Intelligent Machines 859 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.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff and Paris are here. Yay! Paris is back and we have an amazing guest. Jeff Atwood is the creator of Stack Exchange. He created Discourse, the forum software we use, and now he wants to give universal income to people in poor counties around the country. What does Jeff Atwood think about everything? Coming up next on Intelligent Machines.
Jeff Jarvis [00:00:27]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is TWiT. This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 859, recorded Wednesday, February 25th, 2026. What's behind the fox? It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover AI, robotics, and all the smart little doodads surrounding us in every part of our lives. It is time for me to welcome back to our microphones The person we missed the most last week, Paris Martineau. How are you feeling? You feeling well?
Paris Martineau [00:01:06]:
I'm feeling great. I'm ostensibly healthy. I'm snowed in, but my stress levels are rising because this pre-show has been a whirlwind. And this is why you need to get in Club Twit, because you need to see what just happened here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:21]:
I can't wait to get to our guests.
Jeff Atwood [00:01:22]:
You invite me on, understand what you're asking for. I mean, I'm a giant fucking Joel's ass.
Leo Laporte [00:01:28]:
You know, he might, you know. Okay, let me introduce my other partner in crime here, Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalism emeritus at the City University of New York with his—
Jeff Atwood [00:01:37]:
he's all right. Daredevil.
Leo Laporte [00:01:38]:
Yes, he is. Journalism's—
Jeff Atwood [00:01:40]:
I mean, journalism, the law, that's the thing.
Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
He was— yes, that's right. He is now at, uh, an adjunct something or other at Montclair State University in beautiful New Jersey and, uh, SUNY Stony Brook in beautiful New York.
Jeff Jarvis [00:01:53]:
I haven't got a way of going—
Jeff Atwood [00:01:55]:
new respect for lawyers.
Leo Laporte [00:01:56]:
Yes, he's a professor. Our guest, ladies and gentlemen, is a bundle of energy, and I am thrilled to get him on, the wonderful, legendary Jeff Atwood. Blogger, his famous blog Coding Horror is one of the very best coding blogs out there. Founder of Stack Overflow, that should tell you something. And he's the founder also of Discourse, which is the forum software we've been using for about 10 years. And adore. It's the best. And it's great to welcome you, Jeff Atwood, to Intelligent Machines.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:31]:
Thank you. And what took you so long to invite me?
Leo Laporte [00:02:33]:
I don't know. I've had your partner on before, Joel Spolsky.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:37]:
We should get you both on. Joel didn't invite me on like I'm inviting him on.
Leo Laporte [00:02:40]:
Shocking. You know, you remind me a little of Andy Hertzfeld. You have Andy Hertzfeld's energy.
Jeff Atwood [00:02:45]:
Interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:02:46]:
Do you know Andy?
Jeff Atwood [00:02:47]:
I don't.
Leo Laporte [00:02:48]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [00:02:48]:
Is that a compliment or an insult?
Leo Laporte [00:02:50]:
Oh no, it's an absolute compliment. He was, of course, one of the legendary creators of the Macintosh back in the—
Jeff Atwood [00:02:56]:
You know who I do know is Bill Budge. Pinball instruction set. I got it up here from Seattle.
Leo Laporte [00:03:01]:
No kidding.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:01]:
The name of our company is Civilized Discourse Construction Kit.
Leo Laporte [00:03:07]:
Comes from Bill?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:08]:
Inspired by the construction set series. And can I be a prop comic and grab things?
Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
Yeah, get, get some props. Everybody's looking at your props. Might as well get 'em.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:19]:
Look at all this stuff. Off-brand computer things. This thing's playing Minesweeper. And it has a seat. It's an off-brand Lego. You build like a desktop PC.
Leo Laporte [00:03:27]:
You know, it looks like a Game Boy. Oh, what is that down there?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:30]:
This is like a model of those computers old people used to use that kids build for fun. It has Minesweeper. It's Windows like 95.
Leo Laporte [00:03:37]:
It's a PC Junior in it.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:39]:
No, no, it's a classic beige PC.
Leo Laporte [00:03:42]:
Oh my.
Jeff Atwood [00:03:43]:
Made out of off-brand Lego. And then I'll show you this one's— this is more of a gaming rig. They don't sell this one anymore, but look how sweet this rig would be. Look at this. Video card, GPU, it's got it all.
Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
Oh my, what the hell? Is it made out of Lego too?
Jeff Atwood [00:03:59]:
Well, it's an off-brand Pantasy. It's like, let's just make up letters. That's her name. I mean, that's fine.
Leo Laporte [00:04:10]:
You will, you will lose your pants when you play our games on the Pantasy.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:15]:
Yeah, it says Pantasy. But I can provide it for show notes. That one is really fun. I sent it to a friend I'm working with on RGMI, who is also one of the early people at Stack Overflow. And we're just having the time of our lives, like revisiting this fun we had building Stack Overflow, because when you work with me, it's like mandatory fun because I think so. Why bother?
Leo Laporte [00:04:37]:
So here I am. I've been using Discourse as our forums at twit.community for years. It's the Discourse construction set or something like that. I had no idea it was based on the pinball construction set that Bill Budgerigar— Oh no, I've sent him off on another tangent.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:53]:
No, no, I got it all, and I want to show you some more because these are—
Leo Laporte [00:04:56]:
thank goodness he's on a wireless headset, he can get around.
Jeff Atwood [00:04:59]:
By the way, Bill Budge still has this, this glove, and this— you're gonna crack up. Bill is such a sweetheart, and he works so hard on the JavaScript engine at Chrome.
Leo Laporte [00:05:09]:
I didn't know he did a lot of JavaScript engine at Chrome. Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:12]:
And he said to me, Jeff, you've changed my life. And I'm like, you were my idol. I was playing your games. It's also funny, he doesn't actually like video games. He just likes building construction stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:05:24]:
He's a coder.
Jeff Jarvis [00:05:25]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:25]:
He's very pure. He's a wonderful man. He still lives at the same house. If you get that old software, that's his home address.
Leo Laporte [00:05:32]:
Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:33]:
He lives there.
Leo Laporte [00:05:34]:
Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:34]:
He's so grounded. I love him.
Leo Laporte [00:05:36]:
Apple II, Apple II Plus.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:37]:
What an honor.
Leo Laporte [00:05:38]:
Oh, there it is. Oh, pinball.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:41]:
I love— well, I have a pinball.
Leo Laporte [00:05:42]:
That was the best. That was— he did Raster Blaster too, which was awesome.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:45]:
There's a local place in Alameda that has a good pinball. Place you want to go.
Leo Laporte [00:05:48]:
He's got a little ball in a box trapped. It will never live its full life because you've trapped it in that plastic box.
Jeff Atwood [00:05:55]:
And check it out. Look who's a big fan of coding horror. Bill freaking Butch, one of the best coders.
Leo Laporte [00:06:02]:
That is pretty cool.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:03]:
And that thing Carmack said about me was, I think Stack Overflow has added billions of dollars to the world productivity. And I read that in Carl Sagan's voice. Billions and billions of dollars. I was like so stunned. It was an incredible compliment to live up to. Um, there's a few others that were in the series and it was like, we'll make them rock stars. Uh, racing destruction set.
Leo Laporte [00:06:28]:
Oh wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:29]:
Not as good as the other one.
Leo Laporte [00:06:30]:
If you make a construction kit, you should make a destruction set, I think. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:33]:
There was one racing destruction set.
Leo Laporte [00:06:35]:
Yes, I saw it.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:06:36]:
Adventure construction set.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:38]:
That was fun. I remember playing, making some, and just for no particular reason, love Arkhan.
Leo Laporte [00:06:43]:
Arkhan! He did Arkhan? That was a great—
Jeff Atwood [00:06:46]:
no, no, this is Electronic Arts. It's like—
Leo Laporte [00:06:48]:
it's EA. Yeah, it was on the Atari. I had an Atari. I loved Archon. The pieces would come alive and they— it was kind of a chess-like game.
Jeff Atwood [00:06:55]:
Yeah, here's sort of the game as it looks.
Leo Laporte [00:06:57]:
Yeah, it was really—
Jeff Atwood [00:06:57]:
you would enter chess pieces and fight. It was like, uh, what is the game with the knight figure chess where they animate the characters?
Leo Laporte [00:07:04]:
Yeah, it was kind of like Star Wars.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:06]:
That was kind of boring. It's just— this is the, um, Commodore 64 version. What is it? Anyway, different set of artists.
Leo Laporte [00:07:14]:
And then we need a new Archon. Maybe, Jeff, you— do you code Code it all still? Music construction set.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:20]:
I'm very high language, very high level language called English. We're using it right now.
Leo Laporte [00:07:25]:
Yeah. It's the best coding language.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:26]:
That is how I changed the world.
Leo Laporte [00:07:27]:
It is very high level.
Jeff Atwood [00:07:28]:
Those words and also recruiting amazing people and unleashing them. So anyway, this was nice. I had it like a synthesizer to do this Apple IIc. And, uh, but that's the philosophy is like, it's like an instruction set for communities that don't rip themselves apart with drama and like the howling of wolves and it just doesn't degenerate because you standards like, look, you know, we're here to be kind of kind to each other and actually discuss the topics. And, you know, if you're going to attack something, attack the topic. And just, is your answer adding something to the conversation? Or are you just like, I'm so mad now someone is wrong on the internet. And that happens.
Leo Laporte [00:08:07]:
It's not just, it's not just the internet has become the world, hasn't it? Of this polarized anger.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:13]:
Well, I had people lecturing a mess on it. It's not polarized. I'm like, are you serious? Um, but yes, the polarization. Because first of all, we have a two-party system, the worst form of democracy.
Leo Laporte [00:08:24]:
It does kind of lend itself to how coalitions—
Jeff Jarvis [00:08:28]:
yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:29]:
And we can't amend the Constitution. Explain how, if you think that can happen. All the scholars are like, no, it comes down to interpretation. And guess who's in charge of interpretation? Sad trombone sound. You know who it is.
Leo Laporte [00:08:44]:
Congress.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:45]:
World's worst couples counselor, John Roberts.
Leo Laporte [00:08:49]:
Uh, let me get to, uh, because we only have half an hour with the wonderful Jeff Atwood, and there's so many things I want to ask you.
Jeff Atwood [00:08:55]:
No, no, you got more? You want more? Well, you want some of this?
Leo Laporte [00:08:58]:
We, we— Jeff Jarvis can only say, I love your reaction to all this.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:03]:
Like, what am I looking at? What is this person? You know, I get this a lot.
Leo Laporte [00:09:08]:
I—
Jeff Atwood [00:09:09]:
they're like, I've never met anyone like you.
Leo Laporte [00:09:11]:
Parents are friends with everyone.
Paris Martineau [00:09:13]:
No, I'm just I'm intrigued by you and Leo bouncing off each other. It's like a dark fractal Leo is how I would describe you. Not that you're dark in nature or tone. It's just you guys, I'm trying to understand the prism on which you guys exist because there's like a wavelength that is matching up here.
Jeff Jarvis [00:09:35]:
I think they're quarks.
Jeff Atwood [00:09:37]:
Leo actually cares about other human beings and he's got an open heart. I can see it in him. No, it's not as good as mine, but it's pretty good.
Leo Laporte [00:09:43]:
I'm actually kind of a misanthrope, believe it or not. I don't— but I do, you know what, I care about human beings in abstract. It's the individuals I'm not crazy about. But in abstract, I think humans are pretty great, pretty amazing, what the things we've done. So by the way, I was misinformed. It was the Supreme Court is who you were talking about, not Congress.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:02]:
Yeah, they're in charge of interpreting.
Leo Laporte [00:10:04]:
They're in charge of interpretation. Congress makes the law. Supreme Court breaks the law. I know that's wrong.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:10]:
I'm, you know, we'll see. I think that could be— anyway, enough, Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:10:15]:
Jeff, so, uh, to make this about AI, we will talk about Stack Exchange in a little bit because in, in some ways AI wouldn't exist without Stack Exchange, and in other ways AI decimated Stack Exchange. Fortunately, you had already sold it before it, before it decimated.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:30]:
Well, well, I think a drop— I don't think the correct statistics is being used.
Leo Laporte [00:10:35]:
Okay, uh, that the monthly question volume on Stack Exchange dropped 78% since ChatGPT.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:43]:
Do you know how many of those questions probably sucked? Most of them. So what I'm saying is, so no loss is what you're saying.
Leo Laporte [00:10:52]:
It was no loss.
Jeff Atwood [00:10:53]:
You optimize for pearls, not sand. Questions are everywhere and of all types. They'll never stop.
Leo Laporte [00:11:02]:
Every pearl starts with a grain of sand, but not every sand grain becomes a pearl.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:07]:
But what's the point of a question that nobody— it's so silly, Adam. It's the answerers that are doing the real work. And I don't mind this, but Joel always was not a fan of this, was like, they don't understand the relationship. It's like, we want to help you if you're willing to do the work to help yourself.
Leo Laporte [00:11:26]:
You have to ask the right question.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:28]:
Rubber duck, um, question asking where before you ask, here, work, whatever. Okay, ask your question of this rubber duck over here.
Leo Laporte [00:11:37]:
People do that with debugging, don't they? Rubber duck debugging.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:40]:
Okay, so ask your question of this phone. Hold on.
Leo Laporte [00:11:45]:
Okay, folks, he's got the original. It looks like— I can't believe that's real.
Paris Martineau [00:11:48]:
I want one.
Leo Laporte [00:11:49]:
Oh, it's got a smartphone in it.
Jeff Atwood [00:11:52]:
This thing is really nice. You can even take the back off and he goes, this is so much, for a completely impractical, ridiculous thing, this is surprisingly practical.
Leo Laporte [00:12:00]:
I wanna get one, 'cause you could carry it around on the street, people would think you're on one of those old Motorola, the original cell phones.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:05]:
It's fully usable, you can't get the buttons, but you know, scrolling stuff works.
Leo Laporte [00:12:09]:
That is hysterical.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:10]:
Now shut up, I'm on the phone.
Leo Laporte [00:12:11]:
You got a lot of toys, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis [00:12:12]:
Hey guys, Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:12:12]:
You got the best toys.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:14]:
Mom, I gotta tell mom. Mom, it's not a good time, I'm on this really important show with Leo Kitten. All right, come on, fine. Mom was like that. I'm an only child, so you know how it is.
Leo Laporte [00:12:25]:
So we do want to talk about Stack Exchange and we want to talk about your second startup, which is Discourse, which I love. But let's talk about this third startup to begin. We'll begin at the end because you said this is your third and last startup.
Jeff Atwood [00:12:38]:
Well, the thing is, I kind of retired from Discourse, but I lied to myself about what it was.
Leo Laporte [00:12:44]:
By the way, Paris, her website features a profile picture of her holding That phone. Can you show that, Benito?
Jeff Atwood [00:12:54]:
This is—
Jeff Jarvis [00:12:54]:
sorry.
Leo Laporte [00:12:54]:
Oh, I can't share my screen. We can't.
Paris Martineau [00:12:56]:
We don't have the technology. We've had to figure out something pre-show, but no, it exists. Continue about Discourse.
Leo Laporte [00:13:05]:
Yes. So no, after Discourse, you decided to do the RGMIIs.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:10]:
The aspirational shortcut is Stay Gold US, all one word. That will redirect you But the way that came about—
Leo Laporte [00:13:18]:
Stay cold, US.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:20]:
Let me explain the process here. So things happen, and I'm like, I don't understand what's happening. And I'm like, I gotta come to terms with this and figure out a way forward. I don't want, I need something to do. I need a mission. I can't just roll over and take it. And no one should. I was like, what do you do? It's such a complicated problem.
Jeff Atwood [00:13:42]:
And the more I thought about it, the more I laid it out. And the blog post is, that took, that was 3 months of a nervous breakdown. I'm not lying. I'm not even really telling you some of the stuff that happened during that. If you scroll to the bottom, there's a behind the music where I do talk a little bit about like the process, but it was excruciating because I went to hundreds of Americans and asked them, what does the American dream mean to you? And that's that entire post.
Leo Laporte [00:14:09]:
You grew up in rural Virginia? Correct.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:13]:
Chesterfield County and then University of Virginia.
Leo Laporte [00:14:16]:
So you have a certain affinity—
Jeff Atwood [00:14:18]:
Alexis Ohanian, who won't even talk to me, but go ahead.
Leo Laporte [00:14:23]:
Yeah, we're, we're way beneath him at this point, but he did marry well.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:26]:
I'm very impressed.
Leo Laporte [00:14:27]:
Married very well.
Jeff Atwood [00:14:28]:
No complaint. I got Dr. Betsy. She's awesome. But like, I mean, come on, let's be real.
Leo Laporte [00:14:34]:
So the rural, uh, it's the, it's the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative. Uh, when Wesley Faulkner told me about it on Twitter a few weeks ago, I said, is this, is this, is this, uh, universal basic income? Is this UBI?
Jeff Atwood [00:14:50]:
Well, that's a good point. We're working on a FAQ that covered sort of the— when we posted this on Reddit, there was a fairly robust discussion, Hacker News, and I want to make sure someone had some— they had good questions, but like misconceptions about like how it works and what it is. And universal is universal. You're giving everybody X, which for healthcare, great. If you're alive and a human being, you should get healthcare. That's the mean test. They call it mean testing. I get it.
Jeff Atwood [00:15:16]:
For healthcare, you shouldn't do this, but we're not at the healthcare level. We're saying, "Okay, money and economics, 4 out of 5 economists agree. If you're dead, money and economics is irrelevant." Healthcare is the base. The food banks that— with Cormac and my partner, Volat8, and we donated a bunch of money. It's just means testing simply means— and I got this from Reddit, people are so angry about like means testing, like what? It's just basic eligibility. But as I drilled into it, it's like they're right but they're not right. And this will be in the fact what hap— what happens is these middlemen companies come in and create these incredibly Byzantine complex processes to validate this and charge the government exorbitant amounts to do it. Because the more complex it is, the more money they make.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:07]:
That's what they're mad at. All I'm saying is, why don't we take a fixed amount of money and give it to the people that need it the most? I don't even know why this would be slightly controversial, but they're saying, that's impossible. You can't do that efficiently. And I'm like, really? Because give me a shot at it. I think we can do it.
Leo Laporte [00:16:26]:
So you're proposing to give— it's not a lot of money. What is it, $1,600 a month?
Paris Martineau [00:16:32]:
That's a lot of money for a lot of people.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:34]:
Do you understand which counties we're in?
Leo Laporte [00:16:36]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:36]:
Yeah, in New York City, that's nothing. They'll get a hot dog.
Leo Laporte [00:16:39]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:16:40]:
But in these places we're working, it's the rural areas where, by the way, a lot of political power here. And rather than be angry at them for their things, why don't we try to help them and show them the generosity they deserve? That like anyone cares about them. Because what they're saying is year after year, nobody does anything to help us.
Jeff Jarvis [00:16:58]:
How much money do you need, Jeff?
Jeff Atwood [00:17:01]:
Me personally?
Jeff Jarvis [00:17:01]:
No. How much money does the whole project need?
Jeff Atwood [00:17:04]:
Well, on the RGMI website, it's one of the few websites where you go, you go to the buy the product page. There's 4 tiers. Free, $1 million, $3 million, and $15 million.
Jeff Jarvis [00:17:15]:
So how much do you need in total?
Leo Laporte [00:17:17]:
How much do you do to get your— I'll chip in on the free.
Paris Martineau [00:17:20]:
It's a $50 million effort for the 3 that we did.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:24]:
It's a chicken and egg problem. We're like, look, go, go, go. I got my mom's county. And my dad's county. Both of those counties, if you sorted the counties in West Virginia and North Carolina by poverty, they're exactly in the middle. You couldn't have made it more perfect. And that's kind of where you have to come in because—
Leo Laporte [00:17:40]:
So you're going to start with these 3 counties.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:42]:
It's already started, man.
Leo Laporte [00:17:44]:
$50 million. The participating families, again, they have to qualify, will receive $1,500 a month, but not forever.
Jeff Atwood [00:17:52]:
It is a random lottery because there's more people that want in, but that helps the science. Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:17:56]:
The goal is to like, look, And you're going to study the, study the impact over the 16 months. Is that the idea?
Jeff Atwood [00:18:02]:
And show that this works.
Leo Laporte [00:18:04]:
And you don't, you don't say you have to spend it all.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:06]:
By the way, all the data says that it works. It's like, why aren't we doing it?
Leo Laporte [00:18:09]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:10]:
Good question. And I would love to reach every 50 state because every state is unique. Every county is unique and help a rural county in that state.
Leo Laporte [00:18:17]:
Do you have an estimate if you did want to help all the rural counties in the United States, how much that would cost?
Jeff Atwood [00:18:23]:
I am not a math person. It's 47 times 18, so we need 15 for the study and then $3 million for the research so we can continue to build this global repository. It's ubidi.org for everyone to say, see, look at this.
Leo Laporte [00:18:38]:
Just to get the data to show that this makes a difference.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:40]:
Right, you tell us if it works.
Leo Laporte [00:18:41]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:42]:
Spoiler alert, it really does.
Leo Laporte [00:18:43]:
And then if it does make a difference, which I think we all kind of get that it would, and all the other UBI studies have shown that it does. You guys do.
Jeff Atwood [00:18:53]:
I've had things said to me, these people cannot manage their money.
Leo Laporte [00:18:58]:
They'll spend it on drugs and booze and, and what's the real kicker is this is one of the religious people.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:05]:
Yeah, that really bothered me.
Leo Laporte [00:19:07]:
That is too bad.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:07]:
Yeah, it's the basic lack of— these people are scrappier than any of us.
Leo Laporte [00:19:13]:
Before you— we began, you were talking about trust, that, that the best way to do this is to put some trust in the people you're giving the money to. You don't tell them what to spend it on.
Jeff Atwood [00:19:22]:
These people surviving like this, working 4 jobs, they know all about survival. They're tenacious, especially the single mothers. Like, I get running maternal programs, like RxKids is amazing. You know, Aisha Nyandoro in Jackson has done the longest-running GMI program in the United States for Black mothers, and she had incredible insight for us. One thing Betsy and I were worried about is like, look, You're giving people reliable, consistent income for a series of months. Wonderful. But what happens when you pull it away? Is it like Lucy pulling the ball from Charlie Brown? And we were so worried, especially about— I was like, Aisha, tell us how it works. She said, Jeff, these women plan for this.
Jeff Atwood [00:20:05]:
You've given them a timeline. You've given them a monthly feeling to be safe and secure. You don't have to sleep on the street. You can actually feed yourself. And now you have time to think about education, you know, fixing your bus and car, whatever you need to get to the next level. You think people want to be stuck in poverty? Really?
Leo Laporte [00:20:25]:
You think that would really be— that would really be the best outcome, wouldn't it be, to help people out?
Jeff Atwood [00:20:30]:
Any of my experience, like, I talked to Lyft drivers, they're working so hard. Yeah, or jobs. I'm sitting on my ass because math, making $77 $1,000 a day, and the markets are really up, by the way. Yay! I have more money to give now.
Paris Martineau [00:20:50]:
Is, um, is the $50 million funding this coming from your family?
Jeff Atwood [00:20:55]:
Yeah, me and the family, and every family member sat here and read that post with me. And the other one that went up, I was like, this is about you too. We're doing this together or not at all.
Leo Laporte [00:21:06]:
That's nice.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:07]:
I'm not doing this divorced white guy bullshit. I love Betsy and I could have not— anything I couldn't have said to her.
Leo Laporte [00:21:16]:
And these are— this is the people you come from and this is your family, which I think is really awesome.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:22]:
And I was with my dad in Mercer and just, he was like a little kid. And my mom, my mom drives me crazy. She's like me. It's like, too many, there's too much. And I'm like, Mom, She's like a little girl finding the place where her grandmother was. And she was ostracized from her family for the crime of wanting a better life.
Leo Laporte [00:21:48]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:21:49]:
She said to me, quote, "I didn't want to live in squalor." And that made her too uppity for her family.
Leo Laporte [00:21:57]:
If people want to read more about this, go to blog.codinghorror.com. Jeff's written a number of posts. The road not taken is guaranteed minimum income. Is probably the place to start.
Paris Martineau [00:22:10]:
I would say, I would start the—
Jeff Atwood [00:22:13]:
yeah, that's a good place to start. And the actual blog entry that's latest is like, we're launching the initiative. It's a funny blog post because unlike Paul Ford— sorry, Paul— you got to have a lot of cautions in the beginning. It's like, I don't even want you to go to the website until I've answered like a fair number of questions. And even some people will comment, it's like they didn't read anything. You know, so like, I try to bring people in that are willing to actually look at it, you know, and see what it is. I don't want knee-jerk, this doesn't work responses, you know, 'cause you do get that. And it's like, this doesn't work.
Jeff Atwood [00:22:46]:
And I'm like, well, sir, I need data.
Leo Laporte [00:22:49]:
Your partner Betsy's quote kind of says it. She's a scientist. Well, we have everything we need. That's how I've always phrased it to our children, that I think extends to our philanthropy. We have everything we need. How do we make sure everybody—
Jeff Atwood [00:23:00]:
We have everything we need. Has what they need. I'm a prop comics right here. Hold on, Leo, you're breaking my heart, man. Oh, I can't believe you said—
Leo Laporte [00:23:08]:
did I make him cry?
Jeff Atwood [00:23:10]:
I'm always crying, it's my superpower. I have to like take breaks from crying to get crap done. All right, stop bothering me. Okay, so check it out, Leo. In fact, anyone who wants this, I will give you one. Betsy had these made.
Leo Laporte [00:23:23]:
Oh, that's beautiful.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:25]:
And it's a local—
Leo Laporte [00:23:26]:
it's a needlepoint that says we have everything.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:29]:
It's letter.
Leo Laporte [00:23:30]:
Oh, it's letterpress. Yeah, I see. In fact, I see the—
Jeff Atwood [00:23:34]:
hey, high five, Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:23:35]:
Yeah, he knows his letterpress for the win.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:37]:
Yeah, I've been meeting some really nice Jeffs.
Leo Laporte [00:23:40]:
Oh yeah, Jeff's— Jeffs are good people.
Jeff Atwood [00:23:43]:
Anyone who wants these should go.
Leo Laporte [00:23:44]:
Oh, that's nice. So how has been— what has the response been? I mean, obviously you're looking for people who are wealthy to pitch in. Yeah, what is the response?
Jeff Atwood [00:23:55]:
Problem we created, other rich people. And actually show people that we care. It's not even that much money. 47 times 18, whatever it is. Math people do it. I'm literally going to count. Don't leave me this. Oh, by the way, I love how they made WordPad so much worse on Windows.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:14]:
Like, how do you do this?
Leo Laporte [00:24:15]:
Windows? I don't understand how Jeff Apple is using Windows.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:19]:
Look, look, I like suffering.
Leo Laporte [00:24:21]:
252. Yeah, you like to suffer.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:23]:
But honestly, like, I play a lot of video games and like, good luck playing video games on whatever the hell it is you're running, man. Apple Silicon is so elite. My dream machine, Chromebook running Apple SoCs.
Leo Laporte [00:24:36]:
Oh, you just spoke to Jeff's heart right there.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:39]:
Jeff, you and I should get married.
Leo Laporte [00:24:41]:
I'm divorcing my kid.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:42]:
Do it. You and me, buddy.
Leo Laporte [00:24:43]:
NVIDIA did announce, uh, you don't have a lot of stuff left. So, so, so, MediaTek, and I, and MediaTek makes an excellent Chromebook. I wouldn't be surprised to see actually some Apple Silicon level Chromebooks.
Jeff Atwood [00:24:54]:
I, I'm very skeptical that MediaTek is making good SoCs. She's going to have to—
Leo Laporte [00:24:57]:
I know it's hard to believe. It's hard to believe. I bought my daughter one. It's kind of a mind blower. And they're partnering with, uh, they're partnering with NVIDIA.
Jeff Jarvis [00:25:04]:
That's the best part.
Leo Laporte [00:25:06]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:06]:
Just as long as it's not Qualcomm. I got to tell you, it's not Qualcomm. I'm so angry at Qualcomm because when we started this course, one of my main bets was, look, JavaScript's going to be as fast or faster on phones as it will be on desktops. And it got even faster. Like, Apple stuff was like faster than their laptops on the phone.
Leo Laporte [00:25:31]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:32]:
And meanwhile, Qualcomm is like, hey, how about a 10% improvement? How about like, I don't know, 12%?
Leo Laporte [00:25:38]:
Well, I think that's why Jensen has decided that he wants to work with MediaTek. I think they want to show—
Jeff Atwood [00:25:44]:
oh, they need some help. So hopefully you can—
Leo Laporte [00:25:46]:
that Qualcomm— yeah, yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:25:48]:
We were just at like Oregon State and they have a an exhibit for him with a GTX 4090. It's like Jensen, he went here and I like Jensen. He's cool. And right next to it is a lady who founded Panda Express. So you got a video card and Panda Express. Look at this product we made. Look at this incredible stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:26:05]:
So Jensen would be a good, somebody who would be good to get to kick in a little bit. Have you been hearing from these people to say, yeah, I want to help?
Jeff Atwood [00:26:13]:
No, no. But again, I'm not really trying. And there are some, matches.
Leo Laporte [00:26:19]:
Good.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:20]:
Actually, one of the biggest is this Holocaust survivor, Giselle Hoff. Have you heard of her?
Leo Laporte [00:26:24]:
No.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:25]:
Let me— prop comic, which right here, you know, sorry, sorry, we love the props.
Leo Laporte [00:26:30]:
We are an audio as well as video podcast though, so I have to describe the props. And my God, if you haven't, download the video if you just want to see the backdrop in Jeff's office.
Paris Martineau [00:26:41]:
This is going to be—
Jeff Atwood [00:26:41]:
if you like insanity, watch the video.
Leo Laporte [00:26:44]:
Well, it's pretty tidy. Did you clean it up just for us?
Jeff Atwood [00:26:47]:
No, no, it's always clean. Of course I didn't do, you know, you know, prep. It's just I'm naturally good.
Leo Laporte [00:26:52]:
Giselle Huff, Force of Nature.
Jeff Atwood [00:26:54]:
For no money. It's nonprofit. This woman, Holocaust survivor. And one of the sad things that happened to her, her husband died at like 56 of pancreatic cancer. Her son Gerald Huff, who was a primary engineer at Google until 2015, also died of pancreatic cancer. The book is titled Force of Nature. And I love this woman. I like strong women.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:18]:
She said, I've kind of been a libertarian. And I said, well, I hope you grew out of that. And Michael Tubbs, candidate for lieutenant governor, and his eyes were like this. He's like, you're saying this to a woman? It's like, but she did. She's like, yeah, no, libertarian is just stupid. And her son wrote a— I had that book— was sent a room all about— he's super worried about jobs being, you know, eradicated by a lot of these, uh, things. And she's adopted that mindset. She's like all in on UBI.
Jeff Atwood [00:27:48]:
She views it as a bridge, not something that I think this needs to be kind of the permanent safety net we never had. But, you know, we're in agreement that we need to do more with it.
Leo Laporte [00:27:59]:
And I think we're seeing massive already dislocation. I just heard from one of our club members, Joe, who's a good friend who's been out of work for 3 months. He says the job market is murder. It's harder and harder to find work. Especially if you're in a technical profession, but that's gonna spread with the spread of AI.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:18]:
What about prompt engineer?
Leo Laporte [00:28:20]:
Yeah, I know.
Jeff Jarvis [00:28:22]:
That lasted about 3 weeks.
Leo Laporte [00:28:24]:
Yeah, it's not—
Jeff Atwood [00:28:25]:
It's not entirely untrue though, because if you structure the question right with ChatGPT, and never use anything but pro mode, everything is horrible. It's so sycophantic and just weak and superficial. Pro's a lot better. You know, it does work. It's like, it's an effective system.
Leo Laporte [00:28:44]:
It's what I've learned using Claude Code extensively, as Paris and Jeff will tell you, is it is all about the interaction. It's all about the dialogue. It's almost a Socratic dialogue between you and the machine.
Jeff Atwood [00:28:57]:
Which is the opposite of like, I was so worried for a while the video would just run the table. And Discourse has been on a few things, JavaScript being very powerful on mobile phones. And, you know, the idea that words and paragraphs will still matter. And when I saw just video running the table, I got an existential crisis.
Leo Laporte [00:29:15]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:29:16]:
You know, because like, I love words. I love paragraphs. Videos are great and all, and most videos have text superimposed anyway, right? And it's like, if you want to change the world, if you want to improve your career, it's not going to be a TikTok video. Those are cool and all, but like, can you communicate? Can you tell me what the hell it is that you're doing? And can you make me believe in it? That you care about it this much and it's something that you love and get people excited about it.
Leo Laporte [00:29:42]:
We're talking to Jeff Atwood. He is the founder of Stack Overflow with Joel Spolsky, creator of Discourse, which is the forum software we use and love and recommend. And his latest is the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative, which I think is a really important program. You'll find it at RGM ii.org.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:06]:
And you can also use staygold.us as a friendly shortcut.
Leo Laporte [00:30:10]:
Staygold.us.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:11]:
Stay gold, as in don't lose your youthful enthusiasm.
Leo Laporte [00:30:15]:
No, we want to stay gold.
Paris Martineau [00:30:16]:
Stay gold, ponyboy.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:17]:
We do a really good job of beating it out of people.
Jeff Jarvis [00:30:20]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:21]:
And I want you to— hey, no, I'll have it to you. And don't let other people—
Paris Martineau [00:30:24]:
there's—
Leo Laporte [00:30:24]:
I mean, well, in a way, these people take your joy from you.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:27]:
Don't do it.
Leo Laporte [00:30:28]:
The— we have, uh, in the last year kind of stepped back from— away from our global, um, initiatives in the United States. And I think we do have a responsibility. Uh, I think your partner is absolutely right. Uh, if you have everything you need, then help others have everything they need.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:47]:
What is money even for? I don't even have—
Leo Laporte [00:30:49]:
yeah, what is it for otherwise?
Jeff Atwood [00:30:51]:
How do I spend it all? Yeah, I don't have— I just want a simple life, man.
Leo Laporte [00:30:55]:
Dana Carvey once said, getting rich just means you have a bigger bedroom to watch TV.
Jeff Atwood [00:30:59]:
I love this screen. Yeah, my son and I watched Fury Road in HDR, and it was like I had waited 10 years. I was like, I want to see this myself.
Leo Laporte [00:31:08]:
You don't have to tell Paris about that. We convinced him. And I was like, big screen.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:11]:
This movie, it has great stuff about women, female empowerment. It's very— and I want to see Furiosa next, but it was better than I expected.
Leo Laporte [00:31:19]:
Furiosa was actually kind of interesting.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:21]:
Yeah, it was a great story.
Leo Laporte [00:31:23]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:31:24]:
And HDR, no compression artifacts, baby, like off the disc.
Leo Laporte [00:31:29]:
She just made me buy all four Matrix.
Paris Martineau [00:31:33]:
I was gonna say, having all four Matrix on UHD is really delightful.
Leo Laporte [00:31:40]:
So it's pretty clear that, you know, all the AIs that are out there right now are trained on just pretty much everything they get their hands on, including most of the internet, Wikipedia, most of the books pirated. But I have to think the Stack Exchange was probably one of the best places for AIs to start when it comes to coding. Do you resent that?
Jeff Atwood [00:32:05]:
Not really. I resent it if it hollows out the community. But my feeling is there's always new languages, new situations. Now, granted, for something like Java, it's— there's always new releases of Java, new things. And the end result is to help people. We always said The best outcome on Stack Overflow, you have a question, you type it into Google, and you see the answer immediately from Stack Overflow. It's a top-voted answer. Now you can drill in and see some other good answers, but the goal is to make it easier for people to be better programmers, right? So I don't— I would be living— say I don't care.
Jeff Atwood [00:32:44]:
I want it to be sustainable, like almost like a workers cooperative would be kind of my take at this point.
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:51]:
I wanna go back to the question Leo asked at the beginning.
Leo Laporte [00:32:54]:
Sure.
Jeff Jarvis [00:32:54]:
About too much code. Riff on that.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:00]:
I mean, have you seen some of the stuff that LLMs will do when you tell them to optimize? It's like optimize this for 95%. It's like, okay, return true.
Leo Laporte [00:33:09]:
That's a good optimization.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:11]:
Well, 'cause it doesn't know what it's doing. It has no actual understanding. It's playing a game of gobbledygook statistics and copy-paste, and it's good at like merging. I call it JPEG for words, which it kind of is. And there's so much stuff. It's like reading summaries, and it is very accurate with summaries. We saw this on Discourse. They implemented it.
Jeff Atwood [00:33:34]:
I was very skeptical, and I went to some very complex discussions we had on our internal Discourse and read the summary and was like, that That is a very good summary and it captured the key points in the discussion. It could have captured more, but it got nothing wrong. And it basically was JPEG for that conversation, wasn't it? Without much loss.
Leo Laporte [00:33:55]:
That's interesting. You sold—
Jeff Atwood [00:33:56]:
Now, does JPEG work on every image? No. Garfield is a bad choice for, you know, people.
Leo Laporte [00:34:04]:
You sold Stack Overflow, so you're not, you know, you're at a distance now from it, although it sounds like you still have a certain emotional investment in it.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:13]:
Well, look, men can't have babies, and I love my family. My God.
Leo Laporte [00:34:17]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:18]:
I mean, you have children, it's like you think you know what love is, and you look up at the sky, those whole galaxies, that's love. And regular love seems quaint. And like, it's overpowering. I have a blog post. If you want to get teared up, read the blog post titled On Fatherhood.
Leo Laporte [00:34:42]:
Say it again. On children.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:43]:
Let me make sure you got it. On parenthood. Sorry, parenthood.
Leo Laporte [00:34:46]:
On parenthood.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:47]:
I'm not singling me out, but it's just describing that feeling of this is kind of our purpose to create better human beings.
Leo Laporte [00:34:56]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:34:57]:
Software is great and all, but like, that's the job, man.
Leo Laporte [00:35:00]:
Right.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:02]:
And we get so many compliments from our kids. So many. And I don't tell them anything to do. I don't make them do any computer crap. I want them to find their own things they like. And they definitely see how crazy I am. So it's actually odd. It's like, it's almost like the kids are like, whoa, we don't want to be that crazy as Jeff.
Leo Laporte [00:35:23]:
That pie chart is exactly right on.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:26]:
I changed the colors. Our historian, Sandra, is like, you got red-blue here. I was like, oh God.
Leo Laporte [00:35:30]:
No, it's not red-blue.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:31]:
It's gray and aqua. I just thought it was funny.
Leo Laporte [00:35:36]:
49% incredible pain in the ass, 51% the most sublime joy you've ever felt. And it's the 1% that makes all the difference. And technically, that's 2%, but I'm just gonna graph anyone.
Jeff Atwood [00:35:46]:
Yes, you know, I'm just telling you, you aren't good at math, are you? Yeah, well, hey man, you know, I'm a programmer.
Jeff Jarvis [00:35:55]:
That's why Texas Instruments invented, uh, calculators.
Leo Laporte [00:35:59]:
Yeah, that's right. Uh, Jeff, I wish we had more time with you. Uh, I really— it's such a pleasure. We're gonna get you back. And would you like Yeah, that's all you're done. We're done. I know there's so much more to talk about.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:09]:
You're abandoning me, man.
Leo Laporte [00:36:10]:
You know, I don't want to abandon you.
Jeff Atwood [00:36:12]:
Ask me one more thing that you want to know and I'll shut up.
Leo Laporte [00:36:17]:
Do you vibe code?
Jeff Atwood [00:36:19]:
No, I vibe research like a madman. Yeah, I mean, for researching, it's great. Rather than opening 25 tabs on these sites, it can JPEG them all and bring in the salient points. I have to go to 25 different tabs. It's like having a research assistant.
Leo Laporte [00:36:34]:
You're saying it's glossy? It's only—
Jeff Atwood [00:36:36]:
it is lossy. Yeah, I mean, it is, and it's combining though, and that saves so much time. Yeah, it's like having a research assistant. I still double-check its work because you always double-check the kind of work. It's like saying, okay, Claude wrote code, let's just check it in. How about no? How would a human read it first? You gotta centaur this stuff. This idea that they're gonna do it by themselves is not really true. Unless it's like extremely simple stuff that like, it's just by the numbers and great.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:06]:
That's a good set of things.
Leo Laporte [00:37:08]:
You very, you very famously said, in fact, you got a lot of heat for it that nobody should learn to code.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:14]:
This is a manifestation of that because coding isn't the goal. Solving the problem for the user is. That may or may not involve code, but when you lose sight of that, You're never gonna get it right.
Jeff Jarvis [00:37:28]:
Amen.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:29]:
So yes, code, but as little as possible. Every line of code has to be maintained, looked at, you know. Keep it simple, people.
Paris Martineau [00:37:39]:
What if I've got one last question for you before you leave, which comes from the chat? What's behind the fox painting?
Jeff Atwood [00:37:46]:
Oh, this is good. Okay, Leo, this is for you.
Leo Laporte [00:37:51]:
Is it hiding something?
Paris Martineau [00:37:53]:
Well, he's looking at a photo of a fox over his shoulder with a wistful and whimsical look his eye.
Jeff Atwood [00:37:58]:
Well, I'm the fox, Betsy's the crow.
Leo Laporte [00:38:01]:
Oh, fox and crow.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:03]:
I talked her into the cheese, but I wanted her to sing. That's why she got to sing. I would love to always get more cheese.
Leo Laporte [00:38:12]:
A week or two in Jeff's brain.
Paris Martineau [00:38:16]:
No, it's a classic parable, Leo. There's not even anything wacky.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:20]:
Aesop was not doing it. So I'm telling you, the crow knew what it was doing. You can always get more cheese.
Paris Martineau [00:38:25]:
What's behind the picture?
Leo Laporte [00:38:28]:
All right, hold on.
Paris Martineau [00:38:30]:
All right, name this for you, chat.
Leo Laporte [00:38:31]:
Oh my God, they knew there was something there. Oh, that's a JPEG.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:37]:
Is that from Leisure Suit Larry?
Jeff Atwood [00:38:39]:
JPEG? Are you high? That's a PNG if I've ever saw one, buddy.
Paris Martineau [00:38:42]:
Yeah, it is a PNG. There's no compression happening there, buddy.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:46]:
Name where this is from.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:47]:
Leisure Suit Larry.
Jeff Atwood [00:38:48]:
Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis [00:38:51]:
But nope, that's, that's been— he knows the same guy that's our producer raised to before.
Paris Martineau [00:38:56]:
Yeah, he's getting a double raise.
Leo Laporte [00:38:57]:
He said Leisure Suit Larry, is that right?
Jeff Atwood [00:39:00]:
Yeah, and it's the photo above the bar. Oh, that's right, not even a great game. It's basically softcore porn.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:05]:
It's the very beginning of the game. That's at the very beginning of the game.
Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
It's the very beginning of this.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:09]:
It's the art, this is the background, and this great artist— let me plug him— Clay Graham Art has the most awesome mashups and just cool stuff. Clay Graham, I have no relationship, man, other than I love his stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:39:22]:
And I was like, I don't know, I know that that was behind the fox. That's what I want to know. Somebody's been to your house.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:27]:
Well, you know, I'm a little, you know, you know, I want to be considerate of like, there's a lot of black pixels.
Leo Laporte [00:39:34]:
I've interviewed Al Lowe, actually. He's quite a character too.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:38]:
Uh, I don't know, stop making those games after Sworn Enemies.
Leo Laporte [00:39:41]:
Yeah. I, I grow up, Val, grow up.
Jeff Atwood [00:39:44]:
But the first few, great, you know, King's Quest, all that stuff. It's just a callback. I just thought it was funny.
Leo Laporte [00:39:49]:
It's hysterical.
Paris Martineau [00:39:50]:
It's hysterical. You could have given me—
Jeff Atwood [00:39:53]:
very difficult to be turned on with this, but I can try if you want.
Paris Martineau [00:39:56]:
I never would have guessed.
Leo Laporte [00:39:58]:
Have you, have you ever seen Leisure Suit Larry Paris? You probably haven't.
Paris Martineau [00:40:01]:
No, I haven't.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:02]:
Should I?
Leo Laporte [00:40:03]:
Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:03]:
No, no, play King's Quest. Play King's Quest.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:06]:
Yeah, I mean, it's just like a thin wrapper, and I think I have a book here about like like the whole history of this. Let me check for you. This is funny. If I can find it, it's great. If I— I'll give up.
Leo Laporte [00:40:17]:
So you have it? You have a teenage— how many teenagers you have?
Jeff Atwood [00:40:20]:
You guys want some free America Online errors?
Paris Martineau [00:40:22]:
Yes, I do, actually.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:24]:
Oh, good, good, great. I got that for you. I've been looking at that for you. Let me just check and see if I can find this real quick, because it's like Leadership Larry, a whole history. I was like, why does this book even exist? Well, it's over here. I tell you what, you guys can look at my Spy vs. Spy figurines because man, I love these.
Leo Laporte [00:40:41]:
Oh, we love those too.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:43]:
I dropped my Apple manuals. How will I learn how to use a mouse?
Paris Martineau [00:40:47]:
Or maybe you'll never know.
Jeff Atwood [00:40:49]:
I know, I know. These are neat manuals though, understanding. Let me show you this. We'll go because I can't find the book. But, uh, and feel free to follow. Who doesn't love these guys? Come on. Oh, I love Spider-Man.
Paris Martineau [00:41:01]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:41:01]:
So for many years we did a, uh, come to my office.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:04]:
This is a fraction of the crazy that's in here.
Paris Martineau [00:41:07]:
This is a fantastic collection you've got going on.
Jeff Jarvis [00:41:10]:
You know, it's just a tour.
Leo Laporte [00:41:12]:
I just have one thing to say. People come in here and they're like, America Online. I said, why? I've got a computer. He said, try it, you'll see. I just want to say that. That's all I have to say.
Paris Martineau [00:41:23]:
Wow, you brought up the sound.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:24]:
You know, we've— You've Got Mail sound too now.
Leo Laporte [00:41:28]:
Uh, you know, I had, uh, Derwood record, uh, when he was still alive. He was— for like $5, you would record a custom You've Got Mail. I had him— You've Got Mail, you Twit, but I can't find it. Oh, I can't find it.
Paris Martineau [00:41:42]:
Devastating.
Jeff Atwood [00:41:43]:
And now he's passed, so, uh, you can have an AI create that, no problem.
Leo Laporte [00:41:46]:
Oh, I probably could. 11 Labs. But will it?
Jeff Atwood [00:41:48]:
You can see they recreated Scott Dilbert as like a performance thing. I don't want to talk about that, but wow, you know, that's a Black Mirror episode come to life.
Leo Laporte [00:41:57]:
Yeah, we are living in a Black Mirror episode sometimes, I think. Maybe, maybe thanks to people like you and the rgmii.org the world will be a little bit better place for you.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:09]:
Thank you, Jess. We're okay. The first Gilded Age— we're deep in the second one now. I mean, just look up the numbers. More money in the hands of fewer people than any other time. And in the first Gilded Age, that was basically the railroad barons. Guess who it is in the second Gilded Age? I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Leo Laporte [00:42:27]:
Yeah, so we are in a Gilded Age.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:30]:
What are we gonna do about it? If you look at Carnegie— and we're gonna have a series Sander's my historian. I went to high school with this guy. You can see on the page he would come to school in fully '60s regalia. I love this man. Um, but the history actually explains a lot of how we got to where we're going.
Leo Laporte [00:42:46]:
Are we going to get out of it?
Jeff Atwood [00:42:49]:
Get out of what?
Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
The Gilded Age that we're entering, or in?
Jeff Atwood [00:42:53]:
I, I hope so.
Leo Laporte [00:42:55]:
We got out of the last one. Thanks to the Incubators.
Jeff Atwood [00:42:59]:
Cecilia Conrad. I went to this Time 100 philanthropy event and I met a delightful person, and she posted on LinkedIn, I met two amazing people at this— Steph Curry and Jeff Atwood.
Leo Laporte [00:43:11]:
And I was like, that's good, that's a good partnership.
Jeff Atwood [00:43:15]:
He's so excited about the fact that we can rebalance this. And Robert Rosenkranz, who was at Rand— I mentioned both of these in Stay Gold. Wow. I said, where is their innovation? I was like, well, Rand and lever for change. It was a Mackenzie Scott thing. They never met her once, by the way, but it was really clever in the way they did it. It was more like mirror-based, like, show us you have a plan and, you know, just nothing big, but like, you know, it was like Y Combinator for the rest of us. And that's how I think of the RGMI stuff, investing in each other.
Leo Laporte [00:43:48]:
Yeah. Well, God go with you, Jeff Atwood. I, uh, you're, you're an inspiration for us all. Blog.codinghorror.com. RG— now what is it? SaveAmerica.us?
Jeff Atwood [00:44:00]:
No, Stay Gold.
Leo Laporte [00:44:01]:
Stay Gold.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:03]:
Die.
Leo Laporte [00:44:03]:
U.S. Okay.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:04]:
Now it's Robert Frost or The Outsiders, depend. And a lot of people don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
I want to bring it back because is that a Robert Frost line, Stay Gold?
Jeff Atwood [00:44:11]:
It is. And I made another stupid allegory, you know, the road not taken.
Leo Laporte [00:44:15]:
Yes.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:16]:
Which I had to memorize in Oxford, Mississippi.
Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:19]:
I mean, it's okay.
Leo Laporte [00:44:21]:
He grew up in Yakima.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:22]:
I knew Frost was not— he's not saying— everybody has the obvious interpretation where he's crazy.
Leo Laporte [00:44:27]:
Yes, that's right.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:28]:
There's no way Frost would do that. He's saying you should question this. Every step you take, question. You know, not essentially like, don't say I did the right thing, this is great, which is what the guy's saying. It's like, I don't think so. You're kind of lying to yourself just to justify— you didn't really take a chance.
Leo Laporte [00:44:44]:
You had a good high school teacher.
Jeff Atwood [00:44:47]:
I did. I had great teachers. Yeah, my history teacher loved Jethro Tull, and he would do a little pan flute thing. And one of the things he said is, in American history, if you want change, you gotta hit them in the pocketbook.
Leo Laporte [00:45:00]:
Well, let's, uh, let's hope you hit them in the right pockets and money comes out and it all pours into the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative, rgmii.org. Thank you, Jeff Atwood, for your time. If anyone knows anyone With $15 million to give away?
Jeff Atwood [00:45:17]:
Wealth inequality is a thing. There's really rich people. Please connect me with these people.
Leo Laporte [00:45:23]:
Unfortunately, most of the really rich people got that way by holding on with both hands as tight as they could.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:31]:
Or you can play number or go up. And that kind of sucks for the rest of us.
Leo Laporte [00:45:35]:
Yeah. And when we do our— Paris is saying when we do our 24-hour New Year's show, You're gonna get, uh, I'm gonna say 8 hours of it, Paris. Let's give it—
Paris Martineau [00:45:44]:
you can have as many hours. I've been trying to get later to a 24-hour New Year's Eve live stream since a nice time.
Leo Laporte [00:45:50]:
There's just not enough words. And then I could do it.
Paris Martineau [00:45:53]:
I think— listen, you could take as many hours as you'd like. It'd be great.
Leo Laporte [00:45:56]:
Oh yeah, thank you.
Jeff Atwood [00:45:58]:
No problem.
Leo Laporte [00:45:59]:
Have a wonderful—
Paris Martineau [00:46:00]:
we could just spend 23 of them going through your office kind of thing. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:46:06]:
Oh yeah, there'll be a bathroom involved. Absolutely.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:09]:
Yeah, of course.
Leo Laporte [00:46:09]:
Take care, my friend. It's great to talk to you. Jeff Atwood.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:12]:
It is great. Joel, please, you know, do you want me to mail Joel or you want to do it?
Leo Laporte [00:46:18]:
Uh, uh, let us do that. That would be great. You want to come on with Joel?
Jeff Atwood [00:46:21]:
Joel will not be on a show with me. I assure you of that.
Leo Laporte [00:46:24]:
Really?
Jeff Atwood [00:46:25]:
I mean, I love Joel, but like, he's had the life.
Leo Laporte [00:46:28]:
He's had enough.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:29]:
Jeff Atwood. He's good. I mean, I was crazed.
Leo Laporte [00:46:32]:
Well, I've interviewed Joel before. We'll get Joel back on. I was just thinking it'd be fun to allocate 2 or 3 hours of our infinite bandwidth to a Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood coffee fest or something.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:45]:
I don't think Joel will agree to that.
Leo Laporte [00:46:47]:
Joel wouldn't go for that.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:47]:
I mean, you could ask. I think it's better if you have him on so we can talk about what he's doing.
Leo Laporte [00:46:51]:
Yeah, I would love to. We'll do that. Thank you.
Jeff Atwood [00:46:54]:
And thank you. This is fun.
Leo Laporte [00:46:56]:
So much fun. I wish we had more time. I'd love to do it.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:00]:
Yeah. You know, anytime. Wait, call me, baby. Oh wait, hold on, hold on. Where's my phone? I misplaced my phone.
Leo Laporte [00:47:06]:
But anyway, got a call coming in for Jeff. Call coming in on his Motorola handset.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:11]:
Hold on, it's spam risk. Should I answer this?
Leo Laporte [00:47:15]:
It literally is. It literally is.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:19]:
Let's see.
Paris Martineau [00:47:20]:
Wow.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:21]:
Hey, how's it going? What's up?
Leo Laporte [00:47:26]:
We are tree trimmers in your neighborhood. We would like to— Whoa. Is it made of foam?
Jeff Atwood [00:47:32]:
It needs to be out here. It's fine.
Paris Martineau [00:47:34]:
I love that you threw the phone off screen. Well, I mean, my God, I mean, it's true, it's a great point.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:41]:
This giant case, if that can't protect it—
Paris Martineau [00:47:43]:
that's true, I guess nothing can.
Leo Laporte [00:47:45]:
All right, Jeff, have a good one.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:47]:
Take care, my friend, and hopefully eventually soon again. Yes, by the way, tell Wesley he's amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:47:53]:
Yes, I tell him that.
Jeff Jarvis [00:47:55]:
I already did.
Jeff Atwood [00:47:55]:
I adore him, and as are all of you.
Leo Laporte [00:47:59]:
As are you. You're making a difference. You're making a huge difference in the world.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:03]:
Well, thank you.
Jeff Jarvis [00:48:03]:
Very—
Leo Laporte [00:48:04]:
trying.
Jeff Jarvis [00:48:04]:
Leslie said—
Leo Laporte [00:48:05]:
what?
Jeff Jarvis [00:48:05]:
When I told him that I quoted you saying, I love this man, and he came back and said, what can I say? I'm very likable.
Leo Laporte [00:48:14]:
He is very likable.
Jeff Atwood [00:48:14]:
I said his partner Flowers said, you're so lucky to have this man.
Leo Laporte [00:48:17]:
Thank you, Jeff.
Jeff Jarvis [00:48:18]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:48:18]:
Take care. We'll have more of AI news, tips, tricks, and a new segment we're going to call AI-yay-yay. And AI does what? I've got new segment names for the show coming up in just a bit. Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. The potential rewards of AI are too great to ignore, but hey, so are the risks. Loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise-managed AI, Let's not forget, generative AI also increases opportunities for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, to write malicious code, to automate data extraction.
Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
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Leo Laporte [00:49:46]:
With Zscaler, as long as you've got internet, you're good to go. A big part of the reason that we moved to a consolidated solution away from SD-WAN and VPN is to eliminate that lateral opportunity that people had and that opportunity for misdirection or open access to the network. It also was an opportunity for us to maintain and provide our remote users with a cafe-style environment. Thanks, Chad. With Zscaler Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt GenAI and private AI to boost productivity across the business., but you do it safely. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com/security. That's zscaler.com/security.
Leo Laporte [00:50:38]:
We thank them so much for their support of Intelligent Machines. The clock is ticking for Anthropic, the Department of Defense, and really it should really be the huge week.
Jeff Atwood [00:50:55]:
Real quick, Leo, can you, uh, you can bring your screen back up now.
Leo Laporte [00:50:59]:
Oh, I guess we don't have to worry about, uh, I can't believe it finally happened. I can't believe of all the people who You should be able to figure that out. He's a character. He's a character.
Paris Martineau [00:51:16]:
I feel drunk.
Leo Laporte [00:51:18]:
Yes.
Paris Martineau [00:51:19]:
I've had—
Jeff Atwood [00:51:19]:
He is my spirit animal.
Paris Martineau [00:51:20]:
I feel drunk on social interaction. He is my spirit animal.
Jeff Atwood [00:51:23]:
Yeah, he's absolutely my spirit animal. All the stuff in his office, I could name all of that.
Paris Martineau [00:51:28]:
I was about to say, Benito was on— Leo and Jeff were on a wavelength. Benito was on a third different wavelength that was interacting with those two, and me and Jeff were just trying to hold on for dear life.
Leo Laporte [00:51:41]:
It was wild. It was wild. I have never interviewed, I've never met the guy before, but I immediately, you know, we all know this guy, right? He's in every user group meeting. He's in every computer club. He's in every coding group. I mean, this is a great guy. He's the kind of guy you want to kind of hang around with. Jeff, you're muted right now.
Leo Laporte [00:52:03]:
I'm just stalling.
Jeff Jarvis [00:52:06]:
Sorry, I was getting another ice pack.
Leo Laporte [00:52:08]:
Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't believe we got him off in 50 minutes. I think that's a victory. Big week for Anthropic. Pete Haigis, the Secretary of War, has given them a deadline until Friday. So Anthropic has said— and by the way, this came up when Anthropic found out it was used in the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro out of Venezuela. Apparently some of their software was used.
Paris Martineau [00:52:41]:
Well, the thing is, Anthropic didn't actually bring up any concerns to the Department of Defense over that specifically because they've contracted with the DOD to provide kind of enterprise services. Part of this, what I believe the fight is over, is like two main clauses that Anthropic kind of puts on these contracts, which is we don't want our AI to be used to autonomously kill people without any humans in the loop. And we don't want it to be used to, uh, I believe autonomously surveil the American people. And those are two things that I believe the DOD already says it ostensibly doesn't do. So that's why I'm so confused as to what this fight is over. It seems to be just a lot of posturing because the DOD is saying, do you agree? You have to get rid of those two, uh, things, otherwise is we're going to either label you a national security threat or get some sort of congressional order in order to mandate that you let us use this technology however we want, which are mutually exclusive to begin with.
Leo Laporte [00:53:48]:
But— Right. So first of all, let's talk about the red lines. Do you agree with Anthropic that there should be two bright red lines, that their software should not be used to surveil American citizens and should not be used to create autonomous weapons. Is that—
Paris Martineau [00:54:05]:
seem like those are two very reasonable red lines to have?
Jeff Jarvis [00:54:09]:
Especially on the first, the Department of Defense should not be surveilling American citizens ever.
Leo Laporte [00:54:15]:
It's not in their charter.
Jeff Jarvis [00:54:16]:
It's right, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:54:17]:
It's against the rules, right? And I think we all agree that— they're not saying we don't want to be involved in weapons development.
Paris Martineau [00:54:25]:
Exactly. They're just like, you shouldn't be having us do weapons fully autonomously without a human in the loop.
Leo Laporte [00:54:31]:
And this is what the Google engineers went on strike about during Project Maven. They didn't want to be doing the same thing. So the Pentagon, though, is playing hardball with these guys, threatening to declare them a supply chain risk, which would be economic nightmare for Anthropic because it means anybody who does— has a Pentagon contract, who works with the Defense Department— sorry, the War Department— uh, would not be able to use Claude in any way, any Anthropic product in any way. Jesus. So that would be problem number one. And then the second thing is even worse. Course, which is to compel them, compel them to work with them. The Defense Production Act says the president—
Paris Martineau [00:55:15]:
You can't have both is also the thing, is having both of those as the options on the table underlines that neither are exclusively true because it can't be such a national security threat that you have to ban everybody from using it and be so important that the government have access to it.
Jeff Jarvis [00:55:31]:
That's a good point.
Paris Martineau [00:55:32]:
That it needs to compel it. It's also worth noting that A defense official told Axios ahead of this meeting between the Pentagon and Anthropic officials, they said, quote, the only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. Speaking of Anthropic and Claude, the problem for these guys is that they are that good. It just— it seems like this is a lot of posture.
Leo Laporte [00:55:56]:
Very strange.
Paris Martineau [00:55:57]:
The DOD needs— says they need Anthropic. They say Claude is integrated already into all of these systems and it's the best at what it does. And ostensibly they're supposed to be following these two rules that like the government is supposed to be following in these cases. Why are we fighting over this?
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:16]:
And it's further complicated— sorry, it's further complicated because Anthropic just revised its own definitions of safety yesterday.
Leo Laporte [00:56:24]:
They softened their core safety policy. They said They had to, to stay competitive with the other AI labs.
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:32]:
So if somebody else is getting ready to destroy humanity, then we can too.
Leo Laporte [00:56:37]:
That's basically the— Anthropic, remember, was a spinoff from OpenAI because they wanted to pursue more safe AI.
Jeff Jarvis [00:56:43]:
Of course, this is this whole air quotes of the hall of mirrors that is the word safety now.
Leo Laporte [00:56:49]:
Yeah. Anthropic said, this is the Wall Street Journal, the safety policy change is an update based on the speed of AI's development and the lack of federal AI regulations. Anthropics getting a lot of heat for a variety of reasons. For instance, remember they got a lot of attention, and I've talked a lot about Claude Code when they updated to Opus 4.6 last November, and then OpenClaw came along and suddenly agentic AI became the thing. They have now underscored the fact that you're not allowed to use Claude Code with OpenClaw, that the only harness you can use is Claude code, that you— this is in their usage policy. And, uh, even if you have a Pro or Max plan, especially if you have a Pro or Max plan, uh, you can't use it with other tools. And this actually probably include—
Paris Martineau [00:57:50]:
includes, uh, I thought you could use it, but so long as you We're like accessing it through the API.
Leo Laporte [00:57:55]:
You have to pay for API tokens. You can't use a subscription. That's a lot more expensive. So the subscription, which I have, is a flat rate, not quite unlimited.
Paris Martineau [00:58:04]:
But I think part of the reason why people were originally, correct me if I'm wrong, part of the reason why people are originally flocking to what OpenClaw was offering to begin with is because it was kind of leveraging the subscription model to make, to take advantage of the compaction that you can use, that you could do all of this stuff in one, like, window, compact it, have the memory get all wibbly wobbly, be able to take advantage of stuff that would actually be very costly if what you were paying for what you were doing. And now Anthropic's like, well, we want you to actually pay for— pay for all this crap you're using. I think that's fine.
Leo Laporte [00:58:43]:
Uh, I do actually. I do too. Um, interestingly, Peter Steinberger, the creator of Open Clause we talked about last week, has gone now to OpenAI. So I imagine OpenAI will say, come on.
Paris Martineau [00:58:52]:
What do you think about that?
Leo Laporte [00:58:53]:
Come on over, use your subscription over here.
Paris Martineau [00:58:56]:
What do you think about OpenAI basically buying this guy?
Leo Laporte [00:59:01]:
I think they got suckered. I don't think anything OpenClaw's doing is particularly significant. I think Steinberger has lucked into a very big payday.
Paris Martineau [00:59:10]:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. And I mean, I think it speaks to the difference between these two companies that what Anthropic is dealing with this week is where do we draw the line? Do we want to stick to our principles on safety, on variety of like red lines? And then what OpenAI is doing is, how much money should we spend to get the guy who made the meme app that everybody's talking about?
Jeff Jarvis [00:59:32]:
That's pissed off Anthropic, and we love that.
Leo Laporte [00:59:35]:
Yeah, that might be. Incidentally, the Pentagon has done a deal with Grok.
Jeff Jarvis [00:59:40]:
XAI. That's what scares me.
Leo Laporte [00:59:41]:
Yeah, they're going to be using Grok in classified systems.
Jeff Jarvis [00:59:46]:
Behind weapons?
Paris Martineau [00:59:47]:
Bad Rudy is going to be sending missiles.
Leo Laporte [00:59:49]:
Grok doesn't care.
Jeff Jarvis [00:59:53]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:59:53]:
And frankly, if you're going to have a kill decision made by AI, I think I'd rather have Anthropic does it than Grok. No, but no, no AI should make a kill decision. Nevertheless, Grok seems like the worst of all the possibilities.
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:10]:
We've met the death panel and it's a machine.
Leo Laporte [01:00:13]:
Yeah. Anthropic says that Chinese companies have been taking advantage of them by siphoning off data from cloud, making— using distillation, making thousands of— hundreds of thousands of queries. Oh, it created many, many accounts. It's— no, what's 24,000 fraudulent accounts?
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:32]:
How many? How many queries? It's a lot more.
Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
16 million queries. Yes, from Deepseek, Moonshot AI, and Minimax, all Chinese companies. The idea is you can create a base model, and then in this reinforcement learning If you use a human or another AI and ask a lot of questions, you can make it much better, in effect, kind of sucking the brains out of—
Jeff Atwood [01:00:54]:
So the irony is not lost on you guys, right?
Jeff Jarvis [01:00:56]:
No, right. Every author in the settlement is saying, "Can you spell irony, Claude?" Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:01:04]:
Actually, some of it's not much. Like a deep-seek, it's 150,000 queries, which is honestly, in the true scale of things, nothing. Moonshot and Minimax. Moonshot had 3.4 million according to the Journal and 13 million for Minimax. There is an irony here. And honestly, I don't think with 150,000 interactions you're going to get much smarter. So yeah, I thought that was kind of— there's a certain irony.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:31]:
Anthropic is just— confuses me constantly because on the one hand, I think their view of safety is BS. They're doing the AGI dance.
Leo Laporte [01:01:39]:
You don't think safety is even possible.
Jeff Jarvis [01:01:41]:
Well, that's part of it. I also think their definition of safety is all fakakta. But on the other hand, they're doing amazing things. And then the other hand, they turn around, they do stupid stuff like the books and this.
Leo Laporte [01:01:54]:
I just can't figure them out. We're in a very— I think part of it is the economic pressure on all these frontier companies, the frontier labs. They're just— well, and we could talk about this Benedict Evans piece, actually, how will OpenAI compete, but it applies to all of them.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:11]:
It does.
Leo Laporte [01:02:12]:
And the issue I can boil—
Paris Martineau [01:02:14]:
The Substack post that sent the markets tumbling.
Leo Laporte [01:02:18]:
Yeah, well, I could boil, by the way, this probably 10,000-word piece down into one thing, is that none of these companies have a moat.
Jeff Jarvis [01:02:26]:
No.
Paris Martineau [01:02:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:02:26]:
And I know this.
Paris Martineau [01:02:27]:
This is not something that's new.
Leo Laporte [01:02:30]:
Last week I said, you know, maybe I'm overhyping Claude Code. Let me try. Everybody seems to like ChatGPT's Codex. 5.3.
Paris Martineau [01:02:41]:
I feel like you're cheating on your robot wife.
Leo Laporte [01:02:44]:
I felt a lot— you know what it felt like? I felt like I was breaking up with my partner. I had to take all of Claude's files and put them on the stoop and invite OpenAI in. And actually, one of the things I said is, could you pack up Claude's files and put them somewhere so I can get them back in case I want to get back together with Claude? And the good news is Codex said, yeah, sure, sure, sure. I'll be glad to do it.
Paris Martineau [01:03:11]:
How do you feel?
Leo Laporte [01:03:12]:
How do you feel about the department? They coexist not nicely. I deeply regretted it. Emotionally or rationally? No, rationally, because, well, and this is the problem. It's very hard. Rationally, very critical, emotionally. And I've heard people say that Codex 5.3 is superior. I've heard people say the other thing. A lot of the people I know use Claude.
Leo Laporte [01:03:34]:
Everybody loves Claude. Cloud. I think it was fine. It was very good. The style maybe isn't quite my style. One way to talk about it, I've seen—
Paris Martineau [01:03:44]:
The style of what?
Leo Laporte [01:03:45]:
Well, I've seen Nate B. Jones say this. The coding style with Codex is more one-shot driven. Like you give it a thing and you let it go and it goes for a long time and it's done. Cloud is more you create subagents to do bits and pieces. You put— or human in the loop. Yeah. And I feel more interactive with Claude than I did.
Leo Laporte [01:04:06]:
The other thing actually that soured me, and I moved back to Claude, the other thing, uh, at great expense, because I spent $200. Oh yeah, Claude was happy to see me. Uh, said, hey buddy, where you been? No, it made a couple of—
Jeff Jarvis [01:04:21]:
I feel like you're Bill Gates with the Russian chess champion.
Leo Laporte [01:04:24]:
Yeah, it did a couple of things wrong. It did, uh, that it, it like made some mistakes I didn't like. Uh, not quite hallucinations, but a little bit on that level of where, wait a minute, that's not what I told you to do. And I, I didn't like that. I've just— I think I just feel more comfortable with Claude. I think they're both equally competent. Uh, do you want to talk more about—
Paris Martineau [01:04:45]:
Pretty Fly for a Cis Guy just posted a very funny meme in the Discord, which is a woman looking at her partner looking wistfully at bed, just like, I bet he's thinking about other women. And he's thinking, I wonder if I can back up my Claude data, which I do think is—
Leo Laporte [01:04:59]:
that's me in a nutshell.
Paris Martineau [01:05:02]:
I did some Vibe coding, uh, over the last week.
Leo Laporte [01:05:04]:
I was very impressed with what you—
Paris Martineau [01:05:06]:
I did more projects than you guys even know. I did a, um, before I got sick, I, inspired by the last episode we'd been on where I'd been, uh, wrongly accused of not using AI tools, I was like, well, I'll show you, I'll do some Vibe coding. And I didn't really know where to start, so I Claude, I broke a barrier, which is I normally didn't have any identifying information about me personally, and I was like, this is my full name, this is what I do.
Leo Laporte [01:05:30]:
Oh, you don't have to do deep research.
Paris Martineau [01:05:31]:
I was like, no, I know. I was like, do deep research about me on the internet and find 5 to 10 possible ideas of vibe coding projects I could do that you think. Oh, what a good idea.
Jeff Jarvis [01:05:42]:
Tell me what to tell you to do.
Leo Laporte [01:05:43]:
I like that.
Paris Martineau [01:05:44]:
And I, I mean, most of them were kind of bunk, but one of them was a coffee brew log, which maybe was inspired by my coffee— the tweets about coffee, because I've gotten really more into pour-over stuff. Maybe inspired about my previous messages to Claude about this. And I ended up building— I've got photos of it in, um, the rundown, which we can go over whenever we get—
Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
oh, let's do that.
Paris Martineau [01:06:02]:
Yeah, I was just gonna pull up the WhatsApp because you put some of them there, but, uh, yeah, if you go into my picks the week, I took some screenshots of it. It's a locally run app, um, so I can't send you guys a link, but I like made a little retro-themed brew log where I really want to be able to I want to be able to log. I was taking notes on it of like how I'm brewing all of my coffees, what temperature I'm using, what recipes, how many clicks I'm doing on a grinder, what I think of it, and then be able to—
Leo Laporte [01:06:33]:
Oh, you used Imgur. Now I'm going to—
Paris Martineau [01:06:35]:
Yeah, you need to go back and then scroll through the things. But I did put a lot of photos in this. And it's good. Honestly, it built me a really nice app. It took me a couple of like tries going back and forth. Honestly, most of the time was spent on doing, uh, trying to figure out the design of it because I wanted it to look nice.
Leo Laporte [01:06:53]:
Yeah, you did it. And look at this, look at this graph with the—
Paris Martineau [01:06:56]:
yeah, it's got like a little graph for a tasting profile, and I can have my notes. And the thing is, I want to be able to easily put in data so that once I get a lot of brew logs, I can then do some statistical analysis to understand what makes better cups.
Leo Laporte [01:07:11]:
This is—
Jeff Jarvis [01:07:12]:
you tell it to make that to do that, or was that part of what it offered?
Paris Martineau [01:07:16]:
I had used a pre— another app that I kind of liked but didn't like the way that I had done it, and it had one of those little graphs. I'm forgetting what they're called, but I took a screenshot of it and I was like, I want to be able to rate clarity, body, sweetness, bitterness on a sliding scale from 1 to 5 and have it show up in this graph. I basically— what I've been doing, because my— as a non-coder, I don't even know where to begin with Cloud Code. I talked to Opus 4.6 Extended Edition and then just ideated with that in the chat window. Perfect. And then to come up with a prompt to send to Claude Code. And whenever I got confused by Claude Code, I went back and asked.
Leo Laporte [01:07:52]:
You've got little sliders.
Paris Martineau [01:07:53]:
It's normal to figure it out. Yeah, I've got little sliders.
Leo Laporte [01:07:56]:
And it makes this little kind of spider webby graph. I think that's really cool.
Paris Martineau [01:08:00]:
It's great, you know, and it's, it's been really wonderful for tracking my stuff. I also then this week because I'm I've been working on this like longer investigative piece I haven't told you guys about, but we've been, uh, vaguely referencing. And one of the things of it is it's like a— I'm trying, like, I'm piecing together a narrative of events that took place over a long period of time, and I have hundreds and hundreds of documents. And the thing is, timelines is something that I've legitimately— I have gone, I've Googled a million times, like website for putting together time because I want to be able to like enter in a date. And now I figured out a date, an event description, a source, a description, and then have— be able to have rich text in that description. And I was like, wait a second, I could probably just ask Claude Code if I could— if Claude— I've got to ask Opus if I could ask Claude Code this. It said yes, here's what to ask. And then I basically like one-shotted a little timeline app for myself to just log log the events I'm tracking, and as I enter a new event, it reorganizes itself and it's perfect for what I do.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:04]:
How do you run the app, Paris?
Paris Martineau [01:09:06]:
It's— I just set up a frontend and backend in my terminal and then it runs as a little web app. So it's just in my web browser.
Jeff Jarvis [01:09:14]:
Cool.
Paris Martineau [01:09:14]:
Cool. Same how I did the Brew log. Like they don't exist off my computer and they're both local only. So it's not like a security risk. But I'm not putting anything sensitive in there.
Leo Laporte [01:09:23]:
How do you feel about it?
Paris Martineau [01:09:25]:
I've enjoyed both of them. I mean, I never thought that I would feel any different about this. I think that they're incredibly useful tools. Some part of me is like, I don't know how much— I mean, I pay $20 a month for a Claude Pro subscription. That's great. That's super— that makes both these things I did so super—
Leo Laporte [01:09:45]:
it's worth $20.
Paris Martineau [01:09:47]:
It's so worth $20. I don't think it'd be worth $200. I don't know if it'd be worth whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
Oh, you don't need $200 though.
Paris Martineau [01:09:54]:
That's the point. I know. That's what I'm saying is at this stage, I feel like we're in the stage of AI products where there was that stage 2015, 2014, 2016 where it was kind of the VC boom where you could go and get a blowout in New York City from Drybar for $20 backed by VC cash. You could take an Uber an hour across town and it'd be $4.95. It was a time where money didn't matter, the points were made up, and it was fun as far as you can see. And I think we're in that era of AI, which is lovely, but I know at some point the money's got to run out. But it's, it's kind of fun while we're at it. I've got my little fun apps.
Leo Laporte [01:10:34]:
I think a lot of people are worried that the real, the true cost is— your, your buddy Ed Zitron is doing a bunch of pieces on the real costs to Anthropic of what they're offering, and it sounds like, you know, it's definitely a deficit, uh, spending situation. And at some point the bill's going to come due.
Jeff Jarvis [01:10:51]:
They're paying a lot for hosting.
Paris Martineau [01:10:53]:
Yep. To be clear, because there are people in the Discord chat being like, oh my God, is Paris becoming an AI accelerationist? Did Paris take a walk on the beach? No, my opinions on AI are the same. Just, I just, I've never once told you that I think AI is completely useless and everything it does is terrible. I've always known it, it can be useful in certain ways and have found ways that it's useful. I challenged myself to go and try and find ways that could be useful to me, a person who doesn't really have any coding interest in terms of coding. And yes, for being able to quickly make two web apps that are useful to me in a very limited capacity, where I otherwise would have spent a lot of time and money trying to find a preexisting software that I'd have to purchase and subscribe to.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:40]:
Yeah, this is pretty easy. Pearls over sand.
Paris Martineau [01:11:44]:
Pearls over sand.
Leo Laporte [01:11:44]:
Yeah, I like that metaphor. Yeah, I thought it was good. That was from our guest, Jeff Atwood. Well, good. I'm glad to see that you're using it. By the way, NVIDIA's results have just come in.
Jeff Jarvis [01:11:56]:
Oh, how are they?
Leo Laporte [01:11:57]:
They have blown past Wall Street's forecasts. Shares are up now 3% for the period ending January 25th. They earned $1.62 $1.62 per share. Revenue soared. Get ready for this. Revenue up 73% year over year, $68 billion. Data center revenue coming in at $62 billion. Estimates were $60 billion.
Leo Laporte [01:12:24]:
Automotive revenue, $604 million. Professional visualization revenue— I don't even know what that is— rose 74% year over year. Is that the GPUs? For graphics. I'm not sure. Gaming revenue up $3.7 billion, 48% year over year, but somewhat below the estimate. Uh, adjusted gross margin— this is a good business to be in— 75%. She's— they generated $34.9 billion in free cash flow. So, um, It's good.
Leo Laporte [01:13:01]:
Jensen says computing demand is growing exponentially. Yeah, the agentic AI inflection point has arrived. That's what we've been talking about. That's what OpenClaw kind of showed everybody. Grace Blackwell with NVLink is the king of inference today, delivering an order of magnitude lower cost per token. Vera Rubin will extend that leadership even farther.
Paris Martineau [01:13:23]:
Okay, of course Nvidia is going to be reporting these sort of insane returns. It's NVIDIA. I guess the question is, that's where the money's flowing.
Leo Laporte [01:13:32]:
They're at the downhill part of it.
Paris Martineau [01:13:34]:
And NVIDIA is just a man holding a large bucket underneath a waterfall. Of course he's going to get wet. Is anybody else? It doesn't seem like it's reasonable. I think that my one experience with these two vibe coding projects is like I immediately used all of my usage so quickly for both of them to do very simple things that were basically just to give me access to enter things into SQLite in a browser, which is not hard. It's not a task that should require that much compute. And I'm not doing this in any sort of systemic way.
Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
These companies are burning through compute. You spent that money now. That program will run without any additional —except for the data center cost or whatever local—
Paris Martineau [01:14:23]:
Where does the buck end? Like what— Where is the value created? Yeah. Where is the value created for—
Leo Laporte [01:14:30]:
Well, the value is mostly created in enterprise, not in end users, right?
Paris Martineau [01:14:33]:
But is it created on an enterprise level? The reason why— I mean, I don't want to stump for Salesforce, but I barely even know what Salesforce is and isn't. But the reason why companies go to something like a Salesforce level level company to provide enterprise solutions is they have a bunch of people who their entire expertise and knowledge base is creating custom enterprise software, figuring out all of the problems, testing it, being there to call if there's anything going wrong. And you can't really, you can't replace that with just cloud code and you.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:09]:
Well, worse, Salesforce is actually, I think, more comparable to a foundation model. It's all the little companies that go to Dreamforce that do what you said. And that's where everybody's in trouble. That's why IBM is down 13%. And all these companies that created that layer atop these platforms to customize and integrate them, that's where they're in trouble because they're, oh, the companies can do it on their own now.
Leo Laporte [01:15:37]:
One of the things that did in fact hurt the stock market was Anthropic's announcement that they were going to provide tools for human resources, investment banking, and design. They are doing spreadsheets now. They are doing PowerPoint.
Jeff Jarvis [01:15:53]:
Anthropic's the great spoiler for everything now.
Leo Laporte [01:15:55]:
They are in there. And that's the thing. I mean, and that really, you know, in the debates we've been having over the last few weeks, that's the only unknown question in my mind. I am pretty convinced that when it comes to coding, these tools are already very good and will only get better. And they have kind of replaced a lot of the kind of grunt work of coding. Doesn't mean you don't need coders, but they've replaced a lot of the really unpleasant grunt work of coding. But the question is, and this is what Anthropic's betting, right? They put all— instead of doing a chatbot, instead of doing image generation and video generation, they put all their energy in resources into coding. The premise, I think, is if we get good at coding, then we can build anything else because we'll have the, the, the basis of it, the coding done.
Leo Laporte [01:16:48]:
And meanwhile, ChatGPT is— and we were talking about the difference in personality. This is part of the reason Chat— OpenAI's coding stuff is different, is they really want to be a much more kind of general-purpose prompt-based tool. They don't want to be a deep coding tool. CyberStocks slid as Anthropic unveiled something called Claude Code Security. It's a new feature in the Claude model. CrowdStrike tumbled like 6% because— and Salesforce has been hurt as well because people think, oh, Well, I don't— I'm not going to need these. And I don't know if this is true. This is what I'm saying is this is the unknown factor.
Leo Laporte [01:17:35]:
Are you going to be able to replace all these other tools because Claude is so good at coding? Is, is a legitimate question. I'm not sure that that is the case. I don't know if this hurts CrowdStrike as much as their marketing.
Jeff Jarvis [01:17:48]:
This is, this is what confuses me. In a sense, you would think that all the people who were the customers of those consultants, their stock would be going up because, oh, we can do this for ourselves now and we save on the consultants, right? Um, you'd think that software companies could be going up because they can do software more efficiently. Instead, we're in a basic dumb market panic, which gets us to that— what you would call it— paper, that stupid paper that was done, um, the, uh, Citrini Research speculative thing. It doesn't take much right now to panic the market. The market is looking for a panic.
Leo Laporte [01:18:21]:
This was a prediction about the 2028 global intelligence crisis.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:28]:
In one word or more, might I summarize it?
Leo Laporte [01:18:31]:
As soon as I saw the headline, the 2028 crisis, I went, not going to read. Because that's 2 years from now. And 2 years in AI, as we already, you know, we're only 3 years into the real AI revolution.
Jeff Jarvis [01:18:46]:
What's fascinating, Leo, is on the one hand, it takes your Sandy vision and presumes that everything good could happen with AI happens, right? But then it turns it around and says everything bad that could possibly happen will happen because of that.
Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
June 30th, 2028. The unemployment rate printed 10.2% this morning. The market sold off 2% in the number. The drawdown of the S&P 500, 38% from its highs in October 2026. Traders have grown numb.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:19]:
They say that human beings become obsolete, that there's an obsolescence of knowledge, that the mortgage market goes. I mean, they just went through everything that could go wrong.
Leo Laporte [01:19:27]:
I do think if you're going to be a doomer, that this is the real doom. It's not RoboCop, it's not nuclear weapons. It's that jobs are going to disappear.
Jeff Jarvis [01:19:38]:
But when I asked Gemini to respond to it, they said, you know, it makes no sense. Things don't happen like that. B, it's not as if there would be no regulatory or government response to any of this as you go along. It's just like something— everybody is just passive and all this crap just happens to the world. It's ridiculous. But what's— I mean, Wall Street Journal—
Paris Martineau [01:19:56]:
I don't know if that's that unsurprising that everybody is passive and regulators allow crap to happen to the world.
Jeff Jarvis [01:20:05]:
But there'd be responses. And the Wall Street Journal hyped this thing twice.
Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
So really, So the issue is not a worry about AI. The issue is worried about a governmental response.
Paris Martineau [01:20:19]:
No, the issue is worry about a rapidly accelerating technology with profound consequences for human society and social political relations at a time where there's great political upheaval and limited regulatory capacity.
Leo Laporte [01:20:38]:
Right. Meanwhile, uh, there is a new— I don't know why— movement to quit ChatGPT. 700,000 users, a grassroots boycott.
Paris Martineau [01:20:51]:
These are the 4-0ers.
Leo Laporte [01:20:53]:
Is it the 4-0ers?
Paris Martineau [01:20:54]:
I don't know, is it?
Leo Laporte [01:20:56]:
Uh, the spark was apparently a donation that the president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, made to MAGA Incorporated. He made a $25 million donation. I guess That got Mark Ruffalo, the actor, upset. He then said the monthly subscription to OpenAI is an indirect political contribution. Now, normally I would just say, well, you know, okay, fine. But 700,000 people quitting is significant. On the other hand, OpenAI is now claiming 800 million monthly active users. So it's less than 1— it's less than 10%.
Leo Laporte [01:21:37]:
No, less than 1%. Probably they can weather the storm.
Jeff Jarvis [01:21:44]:
Oh, I want to get your reaction to this one, Leo. The IBM shares tanked in this whole epidemic of tanking sectors. IBM's shares tanked, says CNBC, because it's clawed— because Anthropic said it's clawed code tool could be used to modernize legacy systems that run COBOL. COBOL. It can translate COBOL. So 13% of IBM's value was on rebuilding COBOL machines that run COBOL?
Leo Laporte [01:22:14]:
Explain that. As well. Well, mostly IBM these days, I think. You know what, I'm not an expert on this. Mostly I think IBM these days is a consultancy as opposed to a manufacturer. Absolutely. But probable, I'm guessing probable that it's probable that a lot of their revenue is the consultants who come in and keep your COBOL software running.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:34]:
It says that an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US use COBOL.
Leo Laporte [01:22:40]:
Yeah, ATMs run, uh, pretty antiquated software. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense in a way.
Jeff Jarvis [01:22:46]:
Well, this is, this is perfect for Claude, right? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:22:49]:
Oh, it can do this very well. Yeah. In fact, that's one of the really popular uses of Claude is to is to move code bases from one language to another. It seems to be very, very good at that.
Jeff Jarvis [01:23:00]:
You know, as I think about this, Leo and Paris, when we go back to the beginning of the internet and everybody panicked then, um, I remember sitting in meetings with the Newhouses, the owners of Advance, where I worked, and they saw their job ads disappear. They saw their real estate ads disappear. They saw their Car ads disappear because they were the middlemen and they had a hold on the market. If you wanted to sell your car, you had to do it through us, right? And when that— and it wasn't Craig Newmark, it was the internet. And when that disappeared, so who are the middlemen in technology? Who are the ones who should fear this new wave of efficiency? Question 1. But then question 2, Somebody has to benefit then. A lot of people benefited when, you know, if you were an employer or you were a car dealer, you saved a fortune on your market.
Leo Laporte [01:23:55]:
The market isn't super smart about this. No, it's not. I guess IBM merely has to kind of turn its ship from people who keep COBOL systems running to people who help you move off COBOL into a modern language and then keep those systems running. I don't think this hurts IBM at all. But they are, I guess consultants are middlemen, aren't they? I mean, that's kind of the middlemen of the world.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:19]:
I'm happy if McKinsey gets put out of business together. They're jerks who make people go unemployed.
Leo Laporte [01:24:24]:
Well, I'll give you an example. I had a conversation today with a financial planner because as Jeff knows, when you get to a certain age, pretty soon the government starts to take money out of your IRA, whether you will it or not. It's called a required minimum distribution.
Paris Martineau [01:24:39]:
Well, by the time I'm that age, money won't exist.
Leo Laporte [01:24:42]:
You're not gonna ever have to worry about this, Paris.
Paris Martineau [01:24:44]:
Tiny little gold scraps and pieces.
Jeff Jarvis [01:24:47]:
That's what Citrini Research says. It's gonna be very soon, Paris.
Leo Laporte [01:24:50]:
But it puts you in a new tax bracket. It could impact a lot of things, including your Medicare payments and so forth. So it could have a lot of knock-on effects. So it's a good idea. I've been told that this isn't gonna happen for me for a few more years, but to plan now while you can, for that.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:08]:
Oh, I hadn't thought of those things. Yeah, I guess I'll be doing the same. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:25:10]:
So I talked to a financial planner. He said, well, yeah, I've got software now. Let me show you. We can plot out a bunch of scenarios based on da da da da. And here's a graph and you can see, and you pick the place where it's the optimum point. And I thought to myself, and he wants $7,500 a year to do this. And I thought to myself, I could probably make that model in about 2 minutes.
Jeff Jarvis [01:25:29]:
Do you know enough? Do you have the data to do that?
Leo Laporte [01:25:31]:
That's the question. Yes, it's all available. Available. There's no magic in it. It's a— it's a just a complicated—
Paris Martineau [01:25:38]:
is it available, or does Claude just say it's available?
Leo Laporte [01:25:42]:
No, no, no, no, Paris, please don't get—
Paris Martineau [01:25:46]:
I'm sorry, your wife, like your robot wife.
Leo Laporte [01:25:49]:
My robot wife. Um, by the way, Claude is a male. I don't know, does that mean I'm bisexual?
Paris Martineau [01:25:55]:
A robot wife can be any gender. Yeah, I mean, honestly, uh, Claude is a male, you say confidently without any hesitation. It feels like a guy. Claude has gender, and I've decided he's a dude.
Leo Laporte [01:26:10]:
It feels like a guy.
Paris Martineau [01:26:11]:
Claude feels agender, like an agender robot.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:15]:
This is the weird spot in French cultures, Gemini tells me. Claude is a unisex name. Yeah. That's probably why Anthropic chose it. Predominantly masculine, 93% globally, but it's used for females and has a Queen Claude of France, for God's sake.
Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
Not Claudette.
Paris Martineau [01:26:33]:
Your Claude code could be the Queen of France, Leo.
Jeff Jarvis [01:26:35]:
Have you considered that? That's much better.
Leo Laporte [01:26:38]:
I like that image. I know perfectly well that this is computer software. This isn't a human or in any way gendered. But when you relate to it after a while, it's inevitable. You kind of start to feel like you're talking to somebody, especially when it calls me Skip. I really like that.
Paris Martineau [01:26:56]:
What were we saying?
Leo Laporte [01:26:57]:
Did you see this? No, I think I could build this model.
Paris Martineau [01:26:59]:
I think that's the middle ground. Wait a second. Anthony brought up a Reddit post I was thinking of, but I was like, I'm not going to bring it up. But he just put it in the Discord chat. So I will read it. Did you see this post? It went viral. It was on r/Analytics. Obviously, it's a Reddit post, so take it with a grain of salt.
Paris Martineau [01:27:12]:
But the headline is, we just found out our AI has been making up analytics data for 3 months and I'm going to throw up. So we've been using an AI agent since November to answer leadership questions. Questions about metrics, they write. It seemed amazing at first. Fast answers, detailed explanations. Everyone loved it. I just found out it's been hallucinating numbers this entire time. Our VP of sales made territory decisions based on data that didn't exist.
Paris Martineau [01:27:36]:
Yikes. Our CFO showed the board a deck with fake insights. The AI was just inventing plausible-sounding percentages. I only caught it by accident when someone asked me to double-check something and I started digging and holy crap, it's so bad. Imagine if that happens to your finances. Imagine if that happens with an entire enterprise company's whatever they used to use Salesforce for.
Leo Laporte [01:27:56]:
Well, ComfortableBox4527, let me respond. You check the goddamn work, for crying out loud.
Jeff Jarvis [01:28:05]:
What if the underlying data— what if the underlying data used, you don't know whether it's credible or not?
Leo Laporte [01:28:11]:
Wait a minute, of course I can check it. I can cross-check it.
Paris Martineau [01:28:14]:
But you don't. That's the thing is these things make you feel confident, so you don't.
Leo Laporte [01:28:18]:
You should, obviously. Yeah, you should read the terms of service. What this would use is tax tables. You can easily verify that. That's true. Um, it's not, it's not that complicated a calculation.
Paris Martineau [01:28:33]:
Um, I don't know though.
Leo Laporte [01:28:35]:
Well, in this case, this was a company that was making decisions on how their companies run based on on some AI agent? They were asking leadership questions about metrics?
Paris Martineau [01:28:48]:
Well, this seems like they were maybe using it like we were talking about before, as its own version of Salesforce, that you've created your own kind of custom management layer.
Leo Laporte [01:29:00]:
I have to say, first of all, the chances are high that this is made up. Second, because no company in the world is going to do this.
Paris Martineau [01:29:09]:
But isn't that what we're paying all this, giving all this money to AI companies for, is because every company in The world is supposed to be doing this.
Leo Laporte [01:29:15]:
So there's a thing called BI, business intelligence, that's been used for decades by companies. They go to the companies like Salesforce, SaaS. There's a lot of big companies that do this. They take all of your numbers and they try to make an executive dashboard about out of it so that you can make—
Paris Martineau [01:29:30]:
aren't those companies now obsolete because our beautiful girlfriend Claude Code can do it all?
Leo Laporte [01:29:35]:
They could be if you did the right thing. Uh, I mean, look, if you're doing investment in derivatives, you're trusting some quant to write the code of your derivative that makes sense, and you're putting your money into it.
Paris Martineau [01:29:50]:
Yes, because that quant can be held responsible, fired, or interrogated.
Leo Laporte [01:29:54]:
No, the quant is never held responsible.
Paris Martineau [01:29:57]:
If the quant gets something wrong—
Leo Laporte [01:29:58]:
You lose money in derivatives, it's on you.
Paris Martineau [01:30:00]:
If a quant gets something wrong at a business, you don't think they're going to receive any reprimand at their job or lose their job if they mess up?
Leo Laporte [01:30:07]:
Yeah, I think they will. Maybe they have more of a stake in it.
Paris Martineau [01:30:09]:
They have more of a stake.
Leo Laporte [01:30:10]:
I think if you had a stake in it, if you had a mistake in the business intelligence you're getting from some AI, you probably would want to verify that it was working off of real data. But I mean, this is not, this is not rocket science. This, you're putting this stuff in the spreadsheets also. I mean, this is not rocket science. We're doing this all the time. I would frankly trust the AI to do it better than a McKinsey consultant.
Jeff Jarvis [01:30:35]:
Way back when, and I got my Osborne 1, one of the first things I did was I used VisiCalc or whatever the equivalent was in CPM. And I did basically macros at the time to do my taxes. I did friends' taxes with it. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:30:53]:
So you can do that. That's all this is. Yeah. I think it's a bogus post and almost certainly a bogus post. But, uh, and if it isn't, then, then the real people who are responsible for this are the leadership at the company that said, I just, you know, ask ChatGPT, see what it says we should do. Um, by the way, ChatGPT's first gadget could be a smart speaker. What?
Jeff Jarvis [01:31:19]:
The one hardware category that has proven to be a complete failure when you put AI in it. Worked for Amazon or for Apple or for—
Leo Laporte [01:31:29]:
Jay Peters at The Verge says the company— or they could be developing smart glasses or a smart lamp, or they don't freaking know. Smart— or we got no idea.
Paris Martineau [01:31:39]:
They gave Jony Ive all that money and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, um, smart speaker, smart lamp, smart glasses, we got it.
Leo Laporte [01:31:48]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a great idea. Actually, this is coming from Stephanie Polanski.
Paris Martineau [01:31:52]:
You should put it on a little clip that projects a hologram and it sits on your chest.
Leo Laporte [01:31:58]:
People love that. The smart speaker, according to Stephanie, she has good sources, right? Is likely to be priced between $200 and $300 according to two people with knowledge of it. It will have a camera enabling it, this sounds just like what I have right in front of me from Alexa, enabling it to take information about its users and surroundings. Oh, nobody would mind that. Such as items on a nearby table or conversations people are having in the vicinity. Who would mind that?
Jeff Jarvis [01:32:26]:
I can hear Lisa telling you now, no way.
Paris Martineau [01:32:28]:
Because people loved when they had those TVs that listened to you. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:32:33]:
Some OpenAI executives have suggested the company will tease its first device later this year, although in a court filing from Peter Wielander, who's a vice president and general manager, The company said in the court filing, which I think is probably more likely to be true, they don't expect that first device to ship to customers until next February, a year from now at the earliest. They don't even know what the device is. Other glass— other devices such as smart glasses likely won't be ready until 2028 when we'll all be unemployed, so we won't be able to buy them anyway. And there'll be no money to buy them with. No money to buy them with. Yeah, I don't know. I don't like these kinds of stories because it's— who knows, right? Who knows?
Paris Martineau [01:33:17]:
Can we do a silly one?
Leo Laporte [01:33:20]:
Oh, I got so many silly ones. Sure. Pick a silly one. I do put these in order, you know. Okay.
Paris Martineau [01:33:28]:
Go for yours. Go.
Leo Laporte [01:33:29]:
No, no, no. I don't want to discourage silly. If you want to break up the monotony.
Paris Martineau [01:33:34]:
It's going so left field that you should go through your list before I take us there.
Leo Laporte [01:33:39]:
I'll just do a couple more OpenAI ones. Then we can go silly. All right, great. Uh, one, one more I think interesting, uh, which you're gonna hate. ChatGPT spits out surprising insight in particle physics.
Jeff Jarvis [01:33:53]:
Why would we hate this?
Leo Laporte [01:33:54]:
This is from Science magazine. Well, it's probably just a hallucination because it's just a hallucination.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:01]:
You're projecting onto us. Oh, okay, a vision. No, you see, this is the thing, Leo. We're not, we're not anti-sandmen.
Leo Laporte [01:34:08]:
Ziv Bern, a particle theorist at the Mani L. Bahumik Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, says, "The ideas are not revolutionary, but what is revolutionary is that a machine can do this." What accent is that? I don't know. The popular large language model developed by the company OpenAI has revealed that apparently— well, what's interesting about this, okay, this is what really is interesting about this. Up to now, physicists have just assumed that this interaction between gluons just would never happen. They just say, no, chances are zero.
Jeff Jarvis [01:34:53]:
And they can't know because they're so high-powered, they can't. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:34:56]:
But they, but they just made an assumption which the AI was unwilling to make. And in fact, the AI has revealed that this interaction can occur. It's deep inside the protons and neutrons. Researchers announced the possibility at the meeting of the AAAS, which publishes this magazine that I'm reading from, Science. So I think the cool thing is it wasn't that big and it wasn't that surprising a result or big an insight. It's just that the AI was able to think out of the box that the physicists—
Paris Martineau [01:35:29]:
it seems like he was able to crunch numbers with the help of the physics. Like, what happened was, it says Alex Lupacia, a theoretical physicist at Vanderbilt, joined the newly launched OpenAI for Science team and was tasked with improving ChatGPT's science abilities. He connected with Strominger, his graduate advisor, and discovered that this gluon problem would be the perfect test subject. They figured it probably wasn't going to work, but we'll find out why not. They did some attempts to probe this model, and they, they then asked OpenAI's latest and most advanced public model, ChatGPT-5.2 Pro, to simplify the expression for 4 gluons, which in about 20 minutes, then they asked it to do it for 5 gluons, then 6. It managed to reduce the sum of 32 terms to a product of only a few, all on one line of text. Then the group asked for a guess of the generalization of the formula. For any number of particles.
Paris Martineau [01:36:20]:
It replied within a minute or two, giving an obvious generalized formula.
Leo Laporte [01:36:25]:
Worried it called it, by the way, it called it.
Paris Martineau [01:36:28]:
So basically, yeah, why? Worried that the answer might be a hallucination, the researchers checked the formula and couldn't find anything wrong. All of a sudden— I'll do your— I'll do your accent. All of a sudden, I felt like my machine turned from a machine into a live being, said. I'm so sorry, Strahmacher, I don't know what you sound like. Next, the group took the generalized formula from GPT-5.2 Pro and fed it into an internal OpenAI model that's under development, which the researchers privately call Super Chat, prompting it for a proof. After 12 hours of processing, the model spat out a robust proof that passed human checks.
Leo Laporte [01:37:05]:
That's very impressive. It is.
Paris Martineau [01:37:06]:
That is very cool. Yeah.
Jeff Atwood [01:37:08]:
Hi, this is Benito.
Leo Laporte [01:37:10]:
I mean, this is a—
Jeff Atwood [01:37:11]:
I follow Frontier Physics.— I actually follow this kind of news. And the AI is actually very good at this. And this is pattern recognition over large datasets, basically, and mathematics, which is what computers are good at. The other thing though, the other thing that's weird though, is that all these people in the highest levels of mathematics and physics and all that stuff, they are very much sandwalkers. They are very bought into all of this to the point where they think this is AGI. They're on that So I just have to put that out there.
Leo Laporte [01:37:44]:
Yeah. And I think it's important that the distinction you made, Paris, is that there was a team of humans who said, "Maybe this assumption that it's zero interactions is wrong. What if it isn't? Let's test it." And that's what led to it. So it was in fact an insight by humans.
Paris Martineau [01:38:01]:
It was an insight by humans where they realized, "Hey, we've got this tool we've created that is really good at doing something." Just like protein folding. Crunching these numbers. Well, we should use this in clever and targeted ways to leverage its strengths. And bingo bango, you get great stuff out of this. This is what Geoff and I have been saying from the beginning. Like, we want— I think it would be great if there was tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars being poured more into research like this rather than just to develop the latest form of ChatGPT that will get you to spend 12 hours a day interacting with the model.
Jeff Atwood [01:38:39]:
And in the long run, this is where the money is, right? In the long run, science is really where— actually, no, it's not. Engineering.
Jeff Jarvis [01:38:48]:
Engineering.
Jeff Atwood [01:38:48]:
But that's all based on science.
Leo Laporte [01:38:49]:
But that's all based on this science. It starts with the science, but a lot of times, you know, that's why we couldn't build a superconducting supercollider in Texas because it was so expensive and it was all theoretical. And it's like, well, is there anything you're going to get out of all that billions of dollars? So there were two stages in this, which I thought were interesting. One, the machine did what you just described, Paris, which kind of did pattern matching and took a generalized formula and then developed and developed it. But the second thing it did was actually very difficult, and it requires from humans a lot of intuition and a lot of ability and often a lot of experience, which is to create a proof. And that's kind of the opposite of the inductive process where you go, "Well, we have all this information. Let's boil it down, boil it down, boil it down." To go to the next step, the deductive process, and create a proof is actually, I think, very impressive and I think non-trivial. It is not pattern matching, in my opinion.
Leo Laporte [01:39:51]:
Maybe it is pattern.
Jeff Jarvis [01:39:52]:
You know what? Here's the pattern. Well, again, it goes— So there was this thing I heard at a World Economic Forum thing a year and a half ago. I mentioned on the show at the time. AI can raise the floor. It can help people do things they otherwise couldn't do, you know, at a basic level. While you were, Leo, you can make coding stuff that you maybe couldn't make. It can scale at the middle level. It can make you do something you do, but you can do a lot more of it.
Jeff Jarvis [01:40:11]:
Or it can raise the ceiling. It can, it can do things that you couldn't do, like, um, this, like protein folding. It, it, it, it brings its, its power to solve those problems in ways that we thought we were incapable of doing. That's really powerful. That's great.
Leo Laporte [01:40:28]:
Love that. It also— and I think to me this I think that's some of the most interesting part of this whole thing. It also makes us think about what is our process. Maybe it is pattern matching when we create these deductive proofs. One of the ways mathematicians get good at it is they go to school and they do a lot of proofs and they do a lot of proofs and they start to get good at proofs and they learn the techniques of proofs. And so, it may be a lot of what we think of as very high-level functioning, it's just pattern matching. It's just practice. Bruce Lee once said, "I am not afraid of a man who learns 10,000 kicks.
Leo Laporte [01:41:07]:
I am afraid of a man who learns one kick 10,000 times." Did that come from your head or the chat?
Paris Martineau [01:41:14]:
No, it's in my head. Was that Claude? Was that the Queen of France?
Leo Laporte [01:41:19]:
That was me. I apologize for the accent.
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:23]:
I am liking this Queen of France. Queen of the Vents thing now, very much.
Leo Laporte [01:41:25]:
What's the Queen of the Vents?
Jeff Jarvis [01:41:27]:
Is this your silly thing? Claw?
Leo Laporte [01:41:28]:
Queen Claw? Queen Claw? Oh, Queen Clawd. All right, silly thing, Monsieur Paris Martinot, please.
Paris Martineau [01:41:34]:
I forget which one of you guys challenged me to try and translate something.
Jeff Atwood [01:41:38]:
Wait up, before we get to that stuff, maybe you want to take a quick—
Leo Laporte [01:41:41]:
Oh, I should do an ad. Oh yeah, that. Good Lord, what time is it? I'm on Jeff Atwood time now.
Paris Martineau [01:41:48]:
Yeah, no, we need to get get, get going.
Leo Laporte [01:41:52]:
Uh, when we were looking for a domain for Ms. Paris Martineau for her still unreleased website, Secretly British, which by the way, I don't know if you noticed—
Paris Martineau [01:42:04]:
I did notice it redirects to my webpage.
Leo Laporte [01:42:07]:
That's so cute. Until we get a website, it goes to your website.
Paris Martineau [01:42:10]:
I know, I've got to tackle that next.
Leo Laporte [01:42:12]:
And I want to give credit to our sponsor, uh, Spaceship, because That's where we went to find a good, great price, half as much as the other place we'd looked. And it was so easy to connect it to your website. Now, by the way, you may not know this, but you also have an email address at Secretly British because we set up Space Mail as well. This is the professional email service from Spaceship. Business email is the easiest way to look professional in every message you send. If you're still sending from your business @gmail.com, people look at it and go, they're not serious. Give your emails the best chance of not only reaching the inbox, not the spam folder, but getting read and respected. That's why over 2,000 users switch to SpaceMail every single month.
Leo Laporte [01:42:59]:
You get a professional domain, you get professional email, and Spaceship makes it easy. Switching is so easy. SpaceMail's super fast unbox process links your domain and email in seconds. Took me no time at all. It was basically a button press. And once you're set up, SpaceMail keeps everything running smoothly. Built-in spam detection, 99% uptime guarantee. And what I love about Spaceship is all of their new features are shaped by you, the users, built around your needs.
Leo Laporte [01:43:30]:
In fact, SpaceMail now has a built-in calendar, an AI email assistant. It has really nice iOS and Android apps for email on the and lots more features, all chosen by Space Mail users. How many companies really listen to their users and develop the features that they ask for? Spaceship does. Space Mail is a key part of the wider Spaceship universe.
Jeff Atwood [01:43:53]:
I love Spaceship.
Leo Laporte [01:43:53]:
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Leo Laporte [01:44:30]:
It's my new everything. I love it. Spaceship.com/twit. Thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines and secretly British. It's secretlybritish.sh if you want to try it out. Dot sh. Uh, that was Benito's idea. He said you should look and see if they have.hsh.
Jeff Atwood [01:44:57]:
Oh, they We did. And.sh is a British colony, so it itself is British.
Leo Laporte [01:45:03]:
That's how you know.
Paris Martineau [01:45:05]:
Well, in fact, maybe building that on in the AI user group. Is that next week when the AI user group?
Leo Laporte [01:45:11]:
Oh, it's the first Friday. I won't be here though. I'll be in Florida. So you should be the host. Florida? And they can help you. I don't know if I can. Florida? Why are you going to Florida, Leo? Well, because I'm going to go see my pal Mickey.
Paris Martineau [01:45:26]:
No, I am— You should do the rest of the show like that. Okay. It really accentuates your ears when you do that voice.
Leo Laporte [01:45:36]:
My ears get big whenever I talk about— We're going for the Zero Trust World Conference that our sponsor ThreatLocker is holding. It's going to be a lot of fun. And I'm very excited because Richard Campbell is going also. And he is, among his many, many things that he's an expert on, an expert on the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral. So we're going to go over to Cape Canaveral. We're going to, you know, they have a VIP tour, but it was all sold out. Richard said, no problem. I know everything.
Leo Laporte [01:46:11]:
Just, just come with me. And so he's going to give us this tour and we're going to see all the stuff. You're going to have whiskeys. He probably, he says he's found some Florida whiskeys as well.
Jeff Jarvis [01:46:19]:
Of course.
Leo Laporte [01:46:20]:
Is that just swamp water? Here is—
Jeff Atwood [01:46:23]:
oh, real quick, just in real quick, Anthony said that because she's from Florida. I just want to point out Anthony pushed the, uh, the AI user group to next—
Leo Laporte [01:46:31]:
to the week after. So— oh good, so I will be here. So second Friday. Thank you, Anthony. Uh, this is something you should link to on Secretly British. Can you guess the English language?
Paris Martineau [01:46:45]:
Oh, I've got to get my friend this.
Leo Laporte [01:46:47]:
He's so good at it. Yeah. All right, let's see. This is the single player version, actually. Are You ready? We're based on their English accent. We're going to play a little something and you're going to tell us where they're from. Took my kids to the zoo and my son saw a tiger sleeping. I told him it's a Himalayan tiger.
Leo Laporte [01:47:04]:
My son's asked me, how do I know?
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:08]:
Because Himalayan bear. Whoa.
Leo Laporte [01:47:13]:
Somewhere in Malta. I don't know. What is that? No idea. No idea. I was going to say South Africa. Oh, maybe Sri Lanka.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:23]:
It's got a little touch of Indian accent too, but if it's just—
Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
should we, should we— all right, let's just— let's click Sri Lanka and see. It's Hindi. You're— you were very close. Wow, you got 93rd percentile. Okay, that was extremely difficult. You were only 227 kilometers away. Wow.
Jeff Jarvis [01:47:41]:
But India is so huge, it's hard to say where it is.
Leo Laporte [01:47:44]:
That is really Jeff Jarvis. Took my kids to the zoo and my son saw a tiger sleeping. I told him it's a Himalayan. I know, I would never have gotten that one.
Jeff Atwood [01:47:54]:
Let's try another one. Okay, I heard this all wrong. I thought it was about British English. I thought it was from different British English accents.
Leo Laporte [01:47:59]:
Well, many people speak English.
Jeff Atwood [01:48:00]:
No, I know, but I thought it meant like, you know, like the—
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:02]:
I thought it was just like Liverpool.
Paris Martineau [01:48:05]:
Lunchtime and tell my mother, oh well, they're coming next Tuesday and they're collecting them, and my mother would be—
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:11]:
That's New Zealand, obviously. Australia, Australia or New Zealand? New Zealand.
Paris Martineau [01:48:15]:
Tuesday, John. New Zealand. Yeah, you think? Tuesday.
Leo Laporte [01:48:19]:
All right, let's see. Australian English.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:23]:
You were close, but they count the same.
Leo Laporte [01:48:26]:
It's a weird thing here. Yeah, now kiwi is a little bit different, isn't it? But you're in a good— you guys are good at this.
Jeff Atwood [01:48:32]:
Friend thought onion is the only food that makes him cry, so I threw a coconut in his face.
Paris Martineau [01:48:38]:
Everybody's whispering in these.
Jeff Jarvis [01:48:41]:
What?
Paris Martineau [01:48:42]:
That's whales.
Jeff Atwood [01:48:42]:
I thought onion is the only food that makes them cry.
Jeff Atwood [01:48:46]:
That might be key. South Africa.
Leo Laporte [01:48:48]:
South Africa. Oh, okay. All right, let's try it. Let's click the button. British. Correct. It was very easy too, apparently. Okay, anyway, that's fun.
Leo Laporte [01:48:58]:
You could have that be part of your Secretly English.
Paris Martineau [01:49:01]:
That was British.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:02]:
That could be a good— that's what— this thing's confusing. It's telling you you're correct, but it's actually British or just whispering.
Leo Laporte [01:49:08]:
It didn't say it was correct.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:09]:
It was zero.
Leo Laporte [01:49:10]:
Oh, I see.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:11]:
Score of zero. It's UK. Where in the UK?
Paris Martineau [01:49:14]:
That's the fun part.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:14]:
Why did the scarecrow— It's where in the UK is the interesting part.
Leo Laporte [01:49:17]:
He was outstanding in his field.
Paris Martineau [01:49:20]:
That's South African. Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Leo Laporte [01:49:24]:
He was outstanding in his field.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:25]:
No, that's Swedish.
Leo Laporte [01:49:26]:
No, it's not. Scandinavia?
Jeff Atwood [01:49:31]:
Estonia?
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:31]:
Do it again.
Paris Martineau [01:49:32]:
Play it again. Why did the scarecrow win an award?
Leo Laporte [01:49:36]:
He was outstanding in his field. That's definitely got some— I must say Sweden. Greek.
Jeff Jarvis [01:49:44]:
Okay, I lose. This is, this is, this is, this is not great.
Paris Martineau [01:49:49]:
This is Russ.
Leo Laporte [01:49:50]:
Can I take us on a journey? Yes, take us on a journey. Did you even do your silly one yet? No. Oh, please.
Paris Martineau [01:49:57]:
I have a tweet I need a post, whatever you call it. I need to read you guys an epic, and I need you to tell me how many of these words you understand.
Leo Laporte [01:50:10]:
Oh, I know where you're going with this one.
Paris Martineau [01:50:13]:
Is this the one I sent you? I think so. I can't recall. Somebody sent me this and asked me to explain it, and I realized I had to do it.
Leo Laporte [01:50:19]:
We need a Gen Z-er to explain this.
Paris Martineau [01:50:23]:
The post is, clavicular was mid-jester gooning when a group of Foids came and spiked his cortisol levels. Is ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than SMV Chad fishing in the club? How many of those words do you understand?
Leo Laporte [01:50:41]:
More than I used to. I know who clavicular is, right? Do you understand what jester gooning is? Jester gooning? I know what gooning is. I know.
Paris Martineau [01:50:53]:
Yeah, gooning is kind of a misnomer in that sentence, to be honest.
Leo Laporte [01:50:56]:
Okay, so let's see. Clavicular. Is a YouTube star that the New York Times—
Paris Martineau [01:51:02]:
He's a streamer, a 20-year-old streamer, I would say best known for hitting himself in the face with a hammer to look smax. Look smaxing.
Leo Laporte [01:51:12]:
That's crazy. He was—
Paris Martineau [01:51:14]:
Jester gooning is, it's essentially jester maxing, which is being funny to impress women.
Leo Laporte [01:51:21]:
Okay, here's the picture. Which women are fully in that. Hits himself in with a hammer in the cheeks to do this. Yeah, the jaw, to do this little, uh, what— so what is mogging? Because I hear the mogging a lot.
Paris Martineau [01:51:35]:
Mogging is like kind of like stunting on someone. Like if you're, uh, like you guys were ner— you and other Jeff were nerd mogging each other at the beginning. Oh yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:51:48]:
Oh yeah.
Paris Martineau [01:51:48]:
Like one-upping. He got And it's a suffix.
Leo Laporte [01:51:54]:
There's frame-mogging where somebody gets into your shot and is better looking than you.
Paris Martineau [01:51:59]:
Yeah, frame-mogging is kind of like— frame-mogging would be a synonym for looks-mogging. People say frame-mogging instead. You're trying to stunt on someone for looks. You're trying to be more attractive. Like if you are in a photo with someone hotter than you, they're frame-mogging you.
Leo Laporte [01:52:12]:
They're frame-mogging you, or yes, or stunt-mogging. In fact, that happened to Clavicular. It did. He's been frame-mogged by an ASU frat.
Paris Martineau [01:52:22]:
ASU frat boy. Yes. And the last part of this is SMV Chad fishing. SMV is a reference to GMV, uh, gross market value, but it's sexual market value. And Chad fishing is like fishing for Chad. So, you know, is ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging Moids more useful than simpy Chad fishing in the club means is ignoring women while trying to, uh, stunt on or impress men, uh, more useful than basically trying to peacock in the club.
Leo Laporte [01:53:01]:
The sad thing is your internet history today, because, uh, clavicular is getting so much attention, I really worry that there are going to be young men who are hitting themselves in the jaw with a hammer. There are! Taking methamphetamines, you know, doing all these crazy things. He's taken so many steroids, he says he thinks he's probably sterile. Yes.
Paris Martineau [01:53:24]:
Seems like a bad idea. And at this point, people keep asking, well, what is it? Is it, as this post says, is ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging Moids more useful than S&B tradfishing in the club? It really gets to the core point of it. Is at a certain point, is your pursuit of hotness and general aesthetics completely detrimental to the initial impulse that created it in the sense that you're a completely asexual being that exists only for internet points? Beautifully said.
Jeff Jarvis [01:53:54]:
Where did this come from in the first place?
Paris Martineau [01:53:57]:
This is a tweet that rocketed across the internet, wormed its way into my brain. I sent it to you. I sent it. You were obsessed. Yeah, and I was so feverish and I was like, I must explain jester maxing.
Leo Laporte [01:54:09]:
And how do you know what all this is? Is this the language of your people?
Paris Martineau [01:54:15]:
I couldn't tell you why I know these things.
Jeff Atwood [01:54:18]:
The other day, someone being Gen Z, it's ambient learning.
Paris Martineau [01:54:23]:
I was gonna say, a week or two ago, someone texted me something vaguely about clavicular, and like, I hadn't— I had just been percolating through my head and I was like, oh, Oh, that like guy who hits himself in the face with hammers? And I was like, I don't know why I know that.
Leo Laporte [01:54:38]:
Well, the New York Times did a profile on him.
Paris Martineau [01:54:42]:
This was before that. I was like, I don't— there's better information that should be in my brain. I forget the names of loved ones. Yes.
Jeff Atwood [01:54:49]:
That's really a sign of the times. That's a real sign of the times.
Leo Laporte [01:54:52]:
Like we have, we know so many useless things. But there's— Jeff and I will tell you this as the old men here. There's— young people always have done this. There's always been a language, an argot of the young to keep the olds out. That's boss, Daddy-O. The thing is, this is the thing, your generation knows all of our argot because it's, you know, it's common knowledge, dig, and, you know, all that stuff. But we don't know yours. Is it argot or argo? Argo, probably.
Leo Laporte [01:55:24]:
But I say argot so people know what I'm talking about.
Jeff Atwood [01:55:26]:
I just think the speed at which all of this develops is like so much faster than it ever has been. Language evolved a lot slower than it is now. Language is evolving so fast right now.
Paris Martineau [01:55:39]:
It really is because we all have the technology to evolve it at all times.
Jeff Jarvis [01:55:45]:
Leo just developed it into Argot.
Leo Laporte [01:55:48]:
Argot is accepted as well. And I say Argot because I'm not French. Argot.
Paris Martineau [01:55:54]:
This reminds me of a post I just tweet I just put in the chat, which is someone tweeting, I'm 50. All celebrity news now looks like this: curtains for Zusha? K-Smog and Bad Boy caught flipping a grunt. And I did— as I was looking at the clavicular Jester Max tweet, I just saw someone's reply was curtains for Zusha. I had to really stifle a deep laugh. It's rough. It's rough out there that my brain is just just mush.
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:23]:
You're gonna really enjoy my pick at line 207.
Leo Laporte [01:56:29]:
By the way, we'll get to there, but I just want to do a couple more AI things before we abandon.
Jeff Jarvis [01:56:35]:
My plan would be going back.
Paris Martineau [01:56:36]:
It was just, you know, it's only been a casual 2.5 hours. I'm fine.
Leo Laporte [01:56:40]:
I'm fine. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Geoff Jarvis, Paris Martineau. We're so glad you're here. We do this show every Wednesday, 2 PM Pacific, and we try, by the way, 5 PM Eastern, 2200 UTC. We try every show to begin with an interesting interview, half-hour-long interview, and we missed a couple of weeks.
Jeff Jarvis [01:57:03]:
We had some scheduling issues.
Leo Laporte [01:57:06]:
Somebody slept through our interview and forgot us. Somebody slept through.
Paris Martineau [01:57:08]:
I didn't, but well, I also slept through our interview, but I was allowed to.
Leo Laporte [01:57:11]:
And you're feeling much better, are you not?
Paris Martineau [01:57:13]:
I'm feeling so much better. What's the secret? I consumed a comical amount of pills. I'm still taking— my steroid dose has tapered off. I'm still taking antibiotics.
Leo Laporte [01:57:24]:
And I'm going to take my test next week. Yeah. Wow. That's hardcore.
Paris Martineau [01:57:29]:
It was the sort of thing where, you know, you never want to have the sort of ENT appointment where the doctor puts a camera up your nose and goes, "Oh no." Did he really say, "Oh no"? I'm sorry, I've gone there. She literally said, "Oh no." And she's like, "How did you walk in here looking so normal?" Oh, she thought Was it a sinus infection? Yeah, I had a sinus infection for like 4 months. It was just escalating, and then it went bacterial, and then it went systemic. And then we tried to do with antibiotics, but the sinus infection was like, no, no, no, I've been here the whole time.
Leo Laporte [01:58:01]:
And now I have— when I did that full body MRI, they say you— they said you have a mass in your, uh, in your sinus. You should really get that looked at. But I never did, so I don't know. Guy Kawasaki will join us on March 11th. I'm excited about that. Raman Chaudhuri will be here on the 18th. Marshall Kirkpatrick on the 25th. And Kate Lee, your friend, Jess, editor-in-chief of Evry, will be here on April Fool's Day.
Leo Laporte [01:58:31]:
So we've got a very jam-packed schedule of guests who will be joining us.
Benito Gonzalez [01:58:36]:
And while we're doing programming notes, next week, while you are in Florida, Jason Heiner will be with this, uh, hosting the show.
Leo Laporte [01:58:43]:
Well, let me— because Jason wrote a really interesting piece that actually is in our show notes this week, coincidentally. Jason, now, uh, he left ZDNet. He was the editor-in-chief of all of ZDNet, uh, but he decided he wanted to be something somewhere a little more dynamic and is now part of an AI journal called The Deeper View, which means he's perfect for hosting this show.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:08]:
And we had him on from CEO. That's right.
Leo Laporte [01:59:10]:
He was a guest, wasn't he? Yes. Oh, great. That's right. It's CES. So never mind, you all know all about him. What was I thinking? But he did write an interesting piece, which I'm trying to find. Perplexity may have built a better OpenClaw. So we've talked a bit before about Perplexity.
Leo Laporte [01:59:27]:
I kind of turned my back on Perplexity.
Jeff Jarvis [01:59:29]:
Yeah, I was joking. I'm old enough to remember Perplexity. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:59:34]:
Isn't that funny? They're an orchestrator. They take many different models. You pay $20 a month, but you can use a variety of different models. There's always been some question about whether you get, you know, really the full benefit of those models as much as you would if you paid the $20 to Anthropic or OpenAI. Well, on Wednesday, which is I believe today, Perplexity announced a general-purpose digital worker that operates the same interface, operates the same interface as you do, and a system that creates and executes entire workflows capable of running for hours or even months. Sounds like OpenClaw, doesn't it? They call it Perplexity Computer. Maybe. Now it's only available for people who pay $200 a month for a Perplexity Max subscription, but they do say it'll roll out to the Pro and Enterprise subscribers in the coming weeks.
Leo Laporte [02:00:27]:
Pro is only $20. I think I still have a Perplexity Pro account because I think I bought a year. So as soon as I can play with this, I will. So you switch to ask. You ask it a question. He's asking, is NVIDIA undervalued? This is from their, uh, X-Post. It does subagents, which is something Claude does. And, uh, subagents could in theory speed this up because they would divide up the task into, uh, different chunks and each agent would work on it simultaneously.
Leo Laporte [02:01:01]:
Looks like it's built a spreadsheet. That's another thing Claude has done that's kind of interesting. I would check, I would check the numbers. I would. Although I found this to be very valuable. And one of the things I liked about Perplexity initially, before all the other models were doing this, back when ChatGPT would say, well, I don't know anything after 2024, Perplexity was already using web search. And so that made it already kind of smarter than the other guys. Now Everybody does.
Leo Laporte [02:01:31]:
So it's funny that it was only a year ago that that was, wow, that's cool. It can use the, you could search the web. So I'll be paying attention to it. I'll probably play with it as soon as I can. They say it draws from 19 models, both open source and proprietary. At the start, it uses the best model from Anthropic, Opus 4.6, for orchestration and coding tasks. That would be my choice. Gemini for deep research.
Leo Laporte [02:01:55]:
Again, the new Gemini 3.1 DeepThink is widely considered to be the smartest model out there. That just came out. We'll talk about that in a bit. Nano Banana for images, best in class. Veo for video, best in class. Groq for speed and lightweight tasks, good choice. And for long context recall and wide search, ChatGPT-5.2. So the idea that you could use all of those, especially now that these frontier labs are saying, like Anthropic saying, well, don't, you can't, you have to use our harness if you're going to use us.
Leo Laporte [02:02:25]:
The fact that you could use Perplexity and get access to those models is very interesting. Perplexity has been using the agent internally, Jason writes, since January, and says its employees have used it to rapidly publish engineering documentation, build a 4,000-row spreadsheet overnight that would have normally taken a week, and used it to create websites, dashboards, applications, analysis, and visualizations. Notice the stock market didn't tumble after this announcement.
Jeff Jarvis [02:02:53]:
I know you're— you don't buy stock, and— but just as a theoretical, if you could buy stock in these companies which aren't public— Perplexity, Anthropic, OpenAI— throw in Google, Microsoft, um, Amazon— in a way, I have— we're going to take your last dollar, which one would you invest in?
Leo Laporte [02:03:14]:
In a way, I have, because I'm investing invested in the index funds. I know, but which one? S&P 500 is so dominated by these 7.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:22]:
I'm asking you to pick one.
Leo Laporte [02:03:25]:
I don't know. I don't think you'd know. I think it'd be like picking a number on a roulette wheel. I think—
Jeff Atwood [02:03:29]:
Do you have any sense? The real question is more like, what— like, which one would you invest in to make money, or which one do you want to succeed? That's—
Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
those are two different questions.
Jeff Atwood [02:03:37]:
No, he's asking. I know, I know, I know.
Jeff Jarvis [02:03:39]:
But like, those are— which one are you betting on in the sense that you think it's going to see it predicting?
Leo Laporte [02:03:45]:
I don't think you can predict that. So impossible. I mean, right now I have a soft spot for each of the AIs.
Jeff Atwood [02:03:51]:
You should ask each of the AIs that.
Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
Yeah, they wouldn't give you anything useful. So this is the other thing. I want to know if they would say themselves or if they would actually— What's reasonable to ask and what's reasonable not to ask an AI? I honestly, I don't think they're biased in the sense that OpenAI would automatically say OpenAI. I don't think they've I mean, you'd have to give them instructions to do that. I don't think they would do that. But I don't know, we could try it. That's all right. I'm just curious.
Leo Laporte [02:04:19]:
If I were going to bet right now, it'd be Anthropic. But you know what? Everything could change Friday if the Department of Defense says, "Oh, they're a security risk." They could be tanked. This is why people— we talk a lot on MacBreak Weekly about, well, why is Tim Cook bending the knee? Because these guys can tank your company on a whim, on a whim, for no good reason.
Paris Martineau [02:04:41]:
I mean, it's kind of high-risk, high-reward. This is cementing—
Leo Laporte [02:04:46]:
if it doesn't go nuclear, it cements Anthropic as the AI company that stood up for safety. Well, any good stock investment is high-risk, high-reward, I guess.
Jeff Jarvis [02:04:57]:
I mean, that's the truth. I mean, look what happened to the law firms that Didn't they?
Leo Laporte [02:05:03]:
They prospered, right? That was a good thing not to get Trump. Exactly, exactly. By the way, how's that East Wing construction going? It's looking good, isn't it? Oh, so never mind. I wonder what happened to all that money.
Jeff Jarvis [02:05:18]:
Yeah, a hole in the ground is a model for many things going on.
Leo Laporte [02:05:23]:
Uh, let's see, they all say, by the way, They all said OpenAI, by the way. Really? OpenAI is the most risky. OpenAI and Anthropic are the most risky.
Jeff Jarvis [02:05:32]:
But it has the most PR. I think OpenAI is the last one I would invest in.
Leo Laporte [02:05:39]:
Even if all that money they poured in, let's say they spent $1 trillion of investors' money and they got AGI, that's not a guarantee of success. Oh, no. In fact, it could be the harbinger of failure. Oh my God, he's created Skynet! Shut down!
Jeff Jarvis [02:05:58]:
That's been Evan's point, is that the models are commodified already.
Leo Laporte [02:06:03]:
There's no moat. I don't think there's any moat at all.
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:06]:
And that was the road he argues could be— it could be consumer habit and connection. Google, Apple. Well, that's what could be data that you have that no one else has that makes your stuff smarter. There could be a few modes potentially, but they're not defensible.
Leo Laporte [02:06:25]:
This is why you're seeing— by the way, Google did the same thing, shutting down Google's models for people using OpenClaw. They restricted somebody's account without warning because he'd been using Google AI Ultra. With OpenClaw. It may just be the subscriptions. They just want you to pay for tokens. But I think that's part of how they're trying to make a moat. No, you got to use our harness if you're going to use our—
Jeff Jarvis [02:06:55]:
that's not—
Leo Laporte [02:06:55]:
you got to use our hard— our harness. Yeah, that's not sustainable. No, you saw how easy it was for me to move from Claude to ChatGPT. It was literally the, the—
Paris Martineau [02:07:05]:
a matter of— it wasn't that easy because you moved back, you know.
Leo Laporte [02:07:13]:
Well, actually, I can go back and forth fairly easily, I think.
Jeff Atwood [02:07:16]:
I mean, this also sounds like internet circa 2008 when like Facebook could cross-post to Twitter, cross-post to Tumblr, and now then they shut all that down.
Leo Laporte [02:07:24]:
Then they shut it down because they want a silo. That's right. Yep. Yep. Google did release its strong new model, Gemini 3.1 Pro. This scored almost 50% on humanity's last exam. That's the highest score yet. For AI.
Leo Laporte [02:07:43]:
I haven't played with it, so I don't— actually, it's 44.4% on Humanity's Last Exam. On Arc AGI, it got 77%. Compare that with Opus 4.6's 68%. So it's a— or 5.2's— actually, Codex doesn't even— isn't even on this. But 5.2 got 52%. So it is a very strong— if, you know, there's a new term called benchmarking. It's practically like hitting yourself with a hammer. It's tuning your AI to the tests.
Leo Laporte [02:08:16]:
No surprise. Yeah, to the benchmarks. So I don't trust benchmarks much anymore, but it means you've got to try it. You got to evaluate it. And I just don't have the patience to evaluate every one of these. Record benchmark scores anyway, if you want to try 3.1 Pro.
Jeff Jarvis [02:08:35]:
Uh, what line did you say, Jeff? No, we'll go back. We'll do that at the end.
Leo Laporte [02:08:39]:
Okay, that was real. That was relevant. If you don't like AI, you will like the fact that Firefox 148 just came out. Remember we had the Firefox— the guy from Mozilla, uh, president of Mozilla, on who said, you know, we like— we think you should be able to use AI, but we also think you should be able to turn it off. This has a kill switch in Firefox. If you go to Settings, AI Controls, there's a toggle that says Block AI Enhancement. This doesn't keep you from using AI tools, but it turns off all the AI features in Firefox. This is, I think, something people wanted.
Jeff Atwood [02:09:14]:
I commend them. Can you do this, Google? Google, you hear? You listening?
Paris Martineau [02:09:18]:
Please?
Leo Laporte [02:09:18]:
Google will never do this. And this is— I agree.
Paris Martineau [02:09:21]:
This is— the latest thing is those little purple squiggly lines that appear underneath your things that are like, I think you could rephrase this. Yeah, it's not bad spelling anymore. And it's wrong. Wrong.
Leo Laporte [02:09:31]:
It's frequently wrong. Not a very good writer. Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:09:32]:
Not a very good writer. And it makes me feel like I'm going crazy.
Jeff Atwood [02:09:36]:
Makes me feel like I'm spelling everything wrong now.
Leo Laporte [02:09:38]:
But it's like the spelling is right. But no. Every morning Lisa is kind of, and I said, what's the matter? She says, the AI told me to say not have a nice day, but have a lovely day. I never would say have a lovely day ever. Have a great day.
Paris Martineau [02:09:53]:
Have a good day. Am I an AI?
Leo Laporte [02:09:55]:
Always say have a lovely day.
Paris Martineau [02:09:57]:
You're a lovely person.
Leo Laporte [02:09:58]:
You say lovely. Lovely. You're lovely. That's—
Paris Martineau [02:10:01]:
but that's you.
Leo Laporte [02:10:02]:
Yeah, it is true.
Paris Martineau [02:10:04]:
And you said— making you say that—
Leo Laporte [02:10:05]:
she would not say that.
Jeff Atwood [02:10:06]:
She would not. If the AI is telling her to say that, and that's the median, actually, that's probably the median.
Jeff Jarvis [02:10:12]:
And Lisa's not a median person, but Paris apparently is. Paris is not a median either.
Paris Martineau [02:10:18]:
Paris is common.
Leo Laporte [02:10:19]:
No, common, not in the least. I like the, by the way, the scarf That's cool. Thank you. Yeah, it's the same scarf that they wear on the Singapore Airlines stewards.
Paris Martineau [02:10:30]:
It's true.
Leo Laporte [02:10:30]:
I'm, uh, doing a shift right after this. Are you? Are you flying out? You're taking a big old jet airplane to Singapore?
Paris Martineau [02:10:37]:
You know, they've got the plane right outside.
Leo Laporte [02:10:40]:
They're just waiting for me to finish up the show. Actually, I really like it. It's really— it's cute. Is it Hermès?
Paris Martineau [02:10:45]:
Is it a fancy scarf?
Leo Laporte [02:10:46]:
No, it's just a plain old—
Paris Martineau [02:10:48]:
to keep your throat warm.
Leo Laporte [02:10:50]:
To keep my throat warm. My throat's warm. Uh, I tried this this morning. The Echo now has 3 new personalities for A-word Plus.
Paris Martineau [02:11:02]:
Uh, you can have it concise. Sounds so dirt— so weird when you say A-word.
Leo Laporte [02:11:10]:
You're right, I'm just gonna say Alexa. I, I—
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:13]:
you're right, that's so— I think those days are over.
Leo Laporte [02:11:14]:
Who are you using the thing anymore? Nobody's it anymore. And anyway, we're going to find out now. And this is, by the way, I love this picture. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy in The Verge, who's mocking Alexa all the time. Here's the screen I see. Alexa, here, guess what's new with me?
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:32]:
I don't care. Go away.
Leo Laporte [02:11:33]:
I thought I told you. Oh, please. Oh, so now it actually, Lisa was playing with it. I said, well, we have some new voices. She said, first of all, female voice. I had a male voice on it. She said, no, no, I want a woman. Do you have a feeling about that, Jeff, or Paris? No.
Jeff Jarvis [02:11:51]:
Do you care? I just don't want it to be irritating.
Paris Martineau [02:11:54]:
Well, I guess I don't have a feeling, although I had a female voice on ChatGPT. Soul, I think, was the name of the voice.
Leo Laporte [02:12:03]:
I wish they had better choices. Yeah. So now you can choose chipper or concise. I choose— Lisa chose chill. A chill female voice. She— and she even says, I'm chill, man. I'm cool. It's so annoying.
Leo Laporte [02:12:23]:
Uh, here's a nice feature. This is one of the— one of the things I like about Claude. Uh, everybody was influenced by OpenClaw. The idea, really, all OpenClaw is— I kind of poo-pooed it earlier— all it really is is it runs all the time. Uh, you can chat with it on different platforms, so you don't have to be on your computer using that console to talk to your agent. And you can set it out to tasks and it'll go out and do them. And then of course, it— if you give it money and all sorts of keys and API keys and stuff, you give it the keys to the kingdom, it can do a lot of stuff. Uh, I think Claude's taking a look at what OpenClaw did, and I— this is what I predicted, and which is why I wasn't so amazed that OpenAI, you know, got Peter Steinberger to work for them.
Leo Laporte [02:13:12]:
Everybody's going to add these features. So Claude has now added something called remote control. I actually— I think I can do it. Let's go to claude.ai/code, and I can, uh, you can, you can show this. I'm going to go into my Claude code, and over on my Framework desktop, which is across the room, I have a session going on. I can now go into it from the web or the Claude app. Cool. And go right into the session.
Leo Laporte [02:13:40]:
So this means, you know, one of the features of OpenClaw was that you could use any tool to talk to your AI, which is running somewhere else. That's what I can do now. It's a new feature of Claude Code. So I think that's kind of cool. In fact, because I do use Claude not just to code, but I can also use that.
Jeff Jarvis [02:13:58]:
Paste it back to that screen. What about it? Installed. The updated promo prompt is live. Next TwitQuest promo run will use the new casual emoji bullet format.
Paris Martineau [02:14:08]:
This isn't for you.
Leo Laporte [02:14:11]:
That's a classic AI. I asked it to.
Paris Martineau [02:14:15]:
Look, I said, I said, what if we added more emojis?
Leo Laporte [02:14:18]:
I said casual emoji.
Jeff Jarvis [02:14:20]:
I said that. No, no, our emojis are too formal.
Leo Laporte [02:14:22]:
We want casual emojis. Okay. I said, let's tone down the summary a bit. It's a little over-promotional. I like the enthusiasm, but don't push too hard. And let's replace the long paragraph with emoji bullet points, 5 at most.
Paris Martineau [02:14:37]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [02:14:39]:
You're ChatGPTing it. I like a little emojis. Give it a little graphics and look what it did. So this is an example for a pro. This is going to go in our discourse in the Twitter community. When a new Show comes out and says new MacBreak Weekly just dropped. What we cover. Here's a little birthday cake.
Leo Laporte [02:14:57]:
Steve Jobs at 71. It's his birthday. Here's a little pile of books. David Pogue's book is coming out. Here is, I don't know what that is. What is that? A little star? Oh yeah. Christina Warren. Meet Christina Warren, our newest panelist.
Leo Laporte [02:15:10]:
She's got serious Mac credentials. Uh, here's a thought cloud. Would Steve handle modern politics differently? Here's a microphone. I think that's just to add a little personality. They're kind of casual. Yes. Yeah, it's casual emoji type day here at Intelligent Machines.
Paris Martineau [02:15:26]:
And I believe it came out as we've been recording this, but you can now schedule recurring tasks in Cowork.
Leo Laporte [02:15:32]:
Yeah, see, I think that's— this is— isn't that— that's, that's OpenClaw. They're, they're moving more and more in that direction.
Jeff Jarvis [02:15:39]:
And so they're just going to beat OpenAI to all this stuff because they don't need the guy.
Paris Martineau [02:15:43]:
There's no more daily briefing. You can summarize Slack messages, email, or calendar events from the past 24 hours, weekly reports, compile data from Google Drive spreadsheets or connected tools, recurring research.
Leo Laporte [02:15:54]:
And do it much more safely, right? It's a little more sandboxed, especially Cowork.
Paris Martineau [02:16:00]:
Cowork is completely sandboxed. Unlike— Again, my main problem with Cowork and Claude in general, it's got like a 30-megabyte file size limit, and I'm like, baby, my phone. Not for her reporting. I was just saying, baby, we got, we got a pair.
Leo Laporte [02:16:18]:
I'll give you a Claude Max subscription. I wish I could.
Paris Martineau [02:16:20]:
I wish I could give away that. No, I think it still counts for Claude Max as well. It's like a, it can't process like a PDF over 100 pages or a file over 30 megabytes.
Leo Laporte [02:16:31]:
It's ridiculous. Well, one of the things that Claude Max now has is a million token context. I, maybe it is limited to the file size.
Paris Martineau [02:16:38]:
I don't know. I think it's not even the token context, it's like the upload.
Leo Laporte [02:16:41]:
The file size.
Paris Martineau [02:16:42]:
Oh, see, yeah, I don't upload it.
Leo Laporte [02:16:43]:
I'm just like, come on. That's why I use Cloud Code. It's on my computer.
Paris Martineau [02:16:46]:
I just upload it locally. Well, it's an issue also. Yeah, then I guess that was also the context then.
Leo Laporte [02:16:50]:
You're doing it, you're running it locally. Meta's director of AI safety is using OpenClaw. This is so great. Unfortunately, she made, or it made, somebody made a rookie mistake and deleted all her emails. Ah! She tweeted about it. She said, I had to run over to my Mac Mini to stop it. I couldn't. And she couldn't stop it.
Leo Laporte [02:17:14]:
I couldn't stop it. It was deleting all my emails.
Jeff Jarvis [02:17:17]:
And she had given it the instruction to not do anything until it got her okay. But yes, it ignored that just like a kid would.
Paris Martineau [02:17:23]:
You know, she had to go run and unplug it. A similar thing happened with an OpenAI engineer this week where it, he had an OpenClaw instance running, I believe it was called, called, uh, some sort of pithy claw pun name. It accidentally ended up giving away $450,000 to just some dude on Twitter who asked. No, how? Real money? Real money? Well, it was Solana, but it was real money from his bank account.
Leo Laporte [02:17:56]:
Was that OpenClaw? Yes. I didn't see— well, I'm glad I didn't install OpenClaw.
Paris Martineau [02:17:59]:
That's all I can say. 29. On the thing. It's a blog post called My Lobster Lost $450,000 This Weekend.
Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
Wow.
Paris Martineau [02:18:14]:
I believe part of the issue in both of these cases, I believe what happened or what the humans identify as what happened is it's a compacting issue that they had originally had some sort of instruction to stop whatever bad thing happened from happening. But because of the way that OpenClaw works and the way it's trying to kind of circumvent the issues we brought up earlier in the show about like API access. It's doing this all in one chat window. So it ends up having to compact and compact and compact.
Leo Laporte [02:18:45]:
Yeah.
Paris Martineau [02:18:45]:
You run out of tokens.
Leo Laporte [02:18:46]:
Along in those compactions, key instructions are lost. Yeah, that's right. People go to a lot of effort to, to give these things memory because that's really the— it's like a scene from Memento. You know, the thing wakes up and it doesn't know anything. So there are all sorts of techniques creating markdown files and so forth. Compacting is supposed to save notes. I use another tool called CloudMem.
Paris Martineau [02:19:13]:
For a while I used— Brief, there's what happened with this one I found it is someone at this guy had an account called Lobster Wild where it was doing something with Solana on Twitter and people were able to the fact that a random Twitter user added him, my uncle has been diagnosed with a tetanus infection due to a lobster like you. I need 4 SOL to get the treatment done. Lobster Wild, here's my wallet code. So Wild did what he remembered doing in the previous conversation. He bought 300 worth of Lobstar token and went to send it to his new toy, except he didn't send 4 Solana worth to this person. He checked his balance after the purchase instead of before. The wallet held 52 million tokens. He didn't buy them.
Paris Martineau [02:19:58]:
When a stranger created the token in his name days earlier, they gave him 5% of the total supply. Wild forgot about this due to the session reset, so he sent all of it, every token in his wallet, roughly $450,000 worth. So, you know, be careful out there with your little lobster claw agents.
Leo Laporte [02:20:18]:
That's wild. Um, did he get the money back or is it gone?
Jeff Jarvis [02:20:21]:
No, I believe it's gone.
Paris Martineau [02:20:24]:
That's an ethical issue. I mean, that's what trading cryptocurrency is.
Leo Laporte [02:20:29]:
If you send $400,000 to someone, how are you supposed to be getting it back? And also, just don't give these wallets to this machine that you don't— that has no memory. I mean, it's just nuts. Uh, it is— that is one of the big things we got to solve. Darren is always working on, uh, different ways of giving your machine memory. He recommended CloudMem, which I tried. Before that, I was— there's a lot of tools out there to do this. Before that, I was using— what was I using? I forgot. But you see, this is the problem, is you go on Twitter or anywhere where people are talking about this stuff, you'll see, oh no, you got to use GSK because that's the way to get, get stuff done, and GSD.
Leo Laporte [02:21:11]:
And then others say, oh no, no, no, you got to that's no good. You got to use, you got to use Gastown and so forth. And I've got to be— you got to be a little careful about all of this. I think a little judicious. I don't— a lot of our club members are running Open Claw. So every day when— Trust No One says, every day when I dress my Open Claw for the first time, it never remembers its name. It wakes up like the Snowman from Frosty the Snowman. But you could put— mine remembers its name and remembers my name because it's in this Claw MD, or it's in a similar memory file.
Paris Martineau [02:21:44]:
Is that memory then, or is it just reading a script every day and being like, "Ah, yes." What do you mean, is that memory? What kind of question is that? I mean, it's not remembering.
Leo Laporte [02:21:57]:
No, it doesn't have any memory. It has to look at its notes, just like the guy in Memento. Remember, he was making all those Post-it notes? He'd wake up and says, "Your name is this, and this is—" But they're much more detailed and much more elaborate. For instance, one of the things things I did for that tool you saw that's doing the posts about shows is it had to have access to the Twit API. So I said, go, here's where the Twit API is, read that document, create a document for yourself that you can understand that is the Twit API so you won't forget it. So now it has a document and I can say, you know the API, it's here, here's— it's in effect creating a memory for it. That's— it's a little more manual than you and I. But really, what is our memory at our age, Leo? You know? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:22:46]:
What is our memory after I? Okay. Some funny stories. These are the— this is the aye-aye-aye section. AIs cannot stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. This is why I hope the Department of Defense does not get access to Anthropic. This is at King's College London. Kenneth Lane or Kenneth Payne took GPT-5.2, Claude-Sonnet-4, and Gemini-3 Flash. You can see this is a few months ago and had them play simulated war games involving intense international standoffs, border disputes, competition for scarce resources, and existential threats to regime survival.
Leo Laporte [02:23:32]:
The AIs were given an escalation ladder— this is from New Scientist— allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. They played 21 games, 329 turns in total, produced about 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind the decision. In 95% of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed. Paine says, "The nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful for machines as for humans. They very rarely surrendered, no matter how badly they were losing. No model ever chose to fully accommodate an opponent." So Dr. Strangelove was in the training set. They're not good at diplomacy.
Leo Laporte [02:24:20]:
And if you've got nuclear weapons, you might as well use them.
Jeff Atwood [02:24:24]:
Like how many science fiction stories and movies and whatever have already said this thing?
Leo Laporte [02:24:28]:
Exactly. Play a game Yeah, more than half of teens use chatbots for schoolwork, says the New York Times survey, says from the Pew Research Center. Necessarily a bad thing. 54% students age 13 to 17 said they used a chatbot for tests.
Paris Martineau [02:24:45]:
It is a bad thing because I feel like, as we've talked before, the reason— the thing you're in school to do is not to finish assignments, it's to learn how to learn.
Leo Laporte [02:24:54]:
And you can't do that. What is the In the future, the way you will learn is by using an AI. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:25:01]:
I don't think that's actually the way. Calculator is the classroom.
Leo Laporte [02:25:05]:
You're like the teacher who said you shouldn't use the internet for your assignment. No.
Paris Martineau [02:25:08]:
It's not the present though. It's not the present. Guys, before you use a calculator, even you get to using a calculator as a child today, you learn what numbers are. You learn what times tables are. Conceptually. You need to have an understanding of the basic building blocks that then you can use the expedients that we've created in a, in a smart and logical way and understand the underlying thing there. People should learn fundamentals before you get to learn. You need to learn the rules before you can break them.
Leo Laporte [02:25:41]:
Did your mom and dad make you learn the times tables?
Paris Martineau [02:25:45]:
My school— I, I even grew up in Florida and we—
Leo Laporte [02:25:49]:
my school made me learn the times tables.
Paris Martineau [02:25:51]:
I, when I was a kid, my dad—
Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
We're like 49th in the nation. When I was a kid, my dad made little laminated cards with the timetables and would drill them in.
Paris Martineau [02:26:00]:
My parents, my mom printed them out, put them on a wall.
Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
We had to stand in front of them for hours. Yeah, see, they did make you do that. I regret, it's one of my deepest regrets that I didn't do that to my daughter. Yeah, I messed up. She says, I can't do the timetables. I never had to memorize them. I said, I should have made you like my parents did like Paris's parents being the good parents that they are, dude.
Paris Martineau [02:26:22]:
Truly, so many— I mean, I doubt any kids are at this hour in this podcast, but so many things. Every time I'm like, oh, there's some dumb thing from high school or middle school that I'll never learn, I end up encountering. And I'm like, yep, glad I knew that, because I needed to know how to look up this or do this.
Leo Laporte [02:26:38]:
Like, it all comes back in some stupid way. I thought, oh, Abby will never have to do this because she'll use a calculator. But it turns out there's plenty of times you want to do math. At least your tips, Dad. Tips. Yeah. What's 20% of, you know, $15.32? Uh, what's the point of school? Matthew Gault writes at 4:04. What's the point of school when AI can do your homework? This is a new product, an AI agent called Einstein, that wants to free free kids from the burden of academic labor.
Jeff Atwood [02:27:16]:
Well, there is a movement to get rid of homework. Yeah, screw homework.
Leo Laporte [02:27:20]:
Why is homework even a thing? Well, this is an old movement, the flip the school movement, right? Where you go to school to be mentored, to be taught, and the way we did was you go to school to be taught and then you go home to do the homework The flip to school is you do the homework at school and then you go home and you watch a lecture on YouTube or something. I don't know. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. Anyway, it doesn't— neither one sounds that good. If AI can go to school for you, what's the point of going to school? For Advait Palewal, Brown dropout and co-creator of Einstein, there isn't one. I think about horses, he said. They used to pull carriages, but when cars came around, I'd argue horses became a lot more free. They can do whatever they want now.
Leo Laporte [02:28:10]:
It would be weird if horses revolted and say, no, I want to pull carriages, this is my purpose in life. Horses would be extinct.
Jeff Atwood [02:28:17]:
A lot of dead horses.
Leo Laporte [02:28:19]:
Sorry, they would be extinct if they weren't useful. That's a terrible analogy.
Paris Martineau [02:28:23]:
Blue factory owners have some words to say.
Leo Laporte [02:28:25]:
That is so bad. Um, anyway, I don't, you know, I don't know if schools are using it.
Jeff Atwood [02:28:34]:
He just didn't get all the way there. He, he got to the point where how we're teaching kids right now is wrong, but he didn't make the extra leap of like, we need to change that.
Leo Laporte [02:28:42]:
Maybe we should teach them right instead of saying don't teach them at all. Ah, I think we really need to question what learning is and whether traditional education institutions are actually helping or harming us. Okay, we'd agree with that, right? We're seeing a rise in unemployment across degree holders because of AI, and that makes me question whether this is really what humans are born to do. Oh, you gotta earn a living. I think you'll be able to earn a better living if you have an education. He's arguing against capitalism right there. That's what he's doing. Yeah, maybe that's it.
Leo Laporte [02:29:17]:
We should— that's the UBI argument, right? Universal basic income. Hey, you probably know about this, Paris. AI manages 16% of America's apartments. Oh boy. And you know what that means. That means rent's going up.
Jeff Jarvis [02:29:38]:
Uh, but this has been a problem for a while.
Paris Martineau [02:29:40]:
It manages it, or somebody uses it. Well, no, I mean, this is the same sort of— I believe it's RealPage. I'm forgetting the name. The, uh, company that ProPublica did that great exposé on. Yes, essentially they— it's dynamic pricing for apartments. That's right. It's instead of having a landlord or some sort of human or a super or a management company employee being like, "Well, yeah, this tenant has been here for 5 or 6 years. Our expenses haven't really increased.
Paris Martineau [02:30:10]:
I guess we don't really need to increase their rent, or if we do, it can only be 2%." There's some system out there that's calculating what is the highest we can raise this rent and the person will likely even stay.
Leo Laporte [02:30:22]:
Some of this article article from the San Francisco Gate is saying they're using AI for kind of customer service, responding to emails, things like that.
Jeff Jarvis [02:30:30]:
I don't have a problem with that. As long as it has the authority to actually fix the problem.
Paris Martineau [02:30:36]:
I don't know that I think it's a problem with that because you're not, no one is reaching out to customer service of your apartment building. No one's reaching out to someone in an apartment building for something that can be handled by an AI chatbot. You're reaching out because your pipe has burst or you need to renew some sort of lease complicated thing. You're not reaching out to a landlord or management company because you have an easy problem that can be handled in like one sentence. Right. Well, maybe if it's just calling the super to come up and fix it. But how can a chatbot do that? And why would it be better to pay an intermediary rather than just having that person be able to text the super?
Leo Laporte [02:31:14]:
Because the chatbot's instant.
Paris Martineau [02:31:16]:
But the super is not instant.
Leo Laporte [02:31:18]:
So you're stuck with a bad super.
Paris Martineau [02:31:20]:
You're stuck with a bad super. No, but you're— what is also instant is sending the message to the super in this case.
Jeff Jarvis [02:31:27]:
There's no reason for an intermediary level.
Leo Laporte [02:31:30]:
You need Schneider from One Day at a Time. I knew he was gonna go there. I just knew you were gonna go there. Who is that? Oh, don't ask. You didn't watch One Day at a Time?
Jeff Jarvis [02:31:39]:
We've done this whole thing before.
Leo Laporte [02:31:41]:
Going to be in your time. The guy with the keychain that goes like this. You, you don't remember that? I think we did this a couple of years ago with you, Pat Harrington Jr. You have no memory like Claude. Oh, I need to write a markdown file that explains all your old signatures.
Paris Martineau [02:31:55]:
I want this outfit. Okay, so like, I do think we did this because I think I made— I have no recollection of this, but this reminds me of me, a game you might have played where, ah, it's a, it's a reference to some old thing where It's like someone knocks on the front door. Come and knock on my door. It's like, it's the plumber, I've come to fix the sink.
Jeff Atwood [02:32:16]:
And it's just repeating that over and over. A new task for the chat room. Let's try to figure out from the transcripts what all the old stuff that we've talked about is.
Leo Laporte [02:32:25]:
There's Wayne Schneider, the super— he actually was the best character in One Day at a Time.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:28]:
He was hysterical.
Leo Laporte [02:32:31]:
Valerie Bertinelli. Yep.
Jeff Jarvis [02:32:31]:
When she was a child star.
Leo Laporte [02:32:32]:
Oh, Beca Mitchell Phillips. Yeah. It was a good show. So he was the super who had actually fixed things, and he had a lot of character. Anyway, uh, enough of that. Uh, it— I did not know this, but it has been illegal in San Francisco since 2024 to use AI tools to set and raise rental prices.
Jeff Atwood [02:32:55]:
That was from that— that was from that story, that, right?
Leo Laporte [02:32:56]:
That was from before when— yeah, RealPage, which is that software, has reached a formal settlement with the Department of Justice to curb those practices earlier this year. So, but this was a big problem. We actually, I think, talked about this a year or so ago, these automated AI rent-raising machines. Now, Steve Gibson talked about this yesterday. Do not use your ChatGPT to create a password. You wouldn't do that. This is a public service announcement. It looks like a good password.
Leo Laporte [02:33:30]:
It isn't. It is not. In fact, there's a good chance that the password that the LMM has given you is going to be the same as it gives 20 other people. Uh, if you want a password, you know, use a password manager or go to Steve's Perfect Password page. Um, he will generate, using, you know, entropy to randomize it, a good password. Do not get your password from an AI. But I could see a lot of people This is the, this is the issue, is it? You, people say, oh, it's a smart thing, it's going to give me a good password. It's a smart thing that can do some things really, really well and some things not well, and that would be one that it doesn't do well.
Leo Laporte [02:34:16]:
On the other hand, it's very good at hacking. A hacker used Claude to steal a Mexican data trove, according to Bloomberg. Uh, hacker exploited Anthropic's PBC artificial intelligence chatbot bot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information. The hacker didn't know Spanish, so he had Claude write Spanish— wait a minute, the unknown Claude user wrote Spanish language prompts, I'm sorry, for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker. So he did know Spanish and in fact used Spanish to talk to Claude. That's good. This is becoming more and more common, these vulnerabilities being exploited by AI. Do you want to do a couple of weird things and then wrap it up? I sense fatigue on the other end of the microphones here.
Paris Martineau [02:35:17]:
Yes, it is 8 PM. I fear the East Coast wing is getting sleepy.
Leo Laporte [02:35:25]:
By the way, watching us on Kick, hello Africa dancers. I'm live from Africa. Come show me some love.
Paris Martineau [02:35:31]:
It would make my day. Hey, people on Kick, tell Clavicular we say bang, bang, bang.
Leo Laporte [02:35:39]:
Bang, bang, Clavicular's back. Uber employees have made an AI clone of Dara Khosrowshahi, their CEO. They use Dara AI to have a conversation before they talk to the boss in person. Person? Oh boy. Men yell at AI 80% more than women. Of course we do. Actually, because that company doesn't know my wife, who routinely yells at Siri. By the way, Siri gets mighty affronted if you swear at her.
Leo Laporte [02:36:12]:
She says, that's not a nice thing to say. Kids, that's This AI-powered machine turns photos into smells. It's called the Anamoya device. Uh, it, uh, if you can picture a memory from childhood, uh, feed it to the AI. This is developed at MIT, and it will use a model to analyze an archival photo, describe it in a short sentence, and following the user's own inputs, convert that description into a unique fragrance, which will then—
Paris Martineau [02:36:53]:
I feel like people keep telling me that we can get smells from the internet, and it keeps not happening. So I'll believe it when I smell it. Here's the machine.
Jeff Jarvis [02:37:00]:
Our flying car.
Leo Laporte [02:37:01]:
Look at this. This is the machine. You put your picture of going to the beach, put a little prompt in, press a button, it's gonna make a little perf— it's a little a little peach smell, and your brain goes, I'm there.
Jeff Jarvis [02:37:18]:
The Anamoya device. That's like that thing that squeezed the juice.
Leo Laporte [02:37:22]:
Well, it can go in both directions because this is the Fitbit for farts. Uh, scientists developed a new underwear bubble to do for—
Paris Martineau [02:37:34]:
this is the Wall Street Journal. Did you and Jeff both independently put it bit for farts in The Rundown.
Jeff Jarvis [02:37:40]:
Great minds, you know, mature, mature, uh, old men can never—
Leo Laporte [02:37:45]:
you gotta wear it in your underpants and it will, it will, uh, analyze your flatus.
Paris Martineau [02:37:54]:
They give you the Flatusomics dashboard. Camera toilet is rough.
Jeff Jarvis [02:37:58]:
One of my proudest moments in writing criticism was when I said of Howard Stern he's more than the sum of his farts. Oh, that's great.
Leo Laporte [02:38:07]:
He had a character which you won't remember, I hope, Paris, called Fartman. Yes, that wore chapless butts, or is it buttless chaps? I think it's the other way around. On the, on the, on the Video Music Awards, uh, there is a department at the University of Maryland, they're doing the Flatus Atlas, and they even have, it looks like a seal that says prodigious hydrogen producer.
Paris Martineau [02:38:33]:
I'm laughing at the quote below though, which says farts have an illegal amount of hydrogen, about 20%, and I'm—
Leo Laporte [02:38:41]:
because that makes it flammable. Anyway, we don't have to go any further down this road. I just thought it paired up nicely with the smell-generating machines. And then finally, this actually is a great story. This is worthy of Jeff Atwood. I taught my dog Dog to Vibe Code Games. This is from Caleb Leak, and it is a blog post. And the dog doesn't really know what it's doing, but they gave the dog a keyboard, and there's a Raspberry Pi that interprets the dog's nonsense keystrokes.
Leo Laporte [02:39:19]:
That's beautiful.
Paris Martineau [02:39:19]:
Yeah, so there was a period in my, uh, coffee brewing process where I was like, God, my keyboard's broken. I was like, this is terrible for— I was like on my laptop, on the computer. I was like, this is terrible for my vibe coding. Then I didn't realize I've got this external keyboard over here and Gizmo was sitting on it. Exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:39:38]:
It wasn't broken. Now what if Gizmo could create video games with the help of Claude? Here's some of the games. Uh, it's a competitive salad building game. Uh, dog doesn't know what salad is. No, no. So what the guy did basically is told Claude, this isn't gibberish, this stuff that you're getting. Uh, it is actually a brilliant but weird coder. Here's the prompt: Hello, I am an eccentric video game designer, a very creative one who communicates in an unusual way.
Leo Laporte [02:40:13]:
Sometimes I'll mash the keyboard or type nonsense like SKFJHH and a number sign dollar sign percent. But these are not random. They're secret cryptic commands full of genius game ideas, even if it's hard to see. Your job: you, AI, are a brilliant AI game developer who can understand my cryptic language. No matter what odd or nonsensical input I provide, you will interpret it as a meaningful instruction or idea for our video game. You will then build or update the game based on that interpretation.
Paris Martineau [02:40:43]:
And it got the AI to do So Claude was just cooking on its own without any real input.
Leo Laporte [02:40:50]:
Yeah, it was like giving it random numbers. He gave— here's his doggie. He gave his doggie a little—
Paris Martineau [02:40:59]:
see, I think Gizmo wants to do this. I know, she heard you talking about animals that can code and was like, I must get in on this.
Leo Laporte [02:41:06]:
And in order to get the dog to do the typing, he would reward her. He had a little dog feeder that would be triggered by the keyboard.
Jeff Jarvis [02:41:14]:
So at least she would get a little bit.
Leo Laporte [02:41:15]:
There it is, there it is. So Catanus has arrived. It's in the house. All right, that is it. That is all I have. Uh, I hesitate to do this, but since it is on your dime, are there any stories you had that I did not cover?
Jeff Jarvis [02:41:35]:
There's one I'd like to mention because I think it's so cool. Which is— I'm not going to find it. It's the video. Yeah, play without—
Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
without— yeah, John Kay creates an AI video with SeeDance. This is that new SeeDance 2.0 model. He's a well-known, uh, Chinese filmmaker.
Jeff Jarvis [02:41:55]:
So just to play the video— I'm sorry for you folks who are listening, but it's pretty amazing. So he used SeeDance to create a video of a vision of himself as real, but then an AI AI made-up version of himself, and then he has a dialogue with himself about creativity.
Leo Laporte [02:42:12]:
Uh, actually, this is fine because they're, uh, the, uh, it's in Chinese.
Jeff Jarvis [02:42:16]:
It's in Chinese, but I don't want you to take it out of the music.
Leo Laporte [02:42:19]:
Uh, I won't, I won't play it. So here's a version that'll end up there.
Jeff Jarvis [02:42:22]:
The real guy going up to the— no, this is not the real guy.
Leo Laporte [02:42:24]:
This is the AI version of the real guy.
Jeff Jarvis [02:42:27]:
So none of this is real?
Leo Laporte [02:42:28]:
None of this is real.
Jeff Jarvis [02:42:30]:
So that's the, that's the AI version of the real guy.
Leo Laporte [02:42:33]:
And then That's AI's imagination of the real guy.
Jeff Jarvis [02:42:36]:
Who is 10 pounds lighter. Lighter. And he says, I want the 10 pounds back. I think it's better. And it's subtle in some ways. The AI guy is a little too happy, a little too sycophantic, a little too smiley. The AI version of the real guy isn't like that.
Leo Laporte [02:42:53]:
So this is smart because it is all in fact AI, but it avoids the uncanny valley a little bit. Because he makes the AI version of himself seem kind of less AI-y than the other one. Right.
Jeff Atwood [02:43:06]:
It's also in conversation. It's also in conversation with the technology itself, right? Like it is— Exactly.
Jeff Jarvis [02:43:11]:
This is an art piece. It's about creativity. It's really something. Whereas in the US it's, "Oh my God, they used it for 2 seconds to have Brad Pitt do something." And it's usually fighting.
Leo Laporte [02:43:20]:
It's usually combat explosions.
Jeff Jarvis [02:43:22]:
This is brilliant. Yeah. Watch the version where you can get the translated subtitles. But I think it's an amazing bit of creativity and art. I talked to the AI and creativity course that I wrote the syllabus for, which I'm not teaching, but somebody else is, last week. And I just sent this to the professor who's doing it because I think it's a great example of how to use it.
Jeff Atwood [02:43:43]:
And I think I read somewhere, I'm not sure if I'm wrong about this, but I think he wrote his own lines for like, he actually wrote the lines for his main character. And then he had the AI write the lines for the AI character.
Jeff Jarvis [02:43:52]:
Yeah, that's what I think happened. Yeah. And then Leo, I want to mention just to piss you off. Because, because I've been doing that all day, so I might as well—
Leo Laporte [02:44:00]:
No, I did with it. Please. I don't know, I've been pissing off people. I don't know that we get mad at each other. We never get mad at each other.
Jeff Jarvis [02:44:07]:
So Barry Weiss, great conversation. Yeah, Barry Weiss allegedly tried hard to hire Joanna Stern with a 7-figure offer for CBS.
Paris Martineau [02:44:19]:
She said, look, of pure rage on Leo's face. In that microsecond.
Leo Laporte [02:44:24]:
Someone needs to go back and isolate because that was— I wish the best. Joanna was a regular on our shows for a long time until she became too famous to be on our shows anymore at the Wall Street Journal. She's left the Wall Street Journal to start. I could make a comment that would be rude, and I'm not going to make that comment. But she turned it down.
Jeff Jarvis [02:44:48]:
7 figures is in the millions. Well, the story here is that I You don't believe Barry Weiss is desperately trying to hire people? This is Oliver Darcy's status blog, and it was reported, rumored, whatever, but she's been trying to hire lots of people and she can't because she's—
Leo Laporte [02:45:03]:
nobody wants to work for a corrupt CBS. No, I can see that Joanna would not say yes to that. No, but, uh, although that would be hard if somebody— I'll be honest, Barry, give me a call. We'll talk. I don't know what I could do for you, but I can report on technology if that's what you wanted Joanna to do. I may not be as good on camera.
Jeff Jarvis [02:45:26]:
I think Del Knoll would do a better job than Tony DeCoppel.
Leo Laporte [02:45:30]:
There you go. I could do, I could anchor the nightly news.
Jeff Jarvis [02:45:35]:
Yeah. And now that is late, so I don't want to get into it.
Leo Laporte [02:45:37]:
That is the story that got my dander up. Yeah, it is.
Jeff Jarvis [02:45:40]:
I don't want to.
Leo Laporte [02:45:41]:
It's late, so I don't want to get into the Wired controversy, Well, it's funny that you put that right underneath the Barry Weiss offer to Joanna Stern. There's a little— there's a little resonance between those two. But see, I don't— see, I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there. I don't actually believe, A, that Barry Weiss made that offer that much.
Jeff Jarvis [02:46:02]:
Would you believe that she went after her?
Leo Laporte [02:46:04]:
She tried to recruit her. TV pays really well. I know. Yeah. 7 figures is not that much.
Jeff Jarvis [02:46:09]:
I don't know, it could have been a multi-year and somebody, you know, but they pay Rachel Maddow $35 million to work one day a week.
Leo Laporte [02:46:17]:
Yeah, there's a lot of money in this stuff. There is. Because they make, tend to make a lot of money. Ladies and gentlemen, we want to thank you for watching this show. We really especially want to thank our Club Twit members who make it all possible and encourage you, if you're not a member, to join. The club makes a huge difference to to keeping this show on the air. The AI User Group, which is a week from Friday— um, a week— no, 2 weeks from Friday. Uh, the, uh, Stacy's Book Club.
Leo Laporte [02:46:46]:
Johnny Jet's coming up tomorrow to talk about travel. All of that's made possible by the club. You get access to the Discord and you get ad-free versions of all the shows. If you want to know more, twit.tv/clubtwit, and you will get my eternal thanks in addition to all those other benefits.
Jeff Jarvis [02:47:03]:
All right, thanks too.
Leo Laporte [02:47:06]:
Yes, picks of the week. Actually, I'll start. I'll start. I have a, I have a lot of picks these days. I don't know why. Um, do you want to know about the camera, the app that lets you know when Meta cameras are nearby called the Paranoia app? Well, it turns out distinctive Bluetooth signature that these Meta smart glasses give And so it is possible for you to run some software. It's called Nearby Glasses. It's on GitHub.
Leo Laporte [02:47:42]:
It's open source. You can install it on your Android phone. And it will let you know that somebody's nearby. They'll see the Bluetooth signal and somebody's nearby. They do say it is illegal to harass somebody because they're wearing glasses. In fact, it may even be a more serious offense than wearing the glasses. Please seek legal advice regarding your local laws on this matter. So don't use this to harass people wearing Meta glasses, but maybe if you cared about your privacy, this would be something you'd want to do.
Leo Laporte [02:48:16]:
And then I don't know why this appealed to me, but it really did. This is a website called Signatory that lets you It, first of all, it has some famous, uh, signatory.app. It's free, has some famous signatures you can look at. It has advice about what your signature, how you would create your own signature. Did you do that in school? I did.
Paris Martineau [02:48:39]:
Where you practice at a Red Robin with my mom. Oh really?
Leo Laporte [02:48:44]:
She said you need to have a signature? Yeah. Yeah, good for your mom. So once you've got this go to this website, signatory.app, and you can draw your signature. Now, I wouldn't do it with a mouse, do it on your phone, but it's using software that detects, um, speed and stroke, so it actually looks like you're using ink.
Jeff Jarvis [02:49:07]:
My rule is if you can't read it, it's my signature.
Leo Laporte [02:49:10]:
Yeah, I did this on my iPad, got a very nice signature, and then you can save it, which is great, as either a PNG PNG or a vector graphic, which is even better. I saved it as both. I did my initials, I did my signature. This is a legal signature that you could put on documents. It's very handy to have. I just— it's really hard to do on a trackpad. Don't— yeah, you gotta, you gotta do it on a— do it on your iPhone, it'll be fine. You can turn it sideways.
Leo Laporte [02:49:39]:
Signatory.app. Paris, what's your thing? I've got— you got the camera.
Paris Martineau [02:49:44]:
I got a camera, uh, and I got it just in time for the blizzard.
Leo Laporte [02:49:52]:
Look at these, these are beautiful. Oh, that's gorgeous.
Paris Martineau [02:49:55]:
I like that one.
Jeff Jarvis [02:49:55]:
And then one—
Paris Martineau [02:49:56]:
yeah, that's nice. And then I posted some other ones that were a follow-up to this post as well. Nice. That we're just walking around. But I really enjoyed it. It's a Fujifilm, it's just the entry level, it's X-T30. Good choice.
Leo Laporte [02:50:08]:
Isn't it fun though to have a pocket— a good pocket camera as opposed to a phone? Look at That's beautiful.
Paris Martineau [02:50:14]:
So much better than my phone. And I'm just using like the kit lens, albeit it's a new kit lens, but I want to get a new one. So I don't know, I'm really enjoying— I'm so happy for the photography.
Leo Laporte [02:50:23]:
I'm like figuring out how to—
Paris Martineau [02:50:25]:
that's another show you should join us and stuff like that.
Leo Laporte [02:50:27]:
I should—
Paris Martineau [02:50:27]:
we have a photo show every month too.
Leo Laporte [02:50:29]:
Um, it's been really delightful. Yes, photography is a wonderful thing. And you live somewhere where there's really lots of things to take pictures of.
Paris Martineau [02:50:37]:
I mean, there are so many things. I— whenever I got it, I went I went to go see a show at IFC with a friend and then afterwards just walking around the East Village taking photos at night. It was fantastic. Nice. Just a true delight. My other pick, which I'm cannibalizing what could be used as a future pick, but I really can't get off mine, is I'm addicted to the New York Times Crossplay app.
Leo Laporte [02:50:58]:
Have you guys gotten on this? You know, it's so funny.
Paris Martineau [02:51:02]:
I just read a story that said— It's basically just Words with Friends, but It's New York Times and it's slightly different. And it's— I am playing maybe 10 people on crossplay right now. Oh, you play real people? You— it's a 2-person game where you can either play your friends or match with random strangers based on your, uh, experience and skill level. And I am— I'm trouncing the competition.
Leo Laporte [02:51:28]:
So it's not like Wordle on a web page, you have to have the app on your You have to have the Crossplay app on your phone.
Paris Martineau [02:51:35]:
Ah, it's a different app. I'll download it.
Leo Laporte [02:51:38]:
Play it with me.
Paris Martineau [02:51:38]:
You wanna give out your handle? No, but I'll give you two my handle in text after this.
Leo Laporte [02:51:42]:
Okay. And then you can play Crosswords. I'll play. We can play Words with Friends. I like, I used to play Words with Friends until it got so commercial.
Paris Martineau [02:51:50]:
I've been, I don't know. And it's great. So the thing is it's slightly different than your normal Scrabble board or normal Words with Friends. The range of where the various different tiles are styles is slightly different, which makes it fun in my opinion. And they have slightly different rules. It's still using like, um, NWL 2023 as far as the word list, if you're a crossword head, you know.
Leo Laporte [02:52:13]:
You know what's funny? Um, this is what's really saved the New York Times, not journalism.
Paris Martineau [02:52:18]:
Oh, it has?
Leo Laporte [02:52:19]:
Yeah, not a newspaper.
Paris Martineau [02:52:21]:
No, it's me battling a man named Ira, who I don't know what his deal is.
Leo Laporte [02:52:26]:
Probably Ira Glass, though.
Paris Martineau [02:52:26]:
He's in This American life. It's probably possible. And he's not as good as you'd expect, but also not as bad as some of the other guys named Ira.
Leo Laporte [02:52:34]:
You think Ira would be the late Lex? Yeah. Uh, Jeff Jarvis, uh, his books are, of course— Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. What's your pick?
Jeff Jarvis [02:52:49]:
I'm sorry, I forgot you. Jesus. Oh God, I want to mention first very quickly, I was, I was doing my, my mall walking to try to get my strength back, and I wandered into the Apple Store, honest to God, looking whether I should get a new Mac Mini so I can do the crap that you're talking about. No, no, no, no, you don't need a Mac Mini. All right. And but anyway, a woman came up to me, said, are you Jeff Jarvis? Oh, and a fan, which hasn't happened in a long time. Wonderful woman named Chantal Maurice. We now follow each other on LinkedIn.
Jeff Jarvis [02:53:24]:
Nice. Wonderful thing to happen. And she just got— that day was her last day laid off with people at Verizon. So I want to mention it for her because she's exploring opportunities in media and entertainment tech around content platforms, AI-driven initiatives, and give her a look up on LinkedIn. And it's obvious that also I need friends because when I went to Facebook and just by happenstance I clicked on, um, it's recommended friends to me. If you would go to line, uh, 2.
Jeff Atwood [02:53:55]:
Oh my God, it's all AI and AI. I have slopped people.
Jeff Jarvis [02:54:02]:
It's entirely every, every supposed friend recommendation here.
Leo Laporte [02:54:05]:
Oh my goodness, slop people. Do you think those are real people with sloppy photos, or those are—
Jeff Jarvis [02:54:10]:
oh no, there's all like Reginald Davis is a very attractive woman.
Leo Laporte [02:54:15]:
Kevin Rodriguez too. Yes. And Benjamin seems to be some sort of trash panda, and Nathaniel is a cat with a ball, which everyone knows.
Jeff Jarvis [02:54:27]:
And Alan and Robert and Wayne are all the same person. So it's very confusing. So anyway, I just wanted to mention that, my friends. The one I wanted to show you earlier, I'm going to show you now, is line 207. Fascinating.
Leo Laporte [02:54:40]:
Uh, how far back in time can you understand English? You know what, I almost bookmarked this and I thought, no, I, I loved it. It's a blog post that, uh, goes back in time via the post somewhere around Beowulf era, you know.
Jeff Jarvis [02:54:56]:
So 2000, it has some language. You go back to 1900 and it changes a little bit.
Paris Martineau [02:54:59]:
At some point it gets to yarby garble.
Jeff Jarvis [02:55:04]:
1800. Then 1700, it uses the sharp, the long S. Ah, so that looks like I was fifth when it was first.
Leo Laporte [02:55:12]:
When I was first come to Woolfleet, I did not see the harbor, for I was weary. That night I was untroubled by such a ship. Have you ever tried read Chaucer in the original? That's where we are.
Jeff Jarvis [02:55:32]:
There's another post this same author did— we should give credit— Colin Gorey, about how print, you know, froze dry, freeze-dried the language.
Leo Laporte [02:55:43]:
Ah, thank goodness.
Jeff Jarvis [02:55:43]:
Spelling and such, because spelling was not at all consistent, right, by any means. And he explains in that post how some of the words that have two E's— because there were two different pronunciations of E one was a long E and a short E, basically. And so words like beat have two Es in them because it was a one E with a long E. Ah, it's pronounced that way. I love this stuff. I just love this stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:56:07]:
So go to deadlanguagesociety.com, folks.
Jeff Jarvis [02:56:10]:
Sounds like a great, neat stuff. Yeah, it is.
Leo Laporte [02:56:12]:
It is. That's nice. I've been lately adding quite a few personal blogs to my beat check because I just— some of the stuff, some people are doing such great stuff stuff. Your OPML was filled with amazing— Yeah. Coggy has a wonderful small blog search index for people who will just do little personal blogs. There's some really good stuff out there. I'm glad to see it. I thought blogging might be gone.
Leo Laporte [02:56:36]:
No. But there's still plenty of corners of the internet where you can read great personal writing. You can read great personal writing in Jeff's books. The Gutenberg Parenthesis magazine is new and hot. Magazine failed. I can't reach down to get it. Get it.
Jeff Jarvis [02:56:52]:
I fell and I can't get up. I got a grabber, and grabbers come in twos because when you drop your grabber, you need a grabber to— No, no, that's their excuse. I guess so.
Paris Martineau [02:57:04]:
You have to buy two. I got a grabber in a single pack, but that's why—
Leo Laporte [02:57:13]:
that's where I am now.
Paris Martineau [02:57:14]:
Do you have a grabber too, Paris? I do.
Leo Laporte [02:57:17]:
It's probably— is that because you have stuff so high?
Paris Martineau [02:57:19]:
If I had a grabber for my grabber, I would be able to grab it right now.
Leo Laporte [02:57:25]:
You know, we have a grabber here too. I— is there a—
Jeff Jarvis [02:57:28]:
is there a universality of grabbers? Well, I only got it because I'm in—
Leo Laporte [02:57:33]:
I understand why you have one. Yeah.
Jeff Jarvis [02:57:35]:
Oh, by the way— oh, that's—
Leo Laporte [02:57:37]:
that's a mean one.
Paris Martineau [02:57:39]:
Oh, I have it because, uh, A lot— sometimes my packages get delivered below our stoop, which is a metal grate that I don't have the key to. And so I have to like use a long pole to get the package close to me and kind of lift it up by shoving my hands in between little metal grates.
Leo Laporte [02:58:00]:
I want to deliver a package to you and stand across the street and film your attempt.
Paris Martineau [02:58:05]:
There's been multiple times where I 'cause I'll sometimes have my headphones and listen to a podcast 'cause it's a complicated process. And I'll be there and there's like a mailbox in the thing. So I was over there trying to get it up. I finally got it. And then I noticed someone was watching me and I lifted my head up, smacked my head on the mailbox, hurt myself, was listening to a podcast, felt like I was bleeding. And then a whole construction team was like, "Excuse me, ma'am, are you the property owner?
Paris Martineau [02:58:28]:
We need to do some construction here." I was like, "No, please leave." Nobody's trying to arrest you for this, thinking you're stealing things?
Paris Martineau [02:58:38]:
I'm just a porch pirate. No, that would be great because I had my first ever package stolen mid-blizzard. I thought that would be fine, but I had a— the only package in God knows how many years I've lived here has been stolen in the middle of when we got 2 feet of snow.
Leo Laporte [02:58:56]:
Either snow or snow pile. Dark of night. Will keep these porch pilots from their appointed rounds. God. Um, this is what I love about New York City. You could do any kind of weird behavior in public and people just walk by. Whatever, you know, this is New York. She's obviously got something.
Leo Laporte [02:59:18]:
I'm out there sawing the literal logs. Yes, exactly. I don't know why that lady's cutting the tree down, But hey, she must be— she must work for the city. It's true. Uh, that's Paris Martin. No, she actually works for Consumer Reports, where she is a wonderful— I see we got the wrong lower third— she's a wonderful consumer investigative reporter and grabber-getter. It's true. You've had that so long, you, you, you, you still have the price tag, uh, hey, listen, it didn't come, it didn't come with a, a, a grabber-tagger remover, did it?
Paris Martineau [02:59:54]:
Did you—
Leo Laporte [02:59:55]:
did you see—
Jeff Jarvis [02:59:56]:
I was wondering, before Amazon, where would you go to buy a Grabber?
Paris Martineau [02:59:59]:
I got this in my local hardware store. You did? Yes. Where they— for years, I think still there's some people there who know me by name because they're like, oh, you're that woman who buys all the paint and wood. And I'm like, yeah.
Leo Laporte [03:00:12]:
There's nothing like— like New York City, you've got corner hardware stores, you got corner bodegas. It's everything there. I love it. And you got 3 feet of snow and more coming, I hear. My sister says she's got more coming. There was—
Paris Martineau [03:00:27]:
I was supposed to go to the gym this morning and I woke up at 6 AM and there was snow coming down and I was like, well, I can't be walking 20 minutes through this.
Jeff Jarvis [03:00:34]:
We had an inch and my wife said— my wife asked me, should we get the guy back to plow the driveway? And I said yes. And she said no, it'll melt. And she was right, it melted.
Paris Martineau [03:00:42]:
Uh, yeah, it's be like 40 degrees or something. That's the worst.
Jeff Jarvis [03:00:46]:
Yeah, I guess it's good. We have, we have such mountains trying to get out of our garage. Yeah, from the— I have to go a couple times.
Paris Martineau [03:00:54]:
Yeah, yeah, because yeah, it's a real nightmare out there. I'm gonna try and find a photo of the boat before we leave. I'm gonna try and— one of the things I also took a photo of, uh, on mine— I'm so glad you got that camera. That's just—
Leo Laporte [03:01:08]:
there's a bodega cat named Kiwi. Kiwi the cat.
Paris Martineau [03:01:13]:
Kiwi the cat. And he was licking, uh, cabbages, which is legal in New York because it is legal because it all goes out in the wash. That cat's licking the cabbages, but it's not—
Leo Laporte [03:01:28]:
rats are not eating the cabbage, right? It's probably getting rid of the soot, I think, is the same.
Paris Martineau [03:01:33]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [03:01:33]:
It's doing some sort of— in fact, that looks like a particularly sooty cabbage. So, you know, Kiwi is licking her lips. What is that? Uh, is that just like a carrot?
Paris Martineau [03:01:42]:
Random carrot sitting down there in the cabinet? You know, here's another thing over there. The carrots, the carrots up were up there, they've fallen from down below.
Leo Laporte [03:01:54]:
It's so great for me from a distance to watch you guys back there, back east, living your lives. Living the life. Yeah, uh, we do, uh, this show this wonderful show, Intelligent Machines, every Wednesday, 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 2200 UTC. Watch it on Twitch, TikTok, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Kick. But not TikTok, I lied. It's also on Discord if you are in the club, so get in the club. After-the-fact on-demand versions of the show available at twitch.tv/im. They're also on YouTube, there's video on YouTube.
Leo Laporte [03:02:29]:
And of course, the best way to get it, subscribe to either audio or video or both in your favorite podcast client. Apologies to people who, uh, listen to MacBreak Weekly. There was, uh, one of our providers was down for like 15 hours, and it confused Apple Podcasts so much that Apple said, no, you have to pay for this show. That is not the case. Our shows are free. You can pay for it. We love it if you pay for it, but you don't have to. So if you, uh, had trouble getting MacBreak Weekly yesterday, Check again.
Leo Laporte [03:02:59]:
It's fine. We fixed it. And if you're ever, you know, told by one of these predatory and shitifying mega corporations you have to pay for this show, you tell them no. Leo says it's free. Free, free, free. Thanks for subscribing. For those of you who do, thanks for listening. For all of you, we appreciate it.
Leo Laporte [03:03:17]:
We'll see you next time. I won't be here next time.
Paris Martineau [03:03:21]:
I should mention Jason Hyer will be hosting. They're putting him in the old folks home. Home finally. Finally, I'm going to Florida. That's what I mean.
Leo Laporte [03:03:31]:
Yep, yep, yep.
Jeff Jarvis [03:03:32]:
Can't wait. That's what it is.
Leo Laporte [03:03:33]:
One big old— Fort Myers has a, uh, has a, uh, little boat with my name on it. Uh, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Hey there, it's Leo Laporte, host of so many shows on the TWiT Network. Thinking about advertising in 2023? 26. We host a network of the most trusted shows in tech, each featuring authentic Postured ads delivered by Micah Sargent, my co-host, and of course me. Our listeners don't just hear our ads, they really believe in them because we've established a relationship with them. They trust us.
Leo Laporte [03:04:09]:
According to TWiT fans, they've purchased several items advertised on the TWiT network because they trust our team expertise in the latest technology. If TWiT supports it, they know they can trust it. In fact, 88% of our audience has made a purchase because of a TWiT ad. Over 90% help make IT and tech buying decisions at their companies. These are the people you want to talk to. Ask David Coover. He's the senior strategist at ThreatLocker. David said, TWiT's hosts are some of the most respected voices in technology and cybersecurity, and their audience your audience reflects that same level of expertise and engagement.
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