This Week in Tech 973 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Oh, I love this panel. I always say that, but it's true. Alan Malventano is here. Former host of our this Week in Computer Hardware program, he is, of course, now the king of SSDs at Phison. Also here, Doc Rock, the king of video from Aloha, Hawaii, and then joining us from Worcester, Massachusetts, it's Daniel Rubino from the Windows Central website. He's the editor-in-chief over there. We will talk about Windows and Microsoft and the AI PC. Microsoft made a big deal about that, A little utility that many computers have that turns out to have been infested by malware and has caused kind of a crisis in the supply chain. I'll explain what you can do to protect yourself against it. We're also going to talk about new PCs, new AR glasses Daniel's got a pick he really likes and Alan is going to explain HBM, CXL and NPUs. I think I got that right this time. It's all coming up next on TWIT.
01:07
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01:50 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
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02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 973, recorded Sunday, march 31st 2024. The inverted Goldilocks zone. This episode of this Week in Tech is brought to you by Wix Studio. I've got 60 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do from start to finish, in a minute or less on Studio Adaptive designs for every device with responsive AI. Expand Wix Studio's pre-made solutions with back-end and front-end APIs. Generate code and troubleshoot bugs with a built-in AI code assistant. Switch up the styling of hundreds of web pages I mean fonts, layouts, colors all in one click. Add no code animations and gradient backgrounds right in the editor. Start a design library, package your code and UI and reusable full stack apps. Oh, and one more big one deliver everything your client needs in one smooth handover. Well, time's up, but the list just keeps on going. Step into Wix Studio, see for yourself. Go to wixcom slash studio or click on the link on our show page and find out more.
03:29
It's time for twit this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news great panel. As always, daniel rubino is here. Editor-in-chief of windows central. Hi, daniel, good to see you. Oh, you're muted, you're silent, you're quiet. Sorry, no, that's good. God, how computers work.
03:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh, those things.
03:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good to see you, daniel. Where are you? I forget, where are you? Where are you calling from Worcester, massachusetts? Oh, that's right. Yeah, the beautiful Worcester, it's getting there, it's good I taught my kid how to say Worcester, and then, when Gordon Ramsay, on Idiot Sandwich, tried to get him to say Worcestershire sauce, he knew how to say it better than Gordon Ramsay did.
04:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Nice. Yes, we have very complicated towns around this area, both Indian names as well as old British names.
04:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a lot of fun. I grew up in Providence, so I know Worcester. Oh yeah, w-o-r-c-e-s-t-e-r. You pronounce it Also here from the Aloha State, from beautiful Honolulu, doc Rock. Good to see you, doctor, hey.
04:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Good, good, you know, daniel, I spend a lot of time there because my company is headquartered in Amesbury and I'm always like I need to go to Target in Haverhill and then be like what Ha, avril, avril, it's Avril, avril or Peabody. The one that throws me off is watching the TV commercials about the Peabody, because that's what comes on the news. Like you're looking for a Cadillac, welcome to Peabody, cadillac, peabody. I'm like why not Peabody, peabody?
04:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Peabody, peabody. Is that the?
05:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Cochituet, yeah yeah, I love the area though Good food.
05:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
There's a famous lake out here in Webster where my mother is from, and it's based on an Indian name that has over 100 letters and since she grew up in Worcester I mean Worcester, webster she was able to say the whole name. It was like a thing you learned as a kid and that was like how you proved you're like from the area. Yeah, that's pretty funny. It was like a thing you learned as a kid and that was like how you proved you're from the area.
05:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's crazy. I'm going to find out the next one there, because my boss is a Merrimack historian so he knows everything about the region.
05:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me see if I can do it.
05:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Lake Chobanaga Gungamog Is that right, yeah, and there's actually a longer version of it.
05:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the short version. Here's the long one Lake Chargagargamongachongabongadwabungadungahungamog. Wow, those old Garquins knew how to have fun with their tongues. They sure did. In fact, there's a bridge with the name of the lake. On the bridge oh, new England, I think we just call it.
06:05
Webster Lake, of the lake on the bridge and it goes oh new england, oh new england webster lake, but yeah, I think by now they've they've probably changed it also here. Great to have alan malventano from vison. Yeah, I know you know what town. What town are you in right now? Florence, florence, nebraska, florence, kentucky, kentucky. Hey, see, I know, you know I never ask because we all got to gather together in this virtual space floating high above Petaluma, california, but it's kind of fun to know we're all over everywhere. It's great, it's really fun.
06:43 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It's a suburb of Cincinnati, so it's basically Cincinnati.
06:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is always confusing because you're in Kentucky, but it's just over the bridge to Cincinnati, right, and so you can get chili anytime you want, or, if you really want, you can have derby pie, so you get the best of both worlds.
07:01 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
And the airport frequently referred to as the Cincinnati airport is actually on the other side of the river in Kentucky and the airport code is CVG, which stands for Covington. It has nothing to do with.
07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cincinnati. This is good. This is like a geography twit this week in geography. Hello everybody. So tomorrow is April Fool's Day. Daniel, I'm sure, as an editor-in-chief, you dread this day.
07:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, we don't really do these anymore.
07:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but here's the good news Most people have stopped right, yeah yeah, it was.
07:37 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Every once in a while you do something funny. I think Microsoft years ago put DOS on Windows Phone. That was kind of fun. But, like you know, sometimes I don't know it's just gone out of hand and I think some people have lost a sense of humor. Plus, you have to be so careful now not to be offensive, and it's so hard to tell jokes and not be offensive. So, yes, I think most companies need to avoid it.
07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google was famous for years doing the most elaborate. You felt like guys. Have you been working on this since last year? Most elaborate, you felt like guys. Have you been working on this since last year? Google Romance was one, a parody of online dating.
08:16
For those who generally favor the throw enough stuff at the wall approach to online dating, that was in 2006. One that really sticks in my mind. I don't know why is Google TISP for the Toilet Internet Service Provider, a free broadband service that would make use of sewage lines to provide internet connectivity. But the thing is the pages would be so elaborate and I you know the reason I thought you might not like it is because it's very hard to do journalism on April Fool's or used to be, anyway, hard to do journalism on April Fool's Day. We've kind of lost the impetus to do it. I guess People just got tired of all the stupid stuff, but it was on april fool's 2004 that google released something that was not a uh april fool's joke, although many of us thought it might be.
09:19
This is the 20th anniversary of Gmail. I remember that day. Oh God, yes, you and I are old enough. Actually, I think everybody on the panel probably remembers. I asked Micah, he was like eight. He has no memory, no knowledge of it at all. What is your memory of when Gmail was launched?
09:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I got my invite from Kevin Rose, oh nice. And it was crazy because it was like maybe the day after or the next day after launch, kevin was doing a live show and he's like I only got five invites. You know how it was back then, right, I only had five invites. And how it was back there, right, I only have five invites. And so it was, uh, somebody from the audience didn't get one of these invites and I just happened to be one of the ones who got it and it was literally been in gmail since way back then it was so hot those invites, because it was.
10:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was in beta. It was a beta for most of its 20 years, uh, that people were selling them on e for hundreds of dollars. It was expensive. That's so funny, I know. Now it's like, yeah, most people out here have probably 20 or 30 Gmail accounts. This is the press release April 1st. So we all I mean honestly, I think initially we all thought no, google gets the message. This is the actual press release from Google's news site. Google gets the message, launches Gmail. User complaint about existing services leads Google to create search-based web mail. Search is number two. Online activity Email is number one. Heck yeah, says Google founders, co-founders. The inspiration for gmail came from a google user complaining about the poor quality of existing email services. Recalled larry page, google co-founder and president products. She kvetched about spending all her time filing messages or trying to find them. Page said and when she's not doing that, she has to delete email like crazy to stay under the obligatory four megabyte limit. So she asked can't you people fix this? It was a big deal.
11:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They launched with a gigabyte of storage, which is remarkable and let's remember at the time it was what hot mail and yahoo mail were, the competitors, oh, and probably aol still for those hanging out there aol, so that it wasn't like great competition. So they really did come in and kind of innovate. It was also probably the first real fomo on the internet where, with those invites where you know, you know, like was the first thing, I think people were like, oh, this is kind of like different. You know, it was just right when the internet was starting to go like really mainstream alan you have any memories
12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of getting your first gmail account I waited, didn't get an invite. I waited until it was open and uh wow, because it took a long time right before it did.
12:20 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
it did take a long time, but I wasn't like in that much of a hurry because at that time I had my own domain so I was rolling my own email anyway.
12:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Were you running your own server? Were you actually running your own?
12:32 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
server. I don't remember if it was in my house or not at that point. It might have been, but yeah, the capacity thing didn't bother me so much then. But then, eventually, once I got into Gmail, I just switched over. And now here I am. Today I think I'm sitting at 95 percent of my free. I keep getting the warnings hey, you need to buy some more storage, buddy.
12:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So the good news is, you can pay for it now.
12:58 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, that's right.
13:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Actually, it's kind of funny with the hosted thing because, if you remember, back then too, you could do hosted Outlook exchange, and the reason people were doing that, including myself, was because that was the only way you can get push email Right, as a lot of us would have trios or handheld PDAs. It was the only way you can get emails pushed to your device, where you have to have your own remote hosted domain. So you had to be a super nerd getting email like that back then, but it was a lot of fun.
13:24 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Sorry, guilty.
13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the reason I was doing it. Are you running an exchange server, Alan? Yeah. Oh my. God. Now, I've never done that, but it is reportedly the worst experience out there right. There's no worse.
13:39 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, it was a learning experience. That's how you learn the early frustrations of dealing with your own self-hosted things.
13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the thing about Gmail was it kind of made sense because we knew them as a search company. We've since learned they're an advertising company masquerading as a search company, but at the time we thought it was all about search. So it made sense that they would say we'll never throw out email. You have now a gigabyte. You could store all the email you'd ever want and search it quickly. And that was when, I think, people started thinking of email as more than just transient communication. So that's how we think of text messages now. But email.
14:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it's like your contact database. It's your history, it's what you agreed, agreed to. It's a whole bunch of stuff. Well, the other thing at the time that was also relatively uh, relevant was if you were doing something on your computer with like udora or dealing with yahoo, there's a name right, you were limited in the size of your attachments and, if I remember correctly, um, I think it was like two megabytes back then, but then gmail had made it bigger.
14:49
Gmail was closer to 10, eventually became 25, um, but that was the best place to send large attachments was at the time with gmail you still use gmail a doc oh, all day, every day alan, you still use gmail day, alan, you still use Gmail. Yep, yeah, daniel you still use. Gmail Sweets, whatever they call it. Now, all of that.
15:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I use it officially for work because we have to have a Google workspace, but for my personal one I use Outlook. Yeah.
15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use Fastmail, but I use Gmail for years, Actually for a long time. It just is a spam filtering solution. I would have it forward through Gmail just to get rid of the spam and then have it go to my FastMail account. But at work we're workspace, so I still have. All of our Twitter accounts are Gmail, no one uses ProtonMail here.
15:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm surprised.
15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think the whole idea of email being private in any way is a little mistaken yeah that's how I thought too.
15:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was just like because they just got a Windows app now. So although it's basically a web app, but I was just kind of curious if anyone pays.
15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tell people if you shouldn't use email. If you want to be secure, use Signal. Basically, you know, I think I have that uh in my like signature. It's uh, don't email is not a secure. Even with proton mail, which is basically kind of hanging encryption on top of email. I mean, I use pgp but I still I don't think that's a good way to send secure messages. Plus, the metadata is visible. Use Signal, or some nowadays are more choices in Signal, including Apple's messages. Use a more strongly encrypted end-to-end solution. The biggest thing I think that Gmail was besides the fact that a gigabyte seemed like an awful lot in those days that kind of opened our eyes to what was possible with cloud services. So it was an early. It was probably one of the first cloud services most people experienced. But more than that, it was the first web app almost all of us experienced. Yeah, because it wasn't just a web page, it was an app.
17:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
True story.
17:03 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
You could right-click on a line in the email on the list and it would show you a menu instead of just your browser right-click options. That was like a new thing. It's like, oh wow.
17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Gmail does not get enough credit for introducing the world to the notion that you could have an app running on a website. Harry McCracken has a good article from 10 years ago but it's still I mean, the history hasn't changed about how gmail happened and how it launched, and he talks a little bit about that. He quotes john markoff saying the scuttlebutt is Google's about to offer a free email service. That leaked out March 31st, the day before Gigabyte was 500 times what Hotmail was offering, a significant amount. But I think really, to me the most important thing was you could go to a web. Did Yahoo? I guess Yahoo had Webmail. Hotmail had web mail. So maybe, but would you consider them web apps compared to what Gmail did?
18:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, their experience was so horrible, especially Hotmail.
18:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They had ads in there. That was a difference, right. They had like actual visible banner ads and that kind of thing. They put ads in the email where Google didn't do that. They just sold your information instead. So now it's flipped around. Right Now Microsoft doesn't sell your stuff to advertisers, although they use some data, but it's Google. That's kind of the advertising email now.
18:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Remember the days of people printing out an email and it always had like an ad for something weird in it. And then so, in a way, knowing what we know now, we kind of didn't really understand this back then we thought they were just served, right. But knowing what we know now, somebody could print out an email and show it to you and you would see something weird in an advertisement. You know they were searching for that at some point that week and it ended up in was there cialis back then?
19:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know there was viagra right. Very early on you started getting emails that had v1 at sign I don't know about you, leo.
19:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I never got those, so I don't know what you were searching for. Well, they. You know, I'm a little older than you and I think there's probably an age gate there, created by paul bukheit, who, uh, is kind of a legendary guy.
19:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's now a managing partner at y combinator. He's you know, it's a vc basically. But he created, uh, gmail. He created adsense the original adsense and, uh, you may remember, I really liked it. He created something called friend feed. You remember friend feed? Yes, I remember friend feed, and his partner on friend feed was brett taylor, whose name you probably recognize as one of the twitter board members who forced elon musk to buy twitter, among other things. Brett gets around, brett brett is kind of legendary.
19:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So, uh, he created google maps, so, uh, yeah, there's a web app thing is fascinating too because if you think about it, you know Apple, a few years after this came out with the iPhone, famously didn't have apps, but they were. Everything was going to be web-based and of course that didn't work out. Everybody wanted apps. But now we're coming full circle here, as Google has been leading the progressive web app revolution that's been going on. All their services make really good PWAs at this point and it seems like where everything is going now. It's kind of funny that, like apps are becoming like less important than that. The proton mail, as I was just remarking, is now on windows. It's, I believe it's might be in the store or not, but it's basically a web app, you know. So you're seeing a lot of these official apps come out, but they're just web-based technologies, which is fascinating.
20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish PWAs would take off. Google and Microsoft got behind it. Apple, kind of, you know, stuck their leg out and tripped them up a little bit by not supporting it well, in Safari. And then Apple's kind of come and gone on whether they want to support it. On the one hand, they get a lot of money out of you buying apps in the app store so they're but on the other hand, they're getting a lot of scrutiny for the app store and I think that people within apple say, you know, we really should support pwas better because that would get the eu off our back. It would give third-party developers a chance to do something. And then there's parts of apple that say, yeah, but then epic would have an app store and we'd be in trouble. So, uh, I, it's a shame, because pwas are actually. Do you have much experience with us, daniel? It seems as if yeah, given the right service workers, there's pretty much anything you can't. There's nothing you can't do no, they handle encryption.
21:40 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They can handle downloaded files. Uh, the big thing is like for video right, if you're netflix, do you want to download a movie for your flight? How would that be handled? So that technology is getting there. It's a work in progress. They keep coming out with different standards, but you know. So it's not like a finished technology. But it's getting to the point where, especially the work microsoft is doing, where they're becoming indistinguishable almost from like a native app. So I think it still has a little ways to go, but Microsoft has, like in the store, a lot of official apps are PWAs.
22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and we know that you can do a lot because so many apps are electron-based although the cross-platform apps almost are electron-based which is essentially just a Google browser with a web app all bundled together into one.
22:23 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
The coolest thing with PWAs is because it's web-based. If you're using a browser that supports extensions which is questionable on mobile right, they're getting there, but at least on desktop this is normal. You can run extensions within the app now, so you can run your Grammarly, you can run ad blockers, you can run different kind of scripting extensions, so now you can actually modify the app to your liking, which is something that's never been able to be done before.
22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, my only experience with this is because, you know, some years ago I think it's less important now but at one point in podcasting, you know, you had to have iTunes and an iPod. But eventually it became obvious that you know that you could have a website and apps. And pretty soon it seemed to me, especially with the success of the iPhone, that phone apps would be kind of the future and any podcast network should have a phone app. And we looked at writing custom phone apps. We actually hired a company to write custom Android and iOS apps. So after spending tens of thousands of dollars, it was so God awful we could never release it and I always thought a PWA would be the way to go. You browse to our website and the browser says, okay, you want to put this on your home screen as an app. And now it's an app without much effort on our part, using the same technologies we use to create the website. So I've always thought this would be great for that kind of use case.
23:54 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's really good for smaller independent companies your local business because they can just write once and it runs everywhere. The app is technically updated in real time. If you update the website, it gets updated through the app, you know. So it's, uh, I think it's a fantastic technology. Uh, I wish it. You know, I'm glad Microsoft, and especially Google, of course, are supporting it. Hopefully Apple, yeah, safari supports it, but they're always like a generation behind on their PWA, like abilities it feels so half-hearted, you know, feels like, yeah, right, they're really fine.
24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ambivalent, fine, okay, which is pretty much apple these days, isn't it? Fine if you insist, okay, but we're still going to charge you 27, all right. All right, well, happy birthday to a gmail and share your gmail memories with us. We're all still using it. It's kind of amazing 20 years later, there aren't a whole lot of technologies that have survived 20 years.
24:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Uh, I think the one thing that gmail brought to people too. I think a lot of people realize this. But if you were a roadrunner customer at the time, one One of the most frustrating things were moving to say like a new computer, because a lot of people at that time, because of Roadrunner, were heavily pop-oriented. Only the nerds, only the people who were running Exchange servers or who had built their own mail service kind of knew anything about IMAP at the time. I think that Gmail was one of the very first IMAP heavy and you could even set the duality set it so you could do both, because not even the services like Roadrunner a lot of them didn't even have IMAP capabilities. So sometimes you had to cheat and kind of fake it so you would bring the pop mail into Gmailmail in order because your service didn't support imap. But I was ran into that trouble because I was working at apple at the time and whenever someone would get a new computer their biggest fear was am I gonna lose all of my email?
25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
remember, remember, you'd have to set the pop server to do not delete the mail, right, right right.
26:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So if you didn't know any better, you were losing mail.
26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time you download it, it all gets deleted. Yeah.
26:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Right, and the other crazy thing about it at this time which I remember very specifically is Microsoft Office 2003 was just becoming super popular on the Mac side. But one of the things that was struggling is if you picked up a PST Office Mail File whatever it was called back then from a Windows box and you brought it over to the Mac side. If they got a lot of email, that thing would break and then that controls your mail, your calendar.
26:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pst is PTSD. For me, man, hollaback, holy cow.
26:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, I spent so much time un-effing those for customers at the Apple store that I used to have really lovely hair like Daniel. What is it about?
26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft, they love big binary files. They've got the registry, which just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And they've got the now Outlook. I think has kind of gotten away from the monolithic PST file. Right, but your whole, all your email, your calendars, your contacts, everything stored in one blob.
27:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That broke easily ever reached two gigabytes. It would just yeah well, that was some people would get lucky, but most of it was the threshold that I noticed the most anecdotally from doing all these repairs. It would hit two g's and it would be busted and we would have to try to figure out how to. We have to download thunderbird, and I think that's right.
27:26
Is mozilla's called thunderbird, yeah, yeah you have to do like six different steps to try to bring out the individual pieces and put it back together. Oh my god, it was so frustrating and I spent a lot of time doing that is that still a corporate culture?
27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh thing, daniel at microsoft, because I feel like it goes all the way back to Bill Gates, who wanted to squeeze every bite out of everything. Word for the longest time would store your text files in a proprietary format that was run-encoded. You couldn't open it and see ASCII. It was doing run-encoding on it, I guess to save space. It seems like that was. People still do that, they still do that. You it, I guess to save space.
28:05 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It seems like that was.
28:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They still do that. They still do that.
28:08 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
You can if you want to. The default now is it's like it's basically like a form of a zip, like a compressed file, A docx, and internally there's basically like an RTF. It's readable, you can go in and extract the content.
28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you open it with a hex editor and see text? No, it's, it's, it's readable.
28:26 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
You can go and extract the content. You can. You open it with a hex editor and see text. No, if you extract it, then you have to extract the other files, right? Yeah, then you can open the individual files and actually get the text like. You don't even really need to hex edit it to do that.
28:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember trying to decode word files and like the letter b, which is normally an ascii 8-bit letter was like, was like 4 bits Because they were doing something weird. It was just nutty. But I think it's so funny how corporate cultures persist. I mean I'm very aware that these days, because of Apple and Steve Jobs' kind of paranoia and kind of closed mindset has really continues at Apple and I think Bill Gates a little bit in his idea of bringing every ounce out of every bit persists. Maybe a little bit of Microsoft, I don't know.
29:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the weird limitations and things we see in history for computation just comes back to almost like the millennium bug, right, which is things that people didn't anticipate how the hardware would evolve, yeah, and so they didn't think ahead like what this was going to be like in 10, 15 years, right?
29:35
So I think that's where a lot of this stuff just comes from. And yeah, you know, you get assigned a project, you have a deadline, you have managers and you know corners get cut, you know. So I think there's uh, it probably has to be books written about this topic, but yeah, it's fascinating to me.
29:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
there is I think the funniest one today that is very prevalent in the consumer side of it is the fact that, um, a megabyte doesn't equal a megabyte when it's on a hard drive but like 24 bytes right like I think that still throws customers to the very deep.
30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Close enough.
30:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just bought this 5-terabyte drive but when I open it it says I only have 4.7 terabytes. Why? And then to us it's funny, but you understand why the customers expect that. So then I'm like okay, hard drive manufacturers make it 5.4 or 6, whatever, so that when they open it it's actually5. So it's less heading, because one of us always anybody who's anywhere related to IT you get a call every time somebody in your family buys a new hard drive.
30:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm missing space I'm missing space exactly. I can't even believe that we're still doing that. It's too funny. You need a mebibyte. At least lie to them that we're still doing that. That's too funny. Yeah, you need a. You need a mebibyte.
30:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
At least lie to them, because they won't know anyway. Just lie to them. Do something, but stop me from having to get these phone calls Seagate I'm talking to you.
30:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I like metabyte. That's pretty, that's pretty good. This is this was.
31:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you still see this. So I believe there was some regulation that hard drive manufacturers had to start putting the actual the decimal, because the decimal is 1,000 and the binary is 1,048. But then they came up with this M capital, m lowercase, I capital B, the Mebabyte. You probably know about that, alan. You're a storage guy, yeah.
31:25 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
What's a Mebabyte? It's a units thing. Alan, you're a storage guy, yeah. What's a Mebabyte? It's a SI units thing. Yeah, so it uses the power of 10 instead of the power of 2 increments, right? So if you want to and yes, it's used for hard disks and then, ironically enough, it's also used for SSDs.
31:41
So SSDs things that use flash memory, which you would think is like what you would do for RAM do not do the thing that you would do for RAM. And they do that because usually SSDs have some over-provisioning to them, and so it kind of naturally fell into the typical percentage of over-provisioning that you would want to use for flash memory. Also happens to be what happens if you hack the 24 off of the 1024, right, so it just worked out that way. So now SSDs tend to be what happens if you hack the 24 off of the 1024, right? Uh, so it just worked out that way. So now ssds tend to be tend to use, like you know, the the power of 10, uh even though you're going to get the power of two actual bytes the power of two is there, but it's not all accessible.
32:22
Oh, because, if it were, the endurance of the drive would be lower, because you'd be using more of the spares. Here's something.
32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a chart that I think will clear this up for everybody. You got your kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, terabyte, petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, yottabyte. Then you got your kibibibite, your mibib, your gibibite, your tebibite, your pebibite, your exibibite, your zebibite and your yobibite. Why it's not a yodibite, I don't know. I guess it's too close to yadabyte um one's binary.
32:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
that's the b dude yodibite would be better, just for the star wars nerds in the building, and and then a Yaddlebyte. Yes, just to keep it inclusive, you need a Yaddlebyte.
33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So a Yaddlebyte is 10 to the 24th bytes.
33:14 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
The thing that was really annoying about all of that was that they supplanted the MIB in place of the exact use case where most people were using MB already.
33:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, so I see this on drives. If you buy a drive, though, it has the MIB on it right Still, as well as the MB.
33:34 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Well, hard drives will just use the standard without the I, because they're based on decibel.
33:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, even though Doc's family is going to be confused when they open the drive everybody's confused, I'm like, and then not to get in alan's wheelhouse.
33:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But every time I'm looking for a drive, I'm telling myself I want to buy this sad.
33:58
What are you going to use it for? I want to use for a video. Okay, I need to look for an slc drive, but do not buy a qlc drive to do video and they're like I don't even know, I don't see that on the package. I'm like oh, here we go. Okay, I need to look for an SLC drive, but do not buy a QLC drive to do video and they're like I don't even know, I don't see that on the package.
34:08 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I'm like, oh, here we go, yep, yep, so, yeah, so it gets even worse because in the SSD sphere, first you have storage in general, which they like to do the power of 10 thing. Then you might have an SSD that has a base, two type of you know. It might be a thousand twenty four gigabytes to make a terabyte instead of a thousand, right, but there will still be different products that use one or the other within the ecosystem.
34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's no consistency, even.
34:35 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Well, but it gets better. It gets better because, for, because for the data center there's a different grade of data center storage, which has way more over provisioning. So instead of seven percent over provisioning, it's 28 over provisioning, and that doesn't fall under any rent. You know typical 1024 or a thousand. It goes down to, like you know, 960 or 800 gigabytes for for the same amount of nand that was previously giving you a terabyte right.
35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can we talk about kittens for a minute. Actually, we're going to take a break. When we come back we will talk about bad April Fool's pranks. That went south real quick and most of them are of recent memory. We've got Daniel Rubino with us, editor-in-chief of Windows Central, doc Rock the doctor, youtubecom slash doc rock and ecam ambassador extraordinaire. We love ecam. And uh, a sponsor, of course. And uh, of course, alan malventano, also a longtime friend, former host of this week in computer hardware. The long long lost twitch. They the twitch twitch, went to the four, four wins because you and uh um ryan trout went to well, pat okay. So you and ryan trout went to intel, patrick went to missouri and that was it. The whole thing was over.
36:04 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Basically.
36:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, it's great to have you back Former. Okay, I got to do this Former submariner right With the United States Navy. Yes, former intelligence expert contractor to the.
36:20 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
NSA. I wasn't a contractor then. I was still active duty.
36:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay. Well, what is that then? You were detached to the NSA. What is that?
36:27 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
No, it's just like any other duty station for the military, except the NSA was paying the military to have people work there. Basically.
36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Steve Gibson's been going on about the BDUs required for cyber experts in the intelligence agencies in the military. Did you have to wear camo BDUs? Oh, do you remember?
36:55 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I did as a medic. See, here's the thing.
36:57 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I was a chief when I was doing this job.
36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to see a medic, you want a big red cross on the back.
37:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You had to wear that in the hospital, Leo. I worked in the freaking Tripler Army Hospital wearing battle dress uniform. In an emergency room it made about as much sense as screen doors in the submarine.
37:14 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
So it varies from command to command. But maybe now because realize I've been out for over 10 years but there was sort of this transition where initially there were no digital cami kind of uniforms and they started introducing them yeah, yeah.
37:31
But then if it was a command that was a mostly office setting, then typically the command, like the captain, would just say okay, this is the uniform everybody's going to wear, and it would. So when I was working there it was just regular, the traditional navy uniform. Still, they didn't have everybody running around and the digital camis through, you know, blending in with the wallpaper.
37:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is basic military digital camouflage battle dress uniform. I don't know who you're hiding from. Maybe Mr Smith, I don't know, but Steve Gibson thought that was very.
38:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I see a lot of that in Hawaii and it makes no sense, because it's also 90-something degrees here. Basically, people were always coming there for heat exhaustion. I'm like, oh, what do you do? Oh, I work in air traffic control, so you're in the air conditioning unit all day, but then you got to wear this high uniform. It made no sense.
38:25 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It's super stupid. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, we wore. We wore the regular. You know, I was, uh, I was a chief petty officer when I was working at the nsa. I just wore the khaki uniform that they have, which is just a kind of color very nice.
38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Navy does have the best uniforms oh, I agree, nobody looks better than a naval aviator. I tell you what. Uh, submariner, intelligence officer and flash memory guru, mr alan malventano our show today brought to you by a step dog. You may say, wait a minute, you can't have a kitty cat with your step dog. Oh yes, you can, and I call her samantha. She's monitoring. She even meows. Let me see if I can hear it if I tap her head. Meow for us. Small things amuse me.
39:10
This is from DC Labs. It's their Apple Watch app. It's called Step Dog, a virtual pet that lives in your Apple Watch face and helps you track your steps. Your step dog moves around you throughout the day. We had 15,000 steps yesterday, lisa and I tired our step dogs out Boy with that throughout the day. We had 15 000 steps yesterday, lisa and I tired our step dogs out boy. That was fun. Not only that, it falls asleep. Once you hit this, this goal that you set, it goes to sleep.
39:34
The app is free, but I paid the 99 cents a month so I could upgrade. They have over 30 different breeds labrador, husky, german shepherd, and and you can name your step dog or step cat Mine's Samantha after our own cat. I love it. The upgrade has weather forecasts for dog walks or your walks and a leaderboard, so I could say, right now I'm in third place with all the other step dog wearers in our neighborhood. You can add your friends as well to this Winning gold, silver and bronze medals each day.
40:07
I'm not doing so well. I'm kind of who's beating me? I can't. Somebody Sammy is me, then my dog, and is that Gibbs or Globs is winning, but you can see these are the. We're in competition. You know what you might say. This is silly, but it gets you walking and it is kind of fun. It is kind of fun, stepdog. It is a very. I haven't won any medals yet, but I will, trust me, I will. Very sweet little watch face app, free to use from the App Store. Download it, install it and get your watch barking or meowing with your steps. Stepdog from DC Labs. I love my little stepdog.
40:52
All right, let's talk about April fools. That went wrong Like March or late March, early April 2018, when Elon Musk tweeted let's see if the tweet's still there. I think it's not. He tweeted that Tesla was going bankrupt. No, that's a bad idea. That's a bad idea. This was shortly after a crash. The prank backfired immediately, according to USA Today, causing the stop to drop 7%. And even though he tried to inject humor in the way he phrased it, elon's Easter eggs pun wildly misfired.
41:42
Okay, you may remember volkswagen, remember they said they were changing their name from volkswagen to volts wagon? Uh, because of their commitment to electric vehicles. This was just a few years ago, 2021. Uh, they said oh no, it's an april furs. No, but no, no, no one got it. Everybody thought it was. It was real. Um, the taco Liberty bell, april Fools prank. In 1996, they uh re, they put out, took out newspaper ads a little early for the internet, including in USA Today and the New York Times, saying they had purchased the Liberty Bell and were renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell to help out the national debt. Members of Congress, always the sharpest tools in the shed, called the National Park Service to see if that was true. Called the National Park Service to see if that was true.
42:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
According to the Washington Post, the Park Service actually had to have a press conference to deny it, that one's actually funny.
42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty funny. I like that one Pretty pretty funny. Google had one in 2016, a new. Gmail feature. Remember this one, the mic drop. What was?
43:06 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
that was that super goofy.
43:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just funny to me, but it was like you know you have those friends that when you have a conversation, somebody always got to have a last word. Right, there's a mic drop person in every group, so they had a way to get the last word in the email with the mic drop feature. It was super stupid.
43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a special mic drop emoji that you would click that. They said it never happened and that would be it. It would be over Conversation over Mic drop.
43:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Boom. Oh my God, that was good, that was funny.
43:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get the last word on any email. Just send your message with the new mic drop button. Everyone will see your response and this gif, but no one will be able to say anything. By the way, is that something from a Despicable Me? There must have been a little cross promo with Despicable Me. So many fun, not so fun.
44:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Richard Branson. Everyone tries to bring back something cool, but I don't think anybody's done it really well recently.
44:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not cool even the 7-11.
44:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I don't even remember what year it was, but the tiny gulp that was just stupid. Oh yeah, remember what year it was, but the tiny gulp that was just stupid.
44:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, they had a big gulp and a tiny gulp.
44:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They had the tiny gulp. It was really, really dumb. I don't even remember how long ago that was, but yeah. But, you remember it. None of them ever work. They always fall flat. So it'd be funny to see what anybody tries tomorrow. Here's the tiny, the big gulp machine, and then there's a little tiny gulp. That was 2022. Okay, so that was during the pandemic.
44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so I think though it was, it was really the pandemic that kind of put the kibosh on this. We just weren't in the mood for a few years.
44:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah.
44:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody was ready for giggles. I hope it doesn't come back. I don't know about you, Daniel, but if you've got to do news coverage on April 1st, it's hard because you don't know what to believe.
45:11 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it's gotten a little bit better now. Companies are being a little bit more transparent, but, like, sometimes it's just so ridiculous. There's like just no way, you know, but it's true. I mean, for a little while there was this kind of gray area where it's like wait, is this real or not? While there was this kind of gray area where it's like wait, is this real or not? Um, yeah, it's just become I don't know, it becomes corny, because after a while it's just this like pr stunt that companies do, and it's always done by a committee and it's just like there's no humor. You know, at some point it might have been funny, but then by the time it gets through everything, it's been corporatized and it's just lame dr do in our discord says corporate humor often lands like jokes in a Samsung event.
45:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, what's better and we don't push enough and I wish we did again as the resident tech for everybody's family and most of you guys are probably in the same position is worldwide backup day, which is today. Oh, happy worldwide backup day, like every 31st. I got into this because of Kelly Goumont when I was at TWAW Like she's always like make sure that we celebrated it on high verso and ever since her reminding us that, I've always been telling everybody like Worldwide Backup Day is important. That's today because I swear within the next week and everybody in this table, someone's going to call you go. Hey, man, I just lost some files on this.
46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know how to get it back. Should you only back up once a year, Doc?
46:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh no, no, but it's a reminder. It's a reminder to catch up. I think some people might say oh good, I'll do my backup today, every year.
46:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do a backup on April 31st or March 31st, no no.
46:40 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Listen, even if they did that, that would be better for many of the cases that come to be.
46:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's true, thank you, thank you. Great. There's so many people that just don't do it, and then they wonder why, like oh, I can't get my pictures back from my phone and I'm like, no, I'm sorry, it's kind of funny.
46:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Like I was just kind of going through our own coverage and I remember actually now it was last year asus kind of announced the rog ally handheld gaming unit right around. It was going to be announced officially on april 1st as a steam deck competitor and no one in media was briefed on. Nobody believed it. And so, yeah, no one believed it. So it was covered initially as an april fool's joke, but it became very real. It can bite you.
47:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On april 30th it was was real, yeah, yep, I feel like World Backup Day might be sponsored by Facebook only because when I go to worldbackupdaycom and there's a thing that says share your pledge so you can make a pledge right. I solemnly swear to back up my most important documents and precious memories on March 31st, hashtag World Backup Day. But the only take the pledge button is on WhatsApp, not Twitter, not threads, not blue sky, not WhatsApp. Why would I pledge this on WhatsApp? Am I missing something? That's bizarre? So I feel like maybe World Backup Day has a sponsor.
48:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, it says Amazon Mega, amazon mega. Oh yeah, there it is.
48:09 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
I storage backblaze, well see that's why I know about it. That makes sense.
48:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Backblaze since day one. Yeah, that guy is one of the nicest people in the planet that's.
48:16
That's who should sponsor this is the storage guys. Yeah, where the places where you would back up actually Actually we should probably talk about? I don't know if you're going to have to tell your family about this or not, but people who listen to this show techies should know about, probably already do know about a pretty serious issue in a widely used utility that actually has a very interesting story behind it. The utility is called XZ. It's an unzipping utility or a zipping utility that you probably don't use Most people don't but that is on many, many machines and, by the way, it's not just Linux, it's on many, many Macintoshes too. In fact, as soon as I found out about this, I updated Homebrew and it downgraded my copy of XZ, which was being used by third-party utilities. The one that really matters is OpenSSH, which does use the XZ utils.
49:15
Now, the story behind this is fascinating. It actually started years ago. Years ago, a committer J-I-A-T-75, got into the good graces of the maintainer of this program, who was anxious to retire. As is often the case with open source library software, the guy who was working on it was tired and was doing it all by himself, even though it was widely used by all sorts of programs everywhere. So when Gia came along and said, hey, let me help out, he was glad to take the help. The committer committed reasonable, useful fixes for some years, eventually earning the trust of the maintainer who did in fact retire. At which point this guy, gia, had kind of full reign and introduced a backdoor into XZ which would give him, or bad actors, a backdoor into SSH, a remote code execution vulnerability. It took him years to work his way in, worm his way into this, take it over, and then when he submitted his updates it was always obfuscated so it wasn't immediately obvious what was going on.
50:43
Giatan we don't. It's maybe a person, it's a pseudonym, it could be a group, it could be, and I think this is most likely a nation state. This is someone with a lot of patience, playing a very long game. Late last, late in February, two months ago, giatan approached other Linux distribution maintainers saying you've got to put this XZ that we're working on in your stuff under the guise of great new features. It didn't really need new features. The software was done and people put it in. Now here's the most kind of depressing and surprising thing it was only discovered because a Microsoft, not researcher, an engineer who had a little bit of OCD, was kind of annoyed that his SSH was taking half a second longer. He benchmarked it, andres Freund, and he posted to the OSS security mailing list saying I'm getting some weird performance issues and Valgrind crashes. And it was only when he noticed this slowdown and they started looking at the code that he realized oh my God, there's a backdoor in here. It underscores what Steve Gibson and others have called a supply chain vulnerability. That has never really been addressed.
52:20
Almost all software closed and open source uses libraries. Many of these libraries are open source. They're maintained by individuals, groups, unpaid, usually working in obscurity, and many of these libraries, including the Python PyPy library, have been infiltrated by exploits. They replace existing code with malicious code or, in this case this is a remarkable case, but it might not be the only one A backdoor introduced over a period of years into a widely used but very widely unknown utility. So most of the Linux distros have been updated. As I said, homebrew has been well, it's really downgraded. There is no fixed version of XE, but there is a previous version prior to his intrusion and it works just fine. And so they at least Homebrew, when I ran it, downgraded it Just a fascinating story.
53:27
Here's Andres Freund's Mastodon post. He says I was doing some micro benchmark. I accidentally found a security issue while benchmarking Postgres changes. He said I was doing some micro benchmarking at the time needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise, saw SSD processes, sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames. Profiled SSHD. The SSHDman showing lots of CPU time in libLZima with perf unable to attribute it to a symbol, got suspicious. Recalled that I'd seen an odd Valgrind compliant in automated testing of Postgres a few weeks earlier after package updates. Thank God this guy's paying attention.
54:20 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
The real shame of this is that the only reason it was really caught is just because that developer was sloppy.
54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which makes me think. Here's the thing that worries me. I think this is widespread. We know it's widespread. There have been, I think, literally thousands of attempts to put malicious code in PyPy. We've talked about this before. There is really no fix for this supply chain vulnerability and nobody's doing anything about it. Alan Uh-huh. No, it's always just my complaint.
54:59 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Because any particular distribution or collection of different packages, at the end of the day, somebody has to make the judgment call oh okay, we really want this particular thing included, all right. Well, once you're doing, for example, ssh, right. So the SSH whoever's maintaining that at some point said well, we want this other thing included, right. And whenever the audit gets done on SSH, it doesn't include all of the sub packages that are included, because the assumption is that all of those other packages have their own audits going on. So it's really a matter of resources, right. How many resources are there available for any particular project to not just look at that project but everything underneath it that's being included and also keep that up to date? Every time there's a new update to that other dependency Do you go? You know how often are you going back and auditing that as well?
55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would think at this point this is I mean, there have been so many cases of this in PyPy and other libraries that people know about and have kind of ignored, that people know about and have kind of ignored. I would think at this point now people would start to sit up and say we need to have some sort of validating system before random people can submit. But this is how open source works. Is random people submitting code polls right? I don't know what the answer is. Let me just look up the. We've talked about this. I don't know what the answer is. Let me just look up the. We've talked about this.
56:36
Two days ago, pypy 500 plus typosquat fakes, malicious code in the supply chain 500 fake packages with similar names to popular ones. Now people who write Python code will frequently download libraries from pypi and and run them without. I mean, you don't vet it, you just run it. It's a library everybody knows it's okay 500 of them and if you had a slight typo, uh, in your so this is you you might get a mount, a poison package, in your library and not even know it, and I don't see a whole lot being done to fix it. I don't even know if something can be done to fix it. This is a vector, the very powerful vector, for bad guys. When this happened two days ago, pipi halted new projects for 10 hours, but it was only 10 hours, right? I just don't know.
57:33 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I mean, it's just about increasing your. You know, obviously there'll be some lessons learned. They'll go okay. We need better audits, we need different resources allocated to these things. We have to be more uh particular about which things we decide to allow. You know, and it's just all you can do it for something like this. In hindsight, all you can do is take a discerning experience and update the procedures. So try to.
57:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A week ago 170 000 users said to be caught up in a poisoned Python package, ruse. According to the register, this was a Python package for Discord bot makers. 170,000 users had data stolen from their browsers, discord app, crypto wallets and files because of a malicious Python package uploaded in november of 2022. These people play the long game. I'll tell you. Yeah, uh, wow. Anyway, I'm sure steve will talk quite a bit about this on tuesday. It's a really interesting story and and and the patience and determination required by the malware actor is fascinating.
58:50
These universal repositories are incredibly useful for anybody who does coding. I mean, I use libraries all the time and you just assume well, they must be okay, everybody uses them, they're well-known, and I just don't know what the solution is. I really don't. Ssh is so important for security. It's used by so many things. You may not know that you're using XZ or SSH, but you might well be. People use SSH to log into their Synology NASes, for instance. I use SSH to log into my server over here. Who knows? You know what kind of vulnerabilities were introduced.
59:31 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I guess there's really nothing to say about it.
59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The XZ repo is disabled on GitHub oh yeah, oh yeah, and in fact the only solution at this point is not to get an updated XZ but to get a downgraded XZ to roll back to, I think, five, six, one I can't remember what the version is but in almost every case, your distribution of of Linux or your homebrew or Mac ports or whatever you're using, people are aware of this and they're backpatching in almost every case. I immediately ran homebrew update when I read about this and it fixed it. But I did have. I didn't know I had that on there. I didn't use xz. I never would. I never even heard of it, but it was on there. I'm not.
01:00:10 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I'm not sure if it. I mean, that's not the default either, which is why I'm curious to why it would be as severe of a problem. Maybe it. Maybe it passes through xz if you're trying to have a failed login attempt. Maybe it it's like oh, maybe it's using that instead. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, it's weird, it's used in LibLZMA, so it may be a library that was.
01:00:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the problem, though, is libraries that use libraries. You don't know where this there's so much code in everything we use, and this is true also of proprietary software that you buy off the shelf. It's using open source, almost always using some sort of open source libraries, and you just don't know, because it's not your responsibility, and, of course, nation state actors are very motivated to do this, and they're probably. Truth is they're not attacking me or you. Probably they're going to use this in some just, you know discerning ways to attack alan and uh, me former nsa officer might have have some stuff on his hard drive, we don't know. He's got a lot of knowledge.
01:01:17 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
here's the funny thing it's because of what I used to do, that if some country a was trying to use this on country B, the NSA people were the ones that would probably catch that and then try to put out advisories.
01:01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you know, the thing that is so cool about the NSA is that really they have two missions. One is to keep us Said nobody ever, no, no, listen. One is to keep us secure right? The NSA has some excellent documentation on how to harden your system on Windows or Mac or Linux. They have lots of great stuff. But then their other job is to completely crack all the software and they make us insecure. And I don't know if it's two people or one person with two heads, I don't know how they do it, but they have. They have two missions, really Right, am I wrong?
01:02:02 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Alan, well, it's part of national defense, right, yeah, right, it's defense, yeah, which which does sometimes include offense, depending but I think you can.
01:02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can, uh, you can trust the nsa cyber security recommendations.
01:02:20 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
They seem very good and very sophisticated, right oh, listen, part of part of, I mean, my day-to-day when I was, there was reverse engineering malware that uh countries were using against each other, like we would catch other foreign countries that we were allowed to snoop on because they're not, you know, united states people, right, uh, we would catch something, go across the wire and go, oh, that's a nasty piece of malware, okay, and I would pick it apart. And then part of my job description was to come up with even like going as far as to come up with an antivirus signature or like a, a signature for catching that thing going across the wire that you could put on a network sensor, in other words, to prevent it from you know, if that country then decides to attack the United States, we would be protected, right, if that country then decides to attack the United States, we would be protected right.
01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a very important piece I would suggest everybody read on UEFI secure boot customization from the NSA last March Things you need to do. This is what they do and it's great.
01:03:26 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
But I guess it's a side effect of the real job, right? Well, hey, there's Ghidra. There's like NSA makes really good reviews, ghidra's very cool.
01:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's amazing. It's a disassembler. That's brilliant. Right, it's the best disassembler out there.
01:03:37 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, and while they're doing it I mean they're doing it for themselves first, but then, because they're publicly funded, they're kind of obligated to open source the thing.
01:03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A software reverse engineering suite developed by NSA's research directorate.
01:03:54 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, and I mean that's, that's born out of necessity, right, that exists, because they needed better tools to be able to reverse engineer things, right? Very Unfortunately for me, it was only coming about when I was doing that job, so I had to use all the other tools and not the fancy new one.
01:04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm sorry it's okay, they do have a github uh, a page with a few tools on here that you can open source and download uh yeah, no, that's.
01:04:22 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
That's a really powerful set of tools. You can get an ISO. That's like a bootable environment. That's just a Gidro like reverse engineering.
01:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it that one of the languages that they use is called Groovy. See, I think in Good Will Hunting he should have joined the NSA. I think he should have. He would have enjoyed using Groovy. They use it for skill tree, a micro learning gamification platform for skills stress stress tests. I want to learn groovy, just for the name. All right, let's uh. Anyway, I didn't mean to scare everybody, but it is. I think it's really important we talk about this and people be aware of it, and probably there is no issue with Windows. I'm guessing Nobody in Windows is using XZ.
01:05:06 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Unless you're using WSL.
01:05:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wsl. Yep, that's a good point. Good point. More to come in just a bit. First, a word from our fine sponsor for this half hour. Stampscom Did I say this half hour? For more than a decade, since 2012, they've been a sponsor of Twitter. Half hour. Stampscom did I say this half hour? For more than a decade, since 2012, they've been a sponsor of twit.
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01:07:44
Stampscom You've heard me talk about them. Why are you waiting? Don't wait anymore. Stampscom Last week we spent a lot of time talking about Apple versus the DOJ. Not much more to say about that. In fact, this is going to be one of those things that's going to go on for years.
01:08:12
You must have covered the Microsoft DOJj stuff in the 90s right, daniel oh no, that was before my time, it was before your time oh, it wasn't before mine.
01:08:15
It just went on and on. I remember it very well, yeah, but even even in the doj lawsuit against apple, they you know our lawsuit against Microsoft made it all possible for Apple. They patted themselves a little bit on the back, which is anatomically difficult for making it easier for Apple. I guess to some degree that's true. The Microsoft pre this was pretty aggressive is probably the best way to put it. Pretty aggressive is probably the best way to put it.
01:08:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And I think we all agree too, like you know, the idea of like splitting Microsoft apart and all this kind of stuff is a good thing. It didn't happen Like the. What they came to as a solution, I think long term was good for the industry, it was good for Microsoft and it's probably the way things should go, which is the idea of a compromise right between the government and these large and increasingly large firms.
01:09:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I feel like the DOJ. I seem to remember the DOJ did want to break them up and I remember Dvorak and others saying you know what, from the point of view of Microsoft shareholders, this wouldn't be a bad thing. We'd get four new stocks that would immediately go up. We'd be making money. It's not a bad thing. But I think in the long run, what the DOJ did was probably the right thing. And I don't know what their goals are with Apple. They haven't been as clear with Apple about what they want, but I imagine it'll be some of the same things. They're not going to break apple up, but they might want apple to open up their app store, for instance, just as the eu does.
01:09:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Um, things like that uh, anyway, it's interesting to see, like, how long it took to get to this part, right, because, like, these complaints have been going on for a long time, whether it's their uh I message and you know the store, of course, the way both Apple and Google, you know, played hard against Microsoft for the smartphone. You know wars back then, google famously you know it's a good question, right Google never provided apps for Microsoft or their store. And then when Microsoft made a YouTube app that was compliant with Google's own terms, I remember that Google still blocked it. Right, it was like there was no world in which Google was going to allow Microsoft to have any kind of official Google app on its phone platform and no one really got upset about that.
01:10:40
That was just seen as like well, that's just tough, you know. That was just seen as like well, that's just tough, you know. But now it's drove. I just read a story about, like there's over 500 phone makers that were driven out of the smartphone industry over the last couple of years and it's just because, you know, you have Samsung, of course, who's doing really well, you have Google, and then you have Apple and they just they really pushed everyone out and I don't know.
01:11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting debate whether it's fair. That's in the DOJ complaint against Apple. They said Amazon Fire phone failed because the Apple iPhone owned the market, which is a little bit of a stretch. They mentioned HTC and LG getting out of the smartphone market and they blamed Apple on that, which you know, here's a hilarious double-edged sword on this entire situation.
01:11:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We just got finished covering xz, and if everybody and their mama could make a phone instead of a handful of people who you know exactly who to yell at when something goes awry, that is a good point. Now we have to yell at 187 people to try to figure out who screwed up. Right now we have one of four people to slap and we pretty much got it covered, and a lot of people don't understand To me for this the ubiquitous nature of phones and I would say how much of a person's digital life inside the kimono is on the phone. Having more options of phones to me is making it less secure and I'm really curious where Alan says about it, because he's much smarter than me. This is just my feelings of the situation.
01:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alan, do you use an Android or an iPhone?
01:12:26 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I use an iPhone, but mostly out of force of habit.
01:12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's probably the case for most people, right, it's the default.
01:12:34 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, and for me it's not even so much because I'm locked into the ecosystem, because that's the only thing. You don't use Macs. No, I don't use Macs. I only recently started using the watch like not not for very long and honestly I don't use much of the integrated functionality on the watch either.
01:12:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In that case, so you need step dog. You know it's a little doggy.
01:12:58 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, no it's just uh, I I got somebody was at like jailbreak their iPhone Like they had not, was way back in like the GD timeframe, and a friend of mine from work was like hey, I got T-Mobile, but I want to make this iPhone work on it. Can you fix that?
01:13:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for me Singular only in the early days, yeah, yeah.
01:13:18 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
And they said, if you fix that for me, like oh, I have an original iPhone, I'll give you that, wow. And so I just got one for free and was like oh, okay, and at the time I was on Windows Mobile, whatever you know on like a HTC, something or another. Right, I think I had the HTC flip keyboard style thing You're not going to like this.
01:13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A in the box. First generation iPhone in the shrink wrap sold for 190 000 dollars yeah last year yeah, this one.
01:13:51
This one was not brand new in box oh, okay, all right, so you didn't lose anything, okay, yeah it was his older one that he had, you know, paid whatever the ridiculous price was I was going to canada to do a call for help in canada and I brought amber macarthur I jailbroke original iphone for because you couldn't use it in canada and I jailbroke it and brought it up to her and said you can use it. She never used it. She didn't trust me.
01:14:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think she didn't trust me honestly she's like yeah, leo that's probably one of the best things about it, about apple and the iphone was that they they really sort of broke up the carrier domination over the smartphone. That was like what I thought was really brilliant that they forced the carriers to let them do updates directly. Now that's a common thing, because it used to be so frustrating how bad carriers held back innovation. They were the worst.
01:14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were the worst. We forget that. Yeah, they would push. Both Google and Apple would push updates and the carriers would just say no, because it cost them. They didn't want to waste the bandwidth.
01:14:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, the other thing that they helped break up. Along with John. They helped break up the you were paying basically about $2,800 for an $800 phone. If you let yourself live in contract life, If you didn't have the ability to just buy a phone and you were to hold it for two years, you'd be almost three grand into an $800 phone, and so they helped sort of break that up as well. And then I think the other thing which is really funny is the catalyst to the majority of this hassle right now has to deal with Epic and All of us OG gamers remember games that came out fully functional and you just played them and then companies like Epic and EA deliver betas that you have to pay in order to be good at For the 40 gigabyte download in the loot box.
01:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
01:15:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Right. So now you have to buy, you know, Smurf berries or whatever the currency is in that particular game.
01:16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I blame Apple for Smurf berries. I do.
01:16:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Was it WeFarm? I think WeFarm. No. No, what was the Zynga one? Not WeFarm?
01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where it was Rerule and there was.
01:16:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Farmville.
01:16:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Farmville there you go.
01:16:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That started it no-transcript.
01:16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want my donuts, but I think Apple created freemium, didn't they?
01:16:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I mean not intentionally, Companies created it because they realized they can make grip on it, even with Apple taking their percentage Right. And you remember that first keynote where they're like we've paid out over $5 billion to developers.
01:16:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which means we kept 30% of that Mm-hmm For some reason.
01:16:52
I'm blaming freemium on the iPhone. Why am I? I feel like there was a reason for the business model. It could have been the 30%. I felt like Apple encouraged free apps. Oh, I know why Because there was no demo right. On Android you could try it for a week, there would be demo versions, but on Apple there was no demo versions. So developers said we've got to get people using our apps without actually charging them $5.99 up front, and that really prompted. I don't think freemium would have taken off except for that. And at that point you're getting the app for free, you can play it for free and oh, by the way, you need Zynga berries. And it was a little easier.
01:17:43
In fact, apple got in a lot of trouble. Remember there was a parent whose kid was playing what one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish or something. And the kid kept going Mama, can I get some blue fish? I need more fish. And the mama would say, yeah, press the button. And she got like a 500 bill and she said what the hell? And they went and she that's when apple changed the in-app purchase deal and you had to get permit, parental permission to do that. So they tried, but I think as a result?
01:18:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
uh, I think freemium I think I would feel better if I felt they knew exactly what they wanted. I'm talking about the government here. If they knew exactly what they wanted, I would feel better. And if they just weren't so clueless about the simplest things and it's funny then they realize that the tech companies are doing all this and they're making the money right. And this has been going on for roughly 10 years that they've been complaining to the tech companies. You know what they haven't done in that entire time. Increase the educational spending for STEM programs. That would make more people in the country more tech savvy. They haven't done something like I'll give you a tax deduction if you go, take some basic cybersecurity classes and things so that you as a citizen are better aware, so you don't become a victim of these things Like. There's so many things that they could do in order to make us catch back.
01:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that their responsibility, though, really?
01:19:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I would say no, except for having gone to school in Japan, and Japan does things like this Right. When their economy was trying to get back on track, one of the things they did was they incentivized learning to get back into the crafts, bringing back the handcrafts, bringing back the things that we all travel to Japan for. They incentivize holding together certain longstanding traditions. And yeah, so maybe it's not their responsibility, but if you want to get good quick, uh, how about make it instead of making us take, I don't know advanced stretching in mpe?
01:19:49
maybe make people learn more about computing, I don't know I think you could do both more you can do both as well, I agree, and I think we need more p and let's throw some music and art in as well. Let's do it were just talking about home ec. Like we had home ec and we had to do the family planning thing where you carried around either the egg in some schools oh, I remember that the actual plastic baby in others. But then you know, the, let's say, religious zealot people of the US were like nope, you got to stop that. You're teaching kids to.
01:20:19 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
That's why they don't do that anymore. Yeah, how many kids do you have after?
01:20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
carrying around that egg None. It's great birth control, isn't it?
01:20:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
A hundred percent. I knew right away. That was my yo 12th grade. Nope, not your mans, I'm going to stay suited, not me not going down like that. I like cameras and computers and they're expensive, so therefore no bottles. Where did you go to school At that particular time in Rockville, Maryland?
01:20:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you have driver's training?
01:20:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, with a simulator.
01:20:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, wow, pretty fancy. We had driver's training in an automobile on Highway 1. That's from Santa Cruz, on a two-lane road where you had to. They said, okay, now there's four of us in the car, all he has on his side is a brake pedal, not a steering wheel, just brake pedal. He says, okay, leo, pass, that's the first time in a car and he wants me on a two-lane, full speed highway pass. I did it, but, but that was the most terrifying experience. However, they took that we don't have driver's training anymore in California. No, you have to go to a private school if you want to do that, or a parent has to teach the kid.
01:21:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know what made us learn to drive good? The simulator and Ralph Nader films. They showed off Ralph Nader films. Well, they did bring us this?
01:21:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They did. The Highway Patrol has a famous film, which is basically a bunch of mangled cars and bodies that they show you. I remember that true too.
01:21:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, I was terrified to drink a soda and drive because of the coke driving videos they used to show us. I'm like what if the caffeine makes my hands shaky? I was. I was horrible when I first started.
01:22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're old timers now, doc. So this week the EU did push also their digital markets act, that kind of the other shoe dropped. They are now probing and it's never fun to be probed Apple, meta and alphabet. To be probed Apple, meta and Alphabet. The first full investigations under the Digital Markets Act found guilty of noncompliance. Companies could face fines as much as 10% of revenue. Global revenue, that's billions of dollars.
01:22:37
The commission said it was concerned that Apple and Alphabet had imposed restrictions and limitations that constrained developers' ability to promote other services, that's the App Store. You can't mention, for instance, if you're Amazon that oh, by the way, you could buy this book on the Amazon website, let alone on the app. It added it was looking at services, including Google Shopping and Google Flights, over whether Google was giving preference to its own companies and its search results. That's an old complaint, which I think is not. That's not the problem with Google really. There's other problems with Google, but I don't think promoting Google Shopping does it even exist anymore. The commission is looking at whether Apple was meeting its obligations to allow users to easily uninstall any software applications. Yeah, they've gotten better with that.
01:23:31 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Those are the inbox apps.
01:23:32 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
Yeah, but most of those are going to do that too.
01:23:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I think they're pretty good now so. I think the bigger thing is the store stuff.
01:23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's the store. Yeah, I think they're pretty good now. So I think the bigger thing is the store stuff. I think it's the store, yeah, but they do mention Apple's restrictions on changing default settings, browsers and search engines.
01:23:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes, now Apple doesn't— Because they stick until you reset the phone. You reboot the phone Right. They allow you to do it, but only temporarily, yeah, and then for certain things it won't—like if you switch the keyboard on an iPhone, 90% of the time it works Right, but then, like on certain forms, it goes back to the Apple and they don't trust it. You know it's pretty weird. I gave up.
01:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just using Apple's keyboard because it always works Right. Yeah, oh, it's a bug, is that it? The commission opened proceedings against Meta over whether the group's new oh, this is something Meta introduced in the EU Pay or consent. So Meta said OK, since you won't let us spy on our users, collect data for advertising, we'll offer an option you could either consent to being uh, you know, giving up information to advertisers or pay us money for the subscription.
01:24:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But the eu said man, we don't think that's exactly, uh, exactly what we meant that's a weird complaint, that one, just because I mean I understand where they're coming from. They're saying you know a subscription fee. But this goes back to the origins of the internet, the problem where everybody decided to give everything away for free.
01:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not free. It's not free for these companies. It costs them a lot of money and yeah, we, yeah.
01:25:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I mean, they knew that they were going to have to make money.
01:25:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They knew they were going to have to make money at some point, but they certainly conditioned us to expecting it to be for free.
01:25:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Right, this is a deep conversation for us right now, leo, because, as you know, in my place of business there is a Facebook developer put out a situation, maybe like mid-February, that says on April 22nd, basically coming up, they're canceling all third-party API access to the ability to stream into groups. And of course, some muggles got a hold of it and freaked out because they do these massive like paid groups. Right, so say, you're in, you know Alan's SSD lovers group and he does webinars and seminars in there, and you know a lot of people make money through their products that they sell by running these seminars in their Facebook groups. Well, all of a sudden, they're like well, you're no longer going to be able to stream to your group with the third-party tool. You can still do it if you know how to write RTMP, you know key and URL, which is super simple.
01:26:09
But everyone's freaking out that Facebook is closing their business down and it's like but you know, to run video services is expensive and in order to allow you to distribute your program through your Facebook group to 200,000 users, there's a heavy cost to it. Oh, no, it's free. No, it's not. Facebook's paying it right now and the way they're covering that cost is stealing your data. But if they're going to be now told that they no longer can steal your data, especially since half of your users are in the EU, then this is why they're stopping it, and people can't understand that. So they immediately called us and they're blaming us. They're like, oh yeah, you can't you can't put out a whole blog post. No, we didn't.
01:26:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you have workarounds in the blog post. Katie, put a blog post up explaining how you can, what it means and how you can get around it. I wasn't even aware to daniel's point.
01:26:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
People don't understand that none of this is free. Even gmail is not free. Those servers if you ever had to buy your own server, you would know this. They don't come. That stuff is not cheap, right? Or the space oh look, I'm running out of.
01:27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, 200 gigs, 200 gig drives aren't free right, uh, and you know, in in katie's blog post on ecamm she said well, you can still use discord or zoom or you know the other places to do it, but how long are those going to be right?
01:27:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
right, uh eventually eventually if it's not costing you something.
01:27:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's your info and most people still can't grok that yeah, I think people do want it for free and they want privacy. It's kind of why I mean we've you know, I have a podcasts are also hit by this and you know, I would love to continue. We are free, ad supported free, and I and I would think that's a great way to do it. It's, it's democratic. Anybody can watch or listen that wants to and all we do is you know, and we don't spy on people. We can't.
01:28:04
Uh, because it's an rss feed, we don't know anything about you and that's kind of a problem because companies like spotify and others that get you to download their app to listen to the, the podcast, do know everything about you and so they offer to advertisers. They they say to advertisers, you know you could buy a podcast and just hope that your ads are working, or you could buy it on Spotify and we'll tell you exactly what you're buying and whether it's working and whether they heard it and whether they bought and so forth. And it's very hard to compete. It's hurt us. It's hurt us badly, it's hurt most independent podcasts very badly and it's making the idea of an RSS-based you know the traditional podcast medium shaky, a lot shakier.
01:28:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, you would have loved Kai Chook's talk about YouTube diffident to the podcast space, because I've been preaching this for two years, right, and I knew they were going to do it, because our friend Rene works over there and you know I was always just kind of guessing from listening to what he says. But the one thing you know about podcasts on YouTube, a stream or a view is an accurate measure, whereas downloads we had these automatically things landing into your podcast app. Some of us have four or five podcast apps on the same phone, right, so you can be getting five or six downloads to Alice podcast, but maybe I didn't listen to any of them, because I've been busy.
01:29:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't say that out loud. We don't want advertisers to know that I think they figured it out now.
01:29:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So that's so. Yo kai is like we're going to kick butt because our, our stats, our analytics are exactly correct.
01:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a podcast movement. You're talking about yeah, yeah, I question that I think youtube inflates the numbers dramatically.
01:29:44
I agree with you too I don't, and this is the problem with numbers, and podcasters did this to themselves too, because many podcasters would inflate their numbers in public. We never did, but they they would kind of lie, or as you say. But there was a lot of upset in the podcast world when Apple's podcasts stopped automatically downloading shows if you stopped listening to them, well, we're not going to. If you haven't listened in three weeks, we're not going to download any more shows, and that killed the numbers for so many podcasts. But my attitude is well, people weren't listening, so it should kill the numbers. It's okay, correct. You're telling an advertiser that there's a download, but it's not a listen. You're charging them for the download.
01:30:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The most brilliant person I've ever talked to about this. I can't believe I'm going to say this. Don't tell her I said this. The most brilliant person I've ever talked to about this is somebody named Lisa Laporte. She knows everything.
01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's where the rubber hits the road Right.
01:30:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh my god, my head was exploding with what she knows. Don't tell her. I said something that nice about her. She is brilliant. I was enthralled. She knows everything. We understand, though, because we're doing it.
01:30:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We understand what the hazards are. That's why, frankly, she decided to start the club two years ago. We needed to make up for the loss of advertising revenue because we can't and we don't want to track our listeners. We just really don't want to do that. The agencies want us to. By the way, I've mentioned this before.
01:31:17
Big agency came to us and said, okay, here, you got to add this tracking pixel to all your downloads, uh, and we said no, we lost a number of advertisers because of it, all the advertisers that they brought us. They said, well, we're not gonna buy your uh podcast. We said, sorry, but the thing is it wouldn't. It's. It's partly, you know, from integrity, but it's also partly because our audience is smart and they block those. And as soon as we put trackers in the downloads people, they can't download them because they're all running ad blockers and they're pie holes and they're and their stuff just blocks it. And then we get all these complaints well, I can't, your show won't download anymore. Well, yeah, so, uh, I honestly it's a. It's a tricky one, daniel.
01:32:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You have podcasts right on windows central yeah and um, we do just like everybody else, like certain ads, stuff like that. But uh, future as a company overall is not like bullish on podcasts at the moment.
01:32:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's sad. I mean it could be, it should be, but it's because it's it's for you promotional only because there's not a lot of revenue in it. And is it a good promotional vehicle?
01:32:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't know yeah, we do ours not as a business right, ours is just an extension and it we do it very unproduced let's just say that, which is fine, but yeah, but like a lot of podcasts go into like real production they do like preparation, a lot of research, you know, and so they become this like sub business, you know, and then it becomes harder to support. So it's like some people view it as, yeah, some, some people do it one way, some people do the other way. In fact, it's like, at least for us, like, as cool as windows is, it's just not worth it. Really not as no. In fact, it's like at least for us, like, as cool as Windows is, it's just not worth it. Apparently not. It's no murder mystery, right.
01:33:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like we don't get the same audience, but to me that's problematic. That's what happened in blogging and it was sad. Blogging basically bisected into a very small number of blogs like Windows Central that can make money, and then almost everybody else is either doing it out of fun, for fun, because they're not going to make any money out of it, or because it promotes a product, but but in a way that's too bad because you're losing voices that, whether it's in blogging or podcasting, that I think are great and people love. By the way, I just a stat I'm sure they talked about this podcast movement, I don't know if it was Edison 47% of Americans listen to podcasts at least once a month. 47%. That's what's weird. It's this growing industry, it's this growing medium, much more so than radio, but it's the same time where it's hard, very hard, for us to support ourselves. It's very, it's a weird situation yeah, you know what's cool.
01:34:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Um to today's point, though, one of the things I love the most about podcasting is, like daniel's podcast could be like slam poetry at the coffee shop, whereas, like you know, something on the Twitter network is, like you know, midsummer night's dream at the amphitheater in Sydney.
01:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you for that comparison, I think.
01:34:26 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But having that, having that duality to me is where the dope stuff is Right.
01:34:31
As a kid who has both just spit rhymes in front of the bodega on the corner, but I've also done it in front of a packed house at Neil Blaisdell Center with 10,000 people, wow, and they both feel good and they're two different. You know two different vibes Right, and I enjoy both. So I think I like I tell my students all the time I like the content where you just be you and you're not trying to be. You know, edward R Morrow, today I'm presenting the news like you know, edward R Murrow, today I'm presenting the news, like you know, somebody just needs to see somebody like you because I feel like you're ascertainable or we're on the same level, whereas sometimes when you're looking at you know something that's overly produced. You're always looking up and you feel like they might understand me but they don't necessarily get me. So I think there's space for both. But to leo's point, the industry is getting a little split by the haves that have nots at this point and hopefully there's a way to mellow that out I.
01:35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So to get back to the original point, it's reasonable for meta to say in the eu 14.99a month, and you can have meta, or you're gonna have to give us information so we can sell ads. It's either or that's the cost of doing business and I don't think that's an unreasonable thing. So I and you can have meta, or you're going to have to give us information so we can sell ads. It's either or that's the cost of doing business and I don't think that's an unreasonable thing. So I I agree with you.
01:35:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't think the eu is right on that particular thing we should wait with the stores, though, because I I run into that all the time. I'll be like on my kindle. I'll reading a sample which I love. Download the sample. Yeah but then it. Oh, I want to go buy this book. Nope, Hop on my phone because it's faster, yeah, oh sorry, you can't through our app.
01:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to go use a PC to just hit like one button and, by the way, we can't even tell you where you could go.
01:36:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
We can't even say anything about it, that thing about it.
01:36:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really draconian on Apple's part.
01:36:18 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's such a weird experience to do that.
01:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of podcasts, by the way, Google is shutting down its Google Podcasts next week.
01:36:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That was on purpose, that was, to get you to go to YouTube.
01:36:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the Google taketh away. Okay, that's to get See, but when I go to YouTube podcasts it's a little sensationalistic.
01:36:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know what I'm saying they know they have a long way to go, but one of the things they had to do in order to close the hole was merge the teams.
01:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like National Enquirer, but this is my problem with YouTube in general, which is that, in fact, it's hysterical. Mr Beast is saying stop shouting and talking fast and making loud noises, which was the method method, the path he had to success on youtube, but now everybody's copying him and he's saying no, no, we shouldn't do this anymore. Let's slow down and and be quiet. Yeah, right, um, youtube promotes sensationalism.
01:37:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, the hyper edit is the hyper edit is uh deleterious to kids and attention span. So now everybody's like let's back off a hyper edit. I'm like, bro, you started it Okay, we never did that, you started it Right and now it's gone crazy.
01:37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they call it the Mr Beastification.
01:37:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It is funny with the trends, though. Right there there is, as you know doc rock was talking about, like there is this trend now, I think, on youtube, where people are trying to go back to the more root, almost like a vlogging type approach, where you're not going to this overproduced, it'll never work because they won't the people who get all the hits are going to be.
01:37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The people are going oh, she's a cheater, you know? I mean it's, it's that. That's human nature. Right, that's human nature, so that you know, uh, youtube promotes basically, whether it's on video or their podcasts, this kind of sensationalism. And it's not youtube's fault, they're just doing. They're giving people what they want.
01:38:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, emotion I definitely hate versus content. You know, like, oh, apple verse, apple watch versus the galaxy watch. I don't like that because they both deserve to stand on their own and they have things that are cool. Not everything needs to be a competition, but that stuff rocks. I just opened up youtube right now and there's about five versus videos on the first page. Yeah, I hate that content I really hate it.
01:38:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I love, love the thumbnails. The thumbnails crack me up now. Everyone's like you know, like doing that.
01:38:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's not YouTube's. Is it YouTube's fault? I mean, is YouTube? Should YouTube say, oh no, we're going to not promote that stuff anymore, even though that's what you want?
01:38:54 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, I mean it goes into the next story, right, daniel Kahneman there? But the idea of behavior in economics and what people click on and what people view. The fact is it's like the algorithm is tuned to human behavior Right and so it's us. All YouTubers are doing is just like they're responding to that. There's that trend now that you do a thumbnail and then you wait a couple hours see how it does and if it doesn't work, you switch out the thumbnail to something else mr did that too, yeah yeah, well, I, I.
01:39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, let's talk about that. We're going to take a break and we'll come back. We'll talk a little bit more about uh kahneman, but we'll also talk about jonathan heights new book that says think of the children, that social media is creating a mental illness epidemic. Uh, which on the face of it seems reasonable, but maybe not in fact. But before we do that, I think we should talk about yuffie hi, where's my yuffie? Could you give me my yuffie?
01:39:53
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01:42:45
Eufy Video Lock on Amazon. I have to say I love our advertisers including, by the way, docrock, ecamm because they don't say oh, we're going to track you, we got a few. They just trust that we have a smart audience that knows what it's doing and when they hear about a good product, they're going to go for it. And boy, I'm very grateful that there are still advertisers like that that don't say, well, oh, hmm, the Eufy Video Lock, you're going to love it. You can install it yourself, very nice. Search for Eufy Video Lock on Amazon or go to eufycom Local security, no monthly fee. I love them. Thank you, eufy. Thank you very much for your support of this week in tech. I'll do the Daniel Kahneman first, but that'll lead us into this new book by Jonathan Haidt first, but that'll lead us into this new book by Jonathan Haidt. Kahneman, nobel Prize winner for economics, wrote the book Thinking Fast and Slow. Has anybody read it?
01:43:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes.
01:43:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good book, huh yes, fascinating I love all of his stuff.
01:43:53
Yeah, he's a Princeton professor. He was a psychologist, I think, but got a Nobel prize in economics in 2002, passed away this week at the age of 90. Uh, his, his greatest work still is, uh, thinking fast and slow, in which he kind of reveals something that, if you think about it, makes perfect sense that we have two thinking systems. He called them system one and two, but it's actually intuition and logic, right, and we think logic drives what we're doing. In fact, most of the time it's intuition or just a gut feel right, my emotional sense, and then we use logic to say, oh well, this is why I felt that way it usually starts.
01:44:39
But he also came up with all sorts of I love, uh, the idea of loss aversion. Uh, it's much worse to lose a hundred dollars than it is to gain a hundred dollars, which is why, uh, people who constantly watch their stock portfolio overdo the buying and selling, because the pain of losing outweighs the pleasure of of gaining, so they're kind of overweighting their losses. It's also, according to the new york times, why golfers have been found to putt better when going for par on a given hole than for a stroke gaining birdie. They try harder on a par putt because they want to avoid the bogey. Now I know I don't play golf, but that I I understand that in many other contexts.
01:45:30
There was a good uh discussion about this on hacker news, though, in which many people pointed out that a lot of kahneman's uh assert have actually not been replicated Let me see if I can find it, benito, before you show it have not been replicated in science, that he's quoting studies that are one-offs, basically, and I think that's kind of part of the problem of a lot of this kind of stuff is it plays to your intuition, but it doesn't really hold up in terms of logic, which is kind of interesting. My friend, cory doctorow, calls this just so stories and includes malcolm gladwell uh, in this group of people who tell stories that make a lot of sense, like the um, the cracked window problem in cities, right, if?
01:46:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
you fix the little things and it reduces crime.
01:46:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's no statistical evidence to support that, and this is the problem, I think.
01:46:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, there's definitely a fine line between what he's saying and being able to replicate studies, but also this idea of like decision making and you know I do err on the side of the fact that humans are really bad at decision making. I think that's actually.
01:46:47
This also gets. Yeah, yeah, and there are these biases in place. You know, I think last time I was here I was mentioning about Robert Sapolsky's new book, determined, which goes into this whole thing about free will, and he cites a lot of this kind of research, which is that you know, we think we're making these decisions, whether on economics or anything in our life, but it's all the moments leading up to this moment that's going to influence your decision. So this idea that you're really making a choice isn't there because it's based completely on your previous experiences. And you know, I think that type of research is super important.
01:47:20
And just in general economics you know, I started, I was a political science major in college but I did economics too and they called it the dismal science for a reason. It was completely abstracted away from human behavior. It was just mathematics and formulas and assumptions, but this idea of like the rational actor was just ridiculous. I think anyone who knew people realize people are not rational, like they don't make decisions. Oh, economic is really not thinking. Yeah, it's not Right. And everything from your hormones at that very moment to whether you just ate, uh like, affects decision-making. It's. There's so many variables in place that you know for economics. To completely ignore that was ridiculous. So I applaud the idea of like bringing this into behavioral sciences.
01:48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least makes it a little bit more tangible and these are wonderful books to read Freakonomics, fantastic story. Kahneman himself said the book would have been different had it been written later, for instance in particularly in Chapter four on priming. It turned out and economy acknowledged it later that uh, the implicit priming literature is not trustworthy and not based in empirical uh, research. And so read it, but, and it's fascinating and a lot of it will resound with truth. That's part of the problem, though that's more of the same where it feels true, so we believe it. It's kind of more of the same. So I agree, and the reason I bring this up is Jonathan Haidt's book, which, I'm sad to say, a lot of people are kind of quoting and supporting. I'm seeing a lot of conversation on Twitter about it and I think it's important to point out that it may not be all he says it is. They call it the great rewiring.
01:49:23
This is an article from Nature that came out this week. Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Jonathan Haidt says it is in his new book, the Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness, and it kind of makes sense to us that you know a generation raised staring at their phone on TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram is not interacting with the real world, and maybe that's why there are, you know, great increases in the suicide rate and mental health issues. This article in Nature says there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case. It's one of those things it sounds right and feels good but in fact is not the case.
01:50:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The article and oh my god, I love this article, I love this conversation it's because it's candace odgers writing.
01:50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll just let me just quote what she says then. Then she says uh, hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by height. Our efforts have produced a mix of no small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from healthy peers. These are not just our data or my opinion. Several meta-analyses and systematic reviews converge on the same message. An analysis, for instance, done in 72 countries, shows no consistent or measurable associations between well-being and the rollout of social media globally. Findings from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest long-term study of adolescent brain development in the US, found zero evidence of drastic changes associated with digital technology use. So, and the problem is, people are reading Height's book and legislators are proposing we ban TikTok or we, as is in Florida, require parental consent for people under 16 to use social media. They respond to it with laws.
01:51:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
What do you think it doesn? Do you think it doesn't work? It doesn't work. First of all, listen, I don't know about you, um, but I remember the red cup parties that I made so much money in high school throwing you mean those solo cups?
01:51:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, what's a red? Yeah?
01:51:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, okay. So we used to sell these solo cup at the locker room on friday for five bucks. Right, if you brought the solo cup to the barn, that on Friday for five bucks. Right, if you brought the solo cup to the barn that we were going to put this party in. That was your admission and that you could fill it up as many times you could. On the cakes right? None of us were old enough to drink. Nobody could go to the liquor store and buy liquor, but most kids in high school work at restaurants in order to make money. So what would happen? One of the kegs might end up in the back of the restaurant.
01:52:20
It might end up in the barn on a Friday where your mans was DJ. I'm just saying you lost. You can't stop kids from doing what they want to do. Let's start there. But the reason why this chaps mind is all the way back, when we first got printed books, it was like you can't read those because those are going to make your brain crazy. Right, because people who were getting educated was now able to argue back with the oppression, right? And then it went to magazines, and then it went to radio, and then it went to TV. And then it's video games, and then it's like well, color TV. And then it's like, well, let all of us hang out in the same room because we're from all different cultures. And now it's social media, listen, if anything, all of the positives of a, let's say, disambiguated education system far outweigh the less. But what we do know now is that we understand mental health a little better, which we didn't in the past, so it's always existed. It was just hidden in the various things. We didn't in the past, so it's always existed. It was just hidden in the various things. Now that we understand mental health better, we also have this situation where people are modeling symptoms that they don't necessarily have.
01:53:32
I have huge fights with people in my creator community about creator burnout. I was like bro, I never heard you once utter the word imposter syndrome or creator burnout, but because they got. Bro, I never heard you once utter the word imposter syndrome or creator burnout, but because they got popular in the last five years. Not everybody has it. I'm like Paula Rose Kranz wrote that paper eons ago and nobody knew about it and then Oprah brought it up one day and everybody has imposter syndrome all of a sudden's like watching the, the ad for um leotonian 2.0. Talk to your doctor and it may cause like shaky legs and um irritable bowels and I get every one of those.
01:54:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see those and I get, I got it I have it.
01:54:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You got all those things, dude.
01:54:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The irritable bowel is called taco bell homie, you do not need to talk to your doctor you don't have that problem.
01:54:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So I mean, jonathan Haidt is a polarizing character anyway, but I think it's so unfair to blame social media. What really is happening is, I have the ability to conversate with friends from all around the world and we have such deeper connections I've learned so much more about. You know where people are, the connections I mean, come on like I've. I met leo irl like over 15 years ago in petaluma and we still converse to this very day. You know it was a mack world somewhere at the chieftain knocking back drinks and you know, talking about the internet one day. And then I came to petaluma and like none of that wouldn't exist. I wouldn't know. You know what I'm saying.
01:55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wouldn't know.
01:55:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm sorry, these people need to. It's an excuse, because no one wants to take responsibility for the fact that they are not doing what they should be doing in order to foster beautiful relationships.
01:55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, and this is maybe more serious, the author says the other problem is by finding this, you know, culprit. Uh, we're ignoring some genuine things we can do. For instance, there's only one school psychologist in the U? S for every 1,119 students, um and and there are lots of things we could do to improve mental health for young people. Banning social is not only not going to do it.
01:55:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The first place is diet. We won't even talk about that one. Yeah, One of the first places we can cure not cure, but alleviate some mental health issues is diet. We are pumping people with things that causes their emotions to go all over the planet and we never talk about diet. We never talk about teachers and nobody wants to pay the actual health care which also might help. You know what I'm saying? Like during the performative years of your brain, a lot of kids are on low protein diets because they live in the food desert, but we won't talk about that. We want to blame. We want to blame.
01:56:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want to blame instagram she concludes her nature piece by saying unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need and deserve more. So uh, I you know and I agree. Uh, I think it's very easy to say. It's a point. You made a good point, je. Jeff Jarvis has made this too. When people started reading books, there was a grave concern that we would lose our imaginative ability because our nose would be buried in books, and people were worried that people reading books and newspapers on trains would no longer socialize with one another and it would have a horrible effect on our society. There's always a culprit.
01:57:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
There's always a culprit, there's always a moral panic and maybe social is not the big part, everybody who computers starts using SSDs then spinning hard drive makers will fail, and that's just horrible.
01:57:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, what about that? Alan Melvin Tana? Huh.
01:57:18 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Did you ever consider that If they got cheap enough, then yeah, why wouldn't they?
01:57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, we'll see. You know, I don't think TikTok is going to end up getting banned. We spent a long time talking about that a couple of weeks ago with Brianna Wu and Kathy Ellis fighting over that. Kathy's saying it's a free speech issue. The government has no right to ban it. Brianna said well, given my experience and you know, alan, maybe you can back this up with intelligence agencies and politics and government it is very clear that TikTok is actually a tool of the Chinese Communist Party and is problematic, to say the least, in its use and should be banned. I kind of agree with Kathy more than I agree with Brianna. Do you think, alan, that the Chinese are using TikTok against us?
01:58:13 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I wasn't doing that job when TikTok was around. However, you have some expertise. Yes, based on my own personal history, I would assume yes, but how? Probably how, I guess. Any way that they want is the problem, but what could they do? Just have access to all the databases, access to all the information, right, right to uh, influence the algorithms of which things are. Well, actually, hasn't that come out in some there? Was something into this and yeah, they can influence stuff.
01:58:50
Yeah, whether well no there was something about like if, uh, you could make the kids in other countries see less educational content bias than those in China, right? So anybody that's in China looking at TikTok, they should be warning. All of the educational things.
01:59:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
TikTok is banned in.
01:59:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
China. Ironically, they have their own version. Well, yeah.
01:59:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So right, but yeah, yeah there's. I mean, I think the fear is, I don't know if there's necessarily manipulation going on right now. There may be some, but I think the fear is that there could be a gradual turning up of the heat, slow boiling effect, where they steer youth towards, you know, countercultural ideas in the United States, for instance, yeah, and you just do that very suddenly, just start exposing people, because we know how impressionable youth are we were all that age. You know everybody wants to rebel against the system, which is why you're seeing this supposed to rise with communism and socialism amongst youth. Because it's just that's the immediate rebelling you do against the system, know much about it, necessarily, so they can I could, you know manipulate it that way.
02:00:00
I don't know if there's evidence for that, you know, I think they do run the risk. If that starts happening, that you know then there's even more calls to sort of block the app or take action against them. You know this is the whole idea of a free market, right, the idea is like eventually this stuff is scrutable and like you should be able to see what's happening with it. Um, I think it's a dangerous idea just because if you do ban it. It's not like China's going to be like all right, that's cool.
02:00:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We give up. Yeah, it's not like it's going to stop. Yeah, they're going to be like all right well we're just going to you know, take similar actions.
02:00:34
You can still buy information from data brokers in fact do just like the info. So it's the same thing. And Daniel's right, because I remember as a punk rock kid of, say, circa 82, 83, we were all about anarchy. And then I joined the military and I was like, oh yeah, anarchy's not a move, but at the time, listening to Dead Kennedys and rocking my black clothes, you couldn't tell me anarchy wasn't the move. Right, that's just because you're a kid and it seemed like fun and nobody can tell you what to do.
02:01:01 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I will say in defense of anarchism. Spanish Civil War. If you go look at Catalonia, it was actually the CNT-FAI. There's actually a pretty good anarcho-syndicalist movement. That's still and they're still around in Spain. They actually are still part of the union movement there. So technically it can work a a little bit. But I get your point still, which that is, the immediate rejection of all authority, and that's what you do when you're young, which is kind of what's funny. Now they're saying a lot of the youth are like becoming more puritanical for like sex and behavior and stuff as a rebelling against the adults who had a more open system.
02:01:38
So I don't know if that's true.
02:01:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We ruined it for everybody because we was trying to Never mind. This is a family issue.
02:01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dvorak used to always quote Winston Churchill, who said if you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative at 35, you have no brain. I'm not sure.
02:01:58 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I think I still don't have a brain. The potential issue with the whole tiktok thing is take the hypothetical uh, the us government chose to start its own social platform yeah, well, I wouldn't want to use that right, you know, even if it looks completely unbiased.
02:02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To be honest, completely, I'm much more afraid of my government than I am of china's government I live in the us there you go correct correct.
02:02:29 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
However, you really wouldn't want other countries, governments having some influence on our people. Right, like, that's a, that's potentially an issue, even if it was, even if it was something as benign as like, oh, this other government, they think that this issue is important to them. They're going to influence some results by just a couple percent in this other direction.
02:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're doing that already on Twitter. You're going to ban Twitter. They're doing it already on Facebook. They're really doing it on Twitter. Are you going to ban Twitter? Oh no, because it's an american company. It's okay and again.
02:02:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Go to your local high school. Look it up in. Every everybody do this. Ask them to have critical thinking classes in the high school.
02:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know talk about that like and then ask them if they sell red solo cups for five bucks, because I hear there's a party.
02:03:14 - Doc Rock (Guest)
it's 25 now, but yeah. But yeah, it's like we're missing the education side of it again. I think, yeah, you know part of what happened to the US and this is just me, I'm just guessing, I have no background is my anecdotal thoughts. We were top of the food chain for a while because we were very tight on like education, and then all of a sudden we got to top of the food chain. We started trying to bully our way to stay at the top and we ignored all the when.
02:03:40
Korea and Japan we're like we're going to give everybody internet, we're going to make it hella fast and we're going to make school important. We're going to change school to six days a week because we're no longer an agricultural country, so we need the extra education. So no more Saturdays, because you know your family runs a farm. We stopped that. They started going to school longer. We go to school 181 days a year. Japan the kids are out of school 42 days a year. The rest of the time they're in school. Right, like we missed all of those opportunities. And to this day, if you say we're going to bring school and it will take out crime, it will make everybody smarter, but we're going to make school six days a week. People would have a cow. They would absolutely have a cow. No, have a cow? They would absolutely have a cow?
02:04:19
no, because I'm just being quiet how my kids. You know what parents do on saturday turn the kids and go to room play video games while they get the dime off that they're sick of work like.
02:04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry. Let me read meredith whitaker's uh response to the anti-tiktok uh movement. She's the president of signal, the encrypted messaging system we were talking about. She says I'm not a neutral observer. I take a position in the outcry camp. I see no evidence that this bill will offer a meaningful privacy protection from China, the United States or anyone else, or liberate people from the mental buffeting of engagement-driven algorithms. What the bill would do is ensure that TikTok joins almost all the other widely used social media platforms on earth under us control. She's assuming the us would buy it, uh, enriching us, not chinese interests and further entrenching us social network dominance. Us owned social media platforms include the top four most widely used services in the world, with tiktok lagging far behind YouTube, instagram, facebook and WhatsApp. By the way, of those four, three are owned by Meta. 19 of the 20 most widely used social media platforms in the world are based either in the United States or China, making all other countries consumers, not developers, of these services. That's a good point too, anyway.
02:05:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't think the only issue is she doesn't have much of a solution, which she admits, but it's like, what do you do in this situation?
02:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But banning TikTok is not one of the solutions, by the way, right, exactly, steve Mnuchin has jumped in. The former secretary of the Treasury under the last administration said I'll buy TikTok, but, steve, you're not going to get the algorithm because the Chinese government won't let you have that. Oh, don't worry, we'll make our own, to widespread laughter. Oh, we can do that, that's easy. I don't know. It's not a problem at all. Let's take a break. Got still more to talk about. What a great, great panel. I love having you guys on. It's a old friend week. Uh, so nice to see alan malventano, former host of this week in computer hardware. He's now in charge of ssd technologies at fison and whenever I have a question about ssds, this is the guy I go to. He is the expert, so so nice to have you here. Thank you, alan.
02:06:40
And I love your collection of G-Jaws and Jim Cracks. Yeah, wow. Is that just for broadcast purposes, or is that your actual?
02:06:51 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
That's just the office, the background of the office. Actually, this is rare stuff back here. Optane wafers.
02:06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Optane. Whatever happened to Optane?
02:07:02 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Well, Intel spent about $7 billion too much on it.
02:07:05 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Sold it off? I believe yeah.
02:07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the Well.
02:07:07 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
it's not sold off, they just sunsetted it.
02:07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was memory that was so fast but it could be used as storage. It was a buffer memory almost.
02:07:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it was like a pre-buffer for SSDs almost. Yeah.
02:07:20 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
It was a buffer memory almost. Yeah, it was like a pre-buffer for SSDs almost HP used it in their laptops.
02:07:23 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
got a few of them. Why did it fail? I never noticed it.
02:07:26 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I worked on the SSD that you're talking about actually. Oh, did you? Yes, and the biggest pain in the butt was if you were putting it in a laptop, where it the places where Optane was a lot faster than NAND. The unfortunate thing was that if you just looked at its raw speed, it looked amazing. But if you put it actually in a system and you tried to use it well, the bottleneck would immediately shift to the CPU or other parts of the system. So you would get some performance gain, but it would almost immediately be kneecapped because now you have just firmly shifted that performance bottleneck elsewhere.
02:08:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Right, so it explains as you say, explains why you literally never notice the difference.
02:08:06 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Right, and there are some. There were some things that you could have done on that HP laptop that you probably would have noticed, but again, it was not everything. It was a subset of types of things that you would do where you know you would see most of that benefit. But yeah, I mean, they made it in all sorts of forms, right Was?
02:08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this, that Tri-X memory, that triple layer memory. That was the commercial name for it. It was Optane.
02:08:29 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
No, it was Crosspoint.
02:08:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Crosspoint. That's what I. How did that work out?
02:08:34 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
See, here's the really crazy thing, leo, back when you were doing screensavers I mean the original screensavers, not the new screensavers I'm sure there were several topics about the elusive phase change memory. It was like the flying car of memory and it was always over the horizon. Someone someday is going to crack it, someone's going to do it. Well, guess what that stuff actually is? Phase change memory until just never wanted to admit it. So it's like they did it. They actually did it, and then like, oh, but we don't want to call it that because of branding or whatever. I don't know.
02:09:07
Whatever the reason was, but one of the many reasons for its demise probably is they could have made much more, you know, fanfare over it than they did. But yeah, and part of the problem is it came out kind of too early for its time. Well, it came out. It's like this reverse Goldilocks thing right, if it had come out 30 years ago, everything would have it, it would be everywhere. Right, because operating systems would be booting directly from it, like architecturally things would have evolved differently if that type of memory was available.
02:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've gone too far down a different road, and so there was no we went too far down.
02:09:43 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, we went too far down that road, and in the meantime, cpus were just slow enough where, if you put this really crazy fast storage in a system, then you'd get what Daniel ran into, which was bottleneck shift elsewhere. You couldn't really take full advantage of it. It was, you know so, was the. It was the inverted goldilocks zone. Uh, if you will, it's really weird. And then it died, which is, which is really a shame, right, because it's not around and to and to be fair, I was gonna say pcie5 and eventually six it's.
02:10:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's absurdly fast like the amount of like they doubled the speeds between the generations. Like it's getting kind of insane now. So they made a lot of progress there.
02:10:24 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, and now working at Fison, I can say it's pretty dang tough to make an SSD that can saturate PC. You know, gen five, bandwidth Wow. Yeah. Right, that's especially in an M.2 form factor. Yeah, we're doing it.
02:10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have wow.
02:10:35 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah yeah, we have 14 gig per second M.2 SSDs. You better make sure there's at least a heat spreader on the thing, because you know it's a little warm doesn't it. It does consume some power yes.
02:10:48
You know the? But one of the things that we're actually proud of on that is that you only really need the factory heat spreader. You don't need like an active heat sink with a fan or heat pipes or any of the other craziness. We managed to get it to go full speed, but not needing crazy cooling, because that's actually bad for an SSD. If you run your NAND flash at room temperature and you forced it to be room temperature with a water block or something crazy like that if you wanted to be a really crazy overclocker type person, you actually cut the endurance of the SSD in half.
02:11:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No kidding.
02:11:28 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It wants to be warm. Well, when it's active, it wants to be warm because you're trying to force electrons to go on the other side of an insulative material. So the cooler it is, the harder it is for that to happen. Interesting, Right. So when it's active, when you're actively reading, writing, doing all the things to it, you want it to be on the warmer side, and it's actually designed and rated to operate that way.
02:11:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the optimal temperature?
02:11:51 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Well, if you want the perfect optimal temperature, you'd look at the JDAX spec, I think. For client SSDs I want to say it's like 40 C temperature. Wow, that's hot. Yeah, the expectation is that it's going to be warmer, you know, not room temperature when it's active. Now, when it's not active, you want it to be typically like room temperature, right?
02:12:12
In fact, the endurance rating or the retention rating per JDAG, which is okay now that you've stored the data, the endurance rating or the retention rating per jadek, which is okay now that you've stored the data, how long is it able to hold it? You know, guaranteed, or at least per the spec, guaranteed, and for client ssds, that's 52 weeks, and but that temperature is not 40 c, it's the lower temperature, it's like 25 or 30 c, right? So the expectation is, if you're gonna, if it's off, the computer's off, it should be able to hold it for a year, right? Um, but if you ran the system active and forced it to be cold, then you're just eating the NAND alive, right? You're just really beating it up in order to accomplish.
02:12:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So don't put your CPU cooler on your heat, on your RAM, on your SSD, on your SSD.
02:12:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, man Ali, I just want to say real fast inverted Goldilocks Zone is the name of my Kansas cover bed. Oh, okay.
02:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is all very interesting. So SSDs are not rated to store that memory more than a year.
02:13:17 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
That is the JADEC rating, which is the spec that the manufacturers are supposed to test to. But that one year rating is at the end of life. Okay, so that is. It is the worst case. You have exhausted all of the rights, you have done the drive rights per day for the entire warranty period and it's the very last day and then and then you turn the system off. It should hold that data for a year and be able to read you really don't want to take that ssd and then you turn the system off.
02:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It should hold that data for a year and be able to read you really don't want to take that ssd and put it in the closet wrapped in bubble wrap, expecting to see it again in five years, because it there's not gonna be anything there as well no see, here's the other thing.
02:13:52 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I have ssds on the shelf behind me. I even have like an x25m. Wow that I put data on back. Intel, yeah, yeah, the old intel drive, the first like client ssd intel made right yeah yeah, well, that was many years ago. That thing still reads its data, just fine oh, okay most of the.
02:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a few reasons for that it's not good archival storage, though right, I mean it's not preferred.
02:14:14 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
it's not intended to be archival storage, right, but it is possible to use an ssd for an archive type of thing. You don't have to assume that it would only hold it a year and that's it. It's just gone after that, especially if you've not exhausted all of its cycles. So if it's a brand new SSD and you use it as a backup drive, for example, and you only wrote once or twice to it, well, that SSD is going to hold it for much longer than a year. There's not necessarily any guaranteed specification around that, but since you haven't really worn it all out, chances are you can come back in five years. It's probably still there and still readable, just fine.
02:14:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this a landmark in computing, where the IO is actually now as fast as storage, or has it always been a seesaw?
02:14:59 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
battle back. You got to be careful. There's bandwidth and there's latency. The latency, you know, we keep increasing the bandwidth. We keep increasing PCIe. You know gen five, gen six, so yeah, you can move more bits in a straight line, but the thing that is the real limiting factor on SSDs that you run into in your regular computing experience is the latency. I've asked for one piece of information. How long did it take to look that up and give it to me?
02:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Regardless of how fast it actually transferred across the clock. I thought there was no latency in SSD. It's random access, right. I mean we'd have to wait for the drive to come around again.
02:15:34 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Correct. Yes, hard drives are in milliseconds, right, ssds are in microseconds, but they still add up. There's still some and it still does add up. You know, if you do a bunch of them in a row, right, many things that you do on your computer is read the little piece of information and then that information told me what to do with where to look for the next piece of information, right? So that results in a chain of events that will all those individual latencies will stack up on each other and that's what turns into the responsiveness of your system, like how snappy your system feels. Is that latency? And right now NAND latencies are on the order of 40 to 50 microseconds. That's pretty good.
02:16:14
The Optane stuff we were just talking about well, optane was like 7 to 10. Wow, but it was 7 to 10 in a point in time where most of the NAND was running at 80 to 100, so it was like 10 times faster. That was the number you kept saying, intel say, and they weren't lying when they said that either it's just that if you went much faster than 50, you were bottlenecking everywhere else in the system anyway, because this just the kernel didn't know what to do with. You know, in many cases the data was ready before the interrupt, like in a shorter time than the interrupt could even fire within the CPU. That's insane.
02:16:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What, what you got, some what what's going on?
02:16:53 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
What? And this is well, eventually architectures are going to need to change at a fundamental level, even within Windows, because eventually the NAND SSDs are going to become fast enough over. You know, give it enough a couple more years, right? Nand latencies are going to be so low that they will be on par with how long it takes Windows to service.
02:17:13
The interrupt and the whole interrupt thing was from hard drives, right, that's why it existed, right? You asked a hard drive for a piece of information. It's literally an eternity as far as the way you go. Yeah, yeah, right, so, so of course, the cpu is going to go off, do some other stuff and wait for an interrupt to occur which literally interrupts the cpu and is like okay, my data is ready, right, but if the interrupt takes like 10 microseconds to handle, but and the ssd is ready, is it like can complete within 10 microseconds to handle and the SSD is ready, can complete within 10 microseconds, why are you going to divert your attention to something else only to have to immediately turn back around and figure out what to do with the data? Right, you might as well just wait, because it's going to be ready more quickly than it would take to interrupt yourself later.
02:17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much of this gets changed by what Apple's doing with unified memory?
02:18:07 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
For storage, not much. Well, see, they're so integrated, they know exactly how long the memory will take. Right, because they are effectively a closed, vertical, vertically integrated ecosystem. Right, so they're able to tune specifically for that. You can't do the same thing on a Windows system, because the SSD, the storage, could be any speed, even if you limit it to SSDs. The SSD latency could be within a certain range that you couldn't make an assumption about. Even for Linux, there are tunable parameters where you can go in and say I wish you to do what's called hybrid polling, which is where, instead of waiting on an interrupt, it will say well, I know this SSD takes about this long, so I'm going to go off and do something else. But then, after a few microseconds before I expect to be ready, I will come back and start asking it if it's there yet, almost like a kid in the back of a car on a road trip. We're there, right. This is, it's really we've come.
02:19:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have reached an amazing point in this technology. It's just mind boggling what's going on. Are there new architectures out there for this. You know, yeah, cxl, cxl, okay.
02:19:19 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yep CXL is a different unified or a different memory architecture it's taking quite a long time to catch on.
02:19:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think people will build cxl hardware well, I mean is ai, is the demand of ai driving any of this? I mean, oh, yeah, yeah, definitely you look at what right with this, the new processor.
02:19:43 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Listen. I work at a storage company. I was on the floor at GTC with a product to show.
02:19:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh really, At the NVIDIA conference.
02:19:51 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Nice, at the NVIDIA conference, at the NVIDIA AI-focused conference, not GDC, which is more the gaming one, but GTC. Gaming conference yeah, gtc yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, which is more of the technology one. Right, we have a thing. We kind of soft-launched it at CES but didn't officially say anything about it, and then we did the legitimate launch, even showed a system running the thing real-time at GTC.
02:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I always assumed that building these models was CPU or NPU bound, not storage bound. But I guess you have these large data sets that's going to end up being RAM or storage bound at some point.
02:20:28 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yes.
02:20:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Go ahead.
02:20:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Daniel.
02:20:31 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was going to say, yeah, micron is like really big in this area. This is where they make all the server side memory stacks that are needed for AI and it's really driving the competition. They're kind of ahead of Samsung, I believe, right now too, for this stuff.
02:20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it DDR5, or is it?
02:20:49 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
DDR. I think that's a part of it. Hb, was it? Hbm3x is the new one. High bandwidth memory, yeah.
02:20:59 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
And there are ways to do it on a smaller scale without needing high bandwidth memory, which is actually the product we launched. Since we happen to make a bunch of MNAT2 SSDs we figured well, why the heck wouldn't we figure out some way to apply this to AI? In this case, it's fine tuning. So, yes, leo, what you said earlier was correct. Usually you want training and, in the case of our example, fine tuning, which is where you take the existing model that was trained with an enormous amount of GPUs somewhere in a meta data center or elsewhere. Right, you could take that and then apply your own specific data set and sort of I don't want to call it retrain, but the technical term is called fine tuning which is where you take your data and you sort of intermingle it with the existing trained model, right, and the idea is that you want to be able to ask the AI about things you know. You want it to have context of your own stuff, and so in order to do that, you have to do this fine tuning pass. Well, usually you would need to have enough GPU memory to hold the whole thing, or at least, in order to do this fine-tuning efficiently, you would need to be able to do that.
02:22:04
So our product takes some SSDs that we make. We run them in pure SLC mode. Usually a client M.2 SSD does like a half to one drive write per day rating as far as how much you can write to it within its lifetime. These SSDs are 100 drive rights per day. So you can beat the crap out of these SSDs with writes and they are very good for caching.
02:22:27
But what we'll do is we'll take the model. We'll sort of break it up into smaller chunks for the GPUs to nibble on, if you will, and we use the SSD as a background cache for all of that larger set of data that needs to pass through all the GPUs during the fine-tuning, and then it effectively keeps. Because of the speed of our SSDs, it effectively keeps a fewer number of GPUs busy 100% of the time. Oh, interesting, wow, so you can do this fine-tuning and not need to rent space on Amazon or in some cases, people like in the education sector or even HIPAA for medical people that are not allowed to take their data set and send it out of their building, right, they want to be able to do it locally. They also don't want to spend $1.5 million on a rack full of very expensive GPUs. Exactly right. So as long as you're willing to wait longer, you can do this same operation on a workstation size system with our solution.
02:23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like, which, to me, is one of the benchmarks of whether a technology is real and has legs. It sounds like, just as gaming for a long time drew, drove the GPU and CPU mark CPU market and Windows market, that AI is starting to drive a hardware market and that tells me something.
02:23:46 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Oh yeah yeah. If you want to see the system, the article I dropped in the end of the show notes there that's Tom's Harder article covering our system. We partner with MainGear. They built an incredible-looking, really nice workstation.
02:24:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, MainGear's been making a lot of attention. We got a lot of press releases from them. They're doing a lot of cool stuff with AI and making it accessible to people at home.
02:24:09 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
They built us a workstation. I think it's the second picture in the article, Leo.
02:24:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a quad 6,000 data workstation Jeez. Yeah, 70 billion parameters. Holy cow, how much, just out of curiosity, would such a device cost?
02:24:26 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I think that particular build is somewhere upwards of 50 to 60K.
02:24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not bad.
02:24:30 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, you have to realize the GPUs, I think, are more than half of the cost of that system.
02:24:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
02:24:37 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It's four of NVIDIA's top GPUs. That's right. That's right, it's four of NVIDIA's top GPUs. Yeah, it's four.
02:24:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
RTS6000s, Cut any corners and get the Amazon Basics adapter to connect it to the HDMI though.
02:24:49 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah that's the problem, as long as Apple's not selling it.
02:24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's crazy.
02:24:52 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This stuff is going to be super important, because what's going to really happen now is you know everybody talks about LLMs. A lot of them are hosted, of course, on the cloud, and you know we have things like what microsoft is using, but what's going to be the important thing is local llms that companies will use, whether it's a law firm, it's technical industries companies, us in the long run, us, yeah, right, yep, uh, because you can feed your own internal info on device yeah, I don't want to give my precious knowledge that I've collected over 67 years of life to open AI on their server.
02:25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to do it on device and I think that that's very exciting. Plus, I think honestly that I don't want Google or Microsoft or anybody to own this. I think open source is very important, so I think the idea of running this stuff locally, being able to run it locally is extremely important, and I want to rebuild the parts that I used up with those red cup parties in the 80s. You're going to have to put your brain in the machine. Can you do that? Are you willing to do that?
02:25:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm down, down.
02:26:00 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Yeah, so in our case, you have different size models that are available, and so, just to give the very simplified version of why the size of an AI model matters is, it's almost as if you had this lossy compression algorithm that you could apply to a whole set of data, right? So when you train an ai model, the number of parameters in the model is effectively like how big its brain is yeah, like how many billions?
02:26:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
like the standard right yeah well, 70 billions it's.
02:26:30 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
It's pretty large. It's something that you can't actually fine-tune on those four gpus without our solution, right like you need our solution and have a fast ssds and everything to be able to do that, just with that GPU memory. If you wanted to fine tune the model, usually you'd be limited to 7 billion. So we can 10x the model size. Yeah, that's what I, you know, when I do this at home with Lama or Mistral.
02:26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
these are 7 billion token sets. Right, right and yeah.
02:26:55 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
otherwise you'd need a terabyte of RAM, or more Exactly yeah, now, granted, that workstation does have half a terabyte of RAM in it and it does need to use a decent chunk of it when it's doing the fine-tuning of a $70 billion model. That's fascinating, but the key is that it needs a lot more than a half a terabyte of total cached data in order to be able to pass all of it through the GPUs to do the fine-tuning. It's more like a terabyte and a half.
02:27:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, so it's 1.4.
02:27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
VRAM spread across 24 AI GPUs spread across six servers in a server rack. Right, exactly. Or get yourself one of these Fison devices, this main gear pro AI device, you could do it at home. That's the idea. And, by the way, there's another economic reason why this might be pushed down locally is it's very expensive for companies like Microsoft and Google to run these on the server.
02:27:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And that's why you're seeing. I meanrosoft is pushing hybrid uh ai models for this reason because it's it's going to slow innovation if it's all cloud-based right. And now that's why you're seeing. You know npus are such a big deal in pcs because the npu is what's going to allow this localized processing. Intel, just this week in taipei, was announcing its next step and its developer tools. That came out with a, a mini pc basically with an NPU built into it for developers so that they can build these apps that will leverage the NPU. But like, that's where it's going to be, because you will see way more innovation on that end, with software developers making AI actually accessible through their apps directly. That'll cut down on latency, cuts down on privacy, cuts down on costs. All that comes with having a localized AI model through their apps directly. That'll cut down on latency, cuts down on privacy, cuts down on costs. You know all that comes, you know, with having a localized.
02:28:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI model. Let's take a little break because I do want to talk a little bit. Microsoft this week talked a lot about the so-called AI PC. They announced the new Surface 10 and so forth. I'd love to get your take on that, daniel, in just a bit. Daniel Rubino is here from Windows Central. He's editor-in-chief, doc Rock, in the purpleness of his grotto. He's our Easter bunny for this week. Great to have you. Youtubecom, slash docrock and Alan Malventano, who might be in a submarine right now. I don't know. There's a picture over there. Do they have screen doors in submarines? No, no, okay, just checking Our show today brought to you by NetSuite the less your business spends on operations, multiple systems and delivering your product or service, well, you know what that means More margin for you, more money you keep.
02:29:37
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Do the math. See how you'll profit with NetSuite Now slash twit. Netsuitecom slash twit now through april 15th. That means you only have a couple of weeks if you're listening live, maybe less if you're, if you've downloaded the show to check out this one-of-a-kind flexible financing program at netsuitecom slash tw. We thank him so much for supporting the show. So is that just a marketing term? Ai PCs or really is there something there? Microsoft's really oh, there's something to it. There's a copilot key on the damn thing.
02:31:13 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No, I think. For instance, we just got word of Asus. No, Acer, sorry has a new laptop coming out with an older AMD processor and it has the copilot key. It's a $350 laptop, which is great. Is that an AI PC? No, that's a PC with AI. So that's the distinction there all right, all right yeah all right, should, I should I buy a surface 10.
02:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do I, if I want to play with ai? Is that what I need?
02:31:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, so an ai pc by definition will be something that has a modern chipset that has an npu on it. The npu is really the oh that's okay.
02:31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a macintosh that that has an npu on it, technically true. My iphone has an mpu on it.
02:31:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This is actually kind of catch-up for microsoft, really yeah, and so you know, intel has theirs on the the core ultra chip, amd has theirs now on the ryzen 7 and 8 series, I believe, and of course, qualcomm is about to announce its um, you know, snapdragon x elite platform. Well, they already announced it, but it's gonna be coming out real soon and what you're going to see now is this sort of race, just like with GPUs, between, like NVIDIA and AMD oh, interesting In terms of performance. So I expect Qualcomm to have the fastest performing NPU, followed by AMD and then Intel. Even though Intel is making the most noise here and has the most reach in the PC, theirs will probably be the slowest, but you're going to see these shift up to different sizes over the coming years and capabilities. But that's going to be sort of the new battleground. And as far as when customers will and consumers will see a difference in use of this technology, that's where, like Intel just announced with its developer tools, openvino and everything in this hardware, you should I would say in six months you're already starting to see it with enterprise. Until now, it's back at World Congress.
02:33:02
There are companies, like one company I forgot the name of them now, but they're using anti-phishing software via the NPU and AI. So instead of it going to the cloud, like an antivirus system would, it's using its own heuristics locally using the NPU and then it can use that data to update other data files in the cloud for other systems. So you're going to see like a lot of that kind of technology come out and I think that's super critical. Phishing is such one of the biggest security risks right now for enterprise and business. You also just see it integrate into just a bunch of apps, whether it's photo editing, video editing, all this kind of stuff. You're already seeing it.
02:33:42
Of course, Microsoft's putting in all their services. The big thing you'll see this fall is with Windows 11. Microsoft is putting AI throughout the operating system to enhance its search abilities. Like, finally, search will be good on Windows, it'll be contextual based instead of using keywords and it'll be able to search across your devices and different systems.
02:34:03
So you're going to start to see this AI kind of just weave throughout the system and instead of being like a centralized, you know assistant, it's going to be just all these little parts. That said, something like Copilot itself is a front end. You know, I know a lot of people associate Copilot Microsoft with OpenAI, which is true, but the actual back end of Copilot can be configured with basically any kind of AI system they want to put in place there, including those provided by PC and laptop makers, who can put their own in there, as well as other companies who can integrate into Copilot itself. So you just have like one centralized AI system in the PC. It's going to be a really interesting thing for the next year, I think, to see where all this goes.
02:34:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you a believer? I mean, I was a little skeptical for some time. It really felt like we were kind of on the hype cycle with this and maybe it was overhyped. We've certainly had AI winters before, but I'm starting to see so much interesting stuff happening with AI I'm starting to think maybe there's some, maybe this thing has some legs. What's your, what's your point of view?
02:35:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think this is if it's, if this is a bubble or just a fad. I've never seen the PC industry pivot so fast and hard towards a new technology.
02:35:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but they needed something to drive sales right. There's been no reason to buy a new PC and it's killed the market effectively.
02:35:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, although that cycle is going to take place in 2025 anyway, just because that's the usual upgrade cycle for enterprise due to the big burst in 2020.
02:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody bought a bunch in COVID, and now we're going to wait five years until we get the new ones. Yeah.
02:35:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But, that said, enterprise and business like there is so much interest and possibility with AI, a lot of it, too, still needs to be defined. I wouldn't look at this as the early days of the internet, where sure we would get onto the web. You know, the web was new back before. There was ftp, there was gopher and all these and then it was like email and then the web came out, but no one was anticipating like google maps and pinder and like all these other services that have come out since. So that's kind of where we are right now.
02:36:08
Where there are, there are definitely some dedicated use cases that are going to be. You'll see a lot in enterprise and business and then some in consumer, but a lot of it will still be defined by developers over the next coming years as they get their hands on the hardware, developer tools and kind of where the industry goes. But yeah, I see this as oh you know, you can even start to question the ui and ux of computers in general about how we're going to be using these things right, because there could be so many changes in how smart these systems get and they've really advanced, I think, faster than most people anticipated in the last two years.
02:36:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's really cool. The analogy of the Internet is interesting because I think this is the case probably with most new technologies, but certainly with the Internet. When we first encountered it, we saw it through the lens of our own expertise. So you know, people worked in radio thought, oh, it's a new way to do radio.
02:37:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
People worked in publications.
02:37:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's a new way to print our magazine or our, our, uh, our newspaper. We, we very much just used it to do what we'd already been doing. The same thing happened, by the way jeff jarvis tells me, when, when gutenberg invented the printing press, they just took the scribes out of the scriptorium, the monks writing the bibles, and printed them. They printed bibles, that's all they did. Yeah, but it takes a little while, and then new uses for technology emerge. It feels to me like that's happening faster with ai than it took a hundred years for the print and printing press to be used for something besides Bibles. And that's by the way. When novels were invented, when plays were invented, it was a real transformation. The Internet it took maybe a decade. Let's see Google, gmail is 20 years old. The Internet itself is almost exactly 30 years old. So it took about a decade. Ai ain't going to take a decade. It feels like.
02:37:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Because it's the first one that can improve itself.
02:38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI has no preconceived notions about what it could be doing, right?
02:38:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
None of the other technologies could self-improve To a certain extent. I mean there's still a lot of human input and a lot of retraining, but I mean mean it can train itself at night, you know, as we're submitting our errors and our feedback and doing all this other stuff.
02:38:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's just progressively getting better once we get to the singularity, it's going to be bye, bye, I hope. Have fun, I'll see you later.
02:38:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I think the biggest challenge is is honestly getting over the fud, the fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I think there's a lot honestly getting over the FUD the fear, uncertainty and doubt and I think the medical stuff you know is really being helpful and helping. You know crunch numbers really, really quickly. I think in some of those situations where people can see pure positive outcomes not, you know, a writer strike or just some of the dumb images that people create with AI I just saw one the other day which was super stupid and they're like, oh, this tank in this country is bringing all of these soldiers in and they're going to do something. I was like, bro, the helmet is completely wrong. The thing that's sitting on top is wrong. The way the military helmet was cut was wrong. Like it's so easy to tell that that was a fake image, but you know everybody was sharing it and all you had to do was look at the text on the bottom of the trailer because none of the text was actual words.
02:39:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you always know when it's AI these days, because we're very well tuned to notice the uncanny valley. But I think some of that is a misuse of AI. It's saying, oh, we'll just use AI to take over from artists or writers. Maybe that's not what AI is going to end up being great at, dan.
02:39:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I think there'll be. Yeah, I mean, there'll be some of that. I think there is. You know, like I was just talking about that, there's a lot of fear right now. I think the big thing is consumer education. People just associate AI right now with chatbots and generating images, right, but that's literally the tip, like yeah, that's not where this stuff is going to go Once it's starting to be integrated in all sorts of systems. This is where Microsoft is getting a lot of credit, especially from, you know, investors, because they've so quickly integrated AI into all their products. It's been kind of absurd. It's brilliant.
02:40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're now a $3 trillion company, all of a sudden right.
02:40:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The one that I want to see happen more than other, purely selfishly, is the real-time human translation as a minor omni-glide.
02:40:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's practically there when we were in Mexico there was a. Japanese gentleman who didn't speak any spanish. The the. The hotel staff didn't speak any japanese. They were talking through the phone back and forth to call me.
02:40:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I could do both I know you can I know you they needed.
02:40:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They needed a doc, but they have the doc program, you see, and so that's what I mean.
02:40:55 - Doc Rock (Guest)
leo, there was a. She was from Latvia and she had this little device which is kind of common in Asia. The name begins with a P, but it was really small and it wasn't the jinky fake one. This was a new thing, kind of cool, and she was trying to explain to the guy and the words were right, but the problem in this particular case was a technology gap.
02:41:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not idiomatic.
02:41:17 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
It wasn't a language gap, it was a technology gap Right.
02:41:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
And because, me, having been an ex-genius and understanding the technology, I was like I speak Japanese and your English is good enough. What are you trying to say? And I was like, oh, the reason why you're seeing your thing can't do that is you're asking for the wrong thing. And so I just translated to the guy. She was the wrong thing. And so I just translated to the guy. She was basically trying to find the right lens to get that good background compression when you do photos. But background compression has a lot of different meaning in a lot of different contexts and the translator thing couldn't pick up.
02:41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She was speaking in the photography context so is this, it the pocket talk, could do that. This is 300 pocket talk, pocket talk this is $300. Pocket talk. That's exactly it. Very interesting, that thing is good, that thing is really good. Not good enough for kind of a technical conversation.
02:42:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Because, the context switching is the one thing that fails all translation programs Right, especially when you deal with a place like Japan, which is a high context society versus a low context. Never mind, that's a complicated conversation, but yeah it, it didn't understand that gap, but it's getting there we're making leapfrog progress in that, though that's such a training issue. It's not even the language I want. I want that when I say something to Karen, if she says something to me, we know what we're talking about.
02:42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It will cause less problems oh, you want a male to female translator. That's going to cost a lot. I wasn't going to say it that much.
02:42:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's how you get in trouble. I just mean, like any domestic partner situation, if you can unscrew domestic partner situations, then, yeah, what she's trying to tell you is you're a doofus.
02:42:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, exactly.
02:42:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
We need AI as the middle person to balance arguments, you know and weigh in on the matter.
02:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I honestly have gone from being an AI skeptic, thinking it was really just a parlor trick, to, as I deepened my use of it and understanding of it and actually used it more, realizing that this is a breakthrough, I think, and it's going to be pretty amazing and maybe a little bit weird in the next five to 10 years.
02:43:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And I think the internet makes a great comparison to that Cause I was on the web in 1994, you know, but like I was in high school and no one else was right, like it was, it was weird to talk about like all the things you can do, but I was like, do you know how much like potential this has for knowledge?
02:43:43
and people said yeah, yeah right yeah, and it's like I know I'm biased because of like microsoft and copilot, but like I pay for the their premium version because I use it all the time, but because I'm an inquisitive person, I'm always researching, asking questions and the ability for it to summarize go out there, get the data, summarize it for me, give me the main talking points without me looking at 20 tabs of data and going through like it just saves so much more time and it's just. Yeah. There's the accuracy kind of issue, but I honestly haven't run into much of that. So I and plus that's just going to get better over time. So, um, but the rate at which this is improving, I think it's just gonna be interesting.
02:44:23
Like I said, this next year is gonna be a critical year and it's gonna be a critical year, I think, for pc, just because arm, you know, qualcomm's new chip now is gonna be something actually competitive against apple. You have the stuff, you have the refresh cycle. It's a perfect storm of all this new technology that's coming around. That's going to really sort of, I think, change the way we work, the way we behave.
02:44:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How important is Windows on ARM for all this?
02:44:49 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah. So I mean, I think it's pretty crucial, right, because the whole battery life and performance metric is so key now and they have an NPU right, because the whole battery life and performance metric is so key now.
02:44:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they have an NPU right.
02:44:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes, oh yeah, they have a very powerful NPU. Actually, like I think it's the most powerful. It's double-edged sword, though right, I think Apple's facing this situation. I've never seen so many MacBooks on sale. It has to do with the previous generations, the M2s and the M1s, which are still around. The fact is, if you have an m1 and you're pretty normal average user like 80 of their users. You're fine. There's no need to upgrade to an m3. It's almost too good of a device now.
02:45:24
so, like you're seeing a lot of these uh m1s and m2s now discounted um, but a lot of people aren't going for the m3s either. So it's like that's why apple's and I almost feel for Apple, they're in a really weird pinch where MacBook sales are lagging. They're getting hammered by the EU. Now the Department of Justice, the iPhone has issues in China, like they're kind of getting hammered Like there's just had to cancel their car.
02:45:52
And what do they do with all that staff? Put them on AI, because they're behind on that too. And what did it do with all that staff? Put them on AI, because they're behind on that too. So it's like they're really sort of in a weird kind of position right now where they're just kind of getting hammered from all sides. And then you have, of course, vision Pro, which, by the way, did you ever buy one? No, of course not.
02:46:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You got one, Doc. Yeah, I love mine. When's the last time you wore it? Right before I left to go on a plane and I seriously thought about taking it. The one thing that I didn't take it for is I knew there was such a short flight and I was just packing light to move. But my next flight, which is in like two weeks, I'm actually going to bring it, and I just got introduced to a smaller bag inside of the belkin one.
02:46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think honestly looking at it and I'm a real vision pro skeptic so consider the source, but looking at how people are using it, it's really mostly for watching movies. That's pretty much it.
02:46:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Everything else is kind of gimmicky. It's just mostly for watching movies. But I tell you what this is a funny situation because I was during that transition. This is a funny situation because I was doing that transition when I first went to. Okay, leo and I, we both grew up in the Chuck Taylor era, right, basically, sneakers for school, for gym, were Chuck Taylor's 10 bucks hard as a rock, completely bad for your ankles.
02:47:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I don't. I don't know. I had kids. Same thing.
02:47:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Same shape, though Same shape right, even the Maypops. They were flat. There's no EVA, it was real vulcanized Goodyear rubs. But being a kid that graduated in 84, when the Waffle Soul came out and the art support and all that stuff, I literally remember my speed increasing in track. I held a couple of state records in track. I held a couple state records in track, no kidding. So the technology at the time it was just fashion. But then you know people that bought into it. Our school got into BR and you know guys started wearing tights and track in order to, you know, slimline legs and keep them warm before you run, and the speeds immediately increased. Warm before you run, and the speed is immediately increased. I think that it's just that that early part is just that difference between going from Chuck Taylor's to like Nike and what was it called Reebok and one other wasn't Adidas, yet it was Nike Reebok. I see kids wearing shoes today.
02:48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They look like they got marshmallows on their feet.
02:48:14 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Those are dumb, those are so dumb, like reality, though they look like they got marshmallows on their feet. Those are dumb. Those are so dumb, but like reality. Athletics changed in about 84, when shoe technology actually started making people actually better at sports and better supporting various sports Like we were.
02:48:29
I remember my first coach said never run or play basketball in these running shoes. And I was like why these shoes are designed to go forward. They have no ability to go sideways. If you play in these, you're going to bust an ankle. And we were poor, we didn't think no better of it and so many people would roll their ankles trying to play basketball in Nike Cortez. And then it all started to make sense and they started building purpose-driven shoes and everybody got better at the game. So I think that is in that weird infliction point right now, where it's so brand new that nobody knows what to do with it really. But it will catch on. And I think the other thing is you can't help because of its shape. But to compare it to other headsets, it's not even in the same ballpark.
02:49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is kids today in high school wearing moon boots. Those things are so dumb.
02:49:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's how I view vision pro, vision pro with the Moon boots, those things are so dumb.
02:49:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right I want to say go ahead, Alan Was that you no. I got nothing. I just don't keep.
02:49:29 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I just keep picturing Doc on the airplane on his next flight. Just you know, doing this in the in the there is an airline that will not, well, you wear the I think it was.
02:49:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Air france won't let you wear a vision pro because they say you're not paying attention to safety regulations.
02:49:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just saw an article. Yeah, I know. Oh god see, this is how, when government is trying to do stuff they don't know I think it was the pilot, it was- france yeah, it was air france.
02:49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was a pilot that said no, we don't, but the pilot gets to do what they want. Let me see here's Air France's. It doesn't have a specific Vision Pro prohibition, but here is the Vision Pro not allowed on a flight in air France.
02:50:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I tell you two things I do with it. The most of it probably crack you up. I use it a lot for editing Um, just because of making the gigantic screen. So I have final cut open. I got the gigantic screen right there, my MacBook's in front, and it's just really incredible to edit on a hundred something inch virtual screen. The second thing I do with it, I would say, is mental health related. I got the DJ app open. I retired from DJing like maybe five years ago, but I would sit there and just rock out for like an hour and a half.
02:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're happy with your $3,500. It was worth it.
02:50:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Absolutely, because I tell you what I would spend it on Japanese whiskey anyway best kind of whiskey.
02:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I don't know, I would maybe want. Can you do both?
02:51:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
is the question, I guess yeah now we just figure out how to do something else with it has anyone tried the X-Real Airs?
02:51:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
no, they're the $300 to $600 glasses. They have the Pros, which are just coming out now, that actually do have AR capabilities, but these are like, if you just want to watch a movie or do computational work, ooh look, these are just for $350. You put them on Type-C plugs into your iPhone, android, pc, xbox, whatever you want, and the quality of them are good. Now, it's not, of course, vision Pro. Good, right, those are 4K, these aren't, but they are micro OLED and they're actually way better than I would think.
02:51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are they?
02:51:49 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
AR or are they VR? Can you see through them so you can see? So it goes to different stages the airs you can just see through, and then they have a clip-on thing that goes on to black them out. Then they have the next step up, which has photochromatic. So you touch a button and they'll dim them and dim again until it's blacked out. And then they have the pros, which actually have AR. They actually have cameras on them or RGB-type sensors, I believe, that can actually detect your hands and do actual AR.
02:52:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So those are just coming out now for developers and these look like regular spectacles. This is what I want. Yeah, this is so much better than a. I don't know how the quality is, but the idea it's actually the quality is pretty darn good.
02:52:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I'm telling you oh yeah, I got a pair. We all do it with Nocentral because they're good for plugging into an ROG Ally or Steam Deck, because you throw them on and now you have an equivalent 100 foot display.
02:52:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, see, that's the negative. As far as I'm concerned about the Steam Deck, it's too small a screen for the PC gaming I want to do.
02:52:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
What's so funny about this is Sony made this years ago. I remember in our store back in like 2002, we used to sell a Sony, like you put it, like Geordie LaForge, and it was basically a Vega for your face and honestly, I think that's why I like the Apple Vision Pro so much is because I had that Sony one, because it was part of our kit for the store.
02:53:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I just I think that Vision Pro's tech is amazing. I just think a lot of it.
02:53:21
You should, you should really try them. I'm curious about your opinion on them, because when they're on a flight, you just want to watch movies. Like I said, they're not nowhere as good as Vision Pro because those are 4K but, being micro OLED, the field of view of these, the quality, the brightness, they're 500 nits it's way better than I thought it would be. Um, it's really impressive and they're kind of a really cool company. The founder and ceo actually came out of magic leap, um, from that company.
02:53:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting is that, but it's not the same technology no, but it's their technology.
02:53:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Um, they actually design them and manufacture them, so they're not even like outsourcing this, although I imagine some of the OLED lenses are going to be a little bit outsourced. I believe Samsung might make them, but the audio is good on them and they're just cool. I don't know, they're very practical I would say See, I could be really hip.
02:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Instead of having a Vision Pro, I could have a $700 X-Real AR2 Ultra. I did buy some smart glasses which are supposed to come in a couple of weeks. But I forgot what the company was.
02:54:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I bought the Ray-Ban ones because of FSA and then they sold out and they're not coming back, so I think FSA changed their mind on everybody getting Ray-Bans.
02:54:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They got way popular they did surprisingly, they did.
02:54:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike elgin was trying to get me to buy those. All right, I want to take a little break. We have a fabulous little movie we made of all the fun things that happened this week on twitter, and then we're going to wrap it up watch cyber news headline was m series maxeries Macs Can Leak Secrets Due to Inherent Vulnerability.
02:54:58 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
The only thing that's inherently vulnerable here is the credibility of the tech press's coverage of this Holy cow. It really has been quite over the top.
02:55:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Previously on TWIT Security, Now it's not a vulnerability in Apple Silicon.
02:55:14 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
By the time we're done, everyone is going to understand exactly what happened, why it happened, how it happened, and you could go to a cocktail party and really put your friends to sleep.
02:55:27 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
This is the Untitled Linux Show. This week we're talking about AMD's FSR going open source, redis tightening the noose. Linux has arrived with malware and more.
02:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want to miss it. Windows Weekly.
02:55:40 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
We are eagerly awaiting the first Qualcomm X Elite-based PCs. The headline that games will run fine on ARM seems not to make sense. It doesn't seem believable. But what they're saying, Qualcomm, is that the performance of the GPU is not an issue. Mac break weekly.
02:55:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Department of Justice.
02:56:00 - WOT Promo (Announcement)
they're going after Apple, I would argue that Apple built Apple Pay the way it did because it wanted complete control so it could launch that product in a market that had resisted contactless payment for ages. The problem is that they never, ever, ever ever opened it up to third parties to compete with Apple in other ways and, like if you're at the DOJ, you might argue it's an original sin.
02:56:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Twit for justice.
02:56:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh hi, it was a great week on Twitter and next week is going to be really interesting. On the next week's show we're going to have a live studio audience. I'm very excited about this. Yeah, we haven't done that since the COVID days. Remember that, the pandemic. We had to wear masks. It's like five years ago it feels like.
02:57:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I know what the hell it is. It was four years ago. Isn't it crazy how fast it was.
02:57:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Four years ago yeah, so if you are in the club, I think we're sold out, but you could find out more. April 8th and April 21st Live studio audience. It'll be so fun. I think we're going to have mostly a live panel. I know Micah Sargent will be joining us, amanda Silberling will join us next week, Abrar Alhiti in three weeks and we're going to have some other people in the studio. It'll be a lot of fun. We're going to break out the Fezzes. Just a correction it's Lisa Schmeiser tomorrow.
02:57:30
Oh, it's Schmeiser tomorrow next week. Sorry that was.
02:57:33 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's what set me up. Benito set me up and told me I had to be in the live audience. You can fly in from hawaii. I just I just flew home yesterday, oh man oh, I'm bummed yeah, you were at the podcast movement, was that?
02:57:46
good is there, is there hope at all for podcasting oh man, the industry is booming right now. It's actually pretty good. I think the thing that scares everybody is the big dudes came in and the big dudes kind of like overplayed their hand a little bit. Now they're trying to figure it out, but there's some really good stuff out right now, really Okay. Yeah, amy Sedaris is the bomb. I love her. Oh my God, she's great. She was so good. You have to listen to Dr Sheila. It is hilarious and she is very good.
02:58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe really the problem is not so much that advertising is gone, it's just that people don't want to hear us anymore. They've got better choices and we're just going to have to fold up our tent.
02:58:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But maybe I would not say better choices, but definitely more choices.
02:58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
More entertaining.
02:58:33 - Doc Rock (Guest)
A lot of the conversation is around what you're doing, so you're doing the right thing and this is what tell my YouTube credit. Yes, membership is better because I know exactly what I'm getting and you know I can. I can, I'm paying for it.
02:58:46
I don't have to worry about somebody else paying for it and then changing their mind and all of a sudden my coverage is gone. Right, you know. You know how many don't remember Chuck. I thought Chuck was a great show I actually love that show and they couldn't get renewed for a season and then we all had a cow and we were like Subway. You were the main sponsor for that show and because of you, nbc is not going to renew Chuck. So you know what we're not going to eat a five dollar footlong, you jerks.
02:59:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
NBC was like hey, levi, yeah, come on through, we need you that saved chuck. You're unwilling to see the five dollar foot long that was the nerds saved chuck.
02:59:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Now, had chuck been a show that was a membership based thing, it probably still be running because it was. It was pretty good and all the nerds loved it, because anybody who ever worked in computer retail you knew exactly what he was going through, minus the superhero stuff, because it was very real. So I know that at the time I was at CompuSA we all loved that show because it was really.
02:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never seen it. I've literally never. I don't think I've ever even heard of it.
02:59:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, it was great it was on NBC and the nerds basically saved that show. So I think membership is the move. Computer nerd.
02:59:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chuck is forced to his birthday party. His old roommate has spy stuff Sends Chuck an email that changes him forever. The CIA sends agents to find him and he has his first date in years. And that's just in the pilot.
03:00:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, like if Alan and I were friends back in the day, we could have lived that out in real life. I would have been the nerd working at the store. Friends back in the day we could have lived that out in real life.
03:00:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would have been the nerd working at the store. He was, I think, alan was.
03:00:21 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I think alan is chuck. It was kind of perfect, but yeah.
03:00:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So, leo, you're doing the right thing, and this is what a lot of the conversation was at the time was be in control of your own situation, and not necessarily jumping into these big networks and running your membership, because your people, your people will support you and you just have to grow it from there I think it's a harder play.
03:00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's true, it's a much harder play. But I think being independent has some advantages and I think we have a job to do as uh ai starts to take over. Technology is changing quite rapidly all of a sudden. Uh, we have a really important job to do to let people know what's going on and help them understand it and help them be real about it, as opposed to buying the hype. Anyway, that's why we ask people to help us out by joining the club.
03:01:06
We keep the price low $7 a month. Get rid of all the ads. It's ad-free for all the shows. You also get video for shows that are currently only audio, like Hands on Macintosh, Hands on Windows, the Untitled Linux Show, Micah's iOS Today All of those Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks are now public, but audio only. If you want the video, join the club. You also get the TwitPlus feed, which has all the weird stuff that happens before every show and after them and events. Like we did an inside twit this week that was for club members to give them an insight on what's going on inside twit. All of that for $7 a month. There are family plans, there are corporate plans and if you want to pay more, you certainly can. We wouldn't stop you. But it sure helps. If we can get everybody to join, I think we'd have a future. I think we might be able to continue doing what we're doing. If we don't, we might not twittv slash club twit if you are not yet a member. Thank you, Doc.
03:02:11 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Rock for supporting what we're doing. And if you're in the club and you have a storage question and you're at me, I might answer it. Are you in the club?
03:02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alan's in the club and you have a storage question and you ask me I might answer it. You're in the club, alan's in the club, see, see, we try to actually and I would extend this to you, doc, and also to you, daniel, if you want a complimentary membership, we'll be glad to send you one. Just ask, benito, I'm in.
03:02:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, I'm in Good, good, good.
03:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because that's one of the things I like about the club is a chance to have a conversation in our Discord with all of the people who are on the shows. The conversation is not just about the shows, by the way. While I was on vacation, I was getting some very valuable help from the good coders in our club on my advent of code problems.
03:02:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know it's funny you mention all this because with the um, with Google and that's all of its changes it does with the search algorithms, the big focus lately has been back on community, that those are the sites and groups that are starting to better favor with Google, um, where things are kind of going as specialty sites, things with community involved. That's where the experts are, and so it's it's actually good to have all that kind of stuff still.
03:03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree, well, and we have an important job and we and can I be honest, the real reason I just you guys are my buddies and I really want to keep doing this. I love it. I love getting people together like you guys and talking about stuff that matters and learning man and I learned today from you, alan Malventano, clx and HBM and NPUs oh my.
03:03:43 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
Thank you, you almost got any of those acronyms, correct.
03:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not CLX. What is it?
03:03:50 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
CXL, cxl, hbm, hbm. Never mind, forget about it, did I learn?
03:03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
anything? No, letbm, never mind, forget about it. Did I learn anything?
03:03:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No, let me tell you something.
03:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did I enjoy it? Yes, absolutely. Alan, you're the best Phison. Did I say that? Right? That's correct. Phison SSD technologies. If you're ready to build your ultimate AI workstation, you're going to get a Phison for sure, Right?
03:04:18 - Allyn Malventano (Guest)
I mean partially, through our partners.
03:04:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you it's always great to see you. You really, I love your knowledge and it's so nice to hear from you. Uh, thank you so much. Thank you Also, doc rock. Speaking of knowledge not just knowledge about technology, but knowledge about life you are the guy. Thank you, I really. It's always a pleasure. I know you're going to be talking to Lisa tomorrow. We thank you and Ecamm for supporting the shows we really appreciate it and for coming on. Always great to have you, Is that it?
03:04:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, you know it was great because when the conversation came up, I was like Katie, you know what we should just call Lisa, let's go on Twitter. And Katie's like I'm down with that. And then I knew that those two would hit it off and Lisa's the best. And Katie and Lisa just like made instant friends. I'm like I told you she's super cool. The Leo dude's a little weird, but Lisa's cool.
03:05:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they don't let me on the calls gotta ask you is that a koa?
03:05:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
is that a koa paddle over your left shoulder there, do you? Yes, yes, it is a koa paddle and it is. Uh. Yeah, I didn't make it though, it was a gift, but yeah, I mostly use it in case anybody comes in here and tries to test my cyber security we, we bought one.
03:05:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we were in hana and we bought a koop paddle and brought it back and it hangs on the wall. And it's how I know our subwoofers are working, because when Tom Cruise flies over in a jet, it shakes, it vibrates, it goes. Thank you, that's super funny. Thank you, doc Rock. Great to have you on. I really appreciate it.
03:05:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I appreciate you Mahalo, mahalo, mahalo.
03:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And thank you to Daniel Rubino, windows Central Editor-in-Chief. Anything you want to plug.
03:06:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Daniel, while you're here? Nah, yeah, you never. We do the podcast.
03:06:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always try to get you to take advantage of this here, I know.
03:06:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Okay, well, we have our podcast. I'll just say it's going to be a very exciting summer. It is the context is going to be massive this year. Yeah, very exciting summer it is. It's going to be massive this year. Yeah, it's going to be a lot going on and I think it's a lot of exciting technology. So pay attention to Windows Central.
03:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you said something really interesting, which is 2025 is going to be the next big year for PCs. This is the time you're going to start to see those new technologies emerge. The Qualcomm chips are coming out this summer, the Elites, I think. Windows on ARM is going to take off. This is the place to go to follow that. All the gaming, all the Surface stuff, windows Central.
03:06:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, handheld gaming is growing quite a lot. We expect Microsoft to enter that space, maybe the next year.
03:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I heard that rumor. You think that's genuine?
03:06:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh yeah, phil Spencer loves, because, I mean, since he runs the division and he loves handheld gaming, he has all the handhelds out there, but he also knows the problem, which is Windows, and so he wants to bridge that gap between Xbox and PC and he sees handheld gaming as the vector to do that.
03:07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it would run the Xbox OS.
03:07:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It would run something akin to that or some way that they can make it so that there's less friction right now and that you can get cross saves. Yeah, no-transcript. It's an exciting time. It's gonna be great. Yep, yeah, arm, you're going to see a lot of oems.
03:07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, jump into that for the first time, yeah, so it's gonna be kind of fun good, you know I, I run uh windows on my mac, on my m3, and it's it runs beautifully. Windows and arm runs beautifully on it. In emulation they needed chrome yeah they need.
03:08:01 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Now they've got chrome.
03:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was now chrome yep, chrome on arm is uh, google announced it. We didn't cover that, but yeah, that's huge. Thank you, daniel, alan, doc, thanks to all of you who joined us. We do this show Sundays, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us do it live. We return to the live stream on YouTube only, though.
03:08:23
So go to youtubecom slash twit when the show begins. You'll get a notification if you click that bell there and subscribe, and you can watch the whole thing live. You know kind of spoils the Monday commute, though. I think maybe better to subscribe and download it. You can download it from the website, twittv, or subscribe on your favorite podcast client, and that way you'll have it. As soon as we've done cleaning it up, you'll have it ready for your Monday morning commute. Join the club and you can download the ad free version, which saves about four hours of the total time. Uh, no, it doesn't, but how long were the ads? Maybe 10 minutes today. So you save a little, you save a little bit. Uh, what else? Um, I think that's about it. Next week, a live studio audience should be interesting, and in two weeks we are going to celebrate the 19th anniversary of this show hard to believe, ending our 20th year doing this show. Isn't that amazing?
03:09:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
the twit can almost drink, isn't that nuts?
03:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it can, all it can vote. Uh yeah, thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next time. And then, and as I've said for the last 19 years, another twit is in the can Bye-bye. This is amazing.
