's not the government. It's just private corporations who end up making deals in the back. And the thing is, the whole history, going back to the Patriot Act, is about...

1:58:46There's private companies colluding with the government behind people's backs and giving them information and, oh, we didn't know about the subpoenas and, oh, we just let people, you know, the government tap into people's phones and datas and all this kind of stuff. So there's just no trust here. And sure, these companies may have good intentions and you can sell fear, but that's what this is. It's selling fear to people. But of course, it can be quickly turned into some of the, you know, most draconian systems. Panopticon. Well, it's the panopticon. I grew up in London, where we are surveilled every minute of the day.

1:59:21But to be fair, and I hate to be the sort of the... There's no crime in London, right? Well, no, but I grew up during the IRA war and we had, you know, a lot. I mean, that was why we got the mass surveillance in London was because they were putting bombs in garbage cans. And it was, you know. That's always the reason, though, isn't it? Fear is the reason. And that is what we've got. We've got to go back to the love that the World Cup brings. Let's all be happy and kind to each other. But, you know, there is the surveillance state is a terrifying concept. We don't want the government watching everything we do.

2:00:05But the fact that, you know, cameras and recording devices can help when there are, you know, significant concerns or incidences like someone planting bombs, you know, you can track them and you can find them. Things like, you know, there is, it's like all technology. It's how you use it. The technology isn't bad. It's how you use it. That is, you know, it's got to be well implemented and there's got to be a very valid reason. I'm, you know, searching for people in neighborhoods is probably not a valid reason. It's not a dragnet. There shouldn't be technology used to surveil us just in case. But when there are issues, when there's something happening, being able to tap into the technology is a good thing.

2:00:51I mean, unfortunately, it didn't pan out well, but this is what we saw at the same time as the whole Ring Flock safety case was the Nancy Guthrie case and the Savannah Guthrie's mother who was who went missing. And they were able to use doorbell camera footage to try and, you know, to get some idea of what happened. They never caught the guy, though. They never caught the guy. So it didn't work out. But it could it was better than nothing at that point. So, yeah, there's always this. We need more cameras. That's why we need more cameras. pretty diamantes i would point out as a wealthy man and probably can figure out how to hide but he says in his ex post of trillion sensors in space in the air on the ground will allow us to know anything anywhere at any time there will be no hiding humans behave better when they're being watched he says it's a good thing i won't disagree with anything he said there except that it's a good thing i don't think it's again it comes back to you know especially with the flock camera.

2:01:47This is why a lot of jurisdictions and people are kind of fighting back. It's not something people agreed to, right? It's something that's, again, happening to people. If these things are just going up, towns are deciding to do it. And then it's only after the fact that people are like, wait, where are these things coming from? And it's just covered under that, well, it's security. It's normal stuff that we do with your tax money. But I think, again, that's why there's that pushback is that people don't feel like, you know, it's like, all right, if we want to have that conversation in our town about putting up cameras everywhere, let's, you know, have that discussion.

2:02:24Yeah. And it's always weird that we live, you know, people like, oh, we live in a democracy, unless you get the constitutional republic nerds. But like, we do have democratic mechanisms in this country. And it's like, we can put stuff like this to votes, right? We do can do referendums that's all possible but we don't have that discussion a lot of times these things just happen to us yes and so that's why i think people you know it's a double-edged sword you can be like well but people are safer but at the same time you're going to foment this idea of you know being against technology and fighting back against this stuff even though you could make reasonable arguments about having these cameras uh in certain places so there are two themes emerging in this episode.

2:03:07And one is technology top-down and the other is regulation. I mean, everything that you just said, Daniel, is correct and we could have discussions. We have democratic mechanisms and we can easily implement regulation that allows technology to flourish while protecting civil liberties. The same thing with artificial intelligence and the same challenges exist with top-down tech. But we don't use those mechanisms. We choose not to deploy those mechanisms. We're going to take a break. Very smart panel. Love having you on. Dan Patterson, Blackbird.ai, Jennifer Patterson-Tui from The Verge. We're not related.

2:03:55We're not. Oh, Patterson Patterson. are you related though to that guy from the hunger game no the uh the the vampire oh that's pat inson oh they only probably came from the same people though right it's the same name probably i think it's something to do with baking he's patting his cake pat patty cake i don't know i just made that up oh i think you're right he's the son of a baker at some point he's a need need and Daniel Rubino of Windows Central. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. According to CNBC, nearly half of hiring managers say a candidate's enthusiasm about the job is the most important factor when considering them for a role.

2:04:49I mean, of course, you don't want to hire somebody who doesn't want the job, right? Well, if you need to hire for your business, how can you separate the candidates who are really excited about your opportunity from the ones that are just eh zip recruiter zip recruiter has a new feature that quickly lets you see the most interested qualified candidates first so you meet the right people faster and now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com twit zip recruiters smart matching technology connects you with qualified candidates instantly. ZipRecruiter's new feature puts the most interested qualified candidates at the top of your list.

2:05:29In fact, it gives candidates a chance to tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site. This is based on G2. Use ZipRecruiter. Find that enthusiastic talent fast. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. and now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash twit. That's ziprecruiter.com slash twit. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Oh, I have so many more stories and only a little bit more time. Let's see.

2:06:08I'm going to have to do some story triage here. We didn't mention that Samsung is going to start charging for API access to smart things. We should have mentioned that earlier. yeah so it was see this is what i'm talking about your ai needs to have access to that api but to charge me i'm not i don't know if i want to do that yeah this is this was people are not happy about this um it is a they sort of dressed it up and it's like we're going to we're making vast improvements to our api it'll be so much better but yeah it's 4.99 a month for developers to access the API now. But this Samsung goes, SmartThings goes way back in the smart home.

2:06:48It was one of the original smart home hubs. And it's always been a real tinkerer device, like great for setting up all mainly based Z-Wave, Zigbee, used a lot of local radios. And then when SmartThings was bought by Samsung, they slowly kind of transitioned it away. And in fact, the most recent SmartThings hub does not have z-wave radio in anymore um but they do it does support matter um but samsung stopped actually making the hardware itself and it has a third party that that makes their hubs now and samsung has put radios into all of its tvs and appliances and such so thread um radios and matter controller radios are in most of its hardware um and it's moving much more towards uh ai driven features uh much less sort of focus on zigbee z wave those local protocols does support thread anyway for some reason this api is now going to cost you five dollars a month to access and if you use home assistant to access to connect your smart things connected devices if you have a smart things hub that's connected to z wave or zigbee um that will now cost you five dollars a month which is not going to go down well with that community and paulus shouts them from home assistant actually messaged me actually just today and he was saying they have an estimated of uh 50 000 smart things users that use home assistant and um that's over so he says we we always estimate at least four times the number of actual users so it's more like 200 000 people that will be affected by this individuals that are just running their smart home not developers so So, yeah, that's going to be a lot of very, that is a lot of very annoyed smart home.

2:08:38And it doesn't just have to be Samsung products. I mean, one of the points of smart things was that you could connect lots. Up for everything. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if you've had a hub for many years and you use it to run lots of different devices like Zigbee, Z-Wave, NowThread and Matter. Yeah, that it will. I predict that this will push a lot of people off of the hub platform, which, to be fair, it might have been their whole purpose. Oh, maybe they don't want to. Yeah. They have been dragging the legacy SmartThings community into very slowly over the decade or so since that. I don't know.

2:09:17When did they buy SmartThings? SmartThings have been around about 15 years, I think. And I think they bought it maybe six or seven years ago. So during that time, they've slowly been sort of pushing out the old legacy style of SmartThings and moving it towards their new, you know, it's the platform when you buy a Samsung fridge that you now you download the SmartThings app. It's completely unrecognizable from what SmartThings was when it first started. And I think it would behoove them in many ways to sort of slowly lose that part of their audience and really just focus on their main smart home goals, which are very AI powered.

2:09:59And it's a huge user base. I mean, SmartThings probably has one of the largest user bases of the smart home platforms to date because you buy a Samsung appliance, you get the SmartThings app. So, which is, you know, much, I think, much larger chunk of the smart home pie. But those people aren't necessarily doing what people who had a SmartThings hub are doing. Yeah, it seems like there's two categories of smart home users, the ones that want to have it all local. Yeah. And the ones that want to connect to the cloud. and the advantage of the cloud is that you can keep the hardware on its own network and isolated which is for security reasons a good thing to do yeah uh if you have a local hub you have to have it on the same network because or local devices because you have to be able to talk to it um but that's an insecure thing so i don't i don't know i don't know i like the idea of having an ha green server here and everything's local.

2:10:57But it's a security issue for me because I shouldn't really have it on the same network segment as the rest of my stuff. So I don't know. And there's, I mean, most people who are really into the smart home will tell you, you just want everything local, but you do. And this is, again, just to go back to the Matter point, that's what Matter does. It does make everything, it gives you the potential for everything to be local. Not every platform uses it locally, but the potential is there. you do need the cloud for the smart home there's a lot of benefit of the cloud you just do not want to be dependent on the cloud that's where things can go wrong um and and smart things now has hubs in all of its hardware as it mentioned so your tv your soundbar your fridge um a couple of other so they've got uh the the audio frame thing like the frame tv lots of everything that's Smart things, Samsung now manufacturers has hubs in it, not your washing machine and dryer.

2:11:55The TVs do. The TVs, the soundbars, they are the smart things hub. But though smart things is very cloud dependent, even though it uses matter, it's very cloud dependent. So if that's the SmartThings Hub was the original, was the original SmartThings Hub, which is now in Gen 3 or 4, was the main way you could use SmartThings locally. And now, you know, using your Z-Wave and your Zigbee devices and Thread, now you don't have, you're not, well, you have that option, but you're going to have to pay$5 a month for it. So I think it will push people away from that hub. And I think ultimately they're going to get out of that space entirely and just want you to be using your fridge as your smart home hub, which just seems silly.

2:12:44But that's the way the smart home, if you're going to move the smart home mainstream, the hub has always felt like a roadblock. People are like, why do I need to buy this little white box that costs$150 and stick it in my house? But for tinkerers and for people that really understand the technology, because the reason you do that is because you own that device and you've got that control over these local devices, local connectivity protocols. so um but for the for the standard regular samsung customer who's buying a appliance and they're like oh cool i can get a notification on my phone that my washing machine is done i can get notification on my samsung tv that my dryer is done or my fridge door was left open that's all they're really they're like oh that's cool they're not really thinking about the larger sort of implications there okay i'm sorry i asked every time it's just so frustrating it's so complicated it shouldn't be so complicated maybe ai will solve this i can just talk to my ai and say you figure it you figure it out we did figure out who was responsible for the jaguar land rover hack turns out russian hackers this is the one that the damage is so severe that the jaguar had to shut down for a month more than a month uh it was so severe that the uk government had to bail out the company with a two billion dollar loan cost the british economy two and a half billion dollars russia's at it again dan what i tell you uh australia has uh of course passed and now many other countries are considering passing a ban on social media for under 16s studies say it's not working four out of five 80 percent of under 16s in australia are still using social media shocking that what a shock this is an observational study by the university of newcastle the legislation has resulted in quote limited implementation and incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions.

2:15:02You're just teaching, this is what Harper Reid told us when the law was passed. You're just going to teach these kids to be hackers. Australians are going to have the best hackers in the world. Now, Norway's going to do the same thing. The UK just announced it, right? And then immediately Keir Starmer resigned. I don't think they were related. But the UK is going to implement that later in the year, early next year. it's just another example back to our very first topic of how hard it is to regulate these technologies like well banning youtube seems like a really dumb thing to do i can understand maybe instagram or facebook but youtube that's like saying you can't watch tv to people under 16 right that's how they that's their that's what they watch but tv was very regulated for a very long time in the uk it was yeah speaking of which three channels when i was growing up that was all did you did you did your family pay the license fee yeah you had to they would come and like knock on your door if you didn't they were very little trucks yeah did you see yeah the the long wave radio bbc is going silent oh so sad this makes me sad uh the bbc stopped broadcasting radio 4 on the 198 kilohertz long wave frequency after a century of transmission um we don't do long wave wave here in the united states but in the in the uk it did yeah it's bbc4 what was that was it music was it no it was information it was the long wave radio was like part of my childhood my dad used to just listen to the cricket scores on it all the time it was like lulling me to sleep it's like my lullaby um But yeah, it was the great thing about it was, you know, I mean, it's like smart like smart home verticals.

2:16:49The longwave radio had such reach that you could get you could get BBC Radio 4 anywhere in the world, I think, almost because wherever you were, you could listen to it. And it was a very powerful tool. In fact, it was used during the French resistance during World War II, used long wave radio, used this transmission to help to communicate. Like it's got such a fascinating history, this radio band. But it's basically fall and fall to technology. And I think the reason they're actually shutting it down is because they can no longer make the tubes. No one makes the tubes that keeps the antenna going, something like that.

2:17:34Oh, so it wasn't they wanted to shut it down. They just didn't have a choice. And it wasn't financially viable to keep running it. Like, and because you couldn't manufacture the tubes that were needed anymore. And no one uses it. Everyone's moved to digital radio and or FM is still, I mean, radio in England is still a very. Did you listen to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on BBC? Yeah, they used to. It wasn't that old. I'm not that old. But yes, it was one of the first sort of radio books. Douglas Adams. People know The Hitchhiker's Guide. They think maybe it was a book or a movie, but it started as a BBC radio play on BBC 4.

2:18:19I know. Radio 4 is still around. But it'll be what, an internet or will they do broadcast? Radio 4 is a station, like BBC Radio 1, Radio 2. So it's not going away. It's just that it was broadcast on the long wave, so you could listen to it anywhere. And it was a special feed, I think. It wasn't the main Radio 4. I could be wrong. But yeah, Radio 4 is all talking, no music. So it was very low bandwidth. So you could get it anywhere. I like it. But it's definitely an end of an era. It was an incredibly important piece of technology for a very long time. This may not look like an ancient book. it sure doesn't look like an ancient book to me but that is the herculaneum scrolls that were uh ancient un uh scrolls from the roman library of herculaneum carbonized by a volcanic eruption this is the this is all that was left uh but believe it or not thanks to ai we've actually been able to read it using high resolution 3d scans of the scroll you obviously can't unroll it would fall apart so they x-rayed it and they've been able to use ai to read the i don't know if they got anything good i don't know if it was a good read but they've they've been able to scan it and read it these are these are left over from the uh ad 79 eruption of mount vesuvius they're trying to keep kids off books back then yeah they were that's right the volcano here's a big oopsie ford fired a bunch of uh engineers to replace them with automated systems oops they had to hire them back because the automated systems made so many mistakes

2:20:11so mistakenly says charles poon vp of this sounds like it's made up vp of vehicle hardware engineering mistakenly we thought that just by introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had that would produce a high quality product how do you make that phone call like who drew the short straw to like look you gotta i know we fired you but uh no i bet you a lot of those engineers are like said yeah yeah told you so ha ha and the people who made that decision probably still have a job right oh yeah they're gonna stay yeah uh notion had created a gmail client uh but they're gonna cancel it because so many people use bots to handle their email that mail wasn't getting through ai uh powered gmail client on Notion Mail will shut down in September 22nd.

2:21:10Notion said, as Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email flows to agents. Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox. So I guess you didn't really need us after all, so that we're gonna shut it down. How do you do that? I wanna learn that. Oh, I do. That's what I do. i have my read my email for me if you ever get an email from uh from me that sounds a little mechanical no i actually don't have a write my email that i really wouldn't want to do that i don't think meta you may remember was uh tracking its employees mouse movements for ai training now they've stopped it not because it was immoral or wrong or bad but just because they're afraid of data, that the data is going to be exfiltrated.

2:22:09The model capability initiative, which they rolled out in April, captures the mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes of U.S.-based employees with occasional screenshots, feeds them into the meta models for training. But meta realized that sensitive employee data was inadvertently accessible to everyone else, all meta staff, including private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions well yeah you harvest everybody's keystrokes put it in the database shocking uh just a reminder you don't own anything you don't actually physically hold playstation is deleting 551 movies from your account i never bought any movies in the playstation store but uh if you bought rambo first blood you know what you're not gonna miss it bridget jones diary oh the deer hunter now that's a good movie how far away are they from removing games though i'm sure they've already done that yeah as of september 1st due to our content licensing arrangements you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased studio canal content and it will be removed from your video library so just a reminder

2:23:26you don't really own anything you buy. The best part is you don't get any money back. It's just gone. Oh, no. Gone. And if you look at the license agreement, you never really owned it. It was just there. We're going to take one quick break and then some final words, including a farewell to one of our favorite people who passed away this week. Before we do that, Let me tell you about our sponsor, Superhuman Go. A lot of us were promised that AI would make work easier, but somewhere along the way, maybe you've experienced this, it just started to feel like another thing to manage. Another tab open, another app to check, another place to copy and paste information, just to get a simple answer.

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2:24:57Now, I'll tell you how I know about this because we are very happy users of Grammarly. We've been using Grammarly for years. Now part of the superhuman family, superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly works across the tools and sites you're already using your browser your inbox your docs your project tools just like grammarly it fits naturally into the way work already happens it handles the repetitive tasks so people can focus on the work only they can do check it out find out more at superhuman.com that's superhuman.com we're so glad they decided to support this show superhuman.com we love grammarly we use it all the time i'm i think i'm gonna have to install go see see what i can do with it a few final uh thoughts before we wrap things up uh on the show today let me see uh we had a whole oops segment planned all the things ai did wrong this this week.

2:25:57Let me see. I have a few more here. U.S. Auto. Now, I don't know if this is a good idea. U.S. Auto regulators want to eliminate the brake pedal in your robo-taxi. Why?

2:26:17That's a good question. They say that requiring manually operated methods of stopping driverless vehicles is a barrier to innovation didn't want to just go into someone's oh no that that was i had a person in it i'm sorry there was the tesla crash right yeah there was a huge now either test but the robo taxi or or the waymo or whatever yeah actually there's always a big red stop button isn't there it's like get me out of here button nitsa published in one yeah me neither so i don't know. NHTSA, they have them in Atlanta, don't they? Oh, you're in South Carolina, that's right. Yeah, I'm living in Charleston.

2:26:56We have horses and carriages. They'll never have them in Charleston. Never. I doubt it. NHTSA, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, published a notice of rulemaking on Friday to modify federal brake safety standards. I have to think Elon had something to do with this. For light vehicles, by eliminating the requirement for vehicles equipped with automated driving systems and no manual controls to have foot operated service brakes or manually operated parking so there would still be a some kind of stop though it just wouldn't be a break i get i think i see that like they're saying this is a completely different type of vehicle you don't have a steering wheel there's no one sitting there with their feet on the pedals so as long as there's some way of stopping it please yeah yeah go into your app yeah go into open your app stop please another technology regulation metaphor yeah one million passports have leaked online database of a million passports not just us passports um people were using guess why people were using passports for age verification this is the problem one of the problems one of the many problems with age verification uh the person who wrote the book careless people which was an excellent book sarah winn williams it was an expose uh on her years uh working at meta and it was i it was wow uh meta is now going after her she says they're punishing me even though i'm a whistleblower they're punishing her for disclosing its illegal and indefensible workplace conditions and corporate misconduct to federal regulators uh she did write a book and probably made some money on it uh she says meta is doing this to strike fear into the heart of anyone else who dares to consider speaking the truth about meta's unlawful and abusive practices in the public interest betta of course went after her in court and is suing her finally uh we uh are so sad to have learned of the passing of om malik i don't know jenny any of you know om yeah it was impossible to work i mean i did not know him well but you couldn't work in technology media amazing in the aughts and 2010s without knowing him yeah uh he was on our show I think 14 or 15 times I was a huge fan he was a deep philosopher a great artist he a master with a Leica camera he loved his Leica and took amazing pictures started the tech blog GigaOM many of the people you know who've been on this show besides OM worked at GigaOM Stacey Higginbotham Kevin Toffel Yanko Reckers a lot of the best journalists in tech started at GigaOM He started that in 2001.

2:29:56Semi-retired, I think 2014, to become a venture capitalist. Had investments in a lot of the companies you know. Let's see, 2015, GigaOM shut down with 6.4 million monthly readers. Was really one of the great places to get tech information. he was always a welcome visitor to the show he once called me the yoda of tech i said no no you're the yoda of tech i'm the i'm the jar jar of tech uh he he had this deep understanding and you know what's really sad is that his blog which is om.co some of the best articles he'd ever written were just came out this month for instance uh june 7th his article about mythos just brilliant writing.

2:30:54His writing was better than ever. He'd had heart trouble for years, passed away this week, Wednesday, at the age of 59. Very, very young. But we are very happy to have known him, and we will miss the man. If you go to our site, twit.tv, and search for O'Malik, O-M-A-I-L-I-K, you'll find many shows that he appeared on. I his last appearance here was around 2015 when his health problems began but i i brought up uh this article i think a few weeks ago that i would recommend everybody read if you want to get a sense of whom omalik is we are living in pinocchio's world in which he writes about one of his favorite pens a mont blanc uh that commemorates pinocchio but the article takes a little bit of a turn when he talks about the true meaning of Pinocchio and the fact that we are all living in Pinocchio's world today.

2:31:58One of the greats. Really, really one of the greats, and we will very much miss him. That is it for this week in tech for this week. I want to thank you, Jennifer Pattison Toohey, your wonderful... I will say nice things about you when you pass away. senior reviewer no i'm much older than you senior reviewer theverge.com she writes about all kinds of things but especially home automation what do you what do you what tell me some of the doohickeys you've got around the house today oh well next week i have lots of reviews coming out i've been reviewing the new google home speaker um and the new schlake sense pro smart lock that you should have waited to buy should have waited yes um and then there's weird robot things that i can't wait to get rid of and um like the switch bot i can't i can't wait to read a review of that yeah because i'm normally quite nice but even the kids didn't like this thing not really that's what surprises me i mean isn't it supposed to be all cute and cuddly that's the thing it's not cuddly you want to pick it up but it's it's hard plastic and it's on wheels And it's taking pictures of your house.

2:33:07And the two, yeah, there's so many things. I love SwitchBot. SwitchBot is a great company. They come up with all sorts of crazy and wonderful ideas, but this one I'm not sold on. And then the robot lawnmower is in my backyard. You were talking about not getting injured. Well, you don't get injured in home automation, but my robot lawnmowers beg to differ. Do not lie in front of your robot lawnmower. It hasn't hurt you, has it? No, well, it hurt my husband, but it was technically. it was technically his fault. So, but just in general. Not badly, I hope. No, no, just, just, you know, permanent scarring.

2:33:41Oh my God, it nipped him. It was again, his own fault, but there are days, it's a dangerous job. I'm just telling you. Oh my gosh. Which, which one do you have? Right now I'm testing one from Dreamy, one from Husqvarna and one from motion. Oh, so you have the best mode lawn in your neighborhood. You'd think. Is this because you're the only Verge reviewer who has a lawn? Yes, this is the real reason. It's so nice to see you. Jennifer also pops up every month with Micah Sargent on Tech News Weekly and we always love having you on the shows. Thank you. Dan Patterson's in Brooklyn, so he neither has a lock nor a lawn.

2:34:25But he has a lock. I have a lock. Old-fashioned key locks. Yeah, he probably has many locks, actually. Senior Director of Content, Blackbird.ai. Tell me what's going on at Blackbird. Last time you were on, you made an offer. People could sign up for your disinformation detector. Is that still out there? Yeah, yeah. We have a number of tools. Most of them are not consumer-facing, but we do have one called Compass. That's compass.blackbird.ai, which it is made for journalists. And I mean, everyone else, it will detect deep fakes or claim. Like if you see a post on the social web and you wonder, is this BS or real?

2:35:10Just paste it into Compass and it will tell you not just true or false, but it will tell you the context. We call it a context checker, not a fact checker. And far more than just generative AI links, it'll give you real deep context and let you find and read more about what you're finding. finding also of course and others i get bit all the time now especially on x yeah that recent searches that just sums up the world right now social media bands and they put yeah right is taylor swift breaking with trevor's cow no they're getting married i found out they're getting married donald trump won the election like those are the two most important things yeah yeah type of claimant but uh but i saw this uh video i have to find it and i can feed it into the because you do vision which is fantastic that's great i can feed it in it uh it um it was a picture of a cat and a tube and the cat would jump down the tube and slide down it and just form to i thought oh that gotta get one of those and then lisa said you dummy that's ai there's you can't cats don't slide down tubes are you nuts so i guess i have a way i have compass It's my wife.

2:36:24But there are times even Lisa might be fooled that I could use compass.blackbird.ai. It's really nice to have that. Thank you for doing that. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Sorry about the frog voice. No, you sound fine. Our Discord chat, our club chat says, Leo, you're such a boomer. I saw it. It was a video. The cat went down the tube. I saw it. I didn't believe it. were you even for a moment fooled by that I am fooled by the stairs though they're showing in the chat I can imagine a cat doing that oh well let me see now okay this is a test for everybody to see oh yeah that looks real sure that's AI no that's real that looks quite real to me but who knows these days you can't believe your eyes exactly if you're smart you make it kind of like low quality fuzzy yeah well anyway we've got damn to save us here's what happens when a cat jumps down a tube i think that one's real cats do get it do get up to the darndest things are they and then there's daniel rubino he is the editor-in-chief of the wonderful windows central it's always a pleasure to see you daniel i am sorry that you're not into fifa soccer or f1 sports but i'm glad you're into microsoft and windows thank god somebody is they were playing here at foxborough so i know you're just up the road a piece and everything could you hear the cheers no no but they got the signs on the highway so i love it how they say what did they say like new york new jersey stadium or something i mean it's like it's it's not even in new york it's where the giants play but it's oh right yeah they did give it it's in massachusetts it's the same thing with this so the they're using the old the 49ers stadium down in santa clara but they say san francisco it's not san francisco it's 50 miles away it's like foxborough it's like every place in boston it's like i mean massachusetts it's basically just boston right right it's now scotland it's now scotland officially right right oh yeah right Was it true that the Scots drank all the beer in Boston?

2:38:48Is that true? South Boston, that's the rumor. But I think it was just from one pub. But it was a good story, though. So you're telling me that a cat, a cat couldn't? Cat videos. Okay. That is what AI is for. This is the tube. And I swear to God, I think that's real. I think that's real. Don't you think a cat could do that? No? I don't. I built a data center next to my house for this. Yeah, right. Exactly. Do you live next door to a data center? No, I live in Brooklyn. No, you live in Brooklyn. No locks. Okay, let me get this straight. No lawns, no data centers, but the best pizza. Thank you all of you for joining us.

2:39:34Thanks especially to our Club Twit members who make this show possible. We really appreciate your support. If you're not yet a member, please. twit.tv slash club twit for ad-free versions of all the shows the shows in club twit now have chapter markers so you can jump past all the cat videos that's very handy uh we also have a wonderful club twit discord special programming on friday we did our second episode of off by one with jeff atwood has so much fun um all of that because you support this podcast uh it's i think So important to support independent journalism of any stripe. You should support all the ones you use, and we appreciate your support here at twit.tv slash club twit.

2:40:15We do this week in tech every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 6. I'll make it 2 to 5 Pacific. That would be 5 to 8 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch the show live as we do it at, well then our club to discord but also YouTube twitch x.com Facebook LinkedIn and kick after the fact on-demand versions of show available at the website that's twit TV there's also a YouTube channel with the video and you can subscribe to audio or video versions of the show in your favorite podcast client I hope you will do that we thank you so much for stopping by as I've said for now 21 years at the end of every show. Thanks for being here.

2:41:05Another twit is in the can. See you next week. This is amazing. Doing the twit. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit, baby. Doing the twit. All right. Doing the twit.