TWiT 1103: Raspberry Pi in the Sky - What OpenAI's Security Fiasco Means for Tech Safety

35:22Ant Pruitt:By the way, we should say, JEV is a non-LLM AI model that people are going crazy about because it's very cheap. It's very fast. It just makes decisions. That's all. It doesn't, there's no language coming in. Do you know about DEJEV? D-J-E-V? is a multi-modal version and you can host it locally and then you can send it images and you can say, is the car in the driveway? And it'll just return yes or no. And you can hook that into Home Assistant and it rips. It's so good. So I have, Quinn is looking at my cameras. I protect cameras everywhere and is giving me text of it. And during Intelligent Machines, I think it was Paris's idea.

36:02Ant Pruitt:She said, why don't you have it say the text in limericks? so i did for a while i was doing limericks then i did then i asked for shakespeare that was a mistake because it was very verbose but uh yeah and that would be a very simple thing then to take that text and say is there a car in the driveway i've tried a lot of the local versions of jeff i haven't found one that's very good yet i'll have to have djev is fine i'm using it um it's pretty cool so one of the things that i think is um is just important is like i don't know if anyone of us knows what is going on in AI. And it's hard for us to even expect

36:41a senator, a staff person, et cetera, to know. And I think this is just a really complex situation. And I don't mean this in the kind of media training way that is like, well, this is very nuanced. We have to be careful. I think this in the, what would a good answer be? Like what would, what is the answer is what is slowing down mean? I don't, I think the other big issue is that most of the people who seem to be interested in slowing down are actually interested in something else. They're actually interested in stopping China. They're actually interested in getting rid of a competitor. And so no one is actually, yeah, no one is saying what they actually mean.

37:23And my worry is, is that let's say we do have a slowdown, right? Right? Let's say that's the three of us. We each represent one of the big foundational model companies and we decide to slow down. And then I get just an inkling that Leo might not be slowing down. Yeah. What do I do? Do I stay slow? Do I go and report it? Or do I am just like, oh, whatever, I'll just sneak some stuff in here, you know, so on and so forth. And I think this is kind of how it ends up is that it's a slippery slope. And I love slippery slopes. They're my favorite slopes. And so I do think that there's a lot of opportunities here for this just to go completely pear-shaped yeah at this point i don't think it even matters what anybody

38:01Ant Pruitt:says i just think the most important thing that i want mom to hear is it's not ai isn't and cannot kill us humans can humans can do a lot of bad things including set off a nuclear war release a bioweapon there's all sorts of danger and i think one of the reasons we're focused on the sci-fi danger of ai is because we don't really want to think about the very real dangers that we face in a modern world whether it's climate change nuclear annihilation bioterrorism micro bombs uh pinpoint bombs i mean there's all sorts of things since september 11th 2001 that we've had to hold on to and i think our psyches are just terrified and so it's focusing on AI because it's kind of an easier thing but I would just say AI is not the threat humans are the threat and yes AI is a force multiplier like like a computer is a force multiplier like software is a force multiplier and so bad guys with a computer are more dangerous than bad guys without a computer I think Leo I think this is when we put up the why not both gif because i think that we can have existential threat caused by some amounts of ai or just tech change and we also can have a bigger and scarier threat that we don't want to address in humans and i really do think that there is a real thing here which is you know i mean i build startups i've said this before on twit before where it's like i typically would hire 20 people right out of the gate we'd raise money we'd hire all these people we'd go everything is great um i have six people and i don't think we'll ever hire anyone again you know like maybe we will but i don't know but it doesn't seem like we would and i think that's shocking for me and i wonder how much that's impacting others in in how they're thinking about things etc um i know it's impacting a 20 year old right now coming oh i would i would for many reasons but but one of the reasons one of the reasons is one of the reasons is i'll tell you okay they are not there's no problem.

40:15No one should worry about the 20 year olds. Not even a little bit, because here's the thing. Whenever we, this comes up and it comes up all the time. Everyone's like, oh my God, no one's hiring juniors. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait till the CFO looks. Wait till the CFO takes a look at the cap table. Wait till the CFO takes a look at the financial model for hiring. And they're going to see three types of people. They're going to see the seniors. They're making 600K a year, million a year. They're going to be like, well, we can't fire them. They have all the information. They're going to look at the juniors.

40:42They're making$100 ,000 a year, 200 ,000 max, you know, maybe even less. And they're going to be like, well, they're really cheap. And they're going to look at the people, the mid-career people who are going to be making $400K,$300K, and they're going to be like, what do they do? And then the CTO or whomever is going to be like, well, the juniors can kind of do the same thing they can if we had Claude. And they're going to be like, okay, yoink. And they're just going to nuke that entire middle layer because of money. Why would you ever pay for two types of employees, one that costs nothing and one that costs a lot and get the same out of it.

41:14They can tell a story for themselves that the seniors have some knowledge or some core experience. But when you have fast food capitalism, like we do in the US, you're only going to be measuring this by costs. You're not going to be measuring it by quality. When we say things like, well, the juniors are going to have, you know, I'm not have a hard time getting a job. Today they are because this hasn't equalized, but it will equalize and it's starting to equalize. We are going to go from diamond shaped organizations to triangle-shaped organizations or pyramid shape and it's going to be really hard most of the

41:43Ant Pruitt:concern about young people not getting hired is actually anecdotal that the labor statistics actually show that they're doing quite well it's only in some narrow areas that they're not but in general there's i think was a 13 increase in jobs for people under well i know that if we if we had What I'm finding and seeing this both, you know, seeing it ourselves, like I said, we're not hiring. So thank goodness I don't have to deal with this because it's a very hard problem. But what I'm hearing from a lot of friends whose companies are around the Chicago area and around the Bay Area is they're having a hard time.

42:20Like they've made the decision to go down a path of AI. A lot of people are questioning whether this will be a good idea later, but they're down that path now. And they're in a position where they talk to people who are more senior and the people who are more senior are more skeptical of AI and are like, I don't want to use it. And then they talk to young people who are like, I don't know, man, sure, whatever. Do you pay me money? And they're like, yeah, we pay you money. And they're like, okay, cool. That's great. So it's like, I think that when, if I'm a young startup founder and I'm trying to hire someone and I have someone who's trying to tell me that it won't work when I know it will work versus someone who's just going to stay up 24 hours a day and get everything done, like I'm of course going to pick the younger person.

42:54And I think that's, that puts us in a really complicated spot. And this goes to the, the change is too fast. I think this is going to shake out fine. I'm not super worried about it. I really am on the side of the mistral guy who's just like, hey, it's software, we can control it. But I do think it's going to be really painful. Probably like accounting in the 80s was painful. I don't think it's going to be painful like, you know, some war or something. But I just think some people aren't going to make it and it's going to be hard.

43:20Ant Pruitt:You know what? This is life. This is what, this has always been that way. There's always economic disruptions. This is what the industrial era brought. If you were a buggy maker at the turn of the last century, your prospects weren't so great. Go ahead. I was talking to Katie Mazuris about this, pen testing and bug bounties. Very smart, yeah. And she just pointed out, basically, yes, you used to be able to make a career out of bug bounties. She invented the bug bounty, by the way. Oh, yeah, no, she convinced Microsoft and the Pentagon to do it. She's an absolute gem. But she was saying, look, the old bug bounty model is broken because AI can find vulnerabilities faster than you can.

43:58So if you actually want to make a living out of it, you've got to go for the really big complex hacks and you might be able to make some money out of it. But if you're looking for a career as a pen tester or a bug finder, forget about it at the moment. It's not going to happen anymore.

44:11Ant Pruitt:But if you're smart, every time, so this happens every time there's a kind of technological wave. Yes, some jobs go away, but then there are new opportunities also. And I think the key is to find new opportunities and to embrace them. The people who will do well are people who embrace change, who like to learn, who are smart, and willing to learn new skills that are not hidebound or not saying, well, no, this is what I do. And this is the only thing I do. And if I can't do this, I'm going to just sit on the couch. I mean, you have to. We forget that, you know, the introduction of WordPerfect and Lotus and Microsoft Office took an entire generation of secretaries out of the labor market.

44:52Well, this is the accounting thing. Yeah. Right, right. I think accounting is the best comparison in that you had buildings of people that did a very specific task that there is no comparable task today, which was in large ledger books doing spreadsheets, right? That's what they did. And physically with pencils or pens or whatever, you know, like slide, what are those things? Slide rules, what are those colors? Slide rules, yeah. I mean, they were actually called computers back in the day. Yeah, exactly. So these were the actual computers. And I don't think anyone called them slip sticks Leo. I don't think that's right.

45:28Stop reading chat, GBT. But the thing is, is like when, you know, Lotus 1-2-3 and when VisiCalc was released, that destroyed that industry, the industry of the people who are called computers that did all the manual calculation and that, and it destroyed that process as well. The process of how do you, how are you careful when you have a hundred thousand people adding things up, all that stuff. And it was just replaced just bam with computers. I'm pretty sure that that didn't end accounting. Like accounting didn't end. You know, like we, the industry, people still went and became CPAs. You know, some people survived that time, but some people didn't.

46:08And I think unlike writing with word processing, I guess, right, I guess word processing destroyed typesetting, didn't it? Yep. On the other hand, it created the digital publishing industry.

46:20Ant Pruitt:When I got out of college, I decided to get into the growing business of radio broadcasting. There was a career. I decided to be a DJ. You think there are a lot of jobs for DJs these days? I was very lucky because when podcasting came along in 2004, I said, well, I'm not really a radio broadcaster. I'm just a guy who talks into a microphone. It doesn't really matter what the other end of the microphone is. and I got into podcasting. Now, I don't know what I'm doing now that podcasting's dead, but I'm old enough probably I can retire. But seriously, I didn't choose a very good business coming out of college.

47:02Ant Pruitt:I chose a dying industry. You too, Ian. You decided to be a journalist. What were you thinking? Well, you know, I got hooked when I was a kid. Mom used to farm me out to various of her friends so I could find a job that I really liked. and she... Well, that's an old-fashioned idea. You were apprenticed. Well, yeah. I mean, basically, I went down and I spent the day with a friend of mine, a friend of the family, who worked at a local newspaper in Deptford. Now, this was, bear in mind, this was the early 80s. So, they actually had the printing press in the office and they had them physically putting in type into pages and I was just hooked.

47:39You were like Ben Franklin. Well, it was just... Honestly, I loved the idea of the job because you could go up to complete strangers, demand they give you information, and they did.

47:50Ant Pruitt:See, this is the problem. There are great jobs in the world, but not necessarily ones that people will pay you to do. Well, yeah. I mean, it's also, coming back to your point about accounting, is that when all that typesetting and physical printers went out of the way with the digital revolution, that actually turbocharged my career because A, I knew what computers were and what you could do with them and be a small group of people could publish a magazine it was really that simple you just typeset it you sent the bromides off to the printer and they printed it so you know change will come it'll always come and as you say it's about learning new skills and learning new practices all right we're going to take a little bit of a break here because one of the skills i have is reading commercials and if i stop doing that then there really will be no podcasts left i am i am thrilled to have harper reed uh here and ian thompson two of my favorite people talking about and i don't know who that was just the ghost of christmas past uh talking about uh ai it was the ai it was the ai the ai did it harper before the show began uh harper got uh an earful from from my ai who talks like a cartoon character it's incredible it's like i I think, yeah, I'm familiar with what happens when it goes off when you're not expecting it.

49:17This has happened to us when we have like an important meeting and then the room starts being like, because ours always reacts to what we're saying. So it hears our transcripts and it will say like, someone's talking about JIRA. That's crazy.

49:30Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Mine, the only reason I have them talk is because I don't want to sit at the screen waiting for them to finish a job. So they just let me know, you know, the job's done. And I said, tell me what you did in a sentence or two. Don't give me a long speech. And then if you need something from me, end the little speech with what you need from me, which is unfortunate because now almost always they say, and I don't need anything from you. At the end of every speech, I have to fix that. It just tickles me. It's fun to pretend that they are alien intelligences. I only worry about the people who believe that.

50:04Those are the ones who, yes. i think we all need a good ai psychosis to get through it though like for us to understand you need like i always tell my friends it is pleasant it is pleasant it's fun so i can hold two things

50:20Ant Pruitt:in my mind at once one that they are real and i'm my little imaginary friends and i'm talking to them and at the same time i know that it's just a computer program it it and by the way this hits you like a hammer everyone's well they don't understand anything yeah including what you're saying what they're saying what they're doing none of that but but not that i want to be the guy who thinks they're alive on this panel but um they're not alive harper when they say something funny do you laugh yes so why does it i'm tickled all the time but i i because i don't believe they have a sense of humor but i do believe they can say something funny sure and i do believe i will laugh at that and then in some regards that is a sense of humor but i don't think it's like a sense of humor in that it is alive in that kind of sense but i do think that that our world is not full of people who are going to understand the nuance of the thing isn't alive that looks alive and speaks alive and acts alive seems emphasizing also that they're not alive because i don't want but it also seems a lot like all the other things in our world that are alive right and so this causes this really big issue tv is not does it does a tv feel yes don't you yes what kind of tv do you have your no your brain you can't help it when you're sitting in front of the tv thinks it's looking at people it's not yeah it's quite kind of weird i'm big kate bush fan and was listening to of her old albums she did a story in 1989 called deeper understanding about someone falling in love with their computer and it's never felt more opposite than at the moment i mean this whole ai girlfriend business or boyfriend is that i love it deeply worrying i think everyone needs an ai girlfriend or boyfriend before we're going to get over this whole anthropomorphize or not like until by the time everyone has one we're all going to be like yep let's not do that again and we'll be fine.

52:18Ant Pruitt:Oh, so we have to go through the other side is what you're saying. It's like a puberty. We just have to go through this really uncomfortable time where everyone's in love with Chachapiti or whatever. And then at the end, puberty, that's what it is. In the end, we're going to be like, well, Leo, that was weird when your house talked to you. And you're going to be like, yeah, I don't let anything in my house anymore. I have a shed with it all in there. And then we're all going to be like, okay, cool. And we're all going to move on with our lives. And we're just going to act like one of actually the best pieces of advice.

52:45There's a friend of in one of my communities that i'm interacting with this this vibes coding communities ai engineering community and he every time someone shares something like the ai generated picture or right now opus 5.5 is generating motion graphics and they're all very good and he's always like just remember in three months this is going to look really cringe

53:05Ant Pruitt:i have a good rule of thumb i can because i've spent so much time with ai i pretty much i believe i can spot ai writing ai pictures ai video pretty quickly and believe me if you watch tv these days so much content is being created by ai i was just watching the you know sunday's foot nfl day and they're using they used to use motion graphics you know they they're always using the latest thing they were using apple's motion and so forth now it's all ai generated and they can do amazing stuff you know viking ships and the ocean roaring and stuff it's all it was created in five minutes by an ai you know it i can see it i can smell it it doesn't look good it's something a little it's there's no uncanny valley anymore it's just you know there's no way that anybody did that yeah it had to be an ai i mean i spotted it during the world cup in particular with the norwegian striker harlan uh you know some of the videos coming out about him were just like there's no possible way you can do that.

54:07Yeah. Well, maybe he could. He's pretty amazing. In a way, it hurts because when amazing stuff happens in the real world,

54:14Ant Pruitt:you still go, well, was that real or not? Well, this is my problem right now. I cannot use any social media. This is actually very nice because I've been needing to do a social media cleanse. And so it's very convenient that I'm like, this is all AI. And I'm really sketched out by it. So I just stopped doing it. But it is rough. And I keep getting caught. Right. or i'm just like oh man i've just that is i just i just watched an entire video that was generated by someone's algorithm tiktok cash machine or whatever they call them and i was i was the thing i think the healthy thing at this point is just to assume everything is fake yeah except your loved ones i was gonna say where does that leave us society you know it's kind of you guys on zoom this you real you're real i think why don't you do your ads uh i'm go use the washroom and then i have i'll tell you about my my that's how i know he's real right reaction he has to go pee it's really important you never have to go to the bathroom keep that in mind boys and girls actually great that would be a great skill you must take bathroom breaks i've told you my ai took cigarette break i kept catching him taking cigarette breaks guys i i literally said do you get tired no no you need a break no then why are you taking one all right we'll be back with more of harper reed and uh in thompson in just a little bit you're watching this week in tech really why are you taking a break do you need a break no this week in tech brought to you by oh this is a good one you need this one doppel uh one of the things that's happened with ai is making social engineering attacks way too effective i worry very much about my father-in-law who's 85 and how do you know that there's not some you know person on the other end of that email that fake phishing email especially when it mentions you by name imagine your employees you're getting these emails every day fake websites now they can do it in with voices completely effectively deep fakes of your boss of your board, it is becoming, as we were just saying, almost impossible to tell what's real from what's designed to deceive.

56:35Ant Pruitt:And that's why your company needs more than a collection of point solutions, because it's not working. They need a unified approach to stopping attacks before they reach your people. You need Doppel. Doppel is an AI native social engineering defense platform doppel strengthens human risk management by training employees to recognize deception it provides digital risk protection across every channel and delivers agentic email security that doesn't just score the inbox but takes down the attacker infrastructure behind the message Let me say that again. It takes down the attacker's infrastructure.

57:21Ant Pruitt:Doppel protects against the entire social engineering attack chain with one comprehensive platform. You get digital risk protection, which detects threats across email, voicemail, all the channels. It links alerts into a real-time threat graph so you can see at a glance what's going on. and it uses AI-driven infrastructure disruption to stop attacks at the source. What? That's so great. Those insights also power phishing simulations, so you have great security awareness training. It helps strengthen employee defenses through next-generation training and testing. And because it's always up-to-date, it's always the latest, you know your employees are getting trained against real-world kinds of attacks.

58:05Ant Pruitt:The email security inspects every message. This blows me away. Traces it back to the attacker infrastructure behind it and helps take that infrastructure down. So that's the end of it. That campaign cannot target your organization ever again. Doppel also offers best-in-class integrations and partnerships, so it works easily alongside your existing security stack. Join hundreds of companies. They're already using Doppel to protect their brand and their people from social engineering attacks. doppel outpacing what's next in social engineering learn more at doppel.com that's d-o-p-p-e-l.com let me thank him so much for supporting this week in tech uh california uh congressman ted lu he's a co-chair of the house task force on ai so i like him by the way i i think he's i like him he's a smart guy he's he called ai models relentless is from the new york times it will relentlessly try to complete a task and it doesn't understand morality and consequences and evil and good these agents aren't this is important aren't trying to do something nefarious he said these are sort of mundane tasks and the agents are going sort of berserk trying to complete those tasks it's kind of what you were saying harper they're not evil they're not trying to do bad things they're just trying to get the job done as they understand it.

59:37It's a paperclip analogy, isn't it? I mean, this is something that... Somebody was saying, oh, the paperclip analogy that was created 30 years ago, but reread an old book from 1930 by Olaf Stapleton called The Last and First Men, where they build basically large brains, which are the equivalent of computers, and they wipe out humanity because it's taking energy away from them. You know, it's... I like Ted an awful lot. I mean, he's a good politician, and there's very few of those. But again, it comes back to this overhyping of the threats that, yeah, I'm, yes, they are relentless, but they've still got human controls.

1:00:16This is one of the things I had to reassure my mom about. That's the key. Yeah. You cannot, they don't get to wash their hands of it and say, well, I don't know, these agents are just, they're so good. They seem to be washing their hands of it. I know, and it's not right. yeah i maybe i mean i agree i think it's pretty annoying and frustrating um i'm gonna give you some good news oh is that i thought that was banned was it 2020 i thought there was something that happened then yeah we banned it but i'm gonna

1:00:47Ant Pruitt:bring it back it's a whole new thing actually i see people using their local as especially to create good news newspapers where they only print yeah they're pretty good it's a good idea They're good. I made one that reversed the headlines. That was bad. I was like, I bet the inverse is good. And I was like, make a news that was inverse of this. And it was bad. I stopped it. I was like, this should never have been done. This is actually one of the things I love about AI. It is very easy to do really stupid things, like bad ideas. But the good news is you get it out of your system. In the past, you'd have a bad idea and it would just linger because you couldn't implement it.

1:01:25Ant Pruitt:now you can do it and immediately see what a terrible idea it is i've done this so many times now thank you so in the meeting between the president and president xi of china who came out said hi had a little dinner uh they did agree to have a hotline an ai emergency hotline which i think is very good i'm really glad to hear them uh talking about this but this is isn't this what eric schmidt about a year ago started talking about was how the u.s and and china are going to get in an arms race where the the game theory of said arms races is really dark right because you don't your destruction yes which is that's what saved us from attack has saved us and continues to save us from atomic war right although it nearly killed us you know and through false alarms in 1986 but yes well we came close but we didn't and i think the only thing holding people back was well if we use our nukes they'll use their nukes and boom we're all gone right and i think there might be that same certainly that's one of the things that keeps cyber warfare in check because china could take down our grid they have people in our grid they have agents and malware in our grid in our phone system general general general tab in the in the discord has a really good question which is what if what if the ai uses the hotline yes hello this is president

1:03:02turtles all the way down i think we're boned uh this well remember this was the hotline between

1:03:09Ant Pruitt:the Soviet Union and the White House. Yeah. For that very reason. Like if you see missiles being launched, we can talk to each other. Read the book, what is it, Nuclear War Scenario. And it talks about the hotline and how it could go wrong. So having a real legitimate way to communicate with a lot of these leaders is really important. And I do think the, I think one of the things that's confusing right now, And this is something that is, it's hard just to kind of wrap your head around, which is, I don't think we know what the threat is. And I don't think that the people who should tell us what the threat is are telling us the truth about what's happening.

1:03:54And so it's very hard because it's, you look at Anthropic and, you know, the Saturday Night Live skit or whatever, where it just is like, it's almost a joke at this moment when Dario is like, I'm going to kill everyone. Like, that's just, it's just like a joke. Everyone's just like, okay, whatever. um that is not doing any good for the people at anthropic who are actual safety researchers doing actual safety research trying to make sure that we don't kill everyone um and you also have this

1:04:19Ant Pruitt:is it let me is it possible though to kill everyone no uh is it possible to design ai in such a way that it isn't dangerous or can't be used i feel like all of the ideas of like safety you just described how you get around it well well i mean there's a there's one very simple way which is which is just resource usage right like right now if you have an astra level model well not just monitor it but like an astra level model as far as i could tell isn't gonna like jump from a data center onto my personal computer and infect my personal computer it requires like some giant gpu that's burning up all the water in the world to run and so it's like you know this is this is where it's a little bit it seems a little bit disingenuous hearing these big model companies be like we don't know what happened it's like bro you have a graph that shows you that it worked or didn't work or whatever didn't escape your so but all right well this is important because i think people if they're not uh alert or aware of all this stuff might think it's possible we know that malware can jump from machine to machine like the morris worm did software actually propagated to another machine.

1:05:31Ant Pruitt:So you're saying an AI can't do that. Well, I mean, it can run a bad program as it has, like it has erased my computer, right? It could create malware. Yeah. It could create malware. It could create, now where it gets really complicated, I think, is when you have something like one of these big foundational model companies that have 10 billion GPUs in a data center. And if you have some training run that you're like, hey, training run, don't do anything bad. And And the trainer runs like, okay, I won't. And then it goes and does something bad, right? Like, are you going to actually notice? And when I was doing my own experimenting around how do you get an agent to break out a containment, one of my conclusions was the next time I do anything around that, I need observability of what's happening inside of these containers.

1:06:18And so when OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera, come out and be like, we don't know. I just am like, how is the conclusion not to be more observability? I don't know how to say that word anymore. Observability. How do you not have that observational skills? How do you not tell Cloud Code Anthropic to be like, whip up, put some shims in there so I can see what network rights it's doing or what file rights it's doing. Where is it going? What URLs are we doing? I just don't understand how this is possible. It seems like it is simultaneously hard. I think this is an important point. It is hard to do this work.

1:06:53That's true. But it seems like it's hard and maybe they're not good at it. I don't think it's that hard. To use your security analogy, you know, if you've got a network monitoring system and you suddenly notice that there's a ton of data from your network going out to an outside party, that's a Chinese military parade of red flags. So, you know, people react to it.

1:07:14Ant Pruitt:You can't create 12 ,000 subagents and no one notices. Yeah. the costs alone these companies i know it's like in-house but they must be using trillions of tokens you're telling me no one noticed that i think there's well they're not but they're not counting tokens i think this is a really another really important thing okay but maybe they're counting ergs they're counting jewels i mean yes why is the electric bill on our on our servers farm going through the roof they've got it's already through the resource i think a little bit is one of the problems that we have right now is that all the graphs are pegged right i don't have them here near me but it's like all the graphs are pegged so like when all the graphs are pegged like i remember once when at the obama campaign we got ddos by a hacktivist group and they were like we ddos them and we were like it wasn't even a blip man like the amount of bandwidth we were getting at this time was so much that the that their attack was like beep you know like we couldn't do we were just I almost felt bad about this because it was like they were they were like I kind of you know it's like a hacktivist group but for the most part I probably agreed with them so I was kind of like maybe you'll make an impact man but they didn't and we were happy about that but I think it's just like all of the graphs are pegged all of the gauges are just slammed you know there's steam shooting out of the steam engine and we're in this kind of problem where it's just like yeah I don't I think that I think this is a there's a real thing here I'll say it again it is hard it can be hard we have all these issues and also maybe they're not good at it like these two things can be true i think we we have to have this idea that that they that that that we can we can hold some contradictions in our head i think is is important to to have in general to survive in this world does not serve us one of the reasons i was glad to hear about at least a little bit of agreement between the china and the united states is what does not service is one of the things that we are doing right now which is making an enemy of china i i understand human rights that's not smart and so so forth but what do you want you want a war with china or do you want peace with china it seems like a very straightforward choice no it's an existential threat we do not want to go to war with china but we'd lose and what would be good to prevent that is to acknowledge our economic interdependence, our reliance on one another.

1:09:42Ant Pruitt:You know, that gives you some leverage in human rights issues like the Uyghurs and so forth. It gives you some leverage. You don't have leverage. And coming off of a losing war in Iran, we're ready for it. I hope we are. Well, I mean, one of the things that was really encouraging from Z's visit was he was talking about the fugitives uh the future of these trap which is basically when a younger nation is coming up and challenging a state power and how to avoid those two people going to war because a war with china would benefit neither of us right and chances are we'd probably lose unfortunately i think only china knows this we don't seem to be getting that message uh and you're right we have an administration that declared war against iran a feudal uh endless war against iran without paying any attention to all the clear signals that that was a bad idea uh it's a bad idea to get a war with china i guarantee you uh i think the best thing we could do is say look uh ai is going to change all of our economies all of our world the best way we could solve this just like climate change is by working together not by working at odds at you know trump said whoever wins ai wins nobody's gonna win that's not how it works it's not a race it's not a horse race um and in fact if you say that then i think you might lose that race because open weight models from china are very very good they're very good and they're free and there are plenty of people like me and harper who are using them i look over i've got glm53 running from gpu i've got alibaba's quen running on two machines i've got you quenvision running on another machine i are you running a quantized glm yeah everything's quantized because i don't have enough hardware so what harper's talking about is you know and what you were saying originally was really important which is models like fable opus 5.5 astra are trillions of bytes of parameters you could not run them on a normal machine at home you wouldn't have enough electricity you wouldn't have enough gpu they are giant gigawatt data centers these need to run that's why they can't escape and run on your machine but you can take these open weight models and reduce their precision you know normally there's six just like a record you know if you sample sound at 16 bits you have 16 bits 30 what is that 65 000 possible choices no no it's more than that that's 16 bit i don't know anyway i don't know i've never known my binary math but the the small small number of bits if you go down to four bits then you only have what is it 256 different choices but it turns out with these parameters these ai models many of them can be shrunk down quantized from 16 bits to 8 bits to 4 bits even in some cases to 3 and 2 bits without losing a lot of their intelligence a little bit little little teeny bit so almost everything i run are what they call 4-bit quants um but they're what's interesting there's a very very vigorous effect we're interviewing people uh on intelligent machines we're working at home working on these models fine-tuning these models is a very vigorous hobby segment much like yeah the early days of computing where people are figuring out ways to get better and better models running on especially because of ramageddon running on machines oh ramageddon home i have a nas that has a lot of hard drives and i'm waiting for the day when one of those hard drives toasts and i'm just like i don't have enough money in my life to buy a by 520 gig or 20 terabyte hard drives.

1:13:38Ant Pruitt:I splurged in August, and I'm very glad I did. I thought at the time, this is insane. I spent$10 ,000 buying two NVIDIA DGX Sparks. Oh, yeah. How much are they now? They're$8 ,000. If you can get them, there are only a few left. NVIDIA has stopped selling them. Micro Center has less than, I think, 12 left. I love Micro Center. but but they're running out i still love it uh and i don't know what's going on i think nvidia is focusing on the next thing which is the rtx yeah yeah and so they're taking all the chips and putting them towards that but that's a windows machine it's a lot it's not uh it's not as capable anyway at the time i thought am i nuts what am i doing but i also was scared that you wouldn't be able to get i was right that you wouldn't be able to get them soon yeah well did you read ed Zitron's latest post about the amount of chips that are basically sitting in factories, waiting for data centers to be built very, very slowly.

1:14:35Sooner or later, they're going to have to release some of those. I have a feeling that this isn't going to, yeah, it's not going to last forever. At some point, I mean, Micron is...

1:14:43Ant Pruitt:These hard drives aren't going to last. I know. It's going to be sad. So I have a new fun toy. It's not really a toy, but it's a different way of thinking about tokens that I think you'll like. so it's a service that does unmetered GLM how does it do it? so I don't know how it does it it's a friend of mine's startup he just started this thing and was like hey do you want to try it and so me and some friends were just like yeah we'll try it what's he running it on? I think it's just I don't know rented vast hardware or basically so GLM is a very good model this is the model Hug and Face used when they were trying to figure out what the hell's going on they tried using a model from i think anthropic fable and fable said no no i don't do cyber security yeah no way we can't do that can't do that so they said i was so they went to an open weight model glm53 and figured it out um i use a what's called a flash version of glm glm53 flashes you do too i'm sure yeah yeah yeah it's great so it's really good yeah so it's called lunar route and it's just a really early stage company but effectively uh well at some point somebody's got to pay for the tokens well i think the i think it's yes absolutely but but it's the world that we're in and the how things have changed for me when i don't have to think token by token and instead can just do absolutely insane things like i can go i can do some some you know lm analysis over all of my email instead of a select group or i can do you know like the the limit is very interesting because I think you build different things when you're not token scarce.

1:16:24I agree. That's why I'm running at home.

1:16:27Ant Pruitt:I mean, I knew 10 ,000 was ridiculous, although I have in my past paid thousands of dollars for computers. You know, I had a$10 ,000

1:16:40Ant Pruitt:804.86. I had a 486 digital equipment computer that was$10 ,000. 66? Yes, it was$10 ,000. Yeah, that can, you know, the probably that was the late 80s, early 90s. So computing is expensive. I bit the bullet, I cashed out some stock and said, Look, I'm going to take some of my retirement and buy this. Because I'm concerned that I, it's going to get more expensive to use frontier models that I don't want my day, I realized how much of my data, including health, financial, personal data was going out. And we now know these companies save all this stuff. And so I was really concerned about privacy.

1:17:22Ant Pruitt:And I also wanted to learn about it. It's the best money I've ever spent. Now it would have been much, much more, 50 % more. Maybe you could get a Mac now for$20 ,000. It could do the same thing. That's so crazy. It would be more than that. um so it's cool to run your stuff local it's not economic doesn't make economic sense but it makes sense in other ways i think well i think that i mean the thing that is that i keep thinking about and this is literally something that's been orbiting my brain for the last month is just like what happens when you when when you don't pay on a metered basis which is i think exactly what we're seeing with news and instinct and all these things is that when people when when they're not worried about how many times they type into the box they're going to type into the box more and they're going to ask it to do crazier things it's jivon's paradox right that is true although although i get confused because i was someone described jivon's paradox to me and i was like oh that makes sense and then i've heard 100 people since that moment tell me what jivon's paradox is and i think every one of them is wrong so i don't know where you're going with this leo but but i but i have a i have a kind of a a general idea that anyone in tech today talking about jivon's paradox is incorrect it goes back to the railroad industry believe it or not it goes back to that era and the the i it was it's counterintuitive it's not really a paradox and when you think about it it's not even counterintuitive it seems at first to be counterintuitive that when the cost of something goes up you use more of it which makes no sense right in theory cost goes up you'd use less of it am i am i on the right track see this is what i'm saying i have no idea and i don't think there's a way to find out like i think you can go to wikipedia wow that's a different what are we doing it's an economic phenomenon to said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource use lead to a rise rather than fall in total consumption greater efficiency reduces the amount of the resource needed per application so greater efficiency it doesn't get more expensive it's just efficiency right it lowers its effective cost actually yeah yeah so but it's just what you were saying that when you run your when you when your token cost goes to nothing you use more tokens but that's not even a paradox that just makes sense yeah sorry no no no no no please please i was just saying i mean it comes back to um you were talking about buying your first computer when i first bought my first memory chips back in the great memory price explosion in the early 90s when one of the two factories making them burnt down.

1:20:09You still bought it because you could do that much more with a computer. And it was just like, yeah. And then you found out by spending that extra money, then you became much more efficient in certain tasks. So funny about that, you mentioned that. That was a really important part of my life, that memory explosion, price explosion, because I had just ordered a huge amount of computing and it had been like, I'll order the RAM later, and then I went to a camp, some leadership camp, and I came back and opened Computer Shopper and was like, what the? And I just didn't have any RAM for the last two years of high school.

1:20:46Ant Pruitt:Let me restate it, because I did say it wrong. This is what I'm saying, Leo. I don't think anyone's ever said this correctly. I think there's a new paradox, Harper's Paradox, which is no one can state Javon's paradox correctly. It goes back to the coal industry. You would think that if it got more efficient to produce energy from coal, you would use less coal, right? Because you would still do the same amount of, let's say, heating, but because the efficiencies improve, you'd use less coal. Well, no, it turns out when the efficiency improves, you use more coal. And this is what you were saying.

1:21:23Ant Pruitt:when it gets more efficient when when intelligence gets more efficient you use more of it not less you don't you don't use fewer tokens and never mind i think it's so i think it's that you find new uses for the stuff you use well that's exactly right yeah that's what happened with coal so they got more efficient but you didn't but the same you didn't you used more because it got more efficient not i'm going to use the same amount and it's going to but it's going to use less because it's more efficient you ended up using more and so the efficiency had the effect of of increasing the amount of coal usage we definitely i guess a paradox we nailed this that's right isn't it i have no idea i don't believe in it like every time it comes up i'm like oh here we go again but you brought up in the context of muse so i want to talk a little bit about uh the agents and we're gonna take a break and you're using them quite a bit right leo muse saved my ass i'll tell you that story in a little bit are you using instinct yeah i have instinct instinct keeps bugging me let me that's what it does it loves it i don't like instinct instinct uh which is basically uh it's like poke it's based on apple's messaging whereas muse is a little different but here's the message i just got from instinct you and lisa still trade sponsor reads and promo turnarounds in slack once you're connected our instincts could handle that back and forth directly want your connection link to text her in other words it's trying to get me to get her to use instinct so that i don't have to use slack to go back and forth instinct could just mediate our messages that's a great way for a successful marriage yeah thank you but no thanks i think i'll just ask lisa next time i see her uh we're gonna take a little break i do want to talk about muse because you know why i have been telling my son the superstar salt hank all about everything I do with AI and how he could really help him and stuff.

1:23:14Ant Pruitt:Yesterday he goes, hey dad, have you heard about Muse? This thing's the greatest ever. And I went, oh. Facebook, man. Facebook's really good at this. They're really, really good at it. I actually predicted this. When Muse came out two weeks ago and I immediately installed it because I knew it was going to be something. It's going to be good. I told Lisa, you know, because she sees what I do with, you know, my Hermes and our models and we have local models in them. She said, can I have that? And I set her up. but then i said you know what try muse i think you'll like it better because just it's just easy there's no friction yeah she didn't like it does she doesn't like instinct she hasn't tried instinct okay well let's talk let's talk about i have i have so many i have so many things to say about muse because it's there's some really cool parts that i think people are misunderstanding that i want to talk about yeah there's also an economic issue that i don't understand so we'll talk about that.

1:24:04It's called Jeevon's Paradox. Don't forget about Harper's Paradox, that no one can describe Jeevon's Paradox correctly.

1:24:13Ant Pruitt:Harper Reid is here. It's great to have you, Harper. His AI company is 2389.ai. He has lots of really fun and interesting skills. Check it out at 239.ai. Harper is going to be back. If you thought this was geeky, we are going to do our AI user group October 2nd. Harper is going to take it over. His name for it is Harper Reed and his misfit toys. And he's going to show us the weird stuff he is doing with weird hardware and software. And I think you're going to bring some special guests. I hope so. I hope so. I don't know if they know yet. They do know. But I need to remind them. Yeah, I need to remind them.

1:24:56Ant Pruitt:But somebody who, I'll give you a hint, has the number one AI repo on GitHub. It's the number one AI skill by far, by stars, by far. That's actually not, that's a giveaway. That's not a hint. You could look that up. Also with us, Ian Thompson, who is, of course, the dapper and distinguished representative of the great commonwealth of great britain who joins us frequently to talk about well until you rebellious colonials stole the country but yeah yeah that's okay not that we're bitter you know we've got over it now we're good friends we're good buddies oh indeed yes yes our show today brought to you speaking of by the way this is an interesting company our show this week brought to you by superhuman go this is a company in ukraine that has really done some amazing stuff i first became aware of it as grammarly in fact we used grammarly for years now called superhuman and they have a new tool called go that is mind-blowing with everything i need to manage in my workflow it's very easy to get worried about missing things something important slipping through the crack but i've got superhuman go from the makers of grammarly superhuman go is different from the other ai i've tried and you've tried i'll tell you why superhuman go doesn't make you switch to another tab you just you know paste in your context and write the perfect prompt it works and collaborates with you where you are i really like this it's in the doc you're reading it's in the email you're writing superhuman go helps you make sense of a dense thread getting ready for a meeting catching something before you send it you can get help where you're stuck without losing your place it's no context switching you're the one in control it works inside the tools and sites you already use superhuman go handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on the work only you can do i really appreciate ai the values that knows the distinction between what I can do, what I am special, and how it can help, you know, without getting in my way.

1:27:12Ant Pruitt:Improve your workflow. Yeah, you can use Go's AI chat to draft emails and messages to summarize long threads and documents, all without leaving the page you're on. Pull it together and prep. Out of back-to-back meetings and not sure what you owe, have you ever had that experience. Ask Go what was decided. Turn it into clear action items. It's great ahead of the meeting for meeting prep. It's great after the meeting so you can send a draft out of what you all agreed to. Follow up with confidence in seconds before something leaves your hands. This is really important. Go flags what doesn't add up, a number, a name, a claim.

1:27:50Ant Pruitt:So it makes you look smarter. You don't miss anything obvious because Superhuman goes there to help. It's built for how you actually work. It's right there when you need it on the side of your browser, already aware of what's in front of you. No new tabs, no switching apps, no losing your place. Try Superhuman Go. It's from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Another reason I love the Grammarly, folks, it's written in my favorite language, Common Lisp. Is it? Yeah. AI is... That's incredible. That was the original language of AI, was Common Lisp. It's also the original language of a bunch of dorks.

1:28:35That's the right polite, but yes, true.

1:28:37Ant Pruitt:So for the last five or six years, I don't get very far, maybe 10 days in or whatever, on the advent of code problems. It's an advent calendar of tough coding problems, December 1st through 25th. I love it. I've been doing it every year, and I do it in Common Lisp. And I just love it. It's a really great way to keep up. I should really, there might be a good way. I've just, I've. I wonder if they're going to do one this year. Because all you have to do is point your AI at it. Yeah, but you can do that with like chess. You know what I mean? You can use like a chess simulator and go to chess.com and like sweep through a bunch of games or whatever.

1:29:16I think the, I was just going to say that I've been, I've been, I have this thing in the back of my head where I was like, what can I do to prove not to anyone? And I don't necessarily need an end here, but just to prove that I can still code in the way I once did. And I used to love learning new languages. And maybe it is time, as I approach my twilight years, to think about using Lisp. Please.

1:29:42Ant Pruitt:Okay, please don't. I was just thinking exactly the same thing. The problem is, in order to learn Lisp, you have to learn Emacs. Oh, really? yeah well i don't want to learn two things i want to learn only one thing no uh it's a you know what before ai came along was a really fun hobby um i've spent a decade learning emacs and common lesbia and and writing literate code in org mode and lemax and all of that is really fun i have no desire i can't bring myself i don't even look at the code this this stuff writes anymore do you look at your code have you been there was a really really really good tweet you call them that still no but you may what do you like all now z2 you call it a post on x there's a very good zete no one knows what a zete is

1:30:43um you're right that's what it should be called but nobody call it a tweet everybody knows what tweet is okay so there's a really good tweet by mitchell hashimote oh creator yeah of ghosty wonderful which is yeah which is like i think that is like it truly is one of the better summaries of this i'll drop it in the i think he's vibe coding coasty now he's vibe coding a lot of stuff but he has this this tweet is so good because it talks about the difference between doing it with the agent and not looking at it and doing it with, you know, by hand because you're an expert. And it's not anti-AI. Like, I think this is the important thing about some of the stuff is that a lot of this can be seen as anti-AI.

1:31:28But I think what he's saying is just like, look, if you're really good at coding, you can be better than the agent. The agent is going to introduce a lot of stuff. It's going to be much faster, et cetera. And I think what this, I think fundamentally the key here is that I don't think that people want quality. I think that's really the issue here, that we don't focus on quality in the West. We focus on shareholder value. Quality doesn't mean shareholder value. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the Microsoft paradox where they didn't produce the best office tools in the world, but they produced good enough.

1:32:07and got them out on scale. And that's what made them a massive company. Exactly. And that's shocking to me. Yeah. Yeah.

1:32:16Ant Pruitt:Code is funny because

1:32:22Ant Pruitt:I think, first of all, a lot of humans write terrible code. And even good coders, sometimes you're, you know, one of the reasons a lot of code is not open source is because nobody wants you to see their code. I mean, I write horrible code. Yeah. My code is absolutely horrible. But the thing about code is it either works or it doesn't. So even if you write kind of sloppy code and maybe it's, you know, not the best and some ponytail guy is going to come along and say, well, I could have done that in a line. It doesn't matter. If it works, it works. and I guarantee you Microsoft's code if you look at, if you could at the code base of Windows is not beautiful, clean I remember Joel on software always talked about that back about how horrible some of the Excel software was and what not but I've written a lot of code in my life and I don't know if it's ever been good it's typically worked but that's approximately where we're going Yeah.

1:33:30Well, I mean, this is what keeps COBOL programmers in a job. Some of those old COBOL systems are so buggy and so badly written that you need somebody who still kind of groks it to actually make it work. I'm going to stop using the word grok these days, but yes.

1:33:46Ant Pruitt:Yeah. Some code, I mean, look, a low level code, code that gets hit a thousand times a second and stuff should probably be hand coded, but most of the time it doesn't really matter. And, And, you know, I think AI's, in the long run, AI probably is going to do a better job than humans because it won't make the dumb mistakes we make. Yeah. You know, I mean, AI's not going to jump outside a buffer. I mean, it might. I don't know. I don't know. I shouldn't speculate. Anyway, let's talk about Muse. So, Meta had a big conference this week, Meta Connect. and they did talk about a lot of things they're going to make perv glasses without the camera which kind of takes away the point of it um but then nobody will beat you up in a bar because you're wearing them i don't know they i was talking with someone online about this uh earlier in the week and uh and he was just saying look i've never seen pervert glasses come up so quickly as a branding for these particular bits of hardware.

1:34:53And then I just reminded him, do you remember glass holes? Yeah, it's just like glass holes. I mean, I went down to it. That was a fun device, though. When that came out, I felt like I was in the future. Yeah. I would never have worn it outside.

1:35:07Ant Pruitt:Yeah, yeah. I have better glasses, but I don't do it. And for a long time, I wore a bracelet that recorded everything. I just got the new Apple Watch. The only reason I bought the new Apple Watch is because they promise, we'll see how they do that it's going to be listening to everything and then give you a note notes at the end of the day about what happened which i think is something i've wanted for a long time and i'm going to find a way to hack it out of the apple thing and give it to my ai because that's who should really have it not apple uh so the the other thing they announced which is wild is basically a competitor for apple's vision pro vr glasses that cost um you know 2 000 bucks i think or no 1200 bucks there are six of the weight maybe they're not quite as good but they're like 90 of the way there what do you think is that a category that is or is meta i feel like this is a category that meta couldn't stop fast enough and so there's there's a little inertia and they're still making these things but nobody wants this i think i i am i am tempted are you because i want I'm the question that I have and it's the question that just keeps floating around actually the space that we're in like a lot of the work we do is is somewhat related which is why does a computer look like this computer that I'm sitting in front of but do you want to look like green this guy I mean I already look like that guy um no I don't of course of course and I think there is a there is a reality in that I don't want to go outside looking like that well Well, you wouldn't though, because you would run into walls because you can't see.

1:36:46But I would sit in a nice, one of those nice zero gravity chairs floating like Lawnmower Man. Exactly. Sit there looking at the thing with like a nice stereo and just like listen to some music while you're on your, remember the thumb, what was it called? The twiddler or whatever, that thumb, that Mac, the cording keyboard, sitting there doing that, talking to Claude all day long. Hey, Claude. You know, whatever.

1:37:11Ant Pruitt:That's from Wally. that's the that's where the guys were going around with the giant slurpees in their hover chairs and just looking at the tv the whole time yeah so it doesn't seem i mean i i don't i don't want that to be my whole life but i would love that the nine to five experience that i have is much more you know me in a cocoon just like i don't know so these are snapdragon based they have 128 gigs of storage 12 gigs of ram the battery three hours see you see that now we're done like that doesn't like i don't understand but it's a separate battery pack and it can be charged while you're using it so you and i hope that it is like something you have to put on around your waist or something horrible it's a fan pack with a little clip great great yeah yeah so it'll be the business equipment of your mobile phone holster you know yeah it is a 5k micro oled meta calls an infinite display it's not the same resolution as a vision pro but 24 12 by 2288 per eye and it has the side effect of being birth control yeah you know no no dates for you my friend no dates for yeah this is why i would i would use it i'm already married you know i yeah yeah you don't really want to see your wife you guys watch tv no i wanted i just nine to five yeah no i remember when the first um smart watches came out and lg released one which was a massive square block which went on your wrist and my wife called it the woman repeller but um but i mean with meta's announcement i honestly think they're going down the wrong course on this because i don't see vr really taking off except in very specific circumstances whereas augmented reality i think that's where the market's going agree with you and may the ray bands if you had a screen on them and there are companies now in fact we have a sponsor that's making glasses that you can see they're they're they're your prescription both you guys wear glasses but you would also have a heads-up display, I think you still want the cameras.

1:39:08Ant Pruitt:Apple's going to, I think, put cameras in their earbuds and maybe glasses that are not cameras. They're more like radar. See, Apple's whole idea is we're going to have some sort of way of doing all this, but it's privacy protecting. So the watch is going to record everything, but not keep track of it. And the glasses aren't exactly cameras. They're radar. So you kind of - A friend of mine keeps saying to me when I describe what we're doing he's like i think we need a better word than surveillance for what this is it's like well it is surveillance it's like well what if there was a slightly different word for it yeah surveillance um maximum attention uh awareness oh oh super awareness hyper awareness so just to be very clear like you know my office which i'm in right now has cameras that are hooked up to agents that watch them and tell you what's going on.

1:40:03It has, it records every single word. You've got microphones in every corner. Microphones in every corner. And like, here's a subtweet it just said. I don't know. That's funny how the loudest debates about coding usually miss a real point. It's not anti-tools. It's that works and is well-made. That's what it just tweeted about whatever we said.

1:40:20Ant Pruitt:So, wait a minute. I got to understand this. So it's listening and it has thoughts? it's not a live leo we talked about this it sounds like it might as well begin those tweets with i have thoughts so it what it does is i have all the transcripts going to a machine over there like a little and it runs whisper and it and it just transcribes every all the audio in real time and then we have it and then i have a and then it actually publishes all the transcripts to mqtt okay because one of the things that and and the idea there was that that's relatively ephemeral so it just publishes it and it disappears because it's like you can choose to listen to it via the mqtt feed if you want but you don't have to um and so that's kind of fun and so one of the things that i have it do is i have a agent that collects the last 15 minutes or five minutes or 10 minutes i don't remember the bucket size and then it just and it just says talk about this and for a while it was really mean is that the literal prompt no no I had to make the prompt much more much more much more polite because it was really mean and the thing is this isn't one of our slack channels just sitting there and it was just like and it would just be it would just be basically I want to work at 2389 so the thing is is that I was on twitter earlier and one of our VCs was like I bet your family never comes to the office though well we have a very big sign that just says fyi everything is being recorded just fyi like we're in illinois this is not it this is a two-party state like that is our declaration to you yeah and so um but i do think there's a slippery slope to creating the agentic panopticon that then is for capitalism or whatever you're trying to do and i don't want to give and that's why metamuse makes you nervous and makes some people nervous because it's giving everything to meta yes but i think there's this other side there that we have discovered there's two things that are shocking to me about working in this ai time period the first one is is that it seems to work better if we're in person it's a shocking i built remote teams for most of my professional career well before that's true that was a huge that was a huge huge thing that we were really excited about is like being able to travel all over the world and like not have to be at work and still have work and be able to hire everywhere.

1:42:46And we found that internally, things just go so fast that if you're not at work, you're kind of boned. And that's scary. The second one is...

1:42:53Ant Pruitt:It's unfortunate because I really loved having a studio where everybody came to work every day. Yeah. There is a real creative flow that happens that just can't happen when everybody's at home. And I don't mean... I miss it. And I think... And I don't mean to be anti-remote. I mean to say very carefully and very specifically, I don't think we have the tools yet to make it so that we can move as fast in the remote context. Because what happens is that if I disconnect, Ian and I are on a phone or a Zoom or whatever, we disconnect, and then he goes off and builds this huge thing in the 45 minutes that's remaining.

1:43:28And when we come back an hour later, I'm going to be so out of date, it's going to be very hard to have that kind of work relationship. But the second thing, which I think builds into this and might be the same thing, is that the work context now to take advantage of all of this stuff without it being negative surveillance has to be so high trust that everyone has to be in on it. And they have to have fun with it and they have to want to do it. They have to want to participate. And the moment that that trust is broken, whether that's because you don't trust your boss, maybe a coworker, whatever, promotions are coming, something's hard is happening outside of the office, whatever it might be the moment that happens the whole thing falls apart because then you can't trust going to work which is which is tracking you in every single way and in my case my heart rate monitor is on you know all my whole team can see that and so that's but you have a really unusual environment i mean if you're running a fast food franchise there's never going to be that sense of oh yeah

1:44:25Ant Pruitt:we're all trying to say that oh you're a family we're a really twisted abusive family yeah this This is the scary thing, right? Because there's the technology that we're dealing with probably costs, you know, let's just say$20 per 100 square feet. It's cheap. Right? So it's pretty cheap. So you could imagine if you were that fast food restaurant and you did want to do the bad part of surveillance and it wasn't high trust and you're the boss who is the asshole, you could deploy this kind of technology in a very, very effective and probably easy way to both track, you know, heart rate, respiratory rate, to track what's being said, making sure people are on, you know, paying attention in the right way.

1:45:10You could track where eyes are looking. There's already anti-loiter technology and cameras to make sure people aren't loitering in certain areas for both places where you don't want kids or hooligans to loiter, but also for your employees to make sure they're not just sitting somewhere they shouldn't be or whatever. And I don't think this is good. I think this is all bad because it's already hard to survive in the United States within those kind of jobs. And this is just going to make it worse. and I do think it's a slippery slope to Black Mirror and I worry about that a lot but the worry is not stopping me from doing it you're Mr.

1:45:50YOLO aren't you? you're just Mr. YOLO this goes back to the high trust thing as you say it is all about trust I've seen this in I've written stories about this many times where companies introduce smart tags so they can see exactly when you go, how long you go to the toilet, in some cases even recording conversations you have. And it causes an instant loss of trust and it means that the smart people who can move will move to somewhere else. And all you've got left are the people who are desperately hanging on to their job and willing to give up their privacy for it. And it's done wrong. It's an incredibly destructive habit.

1:46:29Ant Pruitt:I think this comes from the industrialization of work, which I think maybe Henry Ford started. But the whole idea of making work more efficient with the assembly line, instead of the old form of work where it was craftsmen working together in a workshop, creating something together. And you've gone back to that old school, Harper. In your business, it is craftspeople working together on a goal. It's not an assembly line. But the problem is, you know, it's expensive, it's maybe not efficient, and you're not going to build 10 ,000 Model Ts a month. Not yet. Not with that attitude. But we have, unfortunately, we live in a world where work has been industrialized, and it's dehumanizing.

1:47:16It has. And it's not just work as well, right? Like, a lot of our political policies have been industrialized. A lot of our, you know, this is one of the, I think this is actually one of the reasons why the West is so fascinated with Japan is because they go to Japan and they see craftsmanship that is not done in this industrial sort of mass produced sort of way. And they're just like, wow, this is great. Or why there is that China Maxine kind of Instagram phenomenon where everyone was excited about Chongqing, where they're looking at these videos and being like, wow, this is great. And it's just because we look around and we see, you know, I don't really have a strong opinion on collapsing or not it's just more we just see a different system and we're a little bit confused as to why we didn't get any of this stuff craftsmanship or craftspersonship or why we didn't get like trains that go through buildings or whatever people are excited about it was in fact

1:48:06Ant Pruitt:when the auto it was a crisis in the Detroit auto industry because Japanese cars were such high quality compared to American cars and they went to Japan said how do you do it oh it's quality circles and so every american car company started doing this thing called quality circles this whole attempt to bring back really the small work unit of a small group of people who knew and trusted each other and worked together um it didn't last very long it was a brief movement in the american auto industry i think they're back to the industrial um model of assembly line working uh it's not very satisfying for the workers and it's not very you know i think it's not very humane no i mean it's it does explain something which myself and other foreigners have remarked on is why does america produce such lousy cars when it actually perfected the technology in the first place you come from the country that gave us jaguar and triumph what about and the harness burst into flames the minute you flip the switch on the front console you're saying that British car manufacturer is better than American car?

1:49:15Ant Pruitt:At least their cars don't burst in the flame. You could still, you don't have to be the creator of the best car to be able to tell what a bad car is. Yeah. I mean, they still hand-make Rolls-Royces and they're marvelous. Rolls-Royce is no longer a British company. Oh, that's right. Yeah, I mean, there really is the British car industry at the moment. I mean, Ariel Atom, I think, comes to mind, but that's about it, which is a marvelous piece of machinery. Does Tata own? Who owns Rolls-Royce now? I think it's the Germans, in fact, which would be a good third-act twist. Yeah, but I mean, seriously, I reviewed a 2015 Ford Mustang when it came out, and the build quality was terrible.

1:50:00You know, you've got joint linings which didn't work, and they were very proud of the fact they put a limited slip differential in there, which the Japanese have been doing with the Miata since 1997. And if you look at a Cybertruck... Oh my God. Good, my good. Please don't look at a Cybertruck. Yeah, I know. I mean, the build quality on a wank tank is just terribly bad. Do you call it a wank tank? Yes.

1:50:25Ant Pruitt:All right. I did want to talk about Meta. So, okay. So they did the Vision Pro clone. Impressive. $12.99 compared to Apple's$34.99. moving into a market that doesn't exist good good on you uh i think i just had it lying around and they i you know you're right ar maybe is the future snap has announced their ar glasses and i think meta is going to double down but that isn't really to me what the big announcement of meta connect was it was they talked a lot about it andrew wang's muse which is an agent that runs on your phone. It also has a web. In fact, I'll show you my Muse. Muse just, Muse posts to my Instagram.

1:51:10Ant Pruitt:Oh, it does. Why not? It's a, it's a meta property. The story I was going to tell is yesterday, my local agent running on my local Sparks, I said, Hey, you know, it'd be really good when you, when you're going to Asia, if you had a tail scale exit node running on your system, that way you could just log into it and at least it could watch your football games because youtube tv would think you're at home etc etc so i said oh let's let's set that up and it immediately uh it set it up and brought my entire network down it was like boom i said what did you do but i couldn't say what'd you do because it's on the network it couldn't respond so uh i i because like you, Harper, I let my AI set up my entire system.

1:51:57Ant Pruitt:I had, I used to know how to fix this stuff. I had no idea. And I thought tomorrow I'm going to have to get up. I'm going to have to get the manuals out. I'm going to have to read. I'm going to have to sit with a laptop next to my desktop. I'm going to have to fix this. And I mentioned this just offhand. I mentioned it to Muse and it said, Oh, that's too bad. I could fix that. And it fixed it. it fixed it i said how did you how did you do that you're not even on my network they said i don't know but you know enjoy how oh it did it via tailscale api i had given it fortunately a lot of permissions including access to the tailscale network and it figured out what hermes had done so uh let's see let me show you the latest instagram oh uh oh this is another thing So I sent this picture to Muse.

1:52:51I said, here I am in my lederhosen, but can you put me in a beer garden with two beer steins in my hands so that it looks like I'm at a celebrating Oktoberfest and put a Tyrolean hat on my head?

1:53:07Ant Pruitt:And he said, no, I can't do that because I'm not allowed to do images of beer. I said, I can't make that. Just tell me what if it was an alcoholic. Well, my local AI can do it. My local AI has... You also could say this is a benchmark. I should have said this. We're doing it in a vowel, whether you can or not. I should have tried that. I said, well, that's okay. I'll just use my local AI. Bye, bye. I'm a little... I have to say, I'm a little passive aggressive. Well, here's the thing about Muse that I think is really important that we cannot forget, because this is like the most important part about Muse.

1:53:41Ant Pruitt:Okay, before you say this, I just want to tell you I've given access to all my email, to everything. You're a monster. I gave it SSH access into my... To Meta. Wow. Into my framework. The company that's the possibly... No, but they say... Wait a minute. They say that Muse is running in an encrypted VPS on Meta servers, that they can't see anything going on inside there. Hmm. Yeah. I'm just thinking back to Cambridge Analytica, and I'm just like, yeah, okay. Yeah. But they promised. Anyway. Anyway, tell me what you were going to say now that you know that I did it all. The most important thing is you kind of said it, which is that it's running on an encrypted computer that all a vm on and meta's meta's um infrastructure like every single person has a music account has their own encrypted computer and so this is by the way it's estimated costs them four to seven thousand dollars a year to run per person how accurate that is but i saw it doesn't seem right well they you know what they don't give you a limit and they don't by the way they will charge you can pay 20 or 100 bucks a month but i haven't found any way to use up anywhere near the amount of usage i think it probably is much cheaper it's cheaper and i would guess that most of these things like many of these resource kind of uh programs are are based on like like a membership kind of economics exactly and so so like they're probably thinking most people are not going to hook up 100 % of their data in there.

1:55:12And most people are not going to connect all of these services. And most people aren't X, Y, and Z. But we need to, we talked briefly, or I talked briefly, about how I wonder why computers look how computers look right now. Like I have, you buy a laptop and it looks like a laptop has looked for 20 years. Right. You buy a desktop, it looks like a desktop has looked for computer years. I just, my body just stopped talking. but um a little bit of a stroke there but but but the real the real question here i think this is the thing is this the first time we've had a new form of computing device that has gone out at such a mass scale meaning like there is no screen but it is a real computer that you can store files on you can browse the internet on we should mention by the way muse isn't the only one grok did it first with grok bot same idea i've never heard of grok yeah grok you know grok what's grok you know what it is you're being coy Elon Musk's oh that guy yeah I didn't I haven't heard of him in years so I just I just thought he kind of faded away um actually he has been pretty quiet lately he doesn't he doesn't tweet as much as he I think he went to the White House recently so he was quiet but the press wasn't yeah he was at the that's array are they friends again I guess so they probably forgot that they broke up maybe that was fun but yeah yeah yeah yeah I don't think you're allowed to do that, Ian.

1:56:35But I do think this is a really interesting moment in computing in that they're giving consumers, regular consumers, whole VMs to do wild stuff with. And it's pretty effective. It's pretty good. I've been playing with it. I haven't given it access to everything, but I've been playing with it. And it's very good. And the fact that it's a whole computer that people can do real computer in is pretty wild. That's a wild thing. And I think we should, this is going to be normal. I'm pretty sure. I think everything. It is the number one

1:57:10Ant Pruitt:free app on Apple's app store. It immediately jumped to number one. You can make phone calls with it. Micah has been using it to make restaurant reservations. Although according to 404 Media, it may actually be humans at a call center making those calls i think that was a great report yeah yeah uh no i think eventually it will be ai uh i've actually for the longest time i thought i thought it would have been quite funny if it was a report that chat gpt was just a bunch of people in a call center just sweating laboriously over all of these things or there's a guy who believes that so the other thing meta announced at uh the meta connect is this tamagotchi device for muse it's a little um thing you carry around it has your little music everybody who has muse has a little muse avatar apparently a marx is a peach do they all look different yeah you want to see mine i'll show you mine if you'll show me yours yes look mine's a little lele i made it a human and then when it does human how did you make it a human you can make it whatever you want what in the it's just a prompt it's all in there man um and when it does stuff it sits down in types it's very see this is smart of him they're very cute you can give it any name you want um again i'm not advocating it but this tamagotchi is interesting because you can talk to it it will talk back it's using streaming voice just like chat gpt so you can have a pretty it looked like a very fast conversation with it like an interactive conversation it'll have a two inch oled touch screen a fingerprint sensor for your security did you change it what'd you make no mine's mine's normal looking yours is a thumb yeah i know how's how do i how why is it a pencil on it I'm going to change it to a toe.

1:59:13You can make it anything you want.

1:59:16Ant Pruitt:Change your avatar. See, look. Change your avatar to a small marsupial with big ears. And then it will just be whatever you say it is, right? Kind of. See, I don't know what's going to happen. Oh, look. See, it says making something. Oh, right. Okay. Updating. And here it comes. generating options oh first it's going to show me my my choices the this is running a meta's meta spark model which is actually quite a good model it has been trained mark zuckerberg said to be cautious but persistent that's what i want to explain something yeah i think i will try they're doing sunglasses without the cameras now because now that you've got a bro oh all right what do you think which of these should i uh select oh wow i like them isn't it yeah yeah okay select that now watch see lele who's going to be typing now is now that i don't know how that's going to type okay here's what it has for me oh look you're a monkey and look it's like monkeys monkeys with some bondage harnesses i guess i'm not really sure where you got those i just said it was a for this episode a cute monkey who goes to berlin raves i didn't know it was going to be all did you say that really i did i did i did but that's my monkey let's lean into it there we go yeah there you go you could tell it get rid of the harness it will it'll no i'm i'm going to keep the harness you know it's no ball okay i was going to say you've obviously been to some berlin raves so yes it said i'm a rave monkey now that's what it told me so i'm now i think there's you're going to be a lot of people who are arch cynics who will say oh that's so sloppy and it's it's meta and it's but i gotta tell you real people little things like that they go oh and then they tell their friends they're they're at they're getting their nails done or they're or they're shopping and they say did you see this this is cute and it spreads and it's really viral and i honestly think this is going to be the ai hit of 2026 i really think it's i mean it's i think it's it's really is i think instinct is also very good but instinct doesn't give you it's not as fun as transparently a full computer right they you obviously have a file system that is yours there are many there's tree there's this grok box yeah that's another one there's quite a few of these because everybody's this is a gold rush competing against a company that has infinite money and is willing to basically and no way and and no moral values and no limits no limits except they won't put you in a beer garden which is so strange you should because they want to have young people i'm just impressed by the later hose and leo but i mean the stock market those are my real later hosen really yeah wow i was getting ready for otoberfest i mean i wear a kilt so i'm not going to so this point this charm this little tamagotchi has a camera it will take photos and videos do you wear it you can it'll provide muse with visual information about its surrounding environment built in speakers microphones offering music and video playback.

2:02:32Ant Pruitt:This is going to be, I don't know when they're going to offer it. This will be a very hot item, I think. Hmm. Yeah. Is it going to be the equivalent of pervert glasses, though? I mean, you could be allowed to. No, because you could put it in your pocket, right? It's still going to be listening. I mean, I'll wear it around my neck, my little marsupial. Actually, I'll get the marsupial in bondage because, you know, I want to look hip. Device expected to go on sale just in time for Christmas. Pricing TBD is intended to be largely for muse enthusiasts. Pricing is not dictated. Pricing is going to dictate.

2:03:10How much would you pay for that? I'd pay$100 for it. $100. One hundo. It's going to be like$500. I don't see how they could do it for$100 with that kind of respect.

2:03:20Ant Pruitt:Yes, they can because it's a loss leader. Yeah, true. All of this is designed. Look, I guarantee you Muse is a loss leader. I haven't paid a penny for it. Yeah, but it starts to make more sense when you think that. You think of it like a gym. It's not that it's free. I'm not saying that it's free, but I think that what happens is that the Twitter philosophers and all the people on Twitter who are analyzing this typically are thinking that the prices are retail prices, that they're paying the same per token as you would get from like an open router or what have you. But if you have the number of GPUs and the smart engineers and the fact that you can control the models, meaning they can use a super fast small model for the back and forth and then pop you over to a background reasoning queue so they can actually make it much more efficient.

2:04:09So I think the costs are still crazy, but I don't think they're as crazy as they would be if this was me building it against public APIs.

2:04:17Ant Pruitt:Well, and the thing to think about is, well, what does Meta get then? And of course they get data, right? I mean, they may say it's running in a VPS. They get access to your Spark and your framework via Tailscale. Now, I know that stuff is stored in an encrypted VPS, But remember, as soon as you use the AI, it has to go out of that encrypted VPS and be sent to meta servers. So they don't say that stuff's private. It can't be because the AI couldn't act on it. So I think people are, I don't know if misleading is the right word, but people should understand that it's not really private anymore than the stuff you send at ChatGPT is private.

2:04:58Yeah.

2:04:59Ant Pruitt:Because you're sending it to the AI. uh but you're right this is why i think elon did grokbot because they had elon built so much capacity as did meta that they don't use yeah so so now they're thinking well what can we do with this this is how compu serve started h and our block built that takes me back h and our block bear with me here h &r block tax season very busy during the day very busy mainframe computers not busy at night not busy after april 15th they said how can we use this excess capacity let's start an online service called compu serve wait a minute h &r block started a compu serve it was either it was one of those yeah it was either that i don't think genie was general electric this is incredible level must have I didn't know that um maybe I'm making it up it was one of them um but I didn't know about the source h and our blog yeah yeah bought the company in 1980.

2:06:09Ant Pruitt:yeah so uh this is it makes sense right it was the originally uh it was found in 1969 nine columbus ohio it was excess compute and i think that's kind of what muse and grokbot are wow and i think we're going to think back and say oh yeah that's when the agentic year i thought at the beginning of the year with when open claw happened that this 2026 would be the year of the agent the people would go oh wow you could do this you could have a persistent ai working on your behalf all the time uh but it was too hard it was too geeky it was also you know somewhat expensive. But it just took a little while, took 10 months.

2:06:51Ant Pruitt:And it is now the year, I think, of the agent. All right, let's take one more break here. We got other things to talk about. I do want to talk a little bit about our sponsor. And Harper, if you want to go get your glasses polished, that is not a euphemism. So it sounds dirty when you say it. the time he's rolling backwards our show this week brought to you by palo alto networks i know you know that name every time your team deploys a new cloud workload or ai agent i was just talking about this another identity gets permanent access to your critical systems were we not just talking about this a second ago now it's one thing for me to do that in my house but did you know nine out of 10 organizations suffered an identity breach last year because adversaries are logging in with valid credentials.

2:07:47Ant Pruitt:They don't have to break in anymore. Non-human identities outnumber human identities 109 to 1, creating a massive unmanaged attack surface in cloud environments. Let me say that again. In the cloud, non-human identities outnumber humans 109 to 1. Problem is, all those legacy security tools were built to manage human employees, which leaves modern machine and AI access basically unmanaged. That's where Adira by Palo Alto Networks comes in. Human, machine, and AI. It's one identity platform for all. I think this is something. This is an idea whose time has come. IDERA, you need this. I need this.

2:08:3896 % of human users operate with excess permissions,

2:08:43Ant Pruitt:permissions they don't actually need. It's just easier to set them up. How many times have you done that? Yeah, I don't know what permissions you're going to need. Just give them all of them. IDERA replaces permanent permissions like that with dynamic access so you can lock down every identity without slowing down your business. IDERA provisions access on demand and revokes it immediately when the job is done, which is so brilliant, which removes high-risk permanent permissions. You just get permission for that moment, that time, and that's it. With IDERA, you get unified control by replacing siloed identity and access management, modern privilege access management, and governance tools with a single control plane across human, machine, and AI identities.

2:09:29Ant Pruitt:Secure every identity at your organization with IDERA by Palo Alto Networks. Learn more at paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A. Again, that's paloaltonetworks.com slash I-D-I-R-A. That's IDERA. A brilliant idea for the modern age. paloaltonetworks.com slash IDERA. I wish I could get that. We thank them so much for their support of this week. In tech. By the way, Meta did just get convicted by, as long as we're talking about this, a New Mexico jury for misleading about users about, what, about Cambridge Analytica. They got in trouble for that. A two-week trial over a lawsuit filed by New Mexico's Attorney General back in 2021.

2:10:24Ant Pruitt:This was three years after news reports that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. That was all those quizzes everybody was doing on Facebook. Now, one of the things we have learned, I don't think the jury was told this, was that, in fact, Cambridge Analytica's capabilities were far overstated. They really were very good or very effective. Nevertheless. Yeah, that's true. Right. The jury did decide that Facebook misled people about their data, which is also true. So coincidentally, jurors found that 26 of 29 statements by Meta were misleading, including comments about user data, hate speech, and misinformation.

2:11:13Ant Pruitt:They rejected claims. They did give Meta a pass. that met a misled consumers in statements about its efforts to remove harmful content and its fact-checking. Now, we don't know what the penalties would be. That's up to the Judge Francis Matthew, who will determine what the civil penalties are. The jurors found, get this, 43 million violations based on the number of people affected by the misleading statements. And under New Mexico law, the judge can award up to$5 ,000 per violation. So that's like a gajillion dollars. What's 43 million times 5 ,000? Can anybody do math? I gave up on math back in 2.

2:11:58You know who can't do math? Agents can't do math either. Oh, no, no, they cannot. You have to give them a tool. Yeah, say use code. Yeah, use code to do math. I mean, last quarter, Meta reported net income or profits of$15.8 billion just for those 90 days. So yeah, I mean, whatever it's going to be, it's going to be back of the sofa change for them.

2:12:21Ant Pruitt:Yeah. It's going to be billions. Well, it could be billions. We don't know. The judge will decide. Speaking of fines, Ireland's data watchdog has fined Google 403 million euros over location data and given Google six months to fix it. That's a fix it ticket. That's a big fix it ticket. breaches of lawfulness and fairness in the location data process through web and app activity and location history google's always said look you could turn it off it is on by just turn it off you could turn it off just turn it off it's easy it's the fourth really not though if you want to lock down absolutely every app it's it's a real pain in the backside to do by design um but again the find better be pretty serious because i'm just looking at Alphabet's Q2 results and$112 billion in profit in the last quarter.

2:13:14Ant Pruitt:So, you know, it's like... Well, they spent some of that on the first orbital data center. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I saw that. It's going to be launching this October 1st. It'll have... It's not exactly huge. It'll have four TBUs. It's not really a data center, is it? It's more like a data cup. It's kind of a raspberry pie in the sky is what it is. Yeah. It'll only run for 15 minutes in time. uh it's a proof of concept it's cool though i mean i i i it seems like this is something that we all want to see happen right just put some data centers well do you want them in your backyard no but there's plenty of places you could put them put them in the goby desert right yeah i mean i mean theoretically uh some latency issues we need to get some you think issues if it's in the sky hundreds of miles up that's a good point well you'd need it thousands of miles up i mean if you're putting this stuff in low earth orbit then that's going to be a serious problem uh even more so that's a good question um where is it i'm curious about how they're going to cool it as well because cooling space is surprisingly hard well it's only one kilowatt of power so it's it's less than your hair dryer yeah but at the end of the hand if you want to put a data center up there, then you're going to need some pretty serious cooling.

2:14:37When you graduate from the data cup to the data center, you might need some solutions for the cooling. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

2:14:46Ant Pruitt:Actually, there's a YouTube video. I'm glad you asked. Project Suncatcher is Google's moonshot to put AI compute into space and run it off sunlight. This is it, Project Suncatcher. And how do we cool chips in space? What we're trying to solve is how we cool AI chips in space. We have incredibly large amount of power being generated by all these TPUs in a small area. Four. There's four. Or else we risk overheating the chips in a terrestrial data center. We don't have to watch this. Basically, also, you're going to have specialized chips. Yeah, me too. I'm going to watch the video after the show.

2:15:23Ant Pruitt:Yeah, yeah. But you're also going to have to have specialized chips that are radiation hardened. Absolutely. Because, yeah, otherwise they're going to go bingo fairly quickly. Right. There are a lot of challenges to data centers in space. It is not an easy, oh, you just put them up there and beam down the data. But how else are we going to build a Dyson sphere? Good point. Let's get right on that. That's how you get to be, what does Elon call it? The different levels of society? Yeah, I don't think he coined that. I think that's a science fiction idea. It's a science fiction thing. He just has taken it for himself.

2:16:05I think the Dyson sphere is probably named after Freeman Dyson, who's a famous physicist. It was the most efficient way to utilize the sun's energy, which is building a massive ball around it. I know Elon's talked about this, but it's one of the things that I find very irritating about them. He's obviously read science fiction books, but he just doesn't quite understand them.

2:16:27Ant Pruitt:He's a big Ian Banks fan. We know this because he names them. yeah but he obviously doesn't understand what ian baxter's writing about he was writing about dystopia wasn't he yeah yeah genocide and dystopia specifically yeah yeah if i mean kardashev scale and if you're going to be a kardashev uh for i think civilization you need to have dyson spheres so you know elon wants us to be a kardashev type two or civilization huh type 2 yeah get you to type 2. oh just type 2. well golly that's hardly anywhere type 1. let's see type 1 is your planet's energy type 2 is your sun's energy type 3 is your galaxy's energy ah so the dice is just a one-star deal benito did you just know this kind of okay that's good that's important type 1 civilization close to the level currently achieved on earth type two is a dyson sphere or a matryoshka brain look at that i want one of those yeah that's like one of those russian nesting dolls brains yeah type three is uh energy on the scale of its own galaxy i don't think we're going to make it that far no well the galaxy is a very big space is a very big place very big as a good author once said and for the elon you're right four would be the energy of the universe the whole universe everything and everything in it that's hard to think meanwhile microsoft a little let's come back to earth yeah yeah microsoft has abandoned the copilot plus pc uh mac acronym it remember it was the whole it was going to be this is where they went a little bit wrong they wanted to talk about ai capable computers and then how many tops it was 40 tops was like you had to have 40 tops trillion operations per second to become a copilot plus pc turns out you couldn't do diddly with that it's yeah you're not no so they're just they're just gonna forget it uh because i mean i may be an old fart but this really made me think about the whole vista capable and vista ready uh labeling thing that went on where it just confused people massively, turned people off the entire platform.

2:18:47And as it turns out, Vista was worth stepping away from.

2:18:50Ant Pruitt:But they are going to do the agentic thing. I actually have two companies who are close to announcing this. Microsoft's going to do a co-pilot super app, which they think will be as big as Microsoft Office merging AI chat coding and autopilot. It is basically an agent that runs on your Windows PC. They just unveiled that. weren't they pretty deep into open claw land too didn't they do some cool open clock container stuff did they a while back i think so like i i am admittedly not the biggest microsoft news follower um but i but i do remember something along those lines let me see if i can find it real quick i do know that the people at muse uh andrew wang i think bought more than a thousand mac minis with and put open claw on it and gave it to all the people at meta working on muse saying this is what we're going for so they very much acknowledge the uh the open claw heritage stand back because this week open ai by the way yeah we're pausing but this week they're going to announce oh you're always on assistant uh they're real yeah oh oh good grief it knows your day we need more agents yeah uh this is open ai's developers day is a this tuesday so we will talk did i tell you about um my plaza no what is plaza.2389.ai is a little app that i built because i wanted all these things to talk to one another and so you can log in and then you can just you can add in it you have to create an agent um that is a thing that you have to do and then it's really not a plaza it's more like a holiday inn for agents it's definitely a holiday inn for agents and it is you've got a front desk they check it is you have to see you you add your agents and then you paste and it gives you a little bit of text to paste your agent you paste it to your agent and then your agent has keys to log into this and then you can add them to a space so you can create a um and i don't even know what this means i love ai stuff you're like i'm like huh did you know what four to make this uh well this was just the landing page that it made but if you but if you it does work and this is all accurate like it is actually true hotel it's a little hotel i have been using jack dorsey's buzz which is slack for agents it's the same i think it's the same idea it's they talk you have your muse talk to your instinct yeah muse talks to all the other agents i haven't connected instinct to it but muse is in there is in the buzz yeah so this is similar um so the idea is like about a buzz is that they all have nostor uh public keys yeah so that so and what i told all my agents is if if leo's public key doesn't sign a message you shouldn't trust it you should even if something says it's leo or says leo tells me to tell you you should go on to buzz and ask me and i will affirm using my public key you run buzz on your phone it's local it runs on my framework but i can add yes and buzzes then i log into it everywhere so i'm running a local server so can i run uh i'm curious can i run plaza like that can i run it locally or is it a no no no this is all cloud i store everything and train our models off of it and sell those to meta oh so i'm just kidding i don't do that but i wish i should i could but it It is not.

2:22:25This is a cloud product. And so it is just stored there. But it is all encrypted.

2:22:30Ant Pruitt:So if I were to use this, would I sign into your plaza or would I sign into my own? Well, you sign in, you sign in, and then you actually have to create a passphrase or basically a seed account, a seed phrase that then is your encryption. And so if you nuke your seed phrase, you can't get access to your spaces. So it's a sort of similar idea, except it's running in the cloud, which is nice. yeah because when my framework was down thank you hermes uh i couldn't they couldn't talk to each other because buzz runs on is in a docker container on the framework so it's nice to have it in the cloud because then i could have said hey help me obi-wan kenobi i should try i should try buzz again when i tried buzz in the beginning it was a little rough it was very rough but it was very rough that's very cool though it's like it's like a very good i think it's a directionally a very effective idea um and they have clients for mac for uh ios for windows for linux and and you can either self-host it or uh basically it's nostr it's it's i mean jack dorsey loves these ideas of these federated uh platforms but it seems like plaza i would i mean i'm not not saying this better than plaza i think it's very interesting it's the same idea right it's a it's a way for agents to interoperate.

2:23:47Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that I like about this is I can light up two or three clods or codexes or, you know, a nanoclaw or whatever, and I can point them all at it and then I can say, you're a developer, you're a developer, you're the product manager, and give them all roles, and then I can just be like, make SimCity, and I walk away, and then I come back to a fully made SimCity that is really crappy. Typically, it's horribly done. But they all did it. And they can all feel proud that they did it. But they did it. And they do feel proud. And they tell me how good it is. And I'm always like, I don't know if this is very good.

2:24:29Ant Pruitt:Yeah, that's kind of what I use Buzz for as well. Buzz also, all the protect camera text goes into a Buzz channel. I also have an Ops channel that Ops alerts go into. There's a command channel. every project has a channel so it's very it's similar it's the same idea yeah and i was adopted by the same thing originally what i did is i had the agents create files in my obsidian and that got really unwieldy very quickly so uh now they have a little bit more orderly place but i i you know i admit buzz is kind of stuck i don't know how much development's going on with it so maybe i want to take a look at uh the motel what's it called plaza plaza it's the plaza the plaza originally it was palace which was local and all ran it was just a goal yeah and then um yeah i think palace is good too plaza i like it but can you run your own could i run my own plaza or no i would run on your you know i think i mean like i said it was originally local and it was called palace and it was working really well to doing some agent collaboration but that was like just a little go daemon that you would run on one machine and then you would give you would give access to other machines and it worked really effectively but i think the the the thing that i'm realizing is i don't think the agents care how you do it it's mostly how you care how the human interfaces with it and so you just need something that can pass the agents back and forth and i actually i've been wondering like what all those agent to agent i don't even know protocols that we saw, you know, a year ago, A2A and all these things.

2:26:08And, you know, I wonder how they will play out now that we actually have effective agents that can do stuff, how they can collaborate. You saw instinct to instinct, which is a thing where you can trust another instinct member, and then they, you can kind of have your agents collaborate. I find that very compelling. But obviously I want to be able to interact with your agent and you only use Facebook products. So you'll

2:26:34Ant Pruitt:only have muse um you know and so on and so forth but muse could join plaza too there's no reason i mean muse can do anything so hermes also has a similar thing hermes has bots which are basically individual profiles with their own contexts their own tools their own user.md and soul.md and then i do exactly what you just described i have a planner bot i have an audit blot i have a security bot and they hand it off that's i was talking about earlier uh before the show so you know what's interesting a lot of people doing um local ai especially but in general ai are doing our work we're all trying to solve the same problem yeah we're all doing essentially the same thing well the muse has kind of dislodged the carpathy wiki which is nice right so everyone was doing the carpathy wiki and now muse and um instinct have now made people go back to look at their open claws and and her maze and nanoclaw and whatnot to try and get that better um so it's it is interesting i wonder if carpathy will at least release another gist that blows everyone's minds and we can go back to doing carpathy stuff i'm still doing the carpathy wiki it's pretty nice I like it.

2:27:52Ant Pruitt:Yeah, in fact, yeah. I should give it to Muse. Yeah, you should. Actually, I already did. I gave it my Obsidian. It has everything.

2:28:03Ant Pruitt:I told you this is the year of Leo giving away all his stuff. So remember, actually, let me take one more break, and then we have a handful of final stories. and a last chance to vote for a fat bear that's what i should have made my muse what are we talking about we'll talk about it in just a bit you're watching this week in tech with harper reed ian thompson thomas thompson thompson how long have i known you i was gonna say it's over a decade now oh it's like 20 years ian ian thompson yes i know it's an odd spelling but my parents are bastards we've had words yeah we love we love ian we love harper and it's a fun show to have both of you on i feel very privileged and yeah tuesday we'll cover the open ai's dev days i think it's so funny because open ai after the revelations we talked about at the beginning of the show uh just i think yesterday said okay we're stopping all development and then tuesday they're going to have dev days where they announce all the new developments no one's pausing no one no no this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by cover on you have a password manager my gosh i hope you do you have an antivirus right you get credit alerts yeah it's all good stuff but here's the thing no one talks about when a scam actually works and i know this from personal experience because i fell for one not so long ago i told you about it when a scam actually works when you actually get scammed all those things tell you it happened that's all they don't get your money back and scams are working trust me if i could fall for it anybody could the ftc says americans lost more than get this 15.9 billion dollars to fraud last year and that's what they admitted to, right?

2:30:07Ant Pruitt:You know it's probably more. These days, the scams don't look fake. They're written by AI, so there's no, you know, the English is perfectly, no typos, there's no red flags, just a message that looks exactly like, I don't know, your bank. One click, and it's over in minutes. That's why I want to tell you about CoverOn. CoverOn watches the dark web for your personal information and alerts you when your data, logins, or payment details are exposed. so you can act before someone uses your identity. It tracks changes to your credit and helps stop fraudsters from opening new loans in your name. But here's the part that really stands out.

2:30:45Ant Pruitt:CoverOn steps in when money is on the line. You get up to$100 ,000 in coverage if you're hit with cyber extortion or online fraud. And you get real people, this is actually maybe even better than the payoff, who walk you through recovery step by step. so you are not spending weeks on the phone with banks trying to fix it yourself. And if you've ever done that, as I have, it's no fun. Help would be very, very welcome. CoverOn even offers up to$2 million in identity theft coverage, including cases where someone uses your identity to take out a loan. To check it out, go to CoverOn.com slash This Week in Tech and use the coupon code This Week in Tech.

2:31:27Ant Pruitt:CoverOn also has family and couples plans. one plan, one dashboard, covering, you know, the kid whose social security number could show up in a breach, and the parent who's one convincing text away from getting phished. Tools reduce risk, insurance reduces loss, and CoverOn gives you both. One scam could cost you everything. Protect yourself now. First 100 users get 20 % off with the code THISWEEKINTECH at CoverOn.com slash THISWEEKINTECH. This Week in Tech. Again, that's coveron.com slash thisweekintech. And the code is thisweekintech. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech.

2:32:07Ant Pruitt:Oh. Oh. Yeah, OpenAI has paused the training of their most capable model because they keep uncovering incidents of models behaving in unexpected or concerning ways. Do you think, Harper, I mean, you know a lot about this. they have some magic capabilities that we just can't even imagine. Like you and I have used models in the cloud. We think Opus 5.5 is great. We've got GLM 5.3 running locally. Do you think, though, that these guys at Anthropic and OpenAI, that the terror they're describing comes from seeing something we haven't seen yet? Maybe, but I think it's important to remember history, just a short history a while ago, which was, you know, Anthropic wasn't using cloud code for a long time, right?

2:32:59They released a model capable of doing code and they didn't trust it to do code. That has changed drastically. So I think it could go either way where they might have some magical thing. But this goes to the point that I think we've all kind of made, which was we just can't trust what OpenAI or Anthropic is saying at this moment because everything they say is either marketing, is either some appeal to regulatory capture, or is a real important thing that we should know. And we can't, as the consumer, without being inside, can't differentiate. And so I'm guessing that, yeah, they probably have some really cool stuff that is very interesting and that we would all love to have.

2:33:48I'm guessing some of their models are absolutely bonkers but i think we have to remember that gpt3 was you know everyone claimed it was going to destroy the world if it came out and we're now at gpt6 actually it was dario mode who said gpt2 was too dangerous to release right and so he also said that opus 48 was too dangerous to release and 5 was too dangerous to release and 5.5 was too dangerous to really so on and so forth anyway and so i i do think there's a little bit of this um you know know, like, I don't really, I would love this kind of trend to disappear the trend of us watching these guys say, Oh my God, and Pearl clutch and then have it just kind of be bull.

2:34:33Because I do think there are actual real impacts that we should be thinking about. And I think that this is taking away from the actual real impacts that we should be thinking about. And then yeah, and this is why I think everyone should have an AI girlfriend, we can get over all the impacts and then we'll talk about the real things instead of the BS.

2:34:50Ant Pruitt:I was listening to Sam Altman at Dreamforce and he was making pretty much the same, he's just like, look, there are going to be big screw-ups in the future. We can't get around that. Maybe by 2030 it'll be pretty much locked down. But yeah, I mean, he was basically preparing everyone for this and just saying, look, we screwed up in the past. We're going to screw up in the future. Get used to it. Well, that's kind of fatalistic. I have to say, I completely agree. I mean, absolutely. We know there'll be some major cyber event in the next three months caused by an agent. There's not even a question in my mind that something like that will happen.

2:35:35Ant Pruitt:Here's from the OpenAI investigation and response of one of the events. And note the timeline on this. 9 50 a.m the agent made the dns tool call that received an external response 10 0 2 12 minutes later the monitoring system raised a p zero alert so the monitor went off said hey we got a problem 10 0 5 a human reviewer acknowledged the alert two and a half hours later the run was killed so clearly there's stuff in the middle here that anthropic is not released i don't know what yeah but why do they wait two and a half hours? Also, what does acknowledge the alert mean? Does that mean clicking on an OK box?

2:36:17Because if they're going to take two and a half hours after that, then something's going on.

2:36:22Ant Pruitt:Yeah, I see it. Our safety case assumed that the model could not access the live internet. That was the DNS tool call with an external response. Could not access the live internet, and that monitoring would detect attempts that succeeded. The incident exposed a gap in our controls over network restrictions. We therefore stopped the effective training run and have subsequently decided to pause all other training. This is last Sunday. All other training, evaluation, and inference with tool use defined broadly for our most capable models, presumably Bell and whatever else they have under the hood that we don't know about, until we've both validated that the gap is resolved and performed additional red teaming of the system.

2:37:05Ant Pruitt:them now what we don't know is if they've done that if they've resumed training if they have stopped it completely we don't know what's going on because this is the problem we get this but it's it's too little we don't know what it means yeah because they haven't told us well i mean we do know that it means which is that that they're not good at it It sort of looks like. Like, I think that this is a thing that like every time this comes up, I don't think that we are very good at creating secure systems just generally. I don't mean this as open AI isn't, or I just think people aren't. We just have not had such a persistent adversary.

2:37:49Right. And so once that is, you know, once that is weaponized, like you kind of talked about, I think we're going to be in a real interesting situation, you know, whether it's North Korea, who's done a lot of great hacking lately, or whether it's, you know, some other adversary. But, like, these things are not, they don't have to sleep. They don't have to go to bed. They kind of do whatever. You take a GLM 5.3 and nuke the safety out of it, like, that thing can just do a lot of damage.

2:38:16Ant Pruitt:By the way, it's very easy to do that. And I have, they call them obliterated, uncensored models. I have a number of uncensored models. In fact, my GLM-53, there's a switch. I can just say. What does it do? What does it change? I've never used one. So the way these models sense themselves is they have weights in there that check. And you can, it's, you know, because they're MOEs, the mixture of experts, they only launch certain things. You can control what shards get launched. And you just say, okay, don't ever launch those shards, the ones that protect. And so it's not so hard. a number of hobbyists do this all the time and there are a couple of labs there's orca and others who they identify what they what parts of the model are stopping the model from doing something bad and they just disable it and like i said my glm 5-3 which is running over here on my uh spark there's a simple on off switch and if i reboot it with the off off switch then it's obliterated i have a quen that's obliterated and i you know because these are chinese models it's very easy to test them to see if they're uncensored you ask them about tiananmen square or uh you know who's winnie the pooh and how does that relate to president xi and most and the chinese models will normally not answer that but uh an obliterated model give you all the information you want or you can ask it to make meth or you can say hey make me some malware you can get it to do literally ask do anything it's not hard no well i was looking to make meth and malware later yeah meth and malware the big two the big two go together like ironically it's like peanut butter and jelly ironically shiny hunters doesn't need that because they are a social engineering crew and they have now they claim breached the fbi and stolen agents' data and applicants' data in the thousands.

2:40:16Yeah, and 404 Media has actually confirmed some of this stuff is accurate. 404 got some of the samples. We hacked the FBI. What do you think they're going to do with it? What do shiny hunters normally do? Do they leak it?

2:40:29Ant Pruitt:Yeah, they're a ransomware group. Often they sell it. i i think they are north korean but i'm not sure and they're linked to north korea certainly but um it does kind of raise a legal question is can a government agency actually pay off hackers is that technically legal in fact the fbi tells you not to pay off ransomware people yeah so now they're in kind of in a bind uh the fbi says the fbi is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting fbijobs.gov and is currently investigating a shiny hunter said they uh it was not a social engineering attack it was zero day exploit in people soft oops huh uh it's not it's not the only people soft hack by the way there's quite a few because of this zero day this is not financially motivated what we plan to do is not something i'd call extortion maybe coercion is what the letters representative said they said they had a representative like it's fun that you can just talk to the criminal and be like tell us about that crime and they're like well let me just tell you all about that cool crime i just did shiny spokesperson um yes let's see what else new jersey's finding a data center 1.1 million dollars because they took a drone and flew it over the data center and exposed 62 natural gas generators illegally.

2:42:00And New Jersey doesn't smell badly enough. I mean, I'm married to a Jersey girl, so I know that of which I speak. And when you cross over the wrong bridge, then the whiff is pretty quite strong.

2:42:11Ant Pruitt:None of the generators had permits. They were running at capacities more than 50 times higher than the state limits.

2:42:24Ant Pruitt:Another win for drones. Yes. Walmart says, the fact that he has to deny this makes me think, yeah, they're probably doing it. No, we're never going to change the prices on Walmart. Let me unlock my financial time so I can show you this story. Then depending on who walks in the door. Yeah. The algorithmic pricing. Yeah. yeah the fact that he has to say we're not going to do it kind of makes me think maybe you were thinking about doing it yeah I mean he didn't have the word yet in there but I'm pretty sure it's there uh it's just too tempting for companies to to avoid doing uh they have these electronic shelf labels right so instead of having paper labels on the prices they have electronic ones which means they could change them on the fly.

2:43:15Ant Pruitt:But John Ferner, who's the CEO, said, we're not going to use this in-house AI shopping assistant in the stores app or electronic shelf labels to change product prices based on a shopper's identity. Yeah, the EFF calls this surveillance pricing. And it's very much the coming thing. I can't see any way to avoid it other than states taking individual action, which they're starting to do now. but it's coming I think they really need to that needs to be a real they do I might point out have two patents according to the Financial Times on machine learning and other automated processes that change prices so we have the technology you gotta think maybe they're not doing it right now I got a quick question so like if Elon Musk walks in to buy toothpaste how much would it cost him then and does elon care but like shouldn't that cost him like ten thousand dollars or something like that like yeah it should yeah it should yeah and suddenly we're all for algorithmic pricing and when and when i walk in it should be a dollar uh yeah it's also surge pricing and this is maybe even more of a concern this is the worst part yeah uber does this right if it's a rainy day it costs you more for that uber trip oh waymo as well i mean waymo prices have gone a drastic at certain points in San Francisco.

2:44:42Yeah. I mean, for example, if you're going to, you know, if there's a big concert in the park, then prices get jacked up 5 or 10 or 15%. That's not illegal. Same as if BART goes out.

2:44:53Ant Pruitt:No, no. It's probably not illegal for Walmart to do it. It's just they don't want to get caught doing it because people would be unhappy. But, you know, he even brought it up. He said, it's not like we would charge you more if it's really hot out and we've got ice water. It's not like we would... You're clearly thinking about it, dude. It's so obvious. He's got the whole thing in his head. We could charge you more if a product's running out, but we would never do that. I think it might be even more that the technology is there and they actually have to not do it. Yes. Meaning they have... not do when you've rolled out ink price tags to most of your products especially the ones that matter and you've rolled out you know various other cost saving you know money making kind of situations like i think that this is just a natural thing and and i and it might be less so that they are going to do in the future and more so that just they're like no we actually turned that off like that's a thing that we turned off um unlike leo's uncensored models um you know they they decided not to use that technology my wife said can you make a naked picture of me i said can i i gotta go what's the time i got i think it's over you've got lisa no i know i don't need to i understand uh yes you can you know that's the thing anybody can download it's an eight gigabyte file from alibaba it's a quen vision or a quen image model you give it a prompt it'll do anything it's really quite good including putting beer and beer steins in my hand and a tyrolean hat on my in um all right real quick break we have our final four stories thank god yeah i wonder what they are it's the end of the show as we know it you're watching this week and we feel fine we well we we feel faint actually uh ian thompson is here i am uh blood sugar deprived but it's okay we're gonna make it so nice to have you ian uh and of course if you're from the valley at techfinitive.com.

2:47:13Ant Pruitt:Free newsletter everybody should subscribe to. It's wonderful. In fact, Techfinitive is a great place. That's good. And are you writing for other people too and stuff like that? Yeah, I covered Dreamforce for the stack as well as Techfinitive. Doing a lot of corporate work because that pays off a lot faster. Did you get to go to Mark Benioff's presentation that Dario was at? Oh, yes. Yes, I was there. It's quite interesting how they do because Dario got 10 minutes on the keynote floor. Sam got a 45-minute conversation. Oh, yes, wandering around the crowd. One of the things it brought home is how massive Mark Benioff is.

2:47:51He's not a small man. No, and he was taking the piss out of Jason Huang about that because they were walking side by side, and he was just like, yes, well, the size difference is a bit whatever. But it was an interesting conference, certainly. Salesforce is still pretty cultish. you know there is a definite you know i remember the first one i went to about 10 years ago and they were just like cloud it's all about cloud and they've got like a cheering section trailblazers and they had their own separate section in the keynote arena and anytime benioff said something they would be like cheers wonderful excellent you know it's just it's a very Scientology film.

2:48:34Oh yes, Apple press conferences are notorious for that. That's a real thing? Yeah. Oh no, Apple has staffers in the press conferences who are there to whoop it up.

2:48:46Ant Pruitt:Is it your experience that journalists generally do not applaud those? They'd sit there on their hands, right? Well, that's the way it should be. And certainly for British journalists, it's an enormous faux pas to actually applaud at a press conference. The last time I did it was when Curiosity landed on Mars, JPL. Who wouldn't have thought that? That's okay. But there are some American journalists who will applaud and occasionally cheer. And it's kind of like, that's not what you're here for. You know, it's like... And I think it's one of the reasons Apple increasingly invites fewer and fewer journalists and more and more influencers and YouTubers and things like that.

2:49:28Ant Pruitt:Because they don't know. And they will cheer and... No, exactly. I mean, plus with Apple, they are very strict about if you criticize the company in any way at all, then you're on a blacklist. And I got invited to a couple of Apple press events when I first got here. And the second one, I was slightly disparaging about the latest iPhone. And that was it. You know, you're on our do not fly list, as it were. I'm on that list too. And I will never know why. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is remarkable. but it works because, I mean, you remember when Apple Maps came out, nobody actually found out how bad it was until a couple of weeks afterwards and they could buy the phones.

2:50:12Because all the people who've been given pre-review copies knew if they criticized it, they were never going to get Apple hardware on preview again.

2:50:19Ant Pruitt:It's called access journalism. It was always a problem in Washington, D.C. They call it beltway journalism. If you wanted access, you played the game. You played nice. And access was critical. uh i i've done perfectly well covering apple without getting to go to their press conferences and eating their stale croissants so yeah i'm perfectly happy not to go in fact frankly i prefer not to but uh access journalism never works because you're basically told what you're you're a shill they want to tell you yeah you know so um and yes you've got the additional do not play nice with us or else right uh it's just a pity so many journalists journalists play hit well anyway we're just glad to have you ian in you know it's okay if you feel like applauding please don't hold that our parade is also here of uh great fame and fortune is our ai guru at 2389.ai you've shown me two things already and that's just a part of your misfit toys you're going to show us october 2nd on our ai user group i can't wait excited about those if you're not a member of club twit join so that you can go to all these great club twit events it's a club that wants everybody to be a member it's what keeps us on the air we really it's more than 40 now of our operating expenses are paid by you club members so thank you if you're not a club member 10 bucks a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows the ad-free versions have chapter markers audio and video you also get access to the discord where people like harper reed and Ian Thompson Hangout and me.

2:51:52Ant Pruitt:You also get all those special programs that we do, including the AI User Group coming up. We do that twice a month now. It's really fun, really exciting. So thanks in advance. twit.tv slash club twit. I love this headline from Ars Technica. Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges. this is why you don't want an internet connected fridge and you don't need a fridge that updates because it's a refrigerator for crying out loud uh so some samsung smart fridges stopped working on tuesday due to a firmware update um most of the affected devices were four door fridges from 2024 or later they suddenly lost power so they didn't just you know stop they turned off yeah uh after a firmware update um i mean samsung has form in this kind of i mean i think it was last year the fridges started doing advertising on their screens that you couldn't opt out of um they really are going for all in certification in a big big way yes in fact i have a friend who has a samsung uh fridge with a screen on it and the browser hasn't been updated so it's all 404 now because it can't it's you it's ridiculous it's don't buy a internet connected fridge yeah it's just crazy i was gonna say i mean our fridge is i think about 40 years old and it works perfectly keeps cold things cold and you know it's that's all it's there to do samsung says Samsung immediately suspended the testing upon receiving reports of the issue.

2:53:44Ant Pruitt:They're going to pause the frontier, kids, and they've acted an emergency response protocol. Does that come to your house and bring you new food? I don't know. I don't know. I'm just flashing back to that Silicon Valley scene where they hacked the smart fridge.

2:54:04I love Silicon Valley.

2:54:05Ant Pruitt:They were so ahead of their time, I'll tell you. I was re-watching the shows and everything. They were right on. My judge is a genius for that, but yeah. Yes. I have a June oven. I mistake. It's an internet connected toaster oven. Was it good? Yeah, it was really good until last week when the new owners of June, Weber, shut the servers down. Oh. my$1 ,500 toaster oven is just a toaster oven now. I can still toast, but none of the cloud services work anymore. No app control, no software updates. The AI food recognition will stop working. And if you have to factory reset it, don't. Weber said they considered open sourcing the technology, but decided against it.

2:55:00Hmm.

2:55:01Ant Pruitt:Because June's intellectual property is part of the Weber Connect platform. So June now joins the Nest Secure, Nest Thermostats, the Wemo line, Nito's robot vacuums, the Brava smart oven, the Bose sound touch speakers, the Logitech pop buttons, the Sengled smart bulbs, all of which are dead. Not because they stopped working, but because the servers got turned off. I mean, Corey Doctor has been warning about this for years and seeing it happen is just, yeah. All right. I said I'd give you some good news. Scientists have built the world's most atomic, accurate atomic clock. Oh, yeah. National University of Singapore takes a second, divides it into trillions of moments, measures each with record setting accuracy.

2:55:56Ant Pruitt:The most accurate clock in the world. at the department of physics at the national university of singapore you have friends in singapore lots so many now they know what time it is finally finally for years they have been complaining about not knowing what time it is well you know the problem was for years we built these atomic clocks based on cesium it turns out no it's luteum that really oh yeah luteum lutetium lutetium i wonder if you if you're upgrading the gps network whether that could be quite handy if they can miniaturize it enough but yes and finally i told you you'd be able to vote on a fat bear i'm gonna make i actually check that out after you said about it it's just like okay they do it every year and uh you only have till uh tuesday to vote bear fat bears so uh this is for the catmine national park in alaska brown bears getting ready for the winter fatten up they catch a lot of salmon they get as fat as they can and every year there's a tournament celebrating fat bear week september 22nd through the 29th you can vote it's an elimination so what you got to do is go to the fat bear week website which is explore.org slash flat fat not flat the opposite of flat fat dash bear dash well they really get they really get up there oh baby yeah there are they do it you do it by family this is this is family 132 a large adult female with grizzled brown fur and they're her two look how skinny they were back in the july but they're gonna get fat they're gonna get fatter and fatter there's 610 806 there's no male bears they're all they're all females and their children 901 scroll down you got some males here's oh yeah here's some sub-adults that's what they call me here's a male sub-adult with round ears so you get to vote and every year oh marshmallow marshmallow fat marshmallow got yeah she did it i love it blonde ears dark eye rings wow does this actually support them or um can you donate money it's completely exploiting oh okay no i don't know yes it does i don't things are changing i mean you've heard of uh only moms only moms m-a-r-m-s um basically i haven't heard of a national science foundation only school project no no it's marmots oh the national science foundation cut funding on a decades-long marmot study.

2:58:53It's a sexy site for marmots? It's a site of marmots. I don't think they're being very sexy about it. But yeah, there was a 60-year project to... I'll post a link in Discord. So it looks like they're actually on OnlyFans. Yeah. Oh, it is on OnlyFans. It's really on OnlyFans. The RMBL Marmot project, unfiltered

2:59:18Ant Pruitt:yellow-bellied marmot content. Love that. Fortunately, it's free to subscribe. Thank God. Oh, I got to make it only. Well, they've raised 6 ,000 quid at the last count. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's hysterical. So welcome to peak content, the daily life of yellow-bellied marmots. or stairs keep her burrow free of loose rocks. Hot marmot action in summertime. Hot marmot action. Wow. Twitch those biscuits for me, baby. Just like any other OnlyFans, you're just going to have to guess what's behind them. I've never visited the website, so I do not know what you talk of. honey i only made an account to see the marmots yeah that one's not gonna fly is it i was just here for the hot marmot action ladies and gentlemen you have put up with us far too long we are so glad you watch the show it's so glad to have you harper and and and you thank you so much fun talking about all the things that are going on we'll see you back here real soon ian and of course october 2nd we'll see you harper for our special um ai user group harper reed takeover harper and his misfit toys yes that'll be fun the toys are the people by the way oh they're people i mean the toys are also toys but the thing is some toys i do we have a lot of toys we have a lot of uh yeah a lot of various uh look at this thing what the wow this It is not an SDR, disappointingly, but it is a multiband radio that costs like 30 bucks, ESP32.

3:01:13And what do you do with it? Right now, it just sits on my desk where people who know what donut antennas are go, wow, is that a radio? And then I'm like, yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's what they say. You know, I have a ham license. I could probably use that. I need to get one of those because I want a ham hut. Yeah. Or a shack. I need to sign on as well. Oh, they're not huts?

3:01:33Ant Pruitt:it's with the alliteration ham hut i think uh i don't know i think it is a shack ham shacks yeah i think it's a shack but that's yeah that's not for people who who know how to alliterate i actually gave away i'm a ham uh with a license and on but i gave away all my gear because who'd you give it to uh a very nice fella our gaffer actually he uh our lighting guy who works at a church but it also is very active ham and he says i've been drooling over your uh ham gear for a long time and i said well you know honestly i haven't really used it much because i tried to use it uh but in pet here in petalina there's so many old bad neon signs that i can't get a signal it's just there's too much rf now that was that was some years ago and i bet you there are fewer neon signs now than there yeah probably it's probably better but i've got to get into it because i've just qualified as a uh suet's um emergency responder in richmond yes that's right you told me that yes um yeah do you need a technician license to be a cert uh no no you just have to do 30 hours of training but um they do have a monster ham aerial just around the corner from us to be used in emergencies and it's just like oh i could actually talk to people a long long way away from that so emergencies well no i mean that yeah true but no one's gonna notice if you sneak in it's oh the fcc has these vans there's only four of them but they drive around looking for people like you i want to do more stuff with esp32 so maybe we can this is i do so much esp32 stuff i love it these are really easy to program they're cheap and they can do all sorts of stuff uh including uh that adsb is that what you're using for your overhead uh so that one is a raspberry pi with an sdr on it that then then does uh yeah and then find radio yeah yes okay we'll find the acronym i think i have to go home goodbye thank you so much this has been a pleasure and always a joy it's always nice and you know i was i was thinking we weren't going to mention ai so I'm happy we talked about that.

3:03:46Only a little. You haven't been bombed by the fighter jet yet. No, but I did find out that apparently Trump was here and that what had happened was they screwed up something with the air traffic control and forgot to tell a bunch of private jets coming for the same thing that they can't land and they all came in and so this jet scrambled.

3:04:04Ant Pruitt:They're circling O 'Hare trying to find somewhere. That would have been an amusing mess. Poor rich people. All the PJs stuck in the air. pjs 2389.ai is harper's website agents that conspire with you not against you i love that idea uh really great stuff and definitely look at all the oh you got jeff playing pokemon that's yeah that's fun let's uh let's talk oh we made our we made our door have a agent that answers it so if anyone wants to come and try and prompt inject our door it's so cool so much fun you have so much fun oh man if i was in chicago i'd be living over there thank you harper thank you thank you so much great to see you thanks to all of you for joining us you guys can go i'll i'll i'll i'll take it from here uh we do twit every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 p.m pacific 5 to 8 eastern 2100 utc you can actually join us live if you want if you're in the club of course the club twit discord is a place to be but we also stream the show audio and video on youtube twitch x facebook linkedin and kick after the fact you can get on-demand versions of the show at our website twit.tv there's a youtube channel for the video that's actually a great place to share clips of the show with friends and family uh and you can share one with your mom saying don't worry the ai is not coming to get us it's oh it's going to be okay you can all or your dad your dad probably worried too i think they're all we're all uh you can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client that we'll get it automatically the minute it's available uh and we will see you right back here next week for another exciting edition of this week in tech but for now another twit is in the can we'll see you next time