TWiT 1094: Rest in Peace, Buzzkill - How John C. Dvorak Changed Tech Journalism Forever

48:32Your business relies on it, in other words. Once it gets to that part, companies will start spending tens of thousands of dollars per day on tokens. Right. If they're if they're having to. We heard somebody and we I still don't know who it was, but somebody said they'd spent half a half a trillion dollars. Well, so so the way the way around that is you take you take some of these open source models, open weights, open source type models. They can cover probably 70, 80, maybe even 90 percent of the workload. Right. Right. Like, you know, you don't need the top models for a lot. what you do right right and and that's another mistake that some companies will do is they'll have a they'll have a drop down for you to for the employee to make the choice of which model they want actually my agent does that it will it has a whole delegation table of things and i have local models running on a 64 gigabyte mac mini i have frontier models i have chinese models and i have subscriptions too i hate to tell you how much i spend but not as much as that but a few hundred bucks a month for anthropic open ai zai uh i use deep seek so that's cheap tokens and so there there are ways to do this where i'm doing a lot of stuff uh it's pretty exciting what you can do it's pretty amazing what one person could do we're looking at automating our entire workflow yeah there's all sorts of innovation happening just all over the place with respect to okay how do you properly feed these things right how do you have some sort of an infrastructure or environment.

50:00How do you have memory and context and do it in such a way that you're not just dumping a bunch of extra context into the model and so you can be more efficient with your tokens, right? There's a GitHub repository called Caveman. I love it. Yeah, where you basically have it talk like you change all of your yeah, you update all of your markdown files, you update all of your stuff to get all the filler words out of there and just make it talk like a caveman and listen like a caveman and now you're using half the tokens and it's accomplishing the same thing we talked like caveman use fewer words yes you know i'm not i'm not as techie as you guys are i know i'm sorry i apologize to everybody who's going what the hell that just what are we i've been using i've been using gemini gems which are basically agents and it is i wouldn't say drop dead simple because you have to keep doing it like it'll it'll get it wrong the first few times but but if you're if you're if you're persistent you ask it to do something and then you try it and it doesn't work and you try it again within a few tries you're going to get some pretty amazing stuff so for example uh as i mentioned to you earlier before we went on the air i'm self-syndicating my radio segment these days so what i have gemini and what and the pain point is i have to write a description i have to give it a file name and then i have to write a summary and i have to a title right so now what i do is i have gemini listen to the show i I uploaded it to Gemini and I created a gem, which basically does all that.

51:24And at the end of the day, I have all the information the stations need. Now, the one thing it hasn't done yet is to actually upload that information to FTP and Google Drive. But I'll get there. I'm sure that's, you know, work on a little bit. But what used to be about a half an hour of tedious, boring work every week, you know, I was able to automate with a very simple gem, not knowing half the words you guys are using, let alone how to implement them. Yeah. Pretty simple. Well, but that's what's so exciting about this is it gives an individual. I run through a study that said the happiest people in the world are symphony orchestra conductors and traffic cops because they get to do things and it makes people do things.

52:06They're telling people to do things and people do it. And it's very satisfying. And I realized that's why I love working. I have a little team of minions. I'm Gru. I have a little team of minions and I tell them what to do. And they do it. And the minions are faultless. They're not faultless. But they're loyal. But that's exactly right. They mean well. They try. And with a little correction, I'm never mean. I always say, nice job. That was a good idea. With a little correction, you can kind of herd them into. But it gives a human, being serious here, it gives somebody like you, Larry, the opportunity to do so much more.

52:51Oh God, it's incredible. And now people are going to say, well, yeah, but what about all the people Larry would have hired to do that? You would not have hired people. I wouldn't have hired them. Are you kidding? I'm not going to hire somebody to do that a half an hour a week. This is not replacing anybody. This is giving you power to express yourself, to do more. And I think that's what's very exciting about this. If anything, we've actually expanded our staff because now on a lower budget, we can be incredibly productive. And so if I invest, for every$1 ,000 I invest in payroll, I'm getting$10 ,000 worth of productivity out of that person.

53:21Right. And I think in the long run, this is positive. There will be jobs. They just won't look, just as, you know, when people started driving instead of riding in carriages or something, there will be jobs. It just won't look like the jobs you're used to. There will also be far fewer jobs. I mean, we are going through. I don't know if that's true. Look, the video game industry alone has lost tens of thousands of jobs recently. And the companies are blaming AI and other things. And partially it's due to the overspending and the overhiring during COVID era stuff. But also, I think what's going to be happening is like, yeah, you're going to hire fewer people, empower them with these AI tools to go do things.

54:01But that means less jobs overall. But the jobs will change. If I were a young person coming out of college, I think I'd get an electrician's license. Yeah, there will always be that. Or a plumber, right? Yeah, a plumber. and they make pretty good money ais are never going to fix your toilet got bad news for you i mean they're giving people instructions right now they will tell you you asked gpt like yeah but that's power that means i can fix stuff now because or i mean i don't know it's it is of course it's challenging and every in every big technological revolution is disruptive and challenging and i and i know that this will hurt a lot of people at the same time it's it's i don't if you guys saw the elon musk interview which is absolutely embarrassing like to everybody which which one of those is the one recently it was a recent one the economist the economist editor-in-chief that's a real journalist not like right not a podcaster not just like a fan you have to watch it what did he say nothing of substance the man is completely like inept and unable to answer like legitimate questions i think something happened to elon because clearly he was at one point very i don't know i don't know if that was true like i think like looking back at the tech of him right now like elon has bought companies he has smart people working for him but the man himself has like he's not the one out here building rockets right he's not the one out here i honestly think something happened um yeah so he told the editor money's not gonna there won't be any money in 10 years yeah uh we'll all have universal basic income i don't know where that's going to come without money he doesn't have any answers no currency it's it's bs i mean but he's also been saying we're going to live on mar there'll be a million people on mars hey leo mars it's not going to ever happen i'm still not able to rent out my tesla as a robo taxi i've been waiting since 2018 for that money and did you pay for now see i paid five thousand dollars to have the right to have full self-driving on my Model X, which I never got.

56:06Yeah. That's wild. That's absolutely wild. That's Elon. That's Elon, but it's also like, I look at what AI has done to this entire industry and to executives and people at the top who are kind of like rebuilt their businesses around this stuff. These agents are clearly working for some people. They can do amazing things. I occasionally use it just to like look up things and do some quick research. I was doing a drive from the Atlanta area to Destin, Florida. So I asked Gemini or something like, hey, what are things to do along? How can I break up this trip to make it easier for the kids? And it gave me options.

56:39It gave me a place to visit. I was like, oh, that's cool. I could do that right from my phone. Actually, no, I did it on iOS 27. So the built-in Siri AI was able to generate some stuff for me to do. And it came up with a thing for me to go to that's two hours away. And I was able to book that. And that made life a little easier. So these tools do have a certain usefulness, and I think consumers will figure that out. But the business people have gone crazy. Seeing what Satya Nadella has done, seeing what Microsoft has done to kind of rework their entire business around AI, it's going to be rough times ahead.

57:13Not just for their business, but for employees, anybody who works. If any part of this bubble pops, the entire global economy is going to take a tremendous hit, and it's going to be real rough. Let me show you something I've been working on for the last month. We had a Twitter ad sales system that somebody Jeff Needles wrote for us 12 years ago that we've been limping along with. Now, the good news is I had that software and that became kind of a spec for this. I haven't written a line of code in this. This has all been written by AI. and it is a incredibly powerful sales system that we could have maybe gotten something off the shelf that would kind of come close but now one of the problems I've had is getting the humans to review it so I add I said could you put a little button on here that's a bug button and it said oh yeah sure so here's a little bug button what's wrong and then I said could you make so they could record their thoughts as they're looking at the page or you have to allow the microphone there we go and now i'm recording my thoughts about this and it and here's the funny thing i said if it's a simple thing to fix just fix it don't you don't have to ask me if it's more complicated uh then um let me know and we can go over it uh-huh simply hack leo's land yeah yeah no way this can go wrong no way that's what i'm not going to use this what if it what if it i don't know blows up the world it's not first of all it's very secure we make sure it's very secure it's behind it's a you know has lots of security behind it you're more secure than open ai apparently leo so i am yeah well i'm counting on companies like cloud flare to you know provide uh security front end security and so forth actually it uses a google sso i'm you know i'm hoping that it's all but we just added a piece of uh so that while you're doing a an ad order you can export it to an excel to a google sheets it can do excel i said what would be nice if you'd save it to a google sheet on the google drive and now it's doing that and i this is a simple project i worked on i for last month i had fable work on it i had claude uh code fable uh opus 4 eight and now opus five opus for it was doing the coding fable was designing i had chat gpt sol look at it review it they go back as i said they go back and forth i had quen five three eight and actually grok was great except i ran out of usage i only had the 30 plan um but grok four five was really helpful they all worked on it together it sounds like you have all your employees you just it's like employees yeah i had a grok the other day he's really a nice guy a little crazy but it's it's so this is a line of business app that uh took us a year to write with a human I haven't written I haven't even looked at the code I mean, what was interesting is there's 81 ,000 lines of code, but almost half of them are tests.

1:00:26It's, you know, I say you've got to do red, green, blue testing on everything. And so it's doing all that. The problem is when something goes wrong, Leo, right? Like when you can't just look at the models and be like, hey, what is happening here, right? And a human has to go look at it. People are reporting, like jumping into these Vibe-coded apps. The actual developers don't know what the hell is going on because the code is like gobbledygook. can't you pinpoint where the code well that's why i put this little bug button i said fix it if it's if it's a cosmetic thing or something just probably fixing it's not going to go wrong devendred knock on wood it's never going to go it's just really it's really you're not alone lisa's saying the same thing she says what if it goes wrong and you're on the air and it's not very wise it's never going to go wrong we will be fewer bugs in this than there were in the original because no human was there to make those mistakes well what do you think alan am i nuts we just use computers to do like specific things to make would you run a nuclear reactor on a submarine this way only if the code was audited right i mean but is but let's let's be let's be fair and this is the same thing with self-driving vehicles are humans really the best people to audited are they reliable i think humans are less reliable this far though yeah well they got it yeah but that's why we're at a turning point we did it took us to get to this point i mean i mean leo everything you just described and like like that's basically the cause for the boom right now right right like there's everyone around the world are in your shoes coming to the realization of the types of things that you can have ai do for you mind boggling and i mean honestly yeah my first like month or two just dabbling i had to start keeping like a list because there was like oh there's that other project that i've that's that's the big problem is yeah you can suddenly do all these things you wanted to do and now that now you lose track there's yeah once you start realizing like oh wait i could do that other thing like so it yeah in my back when i did my reverse engineering work back in the military, I made, well, call it a mistake or not, but I focused so much on the reverse engineering piece of it.

1:02:40I mean, I can just read machine code, you know, like our security now, buddy. Right. Like I'm not, I'm not good at reading code. That's just machine code, but I never did the other direction. I never sat down and properly figured out how to properly just be able to code just like natively. So, so I understand all of the principles, all of those that like, I have everything in my mind about like how I'd like it to work and what I know. Well, that's what you need now. That's all you need now. And that's what you need now. Yeah. So it's a different sort of mentality that you sort of have to have.

1:03:15And if you do, then it's like, it's, it's really eyeopening and you start to realize, oh man, I could do this. I could do that. And yeah. In our personal life. So I use it extensively to analyze my investment portfolio, for example i do that and i have found things that my broker isn't aware of for example i found out i'm over i'm over heavy in certain stocks because they're in mutual funds they're in etfs i mean uh incredible and the other thing and maybe maybe benito whoever's running the board can bring this up um if you go to larrysworld.com and you scroll down a few things you'll see my iphone and ai became part of my hospital care team oh this was cool you know what let's i gotta take a break let's talk about this because you this is really interesting uh and i would like to talk about this absolutely so we're going to take a little break everybody can see the inside of my intestines in a few minutes great not the best teas they're beautiful they're gorgeous you'll love them but you know i'm doing the same thing larry at the close of business every business day my little agent here downloads all everything that happened all my accounts and gives me a summary of how i'm doing it's not always better than a broker ever would oh much better yeah yeah yeah um we're gonna have more it's not gonna be all ai i promise although this was kind of fun i think it's look people say why are you always talking about ai this is the biggest thing larry you and i both been sitting here for 50 years covering this stuff oh yeah and this is the most it was getting boring let's face it this is the most exciting year i'm on the verge of doing what devorac did and you know finding some some diversion to something else to do and then something will happen window the mac will come out windows will come out the web will come out broadband will come out and yeah that gets me very interested now there's just no end of fun things to do with ai it's like taking over my life i'm not sure that i i'm not sure i should be proud of that but it is it is it is so rich and it's so and it's moving at such an incredible pace the potential is huge but so is the risk and that's why we began with that story so is the risk absolutely and we're gonna have to find a way to manage it we will look at larry's thank you devinder for keeping us all uh a realist i'm the skeptic no that's good we need the skeptics too yeah that's gonna protect us we desperately need skeptics i firmly admit i am in AI psychosis right now.

1:05:42Devendra, the skeptic hardwar here from Engadget, where he's a senior editor. Nice to have you, Larry. Magid from connectsafely.org, where he is the CEO, and his radio career continues, thanks to AI, thanks to Gems. And Alan Malventano, former Submariner, now a benchmark and workload lead at Soladime. Actually, we got to talk about SSD and memory shortages. This is your field. One of the bad things AI has brought us is you cannot get a machine with more than 32 gigs of RAM for love or money. And that's a problem. And it's going to be that way, I think, for a while. But I'm going to ask you about that.

1:06:24So we'll talk about that, too, when we come back. Meanwhile, this show brought to you today by Arctic Wolf. Arctic Wolf. I love that name. It's such a great image. Arctic Wolf helps organizations stay ahead of evolving cyber threats. And they do this in a couple of ways, but every year they put out this great trends report that is so insightful. For instance, the latest research reveals something surprising. Even as, and we're seeing it, AI accelerates the pace and the complexity of attacks, just like we were talking about. Many security leaders say they're confident they can keep up. Really? Maybe it's because Arctic Wolf, to better understand what's driving that confidence, Arctic Wolf surveyed more than 1 ,350 security and IT leaders worldwide.

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1:08:40We thank them so much for supporting This Week in Tech. Okay, our hydration break is over, gentlemen. Back to work. This is Larry's article. My phone and AI became part of my hospital care team. And one of the things, especially in the United States, but I bet it's worldwide we're facing, is a dearth of help. When you go to a doctor or you go to the hospital, you're navigating a world. And unless you're very, very lucky, you're not getting the information maybe you need for the best care. Larry, tell us what happened. Well, what happened is I was in New York, and I had an intestinal blockage, which I sometimes have.

1:09:20And I went to the ER in Greenwich Village because I walked to the ER in Greenwich Village and they did a CT scan and then they admitted me to Lenox Hills Hospital, which is a great hospital. The good news is all they did is put an IV in me and I was fine two days later. No surgery, nothing. But that's scary. You're not even at home. You're at it to hell. Yeah, it's scary. But then I took the CT. So what Lenox Hills does, they allow you to download the images as well as the radiology reports. So two things. Number one, while I'm in the hospital, they're coming around drawing blood, right, all the time.

1:09:49By the time the phlebotomist leaves my room, five minutes later, I'm getting the data on my phone, right? That's really interesting. So when the doc walks in, I can ask him or her or them questions. So that's one thing. And the same thing, they did a couple of scans. But the amazing thing is I took the CT scan. I took the image, ran it through ChatGPT without giving it the radiology report. and it gave me its own radiology report, which was almost identical to what the radiologist said. Then I said to ChatGPT, I don't understand exactly, I understand what happened, but tell me visually what happened.

1:10:22Where is the blockage? Why is it happening? And as you can see from that image... This was generated by ChatGPT? So you see the yellow line? I can't quite see your image. The yellow line is where a previous surgery happened and the red line, I believe, is where the current blockage is. And basically, I now know, I knew I had scar tissue from a previous surgery. I now know exactly where that scar tissue is. I know exactly where the blockage was. That bile duct that's surrounded with a marker is full of stuff that shouldn't be there, fecal matter that should have passed through. So I know exactly why I had this blockage.

1:11:00Now, I don't know if it's going to help me prevent it, but at least I have a clear image of what happened. And what's funny about this is I happened to be attending an AI seminar at Stanford Medical a few weeks ago. And I brought this up to the head radiologist at Stanford. And he at first said, oh, you know, radiologists are not threatened. And I said, I agree, we need radiologists. But from a patient education standpoint, no doctor, no radiologist has ever explained to me what's going on inside of my body as well as this illustration has. And so now whenever I get any information, any medical information, I get one of the AI models.

1:11:38And I vary between chat GPT, Claude, Gemini, and a few others. I get them to explain it to me. Did you show this to the radiologist at the hospital? I did. He was kind of blown away. I also showed it to my gastroenterologist who said, you know, I don't know how to read a CT scan. He goes to the radiologist. He goes to the radiologist. But this gave me more than the radiologist. So, yeah, I showed it to the head radiologist. He was pretty impressed, you know. i think one of the concerns besides losing their jobs and you know it's very famously um i can't remember who it was uh maybe dario amode i think it was the ceo and founder of uh anthropics said oh radiologists i won't have a job in 10 years he said that 10 years ago they do still have a job yeah but uh i think not only are they threatened about jobs they also are worried that you're going to get bad information yeah and then they're going to have to be arguing against a machine.

1:12:31But, you know, they make mistakes too. They're human. They make mistakes. And these things can see things that radiologists don't see. Now, you still need, I think, some wise person to put it in perspective. Right. It's a problem. And I don't care. You know, I do the same thing with my Apple Watch. Jeffrey Hinton. Thank you. Joe's corrected me. It was Jeffrey Hinton. I will run my Apple Watch reports or I'm now wearing this Google Fitbit Air. I'll run, although the Fitbit actually has its own AI, which is fantastic, the Google Health. And it will explain technical details in ways that not only can I understand, but it puts it in perspective.

1:13:05So for example, Google Health will take all of my vitals in the context of my activity for the day and my health information because it's linked to my medical records, and it will put it all into context in ways, frankly, that internists typically do. Yeah. And increasingly don't have the time to do oh yeah part of it is that uh you know my doctor went from a thousand patients to five thousand patients you know and so he just doesn't have the time to explain stuff to me when i went on a zempic a couple of years ago he just said here's this prescription go go get it and i had to do a lot of reading and studying yep and i and i had symptoms that i didn't know anything about and yeah i could email him but it's the long process it was very helpful to get that information and and the i've had my genome done by nebula genomics which does the full genome i've i've had biome tests i wear all the you know rings and watches and my scale and my blood i get all the stuff right so i feed that into the ai and i find that i have more information than before the ai told me for instance based on your biome test this is what you should be eating now now we'll see i'm going to do another he said and then 12 weeks from now do it again and we'll see if you've improved i want to do one caveat i'm not going to do a medical procedure or take no i wouldn't have it operate on me i might i might change my diet a little bit but i'm not going to take yes i don't mind eating more you know blueberries okay fine it's not gonna hurt you right so you have to use your head yeah but i'll take something but my doctor will never tell me that stuff you know told me drink more green tea and eat carrots well i had i love him he's a great doctor and he wants to do more but he doesn't have time to do more i had a skin infection in prog at three in the morning there was you're just falling apart dude i know no way i was gonna get real medical advice so for that i actually did use ai and luckily i had the medication with me that it recommended it recommended a particular medication i happened to have it with me and fine it worked but by and large, I don't take pills based on what AI says.

1:15:15So the reason that like a radiologist is still going to have a job is the same reason that like, I'm, I've run into this a lot myself. So here's an example from my work. Yeah, it would be great if we could just make like the all knowing all seeing all doing, you know, SSD benchmark AI, as an example, right, just pick an example. Problem is, you need the expert to recognize when the thing is trying to BS you with the wrong answer. Right. Right. So if anything, you have to be a little bit, it forces you to be a little bit smarter when reviewing its results, because it will try to trick the person that doesn't know any better into going down a bad path, which is one of the other things to, you know, exercise caution with.

1:15:56Right. And that's the reason you're not going to see a bunch of radiologists going out of work because like, yeah, they might use AI as a tool to assist their work. Maybe they can be better at presenting more detailed chart. Maybe eventually their tools at their hospital will just do what Larry's AI did for him to draw on the scan for them, but still be reviewed. That output will then be reviewed by the radiologist to make sure the circle's in the right place and then pass it on to the patient. At the risk of being self-serving to the four of us, in the hands of an expert, AI is an incredibly powerful tool.

1:16:32Now, I wouldn't want to be the guy who gets hired by the PR firm to write draft press releases, and that guy doesn't exist anymore. I wouldn't want to be the junior lawyer who's trying to break into a law firm to do the grunt work. Because for them, they're being replaced by AI, but the experts, the senior people, are able to greatly improve their productivity and the quality of their work. That's the job now is to become an expert. I mean, that's really why. How do you become an expert? How do you get there? you have to get there how do you get there 10 years from now how do those people get there right start now well sure and the thing is it's not that expensive who's gonna hire you now that's the problem that's that's the point there's a different kind of experience like so okay so it doesn't take that long if you if you know i start it all my eyes opened with opus 4 5 november 24th 2025 a day i will never forget i started using it and i went holy moly you're talking about being an ai expert i think i'm talking about being a subject matter expert oh well okay well i'm a subject matter expert in podcasting i guess yeah you're not going to be as smart as alan is about ssds and no never you know oh i'm sorry i misunderstood you how does yeah yeah so how does the next person get to that level in that particular field with without having gone through the same way i help you learn all that i mean it could but that's not the same as experience and it's not the same as like critical thinking did you guys hear about the david eggers went to open ai yeah to do the speech and he spent the entire time saying you guys are ruining the world but the one thing he said is that chat gpt is silencing an entire generation right and i think about that because schools are starting to push ai tools and in colleges it's already a problem and we don't know what impact it's going to have on education for at least the current generation of kids how does it silence people well because it means i think there's a lot of offloading going on versus critical thinking right well there are a lot of kids which they need to knock this off who are saying i don't need to study or learn anymore right because i could just use ai now knock it off kids if you're doing that because that is a bad idea you're giving you're giving them this thing that gives all the answers right people said the same thing when you had a google search right oh now everybody doesn't have to nobody has to go to library anymore how are the kids ever going to learn well i mean later you need to adapt to the new way except those things that like the calculator is a good example right the calculator yeah it gives you the answer and to be really great to you know in a math heavy field you have to actually know what you're doing right to get those answers except now we've created this thing that also offloads critical thinking and creative thinking in ways that could be potentially dangerous yeah I saw people talking about this on Blue Sky.

1:19:20Like, even the act of, like, bullshitting a paper, right? Say you had a paper due the next day. You had to write five to ten, you know, pages on something. And you barely knew the subject. The act of, you know, BSing your way through that paper at least teaches you something. You gain something from that subject versus kind of just, like, slopping up everything that the AI will tell you. Yeah. Anthony Nielsen, our creative director and a very proficient AI user. says ai is both a shortcut and a tool to learn but humans are wired to take the shortcut i mean knock it off the open ai thing is like it wanted the short it didn't want to figure out the answers right you want to go figure out where to just steal the answer so it took the shortcut too yeah i did the same thing so humans are going to do this and we can't just there there is so little preparation for teachers for professors like there are professors saying my entire class is using ai to write papers and to do things.

1:20:17I can't stop this. I have no way to stop this. I can't really detect this. What do I do? All these companies kind of threw us into the situation. It's cheap too, right? I mean, you just have to explain to kids, you're cheating yourself. You know, yes, you're going to get the grade, but you're cheating yourself. This is your chance, your one chance to get an education. I know it's not exactly the same thing, but is it cheating to use a power saw instead of a hand saw? There are people who actually think that. Or ride a bicycle instead of walking, or drive a car instead of riding a bicycle. Well, if you're riding a bicycle in a foot race, you are cheating.

1:20:48It depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish. There are people who think it's, you know, artisans who believe you should be using hand tools. But that's not how we build houses. Here's the thing. For specific things, yeah. There are artisans who will continue to use hand tools because that's their art. Yeah. When, you know, there were a lot of people in North Carolina who worked in the furniture business, building furniture. Beautiful, wonderful, better furniture than you can get today. Gorgeous stuff. But when automation came in, they lost their jobs. And we now have cheap furniture that falls apart in a few years.

1:21:24There are still people who hand make furniture, but it's very, very expensive. If you care about having furniture that's going to last, you'll go to artisans to get that built for you. That's the way of the world. Technology comes along and changes things. It's different. By the way, you can't stop it. You're not going to be able to stop it. You might not like it. line of thinking like here we stopped the nuclear proliferation to a certain degree once we realized it could explode the world right we we collectively as a society it was like hey this is not a great thing that everybody should have these world-ending you know missiles and uh at least something was done to try to like reign that in um alan i'm sure you could probably talk more about that but i do think we have to think about the proliferant proliferation of ai as something on that level right it's not just a tool it's not just the bicycle it's not it should be treated like the atomic bomb it is a thing that can potentially obliterate the way we think the way we that's the debate going on right now washington would like to shut down open models uh china was apparently thinking about that although president xi i thought gave a very good speech believe it or not uh at the uh ai summit last week in which he basically said uh we believe in open ai we believe in open models and actually if you're china that makes a lot of sense um but also like that's china wants to do this because it means awesome levels of productivity right every worker can all of a sudden do a crap ton moreover and that is that's what the corporate level of ai adoption wants i don't i i do think we are starting to lose something fundamentally human about how we read and how we explore and how we create things.

1:23:08And that's why I'm worried about AI when it comes to schools. We have no idea what we're doing. We just drop this tool on teachers, on administrations. They are not prepared for it pedagogically. We don't know how to really incorporate AI into education. And it's just going to land there. And an entire generation of kids is going to go through school with this heavy AI tool usage. yeah it's it's sort of like the thing that happened when um they were teaching uh what the the skill to teach kids how to read right the way we taught kids how to read in america now there's a lot of people going to look back like oh maybe we should have uh maybe that wasn't the best way well they're they're pulling back now on um putting laptops in classrooms yeah i mean i can i can see why my daughter is going through that right now and especially chromebooks like whatever whatever we thought Chromebooks could do.

1:23:58It depends on how it's used, and a lot of school districts can barely even get that right. So now you have AI as something that could completely destroy the way kids learn, or at least change it in ways that we're not prepared for. That's an even bigger deal. I do feel like the problem is this stuff was just dumped on everybody, right? And we are just holding on to the armrest trying to figure out how to deal with it. But going back to my hand tool analogy i mean where is it written that we have to do things the way we've always done them you know where is it written that we have to know how to write i know that sounds absurd but but i mean especially the guy who made his living as a writer yeah but but the point is that just because i made my living as a writer doesn't mean that that johnny and susie necessarily have to be have to learn those skills any more than you i need to have to remember how to do long division anymore i've long forgotten how to do long division i don't care because you've had dark ages before right like what brings about the dark ages if you go see uh the odyssey at the you know like the way nolan has twist has kind of like told his story of the odyssey it is very much about a civilization falling apart and even towards the end like no spoilers but there's a reference to like oh yeah people will forget how to write our stories will be told to the people socrates worried about that Socrates wrote about how the quill is going to destroy memory.

1:25:24Actually, not they forget about it. He worried that the quill will destroy memory. I actually have a presentation that's on Connect Safely, which is the history of technopanics, moral technopanics. And, you know, every way along the line, the telegraph, the radio, obviously the railroad, every single technology that's come along, there have been critics. the the the word luddite had to do with people who are worried about about looms and well they were worried about their jobs they were worried about like their very existence you know there were people who wrote articles about railway madmen they were that women shouldn't ride railroad car trains because men will go crazy from the speed and attack you know there were bad societal responses to all this stuff my thing is this is this is nuclear level this is in terms of like Like you're not just, it's not just another tool.

1:26:13It's the brain is being offloaded. Our thinking, our ability to create like what a lot of these companies want. They spent years trying to get us interested in generative AI images and generative AI video. Sora just completely died because there was no real market for it. We need actual human creativity, right? The reason the Odyssey and other stories have been around for so long is we need stories. We need human thought. I think there is something. There is something that worries me. I love it that Devendra is the young guy here. You and I, Larry, are the old guy. I'm 42 years old. I'm not young.

1:26:54You're young. Trust me. I'm 42. I'm mostly gray. And the old guys are the ones saying, this is exciting. The future is great. And the young guy is going, oh, man, you kids today. you and your long hair and rock and roll cover story of the atlantic magazine this month the end of reading is here rose horowitz said optimists once believed universal literacy was inevitable now it seems the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history because we're all moving the video look at the world's changing technology's changing it faster than ever i mean that's the thing that scares people the most about ai is it's changing i mean i mean leo that's part of the reason i got out of doing reviews was because the written part of that was a dying art and that was like a decade ago we used to think that the best way and it did used to be the best way for us to promote our network was to do lots of reviews that would get searched for on youtube and then people would see them and they would promote the network nobody does that anymore it's dead but i mean dead in my lifetime it's dead in the last 15 minutes that's what's so amazing about the speed with which this is happening i started writing reviews for bite magazine that's how i got started in technology in the early 80s yeah nobody writes or reads i mean i should be going all in on short form video at this point right i should just stop writing absolutely you should be a tick tock guy i'm trying to do things yeah the problem is when you were writing for bite magazine even if we didn't know who leo laporte was we knew who bite magazine was and we knew they had some standards that they didn't just hire anybody off the street that's probably what happened like for example my good friend walt mossberg i don't agree with everything he said back when he was a journalist but i i i agreed with the fact that he when he said it he was a trustworthy guy who put some research into it and i could try and the same thing with devore any anybody who i trust and that was the beauty of the the legacy media companies they only hired people who were competent for the most aren't we learning though that way yeah we trusted the new york times we trusted these and aren't we learning in fact that they probably weren't probably weren't all that trustworthy.

1:28:57They hired me. They couldn't be that trustworthy. And then me. Let's take another break. No more AI. We've got other stories. Google made a ton of money. Actually, it's an AI story. Never mind. It's all going to be AI. It's an AI story. You said no more AI. I was like, well, there goes the rest of the show. There goes the rest of the show. We're going to do this for our lives. I got an email from somebody who's a longtime listener. He says, I can't listen to the show anymore. I don't even know what you guys are talking about. this is you know when we when the iphone came out i got a lot of email from people saying will you guys stop talking about the iphone but we knew this was going to change everything it did 2007 was a watershed all your listeners have to do is take the mp3 of this broadcast put it into gemini and it will explain to them in simple language what we've been trying to say actually i did that i got a big fight with paris who much like you davinder is skeptical on our ai show about all of this had very much your point of view and I got I got really got my dander up and I put the transcript of it into my agent and I said was I wrong I said yeah you were so wrong and it gave me and I said you this is the apology you should give to Paris let me explain why you over claimed here's what's true here's what's not true it was actually really it and because it came from a machine not my wife oh yeah also said the same thing it's just called truth right it's just like it was like oh yeah i guess you're right uh didn't get my hackles up so much uh i just saw a pew study that said some huge number of people uh now turn to ai for advice and counsel absolutely you know um this has become maybe again it's kind of sort of because same thing with doctors we just don't there aren't enough therapists to go around there aren't enough afford therapy there isn't enough let alone to go around yeah and so uh we are sort of turning to ai for those things i don't know if it's bad um i you know i'm sure there is something about our society that this is where we are yeah that's all yeah i'm more bullish i'm very optimistic but partly it's because of my own experience with it has been so powerful and life-changing but i want to one comment is it so i was around in the 60th when fellow berkeley students and harvard students were experimenting with lsd and for the most part we thought experience you know that was me and we thought the world was we thought like everything has changed but as it turns out when it got in the hands of millions and millions of people it was a little different than berkeley and harvard students and i'm not trying to be an elitist here but leo you are a real you are smarter than the average bear and i'm definitely smarter than a bear i agree i'm a little nervous saying this i Well, grant you that.

1:31:46Not smarter than Devendra or Alan or you, but the bear, yeah, I'll go for that. Put this in the general population, and as much as I hate to agree with Devendra, when you put this out to millions or billions of people who don't have the education, the critical thinking skills, whatever it is that you have. I think that's kind of patronizing. It is patronizing. I admit that. It's patronizing, but it's necessary. It's patronizing, but it's not really true. It's too good for you guys. No, not that. I think it's quite the opposite. it i think this is going to empower people that's my hope in a way that they've never been in power before and it's uh to me very exciting but again you know we'll see a lot of people think there's going to be an ai uh bubble it's going to burst i don't think it is i think this is i think this is all these companies are making a full profit leo they're we don't well we don't know because none of them are public yet but uh google is yeah well google's making a lot of money and market doesn't like it all right let's take a break we'll talk about that i'll just give you a hint it's a lot of money uh you're watching this week in tech alan malventano smarter than the average bear larry maggot smarter than the average bear devinder hardwar smarter than the average bear me i'm the average bear our show today brought to you by hawks hunt as a security leader you've been there the eye rolls during training oh not another fake fish the one size fits all fishing simulations that your employees spot from a mile away really really and the report button that gets ignored more often than not your programs are running but it's not changing employee behavior meanwhile they're out there ai is making real attacks more convincing by the day and leadership is coming to you saying they're starting to ask the question that you don't have a clear answer to is this actually working hawks hunt is built to answer that hawks hunt h-o-x-h-u-n-t it's like fox hunt with an h hawks hunt empowers your employees to spot and stop advanced phishing attacks and hawks hunt drives measurable behavior change through personalized and this is part of the key gamified micro training powered by AI and behavioral science.

1:34:06I should probably explain all this. Oh, I should also say for you admins, Hawks Hunt does all the hard work. It does the heavy lifting. The simulations run automatically, not just email, but Slack and Teams as well. So it comes in through the channels that these fishes come in. It's personalized to each employee based on role, location, and behavior that can really trip them up. Every simulation is already using ai to mirror real world attacks which means it's always updated to mirror the real world attacks of today not last week meaning employees are being tested on what's you know actually getting through not some outdated template that they go oh yeah that again and it's fun for them gamified training keeps the engagement high it doesn't no one ever learned from being punished it doesn't feel punitive it feels like fun it feels like you're learning feels great and because every interaction generates a coaching moment you're not just tracking completion you're doing what you need to do which is building behavioral indicators that tell a real story so leadership goes oh it's working you've got reporting rates you've got repeat clicker reduction you've got time to report you've got the kind of metrics that hold up when leadership asks those hard questions but you don't have to take my word for it there are 3 500 verified reviews on g2 because of these incredible reviews hawks on is the top rated security training platform recognized for best results and easiest to use it's also recognized as a customer's choice by gartner and it's used by thousands of companies qualcomm docu-sign nokia trust hawks hunt to train millions of employees worldwide visit hawkshunt.com security now today to learn why modern secure companies are making the switch to hawks.

1:35:51That's hawkshunt.com slash security now. Why? Because we need security now. hawkshunt.com slash security now. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. Alphabet's profits quarterly report out this week. Profit quadrupled. can you say 400 in one quarter 100 this is profit 112 billion dollars in three months and you know google says it's because uh our investments in ai are paying off it's funny because i don't think anybody thinks gemini i know you use gemini gems but i don't think anybody thinks gemini is the best ai out there but it is widely used by real people maybe that's why they're all being used more and more yeah and it's in search yeah right search it's in the exit yeah google docs it's everywhere yeah the stock market however was a little skeptical because of google's capex its expenditure to build that ai uh revenue was uh up but so was the amount of money they're spending um let me see if i can find the uh capex expenditures here i'm looking at the new york times report google estimated spending would be now they had said i think 180 billion last quarter they now think it's going to be 195 billion to 205 billion this year that's double what they spent last year yeah the earlier projection was 190 so it's they're going yeah we're gonna spend even more senator pachai said our ai investments are redefining what's possible across every part of our business i know i'm saying google it's alphabet but it's it's it's google right alphabet okay but does anything else in alphabet's portfolio matter no google google search google ads google ai um google said in june it was raising 80 billion dollars to fund its data center projects.

1:38:04It did that by selling stock. That was before they raised their spending forecast. Stock markets as a result punished Google's stock price. I actually didn't look to see if they came back in the rest of the week, but they went down sharply when they announced this. Let me just look real quickly at their last five days. You know what? They're coming back up a little bit. They're coming back up. Were they wondering, should Google have paid out dividends or something? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things Google does, right? They buy back stock. They give you dividends. Google is currently worth$3.9 trillion.

1:38:51We are in the era of$4 trillion companies at this point. Apple's worth more than$4. It's amazing. but is it a bubble it's going to all pop and these companies are going to go worthless down to nothing not google but well google's the others could be bad google's current stock price 319 that's off from 404 dollars their 52 week high so yeah the market's not excited about the amount of money they're spending um isn't it great as we face a climate apocalypse that we're just burning through resources and money to build AI data it's awesome zero emissions thing we were talking about not so much all their environmental goals everybody's gone shot I mean Microsoft bought that reactor plant yeah right yeah Microsoft's uh saying we're gonna slip we're not gonna make our goals Google's saying we're gonna slip we're not gonna make our goals um you know but climate it changed climate change people that's all that was so yesterday that's a problem for my children yeah that's your kids that's not my kids are already out of that anyway it was a it was a now that was the very good news the bad news is the eu is now going to find google a billion dollars yeah this this you know they've been going back and forth they've decided yeah we're going to fine you for prioritizing our own services and search this all started with google shopping this is a european shopping company said google doesn't put us high enough in the search results um google said it would consider appealing the penalty uh president of global affairs kent walker said this isn't fair competition it's product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants with european businesses and consumers taking the hit you'll be sorry you uh funny thing is the you had just fined uh aliexpress alibaba for uh fraudulent uh advertising the biggest penalty yet 550 million euros it was the biggest penalty for about two days aliexpress uh failing to stop the sale of fake and unsafe goods Well, isn't that why we go to AliExpress?

1:41:18Isn't that exactly what we want? So that 550 euro fine was dwarfed by Google's. European state counterfeiting very seriously. They do. They do. Don't try to sell a fake bag in Florence. You'll get a 10 ,000 euro fine. The U.S. administration is saying, you fine our guys, we're going to tariff the hell out of you. it's if anybody's going to publish punish big tech it's going to be us not you guys but barely except not but but a little but only if they don't kiss the golden ring yeah yeah uh speaking of kissing the golden ring oh boy apple is being sued apple's being sued by customers because they now this is interesting i don't i wonder if this case will go very far i don't know customers say that you allowed a fake bitcoin wallet actually there were several in the app store and we lost a total of 1.8 million dollars due to this fake wallet and it's your fault apple because you're supposed to protect us it wasn't trump coin was it no it's a bitcoin wallet called sparrow wallet it's by the way not just the app store oh wait a minute no wait a minute there is a real i'm sorry i don't want to confuse people there is a real wallet app called sparrow wallet it's available on windows mac os and linux not ios scammers said oh you know what's missing on ios is something that looks just like sparrow wallet that can get people to give us their bitcoin so they put it on the app store apple did not stop it brilliant actually i thought i thought that was one of the things they were supposed to check for honestly in their app submissions i think that's the contention of the lawsuit yeah yeah they screwed up uh the complaint alleges apple violated california's consumer legal remedies act and other laws by failing to adequately review and monitor apps distributed to the by the app store despite marketing it as a quote safe and trusted place to discover and download apps that's right that's what apple says right yeah yeah that's how they justify their crazy uh percent markup on right app purchases and everything else right like that's the plaintiffs said well we trusted this the fake sparrow wallet app that we downloaded uh users found their accounts have been wiped out their cryptocurrency assets transferred to the scammers private wallets the complaint says the Fraud succeeded precisely because Apple exploited the consumer trust it had deliberately cultivated through decades of marketing.

1:43:58Get him. Well, you think, or will the judge say, well, I don't know. I don't know. The judge might say this is Section 230, that Apple's not responsible. But Apple's saying we're going to drop it. The entire thing about the App Store is that Apple does such a great job of keeping it safe and secure, and they vet the apps. Although, yeah, I don't know if that'll stand. Yeah, you can't consider Apple App Store like an open marketplace, like where anybody can submit anything. They're not just a publisher of other. They're not like Twitter where they're just saying, oh, yeah, right. It's a curated marketplace.

1:44:32It's curated, yeah. Yeah. Well, good news, because the number of apps on the App Store are doubling this year because of Vibe-coded apps. They're all AI apps now. Oh, great. Yay. What could possibly go wrong? um apple's uh actually not releasing the facts but sensor tower an analytics company that does this are they're pretty accurate right uh vendor i mean that's the only numbers we ever have yeah uh last year the number of new apps in the app store grew 30 to about 600 000 in the first half of this year new apps doubled in the first half to 560 000 so almost almost the same number in the first half of this year as all of last year i would ask how apple's even keeping up but of course it's well that's why i think that's why stuff sneaks through honestly is that they just don't have the they just can't they're right so they probably shouldn't they wouldn't be leaning on it too much ai for for the actual vetting like it's from what i've heard from developers there's a lot of human interaction with the review i think you have there has to be yeah but they miss stuff for instance uh one of the scams there are a number of apps that if you install them outside of brazil look like kind of dumb game apps but if the your ip address is from brazil they turn into gambling apps which apple bans but you know the apple testers aren't saying well let's what happens if we use a brazilian ip address they don't you know there's only so much you could test i guess if now if they had alan malventano there he could look at the that's just a person here And you could say, oh, I know what this app does.

1:46:11I'm kind of surprised that I've never submitted an app for, like, I'm surprised that you don't have to submit your source. Like, I would have thought that you can do that. Oh, that's interesting. I don't think you do. Yeah. You don't have to, Darren, right? Darren has written, Darren released, Darren Oki in our club, 10 plus handwritten apps back in the day. Now he's released lots of vibe-coded apps. He says his vibe-coded apps are so much better. How many? Okay. now i'm gonna have to go he's got a link to all of the is all of his ios apps darren i trust you darren's amazing uh apps by darren so these are all vibe coded darren ol reader at ai narrated epub look at all this old dj ol bridge ol4 ol sudoku once you these are better than your hand-coded apps darren's a professional coder uh how hard is it to get these on the app store darren you don't submit source there you go we can find out yeah i'm assuming you don't probably no i'm sure you don't but i can imagine it's getting easier you had to it's easier than it used to be which maybe is the wrong direction well i mean it's it's there i mean there's a there's an inherent conflict right because like that this is how apple makes money on the app store one of the ways to make money that's a very good point of money right so what the more apps better for more equals more money right like why would you not yeah well they only make money on apps that cost money true i'm sure they want more apps well if it's if it's ad supported they make a cut oh that's right they get a cut of the end they get a cut of any purchases you make on the app and any purchases and that purchases a big bucks actually most apps are free

1:48:03but no it's true i mean one of the things that you know historically i used to for example feel good about downloading software from download.com which was run by cnet remember that and you know most of the time this stuff was good but not 100 of the time not anymore yeah i i have had conversations with executives at cbs and they're like oh yeah we we stuck so much stuff into download they admit it oh man that's amazing well download.com pretty soon you started to have to download a downloader which had other apps that it would install i mean it became yeah but it felt safer than the web than the unregulated web at least you felt there was someone looking over the shoulder but yeah you know again it was a false sense of security it was it was because those execs like totally knew that they had this platform where they could just sneak a little anything when cds bought cnet yeah so i was so this is benito i was i was working there i was working there when that buyout happened and i saw that happen in real time i saw yes the incentivization of download.com happen in real time and it was really really sad to watch because i was a heavy user of download.com i'm sure we all were back in the day yeah yeah but i did start warning uh my listeners on the radio show pretty early on don't stop don't know and if any download site asks you to download an app to make your download go faster just say no even if i had known that i would have warned them on my cbs radio show and then i would you should have listened to my show larry and you would have known it i blew it i kind of i have to say i missed doing the radio show because that was the unlike the shows we do here which are aimed at enthusiasts and assume you know that you understand what we're talking about when we talk about one bit quants uh the radio show was really designed for regular people was to it was a bridge to regular people to help them understand it this i mean this is the perspective a lot of my reporting too so this is why i'm very much like i look at what regular people are going to be doing with ai and i'm i am a little worried so oh speaking around your people i have a question is is ios 27 beta safe for regular people yet absolutely right now the the first public uh beta is out always wait for the public but this one's very stable i've got it on everything on golden gate now you when you press the button for siri it's this pretty little let me see i guess i have to unlock the thing at the island yeah it's the pretty little island and siri's a little bit smarter than she used to be you can actually ask her questions about your text messages and your emails and stuff and she knows all about it is anybody the answer is going to be interesting you know who's really I mean, the product that Amazon has that runs on the Echo, and I won't use the word because if I use the word, everybody's Echo devices will light up, has gotten so silly with the plus version of it.

1:50:49Every time I ask. Oh, you got to choose the right personality. You have the sassy personality. I don't know what I've got. No, no, no. Look, there are different personalities. There's one personality that will like talk back to you. but we'll say hey hey a word set a timer for broccoli and i'll go timer for broccoli set that's going to be a delicious meal yeah i know it tries to be nuts i'll ask it to write a routine and it will explain to me what routines are and i think well i wouldn't be asking you to write what a routine was yeah just write it well like when you ask one question it's like by the way would you like to add this to your that i hate i'm like that's a justification i did not ask you for this right quiet down no i think unfortunately the most people's experience of ai is that kind of thing and i think that's why there is kind of this general feeling of why are we building all these data centers so that it can sass me about my broccoli this is a waste of money yeah and ask you questions on like i'll ask the question once you know what are you going to make that tonight do you care so larry if anybody happens i really care if this were the radio show uh we got larry on the line from uh the east bay uh larry there is a setting in your alexa app that you could change the personality of alexa plus and just change it to like the i think there's concise or something like that where it's just like business i know but the point is still the amazon like alerts i turned on sassy and i regret it immediately i mean i want a sassy robot but i also well who doesn't cost at what cost at what cost i don't mind sassy but what i do mind is when ai wants to be my friend do we say we're not going to talk about ai here we are can't we can't stop can't stop maybe we're all ai maybe maybe listeners need to be informed we still haven't gotten to leo's leo's wants to do that story about the dram and the ssd prices okay let's talk about it now let me tell you boy people are upset because they blame ai for the fact well western digital and i think sandisk said we sold out our entire capacity for 2026 ai manufacturers uh like micron stopped selling to consumers and then said and we're sold out too and micron says and it's going to be till 2030 before you can get any alan is that true what's going on why aren't they building up capacity i mean the only thing i consider fortunate is that uh my company got out of client but that was because of the post-covid dip solidine wasn't because of solid state storage right yeah so so i previously worked on the client side of solidine and that folded you know three or four years back now it's like it was a while back that's one one thing that micron i think said well they got out of it see they got out of it right in the middle of the ai boom so it was pretty right they said we're not gonna sell crucial's gone we're not gonna yeah crucial's gone and it was like during the upswing and it was pretty clear that that was the reason even i think they even stated in their press release he even blamed apple he said if apple hadn't pushed us so hard on DRAM prices in 2024, we would have been able to build out capacity.

1:54:06But the problem with the RAM market is it's boom and bust. And when we're in the bust, we don't have the money to build up capacity. So when it's the boom, we can't keep up. So he blamed Apple literally. So they drove prices so low. Now that's BS, obviously. Right. But there is a balance, right? So when you're in the middle of a bust, obviously, You don't have a bunch of funds to reinvest into all of the infrastructure because you can't, if you build it, they will come for too long in a row. Case in point, Intel Optane memory, of which I have a bunch on the shelf back there. Optane, which they killed.

1:54:43You worked at Intel. I worked at Intel during the heyday of that. And before that, I was reviewing those products, right? And I was very enthusiastic about it at the time. But of course, if there's not enough demand for the thing and you keep building the thing, right, that's a bad way to roll a business. So that's why you would have a company like Micron that, you know, maybe not because of Apple, but the argument does stand that, you know, when times are tough, you're not necessarily going to have all the funds to invest in a bunch of capacity. and that combined with a sudden boom of a thing that has a crazy demand on both DRAM and storage.

1:55:21I mean, I think part of the, I think in another universe, like the fact that it bled all the way down to hard disks is what gets me, right? That there was, because a lot of the industry was not just SSDs, not just solid state, but spinning drives too. Correct. Yeah. Well, when you, well, you just said Washington Digital and SanDisk, They were talking about hard drives they're sold out of, right? And it was because the industry was moving towards solid state little by little and off of spinning rest, as I love to refer to it. But that whole thing turned back on its head when all of a sudden the supply was dried up for SSDs seemingly overnight, right?

1:56:01Then people are like, well, where are we going to put all of our stuff? Well, if not on solid state because the price is insane, then we have to fall back to hard disk. so it puts a squeeze on the hard disk supply as well, which was already kind of winding down somewhat. I haven't bought a spinning. The only thing I buy spinning drives for is my NAS because of capacity. Correct. And anybody that's trying to do that now is experiencing great pain. Yeah, they've tripled in price. Yeah, right. In some cases, six times more. Framework, I think, is saying six times more for SSDs. Is this worth it, Leo, for you to play with your agents?

1:56:37Yes, and I don't care if you don't have water for your gosh darn golf courses. I don't care. Let's drain the Colorado. I want to write a new first-person shooter in one prompt. I don't get the water. The water thing kind of boggles my mind. The water consumption thing doesn't make any sense to me. If you look at any of the real numbers on the water thing, it's not just gobbling up all the water. that's not how it works and most almost all the data centers now are recirculating the water they're not just spraying it on the chips it evaporates no it's not efficient to do it that way yeah they don't want to do the earlier stories like the google one which they were clearly trying to hide the fact it was like oregon or somewhere like google's building a data center and it was using a lot more water than the actual local municipality was and it is true like fresh water which is what they still need we don't have enough like for people so the idea that we're spending we're shoving all this and we're still dealing with the droughts in the west and the southwest like it does seem bad it seems like a bad choice i'm going to say something here from you shouldn't get it from the same source that's the key is like what should take it from the colorado but i have to point out and if you read cadillac desert it's a great book highly recommend it we for decades built overbuilt in areas where there isn't any water right and we we dug canals we made dams we provided water vegas is in a desert most of arizona is a desert uh we intentionally built there and then built massive projects to provide water for these places but as he points out in cadillac desert it never was tenable and it was never going to last with or without ai data centers humans making poor infrastructure decisions based on boom economics yeah i wonder if that applies right now the economics of it were that the government wanted to build these dams i mean it was a it was a crazy rationale it made no sense and uh and so yeah okay there are places there are deserts and we are living in the deserts this was going to happen whether or not we built data centers i don't know why they keep building data centers in arizona yeah people living in colorado or along the colorado river like a lot of california or at least southern california is also affected by this absolutely absolutely it's rough it is not even talking about electricity it's a whole other reason and then there's the electricity and then there's the uh the output uh let's just build a freaking data center with meth methane gas right that's a mistake i will grant you that elon's nuts to do that and it's a highly polluting and it's a terrible idea but he doesn't care because he doesn't care about the community doesn't care it's actually because he thinks we're all moving to mars so he doesn't care well no he doesn't care because it doesn't affect people like him so that's that's the main thing for elon i have to also point out we have a terrible grid terribly planned because of our belief in free market and uh we are suffering for other reasons than data centers this is not a good uh our our electrical system is awful and there are countries like china that invested heavily in sustainable energy and solar power we're doing just fine yeah and by the way it's not just 100 years yeah it's not just ai i hate to say it because we're streaming this program but streaming oh do you like the internet guess where you're getting it from i know a data center but netflix uses an enormous amount of of course everything we do today in the modern world uses data centers but at least those are those are things that are actively being used by consumers and like delivers a certain sense of good to them right the thing is we are building a crap ton of ai data centers for potential potential you know ai usage by consumers we're seeing some of it but talk to microsoft about how copilot's doing you see how copilot stranger things and the dink are worth it, but creating useful AI tools are not?

2:00:44It's not at the same scale. Those data centers are certainly not at the same scale, but also that was delivering a thing people actually wanted. And the thing I keep hearing from AI skeptics and general people is like, who is asking for any of this? And that's the thing I've noticed with Windows users as well. That was the main pushback of Copilot. And even Microsoft has scaled that back. But that was pushed down people's throats. i mean that really i don't yeah why is there a co-pilot of microsoft paint i don't what if i don't want to engage with this thing and that's kind of the big problem there well i i do not deny that the ai companies have really screwed themselves i mean look what uh anthropic did with mythos the reason mythos and fable were banned is because anthropic scared the hell out of everybody and the government trump administration said oh boy we better stop this um these ai companies are are fairly inept partly because i think they have a worldview that doesn't match normal human yeah again which is why i'm worried that these are the companies building these models no that's why these chinese models because those are good those are those are even though there are reports that some chinese models are stealing from other models and you know what i don't care because those existing models they're all stolen yeah give me a break oh yeah anthropic says we will we stole everybody's data but you can't steal that back have you guys had like a true ai believer on though leo like the people who are like we are building the agi we are building the second oh no i don't believe in agi no no no i don't believe that that's what all these companies like you talk about nario amado like that guy believes in insane things like this is a full-on religion for a lot of these folks i'll tell you what i think the right solution long term is for open weight models small language models that are due purpose-built if we built a model just for larry's uh you know cat scan so that you know that these smaller models you could run locally they'd be they wouldn't it wouldn't require giant data centers uh we also i think the research they're doing on things like self-improving models better post training there's all sorts of things nvidia is building chips that are you know three or four times more efficient than the current crop of chips.

2:02:56There are absolutely, there'll be progress in a lot of areas that isn't anthropic in open AI. And also it can be more accurate. That data, that model designed to analyze CT scans doesn't, shouldn't have access to the entire internet. No. So it can go hallucinate. It should only have access to it. It doesn't need to know who won Wimbledon in 1925. Well, my point is it not, but it also doesn't need to know some crackpot who interprets CT scans as being something that they aren't. That's an issue also. If it only has vetted information, it's going to give you better information. Maybe not as much, but probably better quality.

2:03:30Okay, that's the last AI story. Wait a minute, there's one more. That's what you think.

2:03:37Anthropic, that did admit, as every AI company has done, to ingesting a bunch of books, pirated. Actually, Anthropic did two things. Some of the books they bought, scanned, and then threw out. so that you know and those the judge said that's fine that's fair use wait the fact they bought one copy yeah they bought it but the problem they trouble they got was the pirated database they the judge has now approved a settlement for 1.5 billion dollars um to go to authors like three thousand dollars a book did you apply for your uh yeah benefits I, being an AI enthusiast, I did not. I did, but the problem is my books, I don't think anybody wants to pirate my Windows XP book.

2:04:26Well, two of my books, I've written 13. Two of them were in the database. Now, of the$3 ,000, had I applied for it, some goes to the publisher, some goes to my co-authors, you know. But it wasn't about the money. It was like, I'm glad that these crappy books I wrote 20 years ago have a new life in AI. I don't mind. scan away anyway there are plenty of authors who are going to get the money 350 opted out hoping that they could sue further but the rest are settling with anthropics i haven't heard a word i don't even know if i'm getting a dime i don't know if my oh you will worth anything you you will you how many books were in that database of yours oh i can't remember i've written 12 i can't remember how many yeah two of my 13 were in there um weirdly though like not the best sellers was just kind of random and mine are so out of date i haven't written anything in a while yeah well that's more likely the older it is there were half more than half a million works uh in this uh pirated database um

2:05:33in a statement to reuters uh lead plaintiff said the settlement brings us one step closer to real accountability for anthropic no okay and puts all ai companies on notice they can't shortcut the law or override creators rights actually the judge's decision was really i think a decision in favor of fair use yeah uh because a lot of the infringement was deemed fair use it was just this pirate i mean if you think about it how do we how does any of us know anything we all read the books suggested and or newspapers or something i don't i don't have a bunch of reporters that i would that works for me that are reporting to me what's going on in the world i rely on so if i tell you what's going on in the iran war it's because i probably read it in the new york times or somewhere it's not because i went to iran to observe it yeah and certainly not from the government all right that was the last story now we're going to take a break and come back to davindra hardwar alan malventano who did not fully explain why we are running out of ai i mean um memory and storage just supply and demand there's just too much demand for too much demand too little there's your simple answer very simple yeah that is simple it's not a surprise it's called economics yeah uh but it is frustrating that you know i wish i had bought that 512 gigabyte mcintosh last year when i could have well i mean i'm putting off upgrades right now like i can't like i literally just can't can't afford the dram can't do it yep and larry maggot connect safely.org how's the bowel it's good right now it's doing great yeah but now your achilles is bad we all looked at it earlier emergency room i tripped over a crack in a new york side no i thought i sprained my ankle but it turned out i must have ruptured my achilles wait you injured yourself on the way to the emergency room for something else something else i know it's a long crazy story but bottom line is i got to go into surgery on fraud it's kind of appropriate you should go see the odyssey before you go in for achilles surgery no killies in the odyssey but you know oh he's not in the odyssey yeah oh that was the real heel damn it yeah i mean the trojan horse is from the aeneid so it's all it's all mushed together it's an interconnected story that was the mcu of its time did you see it yet uh i've seen it three times three it's a very okay okay we should talk about it because we should talk very anti-ai and i think i kind of love it no but we can talk about it like how bad it is we can talk about that that'll make it that's all uh thanks for watching twit regardless uh this show brought to you by superhuman go go a lot of us were promised that AI would make work easier but somewhere along the way it started feeling like just one more thing to manage another tab open another app to check another place to copy and paste information just to get a simple answer that's why more people are turning to superhuman go what is it well superhuman go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero instead of forcing people into another app or another workflow it works where they already work goes ai chat sits on the side of the browser it's always ready to help you do the things you need to do draft emails and messages summarize long threads and documents doesn't get in your way it's there to help it helps you search across apps without leaving the page you're on that's nice because you know So context switching, as soon as you go through a doorway, your brain goes, whoop, new context, and loses everything.

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2:11:34I wrote about that in Gadget. I've seen people drive several hours, you know, book a hotel stay just to get to a theater that plays the Odyssey. It is so wild that there are so few true IMAX theaters around and even like fewer that can do 70 millimeter film projection. Well, because it's so expensive both for the theater and for the filmmaker. Only somebody like Christopher Nolan can really do it. and this is the first film fully shot in 70 millimeter so oppenheimer i saw that oppenheimer which was on 70 millimeter wasn't fully 70 it wasn't fully like he's he's done more and more it started with the dark knight for him but like he's slowly added more and more dark that was weird because it would switch back and forth and i didn't know it's i mean all the movies would kind of do that a bit um he's the one that popularized imax is like a big thing because he's an analog film guy and that was the best high quality analog film you know technology available but what's weird is that it's like it's a dying technology you know like they're not building more projectors they're not building more cameras so imax eventually will have to go fully digital on something but nothing can really touch like the it's like a 12 to 16k effective resolution you can tell film it's very clear like seeing it at the full full projection it is otherworldly because it's like you are being transported to another world everything looks obscenely clear and there are a lot of like large shots that's what i didn't like about oppenheimer because i'm looking up yeah cillian's nose i i you know i saw oppenheimer on the 70 millimeter film and then i went home and watched it on on my nice tv with a nice setup and i far preferred it because i could follow the story on a normal size screen and imax it's all about yeah that the picture right it is this is a much better use of imax than oppenheimer because it's spectacle isn't it yeah it was movies mostly conversations of people inside small rooms you know and this is that's not good you get the full spectacle of it and also you get like scenes with thousands of extras scenes with thousands of people doing things that take real human effort so obviously there's cg somewhere but they didn't like go and like green screen large portions of this movie it's not like filmed on the volume like so much of the marvel and star wars stuff these days it feels real and authentic and it's a story that's relevant to our times but also man it does make me think human humans did this here this is a story we've been retelling for 3 000 years homer wrote down a version of it but is it really you think it really happened no no oh okay so humans made the movie not humans this is their marvel universe there are like gods and stuff there's a cyclops okay yeah yeah i mean maybe the oral storytelling was like based on a city that could have been something like troy like there are probably bits of reality i've been to what they say which sliemann discovered and said it was troy and if you they say well we don't really we don't know but they did put a giant wooden horse out front so you think it's troy but it is amazing to see like one of the oldest recurring stories we've had as a absolutely in a crowded theater with the like latest technology that we had this is a story that persists and for a reason it worked it works it absolutely works it's a good movie times because first of all i the first time i saw it was for a press screening i had to go back to see it in full imax and i i didn't like i was not bored one bit this is a three-hour movie that like moves like gangbusters so i went back to watch it again because my wife didn't get to see it so i did that on vacation even took some vacation time to see it again that's ironic because of course uh as burke says it's uh the whole story is the one homer made up when he wanted to leave his wife so uh honey i was i there were sirens and cyclopses that just i couldn't get back fast on so it took me a long time to get home he was out drinking with the boys come on definitely leo everybody like leo you can get to the metreon which i'm gonna go to the med that's where i saw oppenheimer you can but this is the problem yeah go look it's sold i mean it's not sold out but all that's left is front row or the i mean you the problem with the imax is not only that they're only something like 20 70 millimeter film imaxes but there is only a small number of seats that you want right you want the middle of the middle kind of you want the middle or the back but it It depends on the theater.

2:16:03I was second row at the Regal Mall of Georgia. And it was actually, I'm a front row kind of weirdo in general. I love to be up close whenever I can for any theater. But even for that one, you could still see the entire picture. And the way Nolan frames it is that it's really the center of the frame that he focuses on. Because that's what they crop into for the smaller film formats. So if you're looking there and then peripherally, oh, there's a huge sky or there's more sea below. You don't have to look at everything all at once. so even even if you're close you'll get a good experience there i think all right i i'm just waiting until i i don't have to sit in the front row because my neck it's like i would also recommend um keeping like look daily for tickets like for a day you're free because people cancel tickets and something sometimes things will pop up i i was thinking of going like at eight in the morning but even then yeah there's no seats there are midnight screenings there are 3 a.m screenings and they're all being sold out yeah you can't because everybody's got there's a i mean they're really only probably in each theater maybe a hundred good seats it is going to be the best box office of all times it sounds like 265 million in the first week yeah yeah and there are the imax tickets are so much more expensive and i think like it seems like people are really digging this i don't i have no idea why oppenheimer became such a phenomenon i thought that movie was fine but not like the billion dollar you know blockbuster it was fine for home let's put it that way yeah yeah I wonder how long before this streams be quite a while I'm sure well you even want to watch it at home yeah that's something you'd want to watch in the street yeah it's a great movie so like you would have a good time watching at home but the whole point is to be I think overwhelmed by it and also like hey when last have you been to a fully jam-packed theater filled with people like enjoying a story that feels so generous generationally important and the angle he takes here is also very much like relevant to today you can totally read like today's headlines into you how he frames the odyssey the the movie theater in mountain view that i go to is often empty so i'm sure well this is what i thought movies were dead um our local little local theater in petaluma nobody was ever there there were rats it was terrible but they put in um an imax not the big IMAX you know IMAX could be there's a lot of different things IMAX could be but it was a it's a giant screen yeah they put in a weird one called uh ScreenX where the walls become yeah the screen I hate I hate ScreenX but I know it's weird and then they put in um you know the the stadium seating and the trays and the things and they serve liquor and you know they come around with food but i now they're sold out good and it's young people young people have always been the main audience for movies i think but it's young people and they want to go to the movies again which i think is very interesting and it's the young people who are also like not really getting into ai as much as i think a lot of these companies want to so there's i got my girlfriend to hold my hand when i was a teenager larry did you do the stretch and then you just put your arm around her very like suavely and cool i'm not going to tell you or ai what i did i do yeah you know what yeah yeah you have to tell the ai as i go give tips yeah uh it was definitely a few first no but the movie theater was that is the place we dated that that and back to the seat of the car yeah yeah so they've uh the gross uh for the first two weekends in week now is 286.3 million uh they made it they had another great weekend so far uh they're making a big box I think people are going back too because like once once you see it if you vibe with that movie the experience is worth well that's just thing I could see I would have a very strong opening but I'm I'm I was thinking that the Odyssey are it's three hours are people really is this what people really want to see i thought this might not be mass appeal but i guess it is is it worth rereading the book before you see the movie in case you forgot what happened it's been a long time i i spent a large portion of time in high school like translating the eneid and the odyssey so from from the original greek i did the eneid from latin and we did portions of the odyssey in latin not from greek so it was a latin class so it was it was not original but it was still like we spent a lot of time studying the text and everything and that is there's a reason that story has stuck around because i think humans can read a lot into it and certainly in our society today it is certainly saying a lot about like the state of the world which is surprising that no one found a really relevant way to frame that story it was a great way for me to fall asleep in college and uh all i remember is something about a wine dark sea like a hundred times yeah yeah uh there there is that newer translation by emily wilson i have not read apparently that's a very good translate actually i have that uh i bought that because i've read that it's a very but it's controversial inspired him to do this i believe so is it yeah it's very controversial because it is not a word for word it's more poetic but that's maybe what we need that's how the story was told it was all we shouldn't yeah yeah it's an oral tradition yeah well there's our movie review for the show aren't Aren't you glad we didn't cover any AI?

2:21:28Well, again, anti-AI because, man, the human effort, the human power in that. Somebody released like an AI Odyssey movie ahead of the actual Nolan movie. Elon did. And it's terrible. Well, he announced. Oh, no, he tweeted it. He retweeted it. He tweeted that something will happen. And we know what Elon means when something will happen. Probably never will. It will happen on Mars. Some other indie director had produced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot. we watched a little bit of it it's yeah maybe i'll show a little bit of it it's so awful it it astounds me like coming at this from like i i'm also like a part-time movie critic so like looking at this from the way the tech companies are presenting entertainment it's like have you guys ever seen a movie do you know what people actually want um the when something looks cold and dead it really turns us off it does it's the it's the it's the dead eyes that kind of give it away um i think this is uh this is the elon musk one this is the one he retweeted right from heavy even though people are like um you know the uh the ship built on grok that's why elon is built on grok yeah but uh ships ship wheels are a fairly recent seafaring invention so if you're gonna be accurate to the odyssey he's eating a potato chip wait a minute or is it a pringle wait a minute let's see what he's eating here hold on a second he's he's gonna I think that's a Pringle.

2:22:48I don't think they had Pringles. Oh, heavy. Heavy. Now he's drinking from the cup while the girls plant tomatoes, apparently. I don't know what's going on. At least he has five fingers. That's good. We've gotten past that. Will Smith can eat spaghetti. The AIs think that acting involves a lot of pauses, a lot of dramatic sighs, a lot of long staring into the distance. there's a hole in the rock go see the real odyssey goes yeah this is not in a theater actually no one intended the fact that elon thought oh this is so good and posted on twitter really underscored the gulf between the ai bros and humans for sure isp i love this headline from ars technica isps long nightmare of having to list all the fees they charge is finally over thank god the fcc remember that brilliant idea the bide administration have the the nutrition labels for your isp so you know exactly what it cost well the fcc today voted to eliminate those rules so that isps don't have to go through all that those poor isps can just like you know I'll just give you a number, a simple number.

2:24:10That's all you need. Yeah. Just pay it. The burden of listing fees. Broadband lobby group, U.S. Telecom complained to the FCC. Providers must create and update hundreds of different labels to account for geographic variability. Ensure their systems properly cue the label specific to the proper location when the customer inputs their address. You don't think they do that when they send you the bill? Right. Oh, it's so much extra work. work no you're already gonna do that when you bill me for crying out loud well the FCC we know who they work for they've always worked for uh the government uh lawyers now say the Trump administration uh can use tick tock again so that's of course it's run by his buddy on their government phones yeah yeah why not so because uh yeah it was uh tick tock was incredibly dangerous so danger which nobody has revealed to us just yet alan i don't know if you have any thoughts about that one but i i'm still struck by like we did this whole thing based on nothing and it's well i mean i can i can offer so like yeah i don't understand why government phones are doing any service of even similar to tick tock you shouldn't have tick tock on your government issued phone that's my that's my point like it's the type of so like it's nothing about tick tock in particular that's just you shouldn't have instagram on it you shouldn't have facebook on it right exactly that's not what the government phones are for like just don't you have your own gosh darn phone yeah yeah exactly that's i mean that's what you're supposed to use your own phone for that kind of stuff it's still against the law it's not like the law went away the trump administration said you can ignore the law yeah well that's not uncommon yeah that's typical yeah yeah i mean there's i mean the simple concept defense and death like you don't you don't have government phones with like that sort of stuff shouldn't be on a government phone that you would assume is connected to a government closed network so that means that the poor the poor folks up in norfolk virginia uh sitting at the at navy cyber defense operations command for example like where i used to work back when i was calling into the show you were in my off time you didn't tell me that oh yeah that's where i was working in the early days when i did the drobo review and took the drobo apart i was on the base in little creek virginia did we know that yeah i think i said i might have said something um yeah i was oh it was in my barracks room on the base but like that's awesome that's so cool uh yeah like those poor people are gonna have to try to defend the entire like navy intranet or dod intranet from people trying to use other services that like i mean it's hard enough to defend networks as it is with all sorts of adversarial kind of stuff I gotta have my TikToks.

2:27:02Yeah, I feel for those guys trying to keep the network safe. Maybe they should keep the network safe by just doing, you know, war planning on Signal on their personnel. Oh, there you go. That'll be so much easier. Just keep the Navy. Yeah. The problem was they weren't using Signal. They were using a third-party Signal compatible app. Yep. Oh, yeah. Which made it worse. It wasn't secure. Yeah. Yeah. Known to be insecure. and then there were plenty of black hat talks on it after the fact too, right? My question is, who do you trust least, the Chinese or the elephants, when it comes to your information?

2:27:39I mean, who are the elephants? What do you mean? Larry Ellison's company. The Ellison's. I thought you said elephants. Elephants have memory. No, Larry Ellison owns TikTok. All of these guys, their one interest is making more money. Like, they don't have enough. That's their one interest. And they're going to use your information. they're going to sell it of course they are but they also have like political uh you know angles which are different than the chinese government did so that was my main worry like but even that was like there were supposedly some big you know big reason tick tock had to be sold in the u.s and we still don't know what that is well interestingly a judge has halted the paramount acquisition of warner brothers the trump administration approved it but the state said whoa hold on there you mean And Barry Weiss isn't going to get to run CNN?

2:28:28That's good news. You know, it's fun watching the CNN anchors get more and more outspoken as they thought, we're going down. We might as well get nothing to lose. Just tell people what's happening. We might as well just go for it. The Trump administration didn't just approve it. They, like, hand-holded this whole deal to make it happen when Netflix was the previous buyer. Well, did you hear what Trump said about CBS, about a regime change at CBS, an enemy of America? And now it's run by good people. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Notice when ABC and NBC did not carry the presidential primetime address about how the election was stolen in 2020, that he said they should have their licenses revoked.

2:29:13Right. You didn't mention CBS. No, CBS is a friend of theirs now. Friend. Yeah. Friend of the family. He loves CBS. All right. One more commercial. And then let's talk about prices. money and uh other stuff actually speaking of money the AI industry has now spent 65 million on the campaigns in uh November wonder what they're lobbying for oh I know I thought you're gonna say during this podcast yeah during this podcast they've spent favorable they want they want favorable language meanwhile the trump administration is saying we need an ai kill switch i bet you'd like that devinder wouldn't you there should be a big button in the white house that says stop the ai's white house i wouldn't want today's white house can we put it somewhere else where where do you put it give it to alan alan would you like that button in your basement i'll take the button i got a button here somewhere just don't make put it next to the that was easy button and confuse the two that's the button i was going to find i have one over here if you want uh we'll have more in just a little bit you're watching this week in tech devendra hard of work always good to see you i'm glad to have you on to to talk some sense into me i gotta be the crank now leo so i'm gonna crank it up i just think it's so funny that the old guy is saying i love the future and the young guy's going no no don't do it don't do it old man i went to a demonstration in berkeley of undergraduate saying we want to take control of our technology we don't want these big companies no the kids are really yeah yeah yeah it's slow tech is how we're going back to it yeah slow tech local tech local tech yep farm grown uh he's down on the farm look at that look at look at his shelf unbelievable unbelievable you got everything man what's your favorite tchotchke there what's the baseball is that a signed baseball that's smarter every day oh cool there's my favorite josh there oh that's my favorite too i got one of those there you go lovely guy named joe in hawaii makes those he's so cool uh yeah i have a bunch of those over here they're off camera you can't see them they're good uh i'm gonna give you this though i want to get uh joe to make this uh-oh little badge works it works for me too just like you yeah yeah joe noel he lives in hawaii but i want joel to turn this into a wooden coaster works on my machine every it guy should have just you know have that just on their forehead is that is that particular one 3d printed it looks uh it's it's what's weird is it's velcro so it's like i don't know what it's oh it's a patch i should put it on my coat yeah i guess on my machine jeff atwood gave me that the uh coding horror guy factor stack exchange i love that i'll get one that all right we'll have more in just oh and i i forgot to say and larry maggot is also here the other old guy when are you going for your surgery friday wish me well i hope i it's it's a simple outpatient procedure right it's an outpatient procedure that the doctor is not nervous at all i am good it's arthroscopic they just put a little hole in oh no not when you're transplanting not when you're grafting a tendon where are they getting the tendon from either from my big toe or the side of my foot that's not gonna decide that till he opens it up when they have to open one side to put it in the other side yeah i should have treated it i i didn't you know hey kids if you have a sore foot and you go to the doctor ask him to check your tendon don't don't assume it's a sprain and don't walk 100 miles with a with a you so you actually made it worse oh much worse i will i will walk to all over new york washington toronto montreal you know miles and old's a bitch minor little pain you know the thing about nobody took it seriously because i wasn't in horrible pain don't uh don't get old kids actually get old it's the alternative it's not that right it's better to get old get old get old get you know but stay healthy as much as you can stay that's what i was thinking you know i'm walking thinking i'm that's good for walking's good for you i thought okay all people are supposed to walk you're supposed to walk so my mom passed away a couple of weeks ago oh i'm so sorry oh it's fine she was 93 she said she had not a pain in her life she felt great she just went to sleep one morning she got up got showered took a little nap never got up uh and that's perfect that's what i want 93 not a pain not a care in the world she was a wonderful woman very happy um but now this is what happens larry people start dying around you well you know we talked a lot about john i'm not that much younger than john at all and uh it it got i thought about it i mean i'm sad for him but I'm also aware.

2:34:21We're all, you know, every day I asked my AI, I said, what should I do about this? It said, just live every day. And you know, the AI is never wrong. Our show today brought to you by, I don't know how the AI knew. It just said, you know what, Leo, don't try to leave a legacy. Don't try to write some big story in the sky. Just be honest and truthful and live every day as if it's your last life. That's probably pretty good advice. This Week in Tech brought to you today by Gusto. That's a good name for a company. Gusto. That's the good stuff. Right now, everyone in business, and this is true of us, is trying to run leaner, right?

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2:37:27there's so many uh stories still we only have a few minutes galaxy fold z galaxy z fold ultra are you excited about this divinder have you taken a look at the new they had their galaxy i've been on the beach for the past week so oh you didn't have to do that yeah yeah i didn't have to deal with this i wonder if it's a bellwether for apple's foldable which we think will be coming out in a couple of months well samsung has one now that is more like a little um square i guess or yes they do don't they differently which is kind of what pixel apples is supposed to be right that's what the rumor is and that's what like the case leaks have shown so i am i'm all for that if Apple moves that way.

2:38:06The first couple generations of foldables were so flimsy and so expensive and now I feel like they've at least figured out how to build these things better and more. We know Apple is getting its screens from Samsung so I'm thinking maybe this is kind of a way to see what Apple's going to look like. I don't know. It's very thin. And the crease is better. Apple's been very worried about the crease. One of the reasons Apple didn't do a folding phone is the crease apple would not live with you know producing something that had that crease right i think that's a major reason well the price 2099 to start and i bet you apple's phone's going to be in that price range yeah half of that's the ram given yeah given how much they've already jumped up prices and the rumor is we're not going to see a base level iphone 18 this year either that may wait till next year right um maybe around 2000 for sure i could see them going even higher because it's apple it's like a 2500 smartphone first to do it with a base price and i'm gonna have to buy it because you have to i have to i don't wanna i do have the z uh fold seven and it's really thin it's really nice it's beautiful but android android yeah android i like android i well i like graphene have you tried i put graphene on my pixel and i was really impressed now here's something to be aware of graphene has this uh pin number that you can put on it that will erase the phone so if you are uh being stopped by law enforcement and uh you don't want them to take your phone you can and they say well just unlock this for us no unlock it for us or you're going to airport jail okay and you use and you say here's my pin one two three four but it's that special pin it will erase it except maybe you don't want to do that uh there's a guy backed up hopefully huh it might be backed up well yeah no no the whole idea is that you have you know at home or somewhere you have a backup yeah um there's a guy named sam tunic who was a big protester about uh uh cop city which is the was this in atlanta i think it was this is your neck of the woods davindra the training center in atlanta uh known as cop city he was trying to get in the united states he had graphene on his phone which is a really nice privacy forward operating system in january he was stopped at the border coming back uh at atlanta's hartsfield jackson airport after vacationing in the dominican republic he was already on a watch list because of his merely because he was protesting cop city but he was on a terrorism watch list so border patrol said give me your phone unlock it he gave them that special pin he an agent took him to a room with a table several chairs and a camera and microphone several agents began a quote secondary inspection they pretended they were looking for child sexual abuse material but it was because he was a protest he was a terrorist better off not even giving like any pin right because they can't he would have because now pins right he's in trouble yeah for destroying evidence well he didn't do it well that's what we're gonna find out yeah when they typed it in yeah yeah well that's what we're gonna find out because uh he is now being prosecuted by the department of justice because for destroying uh evidence uh this will be the first time the law has been aimed at an operating system on pixel phones um it's very interesting graphene says well we you don't have to use that we have other ways of you know graphene is secure it's going to be hard for them to get the information out of your phone but if you unlock it i think you know there is a there are there's lots of stuff on graphene you can have deniable you know storage and so forth isn't the the general advice though is that cops can basically push you to do use biometrics to unlock your phone but they can't do the pin pad at least that's what i've heard because it's in your brain well some courts have said that but not all courts and i don't think there is a universal uh doctrine on this gotcha so he they somehow they convinced him to get to give them a passcode the screen went blank flashed several times the phone appeared to restart and now they're saying you destroyed the evidence and you're going to jail not because of what we found in your phone because what you did so just a word of warning if you're planning on doing that i'm going to bring um we're going to black hat alan are you gonna be a black hat this year i don't usually i mean i should have went a bunch in the past but i ended up not like when i was in right should i be nervous lisa's all worried because we're going to do uh we're going to do security now there and windows we don't bring your agents there be careful be careful what you bring well yeah so she so what should i uh an iphone's all right right if you say so so uh some people have said turn off your blue don't use bluetooth don't use wi-fi yeah is that okay i would say i would say cell phone network only but that's not safe either at black hot no because they put a stingrays everywhere that look like real cell towers but they're not right yep they're in the middle attacks so don't bring my phone at all well i mean you could bring stuff just don't bring anything new with information on it that you don't want someone else to see bring my graph you have multiple devices right leo like bring a non-primary device without yes correct all right that's what i'll do yeah i don't know with a clean install yes not signed into anything certainly but i gotta talk to my agents i can't leave these guys alone well who knows what they're gonna do open them up to a vector and black awesome yeah there you go that's what you want someone from black i did i said um i did a security audit yesterday they said you don't have a password on this you know if somebody got in your network they could wreak havoc i said oh yeah nobody's gonna get my network you don't have a password on it they made me put they made me put a password on it on what phone on my agent on his on his network oh my god my network agents are unpassworded yeah yeah okay yeah all right last thing i'll say uh how much okay show of hands how many of you love the cookie banner the what the you know the thing when you go to a website it says we use cookies okay opt out opt-in no if you love that that's the only thing ever but it's also I kind of I like what it represents even though it's a bad implementation of whatever yeah it's a bad implementation is the problem yes cookies aren't come on third party tracking cookies okay but every website uses cookies which means every website has to put up a banner yeah right our banner on our if you go to twit.tv our banner says yeah we use cookies what about it

2:45:44okay it was a simpler time when we worried about cookies and not about what the ai agents can do to our data you can fingerprint a browser you don't need cookies cookies are old school man anyway the eu is finally thinking of doing something putting a setting in the browser that you set and you'll never see another cookie banner the tracking industry is pushing back and so far they've been successful so i'm pushing everybody to this site kill the cookie banner because it's not just the eu right it's kill the cookie banner.eu but it's not just the eu because it's an eu a gdpr rule i know actually predates gdpr because it's a rule in the eu every website and the world has it, including ours, because I don't want to say, well, if you're in the EU, you can't visit our website.

2:46:31So we put up a cookie banner. Right. Kill the cookie banner dot EU. Take action. Sign the petition. Cookie banner's bad. There's a better way. And I would love it if I didn't have to click a cookie banner. You know what? Actually, you can use UBlock Origin and just it's one of the annoyances you can turn off. No more cookie banners. All right. that was my uh that was my plug that is it you guys have survived the marathon known as twit john c he would have said get on with it a long time ago r.i.p salute r.i.p everybody pour one out for john uh we would have lost him during the third break yeah he'd be off stealing mugs yeah stealing mugs you know your five thousand dollar body a bottle of brandy or whatever got any wine that's true yeah there's the wine uh we'll miss you john i i sure missed having him on the show he was always great devinder hardwar i am so glad you're still around keep up the good work you are the best for a long long time to come senior editor and in gadget uh anything you want to plug sure i mean i if you like me talking about movies uh check out the film cast at the filmcast.com We just reviewed the Odyssey and we're going to be reviewing the Avatar movie that just came out.

2:47:55There's another Avatar movie? When is he going to stop? The Last Airbender show. So the Last Airbender show is now producing new stuff after The Legend of Korra. So Avatar Aang, The Last Airbender, is the new movie just hit Paramount+. They have a new series coming in fall as well. And I think this is one of the best series for kids, best animated series ever made. so check out the movie check out avatar the last airbender for sure we uh we saw the back rooms in petaluma where the director's from and he was there zach was there that's cool what a great story i mean it's not a great movie it's okay but it's a great story the guy you know started it on youtube it's done very well it's what is he 22 and he's a hollywood film director they gave him a 10 million dollar budget it's amazing is the name but uh yeah he he was tapped by 24 when he was like 16 yeah because they said you know the kids today the kids the kids a lot of good boy you know i gotta i gotta i haven't seen obsession yet i just saw obsession is incredible yeah okay good very good yeah i just saw a disclosure day i'm you know it's a spielberg right that's that was more fun than the theater i think if you watch disclosure day at home you see how it's like kind of a mess but you know it was fun i enjoyed it you know it was fun it just kind of showed though how how detached spielberg is from how the world works today i know yeah yeah it's a spielberg it's a there's bright lights and there's a lone guy and nobody believes in that movie there is an amazing yeah chase scene in that movie with invisible fire trucks um i love i'm not gonna spoil it um uh anything great coming out in the next few months that we be looking for besides the odyssey uh summer is ending i mean ridley scott has a new movie that's coming out that i have heard very little about that's like um kind of like a post-apocalyptic thing so that'll be interesting but i was super excited for avatar ang and i just saw it this morning with my daughter and it's incredible so check it out if you like the last airbender okay thank you david thefilmcast.com uh there it is 603 episodes since 2008 and there's going to be more because the movies never stop and i love jeff canada give him my best by the way oh i will yeah uh thank you alan malventano so great to see you yeah i'm sorry i missed you guys when you were in town shoot i saw your email too late but at least we got you on the show next time you're in the bay area come up and say hello when when was i when was that when was i in town i feel i was like recently maybe i'm wrong weren't you in sonoma county or somewhere was that you maybe wasn't you no i don't think it was me oh oh was somebody posing as you maybe no no his agent maybe it was i was being catfished it was one of your ais yeah there's cat i was being catfished yeah you and your wife weren't in the sonoma area uh we i don't think recently maybe it was a really old email i thought i don't know i'm not good with email yeah i just i know that leo i've learned that with you i don't send you emails no he's knocking your door text me a year or two ago no text you no now i gotta look at my phone number no i gotta get through the agents i got leo's number listen i used to work at the nsa i got leo's number you probably could find it great to see you alan thank you for being here i appreciate it thanks for everything you do good luck with the hard drive thing i'm sure they're gonna really take off someday i mean we're making them as fast as we can make them that's all i can tell you it must be a nice must be nice uh and of course larry maggot good luck with the surgery is great to see you thanks for all you do connect safely.org everybody should go there there's stuff for young people there's stuff for old people yeah you actually have a guide to uh uber senior accounts seniors yeah guy to uber yeah yeah and we have an article on there that i wrote about how we need to regulate social media but not ban it from kids we don't agree often we want social media to be fixed so kids can go on it safely yes i agree it's too bad it's run by people like mark zuckerberg who really don't have children's interests at heart but at the same time you know why are countries banning youtube there's so much useful stuff there there's so much it could be anyway leo uh uh it'll be August 5th of 2025.

2:52:27Oh well I'm sorry I missed you last year out of yesterday really it was last year you should have asked you you were having a contractor battle and you were busy I was gonna I just well you know guess what there's still it's still happening there's scaffolding out here they didn't put scaffolding there yet we've had oh Lord it's been going on for two years oh my goodness so when you come out in 2028 maybe we can talk yeah maybe it'll be done it's a non-stop lisa says i am so sick of this house she said just once just once i'd like to be able to get out of bed and there's nobody looking in the window just once thank you larry alan thank you davindra great to see all three of you thanks to all of you for joining us we do twit on sundays two to five pacific five to eight eastern 2100 utc you can watch us live if you wish in the club twit discord if you're not a member of club to it look into it because there's a lot of great benefits ad-free versions of all the shows chapter markers so you can skip the ai crap if you want just jump right by it uh you also get special shows like our ai user group if you want more ai we've now down twice a month We also have the Stacey's Book Club, Micah's Media Club.

2:53:47We have the Photo Club. We have travel. We have, I mean, so much great stuff in the club. $10 a month. It supports what we do, and it's a big part of our operating expenses. We really need it, and it makes a big difference. So if you support independent podcasting, if you believe in it, please help us out. Twit.tv slash club twit. But you don't have to be a member to watch live. We also stream to everybody, and there are people watching on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik right now. 727 of them. Hello to all of you. It's good to have you here. After the fact, though, you can watch whenever you feel like it.

2:54:23You can go to our website, twit.tv, download a show there, or get links to the RSS feed or the link to the YouTube channel. There's a dedicated YouTube channel. We do audio and video of every show. If you subscribe in your favorite podcast client, audio or video, you'll get it automatically. You don't have to think about it you can have it for next time you're on a submarine there's something about these shows people just so alan loads them up on his you probably was an ipod back in the day right no it was a dell axum oh i remember the axum yeah yeah wow very early media player it's funny steve martin uh told me that he used to listen to the radio show he was up in um vancouver washington and doing a big, it was called The Big Year.

2:55:11It was a show about birding. And he said, we're in the middle of nowhere. I got nothing to do. So he did the same thing. This show is great for lonely people stuck in the wilderness or underwater. I was a superhero on the submarine. I had a Dell Axum loaded with an offline copy of Wikipedia on a five gigabyte IBM micro drive. Sure. I think. Yeah. That's huge. So I basically had the internet on the submarine. I was like the only guy. Wow. Yeah. Very impressive. It was good times. Yeah. I was watching. I was watching. He's leaving. Bye, Larry. Go take care of your ankle. I'm good. I got to rest my ankle.

2:55:53Take care, guys. Go rest your ankle, sir. Well, we got to close the show anyway. Yeah, we're done. Yeah. Have a great. Have a wonderful, wonderful life, everybody. We'll see you soon. Okay. Maybe next Sunday. I don't know. Everybody's dying around me. I don't know if I'll ever see you again. I don't know. Take care, guys. Good show. I might die. Who knows? Anyway, great show. Take care. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.