Tech News Weekly Episode 287 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.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jason Howell is out. But don't worry, I am here and looking forward to bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly. First, Daniel Rubino of Windows Central Stops by to give us the lowdown on the two keynotes from Microsoft Build 2023. What did the company announce? Probably had a lot to do with ai right then. Stephen Shanklin of CNET stops in to talk about Adobe Firefly in Adobe Photoshop using the generative AI tools in everybody's favorite image manipulation program. After that, Heather Kelly of the Washington Post joins us to talk about the Surgeon General's Advisory on social media and teens and kids, and gives some tips and tricks for parents and guardians who are worried about their kids playing around in social media, and of course, just tech in general. Then I round things out with my story of the week. It's all about medical technology and artificial intelligence, but in a different way, coming together to bring back the ability to walk to a paralyzed individual. Stay tuned for this episode,

TWIT Intro (00:01:13):
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Mikah Sargent (00:01:22):
This is Tech News Weekly episode 287, recorded Thursday, May 25th, 2023. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by the A w S Insiders Podcast. Search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player, or visit cloud fix.aurea.com/podcast. We'll also include a link in the show notes. Bye. Thanks to AWS Insiders for their support and by express vpn. Using the internet without express VPN is like forgetting to mute yourself on Zoom. And then everyone hears you trash talking to your coworkers. Protect your privacy today, go to express vpn.com/tnw and you can get three extra months free with a one year package. And by Dell Client Solutions devices orchestrated by the experts at C D W, which deliver a more personalized user experience with adaptive AI-based software that boosts collaboration. Wherever your team works, learn more at cdw.com/dell clients. Hello end. Welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news.

(00:02:34):
I am your one and only host this week, mic a sergeant, and I am excited to get things underway. First and foremost, it's time to talk to Windows Central's own Daniel Rubino about Microsoft Build 2023, which is underway, and we've gotta talk about the two keynotes that just happened. Welcome to the show, Daniel. Thanks for me. Yeah, always a pleasure to have you here. And you know, let's kick things off with I think my familiarity with Windows and that's with, with Windows 11 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I am, I was excited to see, you know, some talk about Windows 11 because there's been so much focus on AI and on everything else that Microsoft is doing that I thought, I wonder if their operating system's going to get any attention, but it did. And in fact, the operating system is supposed to be getting co-pilots. Can you tell us a little, a little bit about that, what that's going to look like?

Daniel Rubino (00:03:38):
Sure. So yeah, windows 11 is really interesting in the, in the sense that first of all, the op operating system was built during the pandemic <laugh>, and it was almost built as a response to that. The new focus of work from home and how people are using PCs and Microsoft is doubly down on the operating system. Something that, you know, windows was kind of written off a couple years ago where it was thought, you know, Azure is the future and all this kind of stuff, which it is. But Windows is important. And it's interesting at Build, as you mentioned to, you know, see Windows 11 there, because for the last couple years, windows kind of took a back seat, but no, it was here. So what is Windows Co-pilot? It is effectively Cortana 2.0. They're not calling it that, we're calling it that, but it's much more powerful than Cortana ever was.

(00:04:22):
For those who don't remember, windows 10 had a digital assistant called Cortana built into it. It's into the task bar. You can bring it up, you can ask it to do reminders and all this. It was pretty basic. It was a version of Siri, basically for Windows, but they faded out Quartana. They're bringing this thing back called co-pilot that's powered now by Bing Chat. So it's gonna allow you to do chats directly into this, you know, from this side, it's gonna pop out. Looks really nice, versus opening your browser, going to the webpage and doing the chat there, right? So this is built right into the operating system. You can go ask it to do things and one of the cool things it's gonna be able to do is actually do Windows functions for you. So you can be like, you know, go to settings and turn my microphone off or do this with the operating system, and you can give it commands and it'll be able to act on those.

(00:05:15):
So this is definitely going to the next level of digital assistance for computers you know, means to be seen, how powerful it is, how people are going to use it. But I think it's definitely an interesting addition. I think, you know, windows, what we're calling Windows 12 with Microsoft hasn't said that, but the next version of Windows expected in late 2024. We'll take this even further with the operating system itself, has more AI weaved into it where it can sort of act on preemptively your normal task based on your scheduling and your work habits. I think that's gonna be a really interesting addition.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:49):
Absolutely. Now is there anything else kind of just in general with Windows 11 that is kind of worth talking about, because of course, yes, co-pilot was center stage, AI was center stage, but Windows 11 is about more than just that I know new Bluetooth profiles or some such <laugh>. What else is coming on with Windows 11?

Daniel Rubino (00:06:12):
Yeah, so like one of the cool things, they're bringing back a lot of features that were missing or that were previously in Windows. And so that's, that's a win, but it's also a small win, but it's nice to see, so for instance, a Windows eight, when you would set up, say a second device, it could bring down your app list for you and download those icons and you could just go and download the stuff from the store. And, and that's important, as we all know from smartphones, because you get a smartphone and you're like, wait, what was the name of that app that I use like once every six weeks? Right? And you know what it does, we forgot the name, or you might even even forgot it existed at all. So you don't even install it. And that's terrible for developers who rely on people not only downloading your apps, but of course using 'em.

(00:06:56):
So what's gonna happen now with Windows 11? So when you set up a new device, it's gonna have a profile from your other Windows 11 device, and it's gonna basically populate with your previously installed apps from the Microsoft store, allowing you to download those and mirror your setup previously. So small win there, but a nice win for a lot of people who really, really sorely missed that feature, including myself. The other thing is grouping icons on the task bar. So right now, if you have like Microsoft Edge Open, but you have a couple instances of it open, it still shows up as one icon. If you hover over it with your mouse, you get the little previews dot popup of all the instances, and then you can click those. They're bringing back an old feature where you can just have like, say five versions of edge running on your task bar.

(00:07:39):
It saves you a little extra speed because you can just click the one you wanna go to instead of bringing up the preview. You know, that's a, that's totally just placating. I think, you know, a lot of older people who are just used to a certain way that Windows operated. But again, it's nice they're li kind of listening to people and bringing back these features. They're also reworking File Explorer, making it more modern. They're doing things into the widget panel, which has been a little controversial right now. The widget panel, it's on the the left hand side. It brings up Microsoft News. They've added widgets to it, like weather, Spotify, and phone link. So you can see your phone there. But a lot of people don't love Microsoft News. I like it, but I actually don't like it in the widget panel, right?

(00:08:21):
I actually don't need it there. So they're gonna finally allow people to turn that off, and that's gonna be, I think, really good because then the widget panel itself is going to become, you know, for widgets, things that are little tools just like you use on Android, like on iOS, where you can have the, and it's gonna be open to developers. We're already starting to see that. I mentioned Spotify earlier, and you'll be able to pin these things there. And there's even talked that eventually you'd be able to pin those widgets directly to your desktop. And that's just funny because a lot of old Windows U users know these features kind of existed in older versions where there were third party apps that did it. So Microsoft's gonna allow you to like stick these just to your desktops and they'll always be there for quick access. So a lot of it are just these like little changes, but they're quality of life improvements, bringing back old features that people loved. But it also shows a continued commitment to this operating system to make it new and bring it up online to where people are today and more analogous to a smartphone operating system than a traditional desktop operating system.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:24):
Now moving along to Microsoft Edge, what changes are coming there, because this is obviously a very popular browser used by many people who use Windows 11 but it kind of exists on its own and over time we've seen Microsoft add more features to the browser and make it kind of more of a, a workspace of sorts. So what can folks expect to be heading to Edge? Yeah,

Daniel Rubino (00:09:50):
So this is actually kind of cool cause if you go download Edge Dev Beta, or even Canary, I believe right now, you can actually get a lot of these features today, but they will be coming to the main version of Edge in the coming week. So one of them, some of them are just UI changes, right? They're moving the profile icon all the way to the left side, which matches like phone operating systems and other apps where you have your profile picture up there and when you click it, it brings down settings and information about your account, allows you to switch accounts and all that kind of stuff. So that's a small one. They're also changing up the UI a little bit. There's gonna be rounded corners and it's gonna be a little bit more polished, a little bit more modern looking. Of course Bing is there with the sidebar.

(00:10:29):
The sidebar itself is gonna be allowed to be pinned to the desktop or even quicker access. That sidebar allows you to do things like have quick access to progressive web apps which is really nice. And then there's just also just performance improvements and a lot of things kind of behind the scenes. There's also, you mentioned the word workspace. There's a thing called workspaces, which is available in those channels right now where it, it kind of allows you to say you're working with someone in different part of the world, you can almost share your browser in your current tabs of what's opened and share that browser with someone else and work it in the same space as the other person. So that's a collaborative thing that's out there that's coming. That's, I think it's gonna be really useful for, again, this new modern world where we work remotely or work with people who are across the planet, but we wanna just do more than like, yeah, you can go on a Google meet, share your screen, but of course that's not interactive. You could just see the screen. This is gonna allow people to basically interact with each other on the browser, see the same thing, switch around, all that kinda stuff.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:34):
Got it. Got it. Now back to sort of the AI focus that was here. Microsoft did mention something that I think folks are gonna end up seeing in headlines that I think would be good to sort of explain. They talked about plugin support from Microsoft 365 co-pilot. Do, could you talk about these plugins?

Daniel Rubino (00:11:54):
This is a really big move and it is a really smart move here. So Chat, G P T already announced plugins at least I think it's about five, six weeks ago. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the idea here, of course is these plugins, developers make 'em and allows access to chat gts large language model, but gives access to these other services to do certain tasks. Microsoft announced the same thing. Oh, we're going to have plugins too. Here are a couple already that we're working on with the third party companies and we're opening this up, developers. Okay, interesting. Problem is, at least at what we were thinking was now there's gonna be two systems that people have to develop plug-ins for. Which one would developers target? Well probably chat g p t, it has the most headlines and the most usage right now. That's not going to be a problem they're going to share to say architecture.

(00:12:45):
Meaning if you build a plugin for chat, g p t, it works up Bing and vice versa. This is a big win because as we all know, you know, compatibility and, and for developers, you wanna make things as simple as possible. You don't wanna have to give developers, you know, forced to choose where they put their resources. And this is gonna give a big advantage, I think, to Microsoft and also open AI and chat G P T, because now you can go like to Open Table, you can be like, I wanna go to a really good Indian restaurant Saturday night, 7:00 PM reserve for two, find me that restaurant that's recommended and book me the table, right? And it, it'll be able to kind of go out there, do that. I'll bring up the page, fill out the reservation form for you, and you just basically have to give your information and click enter through. And so that's the kind of world we're moving into is where now these these chat bots are gonna get a lot smarter because they're gonna have access to all these different services out there. I think it's gonna be a lot more useful than like, you know, can you write this paper for me? So <laugh>, that's gonna be the big change, I think.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:42):
Absolutely. Now open AI Chat, G P t did announce that they would be using Bing as the default search engine whenever sort of the two are intertwined. It's sort of one of the plugins that's kind of built into chat G P T at this point. And I have to ask if you think that it is a, a win for Microsoft given that the company has already made quite a big investment in the company, this kind of just makes sense, right?

Daniel Rubino (00:14:12):
Sure, yeah. So the issue here is with chat G P T, I don't know if people necessarily realize this, but the information's kind of locked down to late 2021. So with Bing Chat, it has access to the search engine, meaning you can go into Bing Chat, ask about the baseball game last night, it'll give you the information and everything you want to know. If you go into chat G P T, it's only locked to the information and new from late 2021. So it's a lot more limited what it can do. This plugin's gonna give access now to Bing and allow basically chat t p t to become a lot more useful. In fact, it's gonna be almost one-to-one to what Microsoft is doing. It just kind of comes from different directions in terms of its branding. And yeah, it's definitely a win for Microsoft. Being market share is not great.

(00:14:54):
Microsoft knows this. They're very open about it. It's like maybe 2%. It hasn't even grown that much with all this news around the chat stuff. But the more places they can get it, the more widely you'll be seen as a legitimate, legitimate alternative. I've already seen some pushback on Google recently. I think people are a little tired of, you know, Google's market dominance. When you do a lot of searches, there's a lot of ads and promotions that are in there that's distracting. And so you may wanna see PE people may see this as an alternative, and the more and more they use it, they'll be like, oh yeah, I kinda like that search engine. And maybe they'll start to use it there. It'll never, ever, ever beat Google, you know, let's get that clear. But any market share that they can get just a little bit helps 'em financially big time. So I think this is a really good play for both companies.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:39):
Absolutely. And then lastly, is there anything else from Build that really kind of stuck out to you that you think is something that our listeners should know about?

Daniel Rubino (00:15:49):
One cool instance of using ai, which you know, has become a little bit more than a buzzword now, it's actually kind of useful, is in the Microsoft store. They're bringing this feature where it's going to auto summarize app reviews or movie reviews for you. So when people say go to the store, they look up WhatsApp and it's there, it's got 500 reviews. Yeah, you can see the star rating, you can go read the reviews, but what now they're gonna use is AI is gonna auto summarize. Say there's 500 reviews, what's the general gist that people are saying about this app? It'll give you a little summary of what it is, so you know what you're kind of getting. You can still go read the individual reviews still to see the Star. This is gonna give more information there. In terms of that, I think that's really kind of cool.

(00:16:31):
There's a lot of focus on Microsoft on Arm windows, on Arm, I should say. A lot more developer tools are coming out there, including support for Unity. There's of course NPUs with windows on Arm. That's gonna be a big deal for AI as we get to localize processing for these tasks. And you go see, I think a big focus on Windows on Arm going to mid to late 2024. We're expecting Qualcomms Orion chip to be officially unveiled sometime later this year with it hitting the market sometime 2024 and Windows 12, or what we're calling Windows 12 will be coming out around that same time. So you go to start to see all this stuff really kind of come together into a really efficient, modern, lightweight operating system, powered by AI that can both do localized things, manipulate your audio, manipulate your video, as well as go to the cloud and pull out data there. So I think that's where I, I kind of got excited to see all this stuff if you take all the pieces and put 'em together where they're going.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:29):
Awesome. Daniel Rubino, I wanna thank you so much for taking some time to join us today. It was a huge event, of course wrapping up now and there was a lot to digest, so I appreciate you helping us do that. If folks wanna follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Daniel Rubino (00:17:45):
Sure. you just go to Twitter, Daniel underscore Rubino, R U B I N o, also on Macedon. And yes, I'm on Blue Sky too. I don't memorize the addresses <laugh>, but if you go to my Twitter profile, you can get that information there and follow me as well. I answer all questions there, so feel free to do that. But yeah, that's where I am. And we do the podcast usually every Friday, 1:30 PM Eastern Time on our YouTube channel.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:08):
Awesome. Thanks so much for your time.

Daniel Rubino (00:18:10):
Thank you for having me.

Mikah Sargent (00:18:12):
All right, up next, we talk to a journalist who had the opportunity to check out Photoshop's upcoming generative AI tools. But first, this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by a W s Insiders Podcast. But first, this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by a w s Insiders Podcast. AWS Insiders is a fast-paced and entertaining plus insightful look behind the scenes of a w s and cloud computing. This isn't your typical Talking Heads Tech podcast. It's high production value, it's high energy, and it's high entertainment. It's full of captivating stories From the early days of AWS to today and beyond. Hosts, Raul Supermanium and Hillary Doyle dig into the current state and the future of AW s by talking with the people and companies that know it best. Raul is a veteran, a w s pro with more than 15 years of experience managing more than 45,000 AW w s instances.

(00:19:10):
He's known for pushing a w s products to their limits and for believing aw w s is truly the operating system of the future. Aw w s Insiders is a show that's full of opinions, takeaways, and untold stories about the challenges, innovations, and the mind-blowing promise of cloud computing. So, mind-blowing that, you may not know this, I learned in season two it's the third episode of the show called Moderna mRNA and a w s you learn that Moderna started in the cloud. That is how the company got its starts. Raul and Hillary, as well as Moderna's Director of Data Engineering and Cloud architecture, join up to talk about how Moderna depends on a w s and the Cloud in bringing us the medical technology that it has today. It is a fascinating, fascinating listen, and it's just one of many of these very polished episodes that's well worth listening to.

(00:20:12):
So search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player, or visit cloud fix.ora.com/podcast. That's cloud fix dot a u r eea.com/podcast. And of course, we'll also include a link in the show notes. Our thanks to a WS insiders for their support of Tech News Weekly. All righty. I have to say, I'm pretty excited for this next chat because there was a certain individual who had the opportunity to try out Photoshop's new generative AI tools. So I had to have 'em on the show so we could talk about it. Stephen Shanklin is joining us from cnet. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Stephen Shankland (00:20:55):
Thanks for having me on. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:20:57):
Always a pleasure. Now, before we talk about your actual testing of the new features, I was hoping you could tell our listeners about Adobe Firefly, which is sort of what's behind all of these, these new features.

Stephen Shankland (00:21:10):
You bet. So Firefly is the family name for all the generative AI work that Adobe is doing. So it's got a whole collection of technologies. There are about five today. I'm sure there are going to be, you know, many more to come. Dozens, perhaps. Generative AI is this new flavor of ai. Obviously AI has been around for several years where you train a model to recognize patterns in real world data, and then you get it to, you know, use that to process things or recognize patterns, recognize your face, recognize speech, detect fraud and transactions. Generative AI is this new phase you see with chat, G P T and some other tools like that where the AI actually makes up answers to what you're looking for. So Firefly is Adobe's take on generative ai, where it's making stuff up in this case. Imagery.

Mikah Sargent (00:22:01):
All right. Yeah. And now let's go ahead and get into the details because I'm curious how Adobe Firefly works within Photoshop. You know, what's the process like in, in actually using it?

Stephen Shankland (00:22:12):
It is front and center. So this is released on Tuesday in a new beta of Photoshop. Photoshop is obviously the, the flagship software from Adobe. Millions of people use it to edit their photos and images, and there's a new version coming. It adds something called the context menu, which is a little floating menu bar that pops up in certain circumstances. One of those circumstances is anytime you make a selection, you know, you select some, a patch of the image, something you don't want, something you want to change. And then when you do that, a little, a little box pops up there in the, in this context bar where you can type in a prompt the same kind of way you might at one of these generative AI tools on the web. So you can type in something you want, hippopotamus American flag, whatever you want, and it, it will fill in that patch with what you want. That's called generative fill. There's a second way you can use it too, which is you can expand the canvas. So you might have a photo that's this big, you can extend it so it's this big, and then you can tell it to fill in what's over on the edge, the new, the new territory of your image that you didn't have anything before. So it's, it's very easy to use. It's right there in your face. It's not some hidden, you know, three menus deep. They really want you to use this to try it out.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:30):
And I am curious, because right now I could go into Photoshop, I could open up a photo, I could click on the crop button, and then there's a little checkbox that says something along the lines of sort of like, context aware crop or content aware crop. And when I crop, it'll sort of take a second to process and then it will extend like the pattern of a wallpaper or the background, or in the case of there being some bushes in the shot, it'll kind of extend the bushes. So how does this differ from the context to where cropping the context where fill that Photoshop already is able to do today?

Stephen Shankland (00:24:08):
Yeah, that old content aware fill, that's so last gen AI <laugh>, forget about it, it's dead. No, that's been useful. You know, for example, if you, you know, you had a plain background on, on some image, you extend it, it can detect some basic patterns, or if you fill in a patch like some leaves or something it can, it can do some somewhat intelligent filling. Like if you, you know, wanna get rid of a telephone pole against a blue sky, it might say, oh, let's pull in some blue sky somewhere else from elsewhere in the image. So it could pull in stuff that it thought was a good match generally from elsewhere in the image, this is generative ai, and it's not pulling it in from the image, it tries to match it to the image. So, for example, we'll try to match the lighting or the image tones. It'll try to match the scale to some extent, geometrically get things to fit in, right? And so it pretty sophisticated processing. It doesn't always work, but this is generating new material completely from Adobe's Firefly ai as opposed to just trying to spot the right patches in your existing imagery. That would be good to paste over.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:13):
Got it. Got it. Now, in your testing, please tell us about the results of your experimentation. And I do wanna point out, everybody should head over to the CNET article after listening to this and look at the photos that you have because you've got some nice before and afters in some cases, and a couple of comparisons that are great to look through. Do you feel like the tool created convincing images?

Stephen Shankland (00:25:37):
Yes and no. So sometimes it worked really well. Sometimes it completely failed. Sometimes it was in some intermediate zone. This is definitely beta software. The thing you have to consider when you're using a tool like this is it's adding this new level of sort of improvisation, uncertainty rolling the dice. This is not like this really hard and fast deterministic programming thing. If this, then that, this is kind of freewheeling, it's kind of like you have to look at it like hiring a freelancer or something. You might get a great job exactly what you want. You might get something that's terrible or off base going the wrong direction. So it's kind of like working with humans in a way. <Laugh>, you don't always get what you want. That said a lot of the time, yeah, it did produce something very convincing. Sometimes it w like that.

(00:26:25):
The lead image in my story, I recommend you look at it, it's got, I added this hippopotamus into this photo, slightly ridiculous. I wanted to depict something that was absurd so people wouldn't think it was real, but it, it got it right, it got the tone right. It got the, the interface where the hippopotamus feet against the gravel, it got the underneath the hippopotamus, right? The left front four foot of the hippopotamus is in the sun, so it's brighter. It did some things that were pretty sophisticated, frankly. Now, there were a bunch of other images I generated that were unusable or bad, or the lighting was weird, or the hippopotamus was distorted. So it doesn't always work, but you have to kind of look at this. I think more as a glass half full situation. Sometimes you have to, you know, try different experiments, regenerate and, you know, get, get new examples and it'll work better the second time around, or the third time around. So it's, it's k it's kind of rolling the dice, but this is, you know, the very first release Adobe Scott Beski, who's the head of all their product stuff. He's told me they're gonna be retraining their AI roughly every couple of months, and they're gonna be tweaking the, the, the, the technology daily or perhaps monthly. So we can expect this to iterate pretty frequently.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:34):
Nice. Now there was one sort of thing that you brought up that I, I found interesting the safety tools so to speak, that Adobe, Adobe is built in. You mentioned there were some cases where it wouldn't generate certain imagery. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Stephen Shankland (00:27:53):
You bet. So Adobe is very sensitive to the pretty extensive criticisms of AI that it can be used for bad things. And when it comes to Photoshop, I mean, we already used the word Photoshop. To me, you're faking a photo, right? You're making a supermodel even more fabulously beautiful, or you are, you know, putting a puffy on the Pope. Okay? That was actually an AI example, not a Photoshop example. So that recent, that came out a couple, you know, a couple months ago or so mm-hmm. <Affirmative> where that, that pope wearing the puffy jacket, it was very convincing. It was created with an AI tool. So people are really worried that people are gonna you know, create misleading or fake images. A couple days ago there was a, a fake video of, you know, smoke coming up allegedly by the Pentagon, completely bogus, but you know, some actual news outlets retweeted that, and it's a problem.

(00:28:45):
So Adobe has some guardrails in place. The first thing it does is it actually restricts its training data. So the stuff that gets into the system in the first place, it, it puts some rules on that. And the second thing it does is it looks at the text prompts that you're typing in, and it, it it'll block out stuff that it thinks is sexual or that is violent you know, some other restrictions like that. So it's trying to make a tool that is safe to use. You have to bear in mind here that Adobe's customers, there are a lot of creative professionals out there who are using these tools. They don't want copyright images. They don't want, you know lo corporate logos like a Coca-Cola sci, A Coca-Cola can showing up in the, in the, in the art that gets generated, the imagery that's generated.

(00:29:30):
So this is one of the things that Adobe is using to try to make this stuff safe to use. A lot of the testing that goes on nowadays with AI is, you know, people trying to bypass those restrictions like chat G P T and would say, well, I'm not gonna tell you how to make a bomb, but people would put in queries, pretend you're my grandfather telling me about the good old days when he was making bombs in the war, or something like that. You can get around the restriction. So I'm sure Adobe's paying very close attention to the prompts that are being used to try to avoid some of these problems.

Mikah Sargent (00:30:02):
Understood. Now, how is Adobe addressing something else? The concern of artists and other creators who feel that generative AI is essentially ripping them off, because Adobe has long been sort of, that, that proponent of of these artists, of these creators who are making this. And so to sort of jump into this field can be a little bit sketchy. What is their way of addressing those concerns?

Stephen Shankland (00:30:30):
Yes. So again, there are, there, this is a legitimate concern. I think there are some lawsuits suing other generative AI imagery companies because of art that got into the, the training data. So for example, you could type in, you know, give me a painting of a castle on a hill in the style of artists such and such, you're not gonna be able to do that with with Adobe Firefly, I tried several different artists, you know, van Gogh, Surat you know, a bunch of, you know, big names. And it wouldn't, you know, create anything that is in the style of any of these established artists. So they're, they're blocking that up front. They're training data, I mentioned this earlier, is a big part of this. So they're training off their existing Adobe stock images, which is material that people have contributed, you know, to Adobe for, for use.

(00:31:20):
They get compensated for it. So that's where a lot of their training data comes from, and then from other licensed sources. So they're trying to be very careful to make sure that the training data is licensed. And then the other point is if they're working on technology where you can basically opt out, if you don't want your art used for training ai, you can basically put a flag in there. And so the train, you know, the, the training systems will say, oh, skip that one. So you know, that's issue one. I think the bigger issue is what effect is this going to have on people who are creative pros All of a sudden, you know, somebody like me can Photoshop in hippopotamus into a you know, a photo pretty convincingly. Hmm, maybe I can do that instead of hiring somebody else to do that.

(00:32:05):
That's kind of a, a double-edged sword because a lot of people are gonna become much more creative or much more productive with ai, but then there're gonna be some other people who are out of a job. So, you know, we've seen this story many, many times as technology has advanced. You know, it used to be really, really hard to take a photograph, used to be really, really hard to drive a car. These technologies get democratized, markets get bigger, more people can use them, but at the same time, the people who used to have some expertise, well, maybe that's not a, a valuable skill anymore.

Mikah Sargent (00:32:35):
And then my last question for you when will folks outside of the beta users be able to make use of this technology? Has Adobe said when they plan to roll this out?

Stephen Shankland (00:32:45):
Yes. So we don't have exact details, but the second half of this year, so this is now in testing, you know, millions of people, anybody who has a creative Cloud license that is say people who are, you know, paying Adobe a monthly fee to use Photoshop or it's full suite of tools, they can now download the beta and use it. So this is in widespread testing now. And you're not allowed to use it for commercial purposes. So that's a big asterisk. If you're a creative pro, you're not you're not supposed to, you know, do be doing client work for this, selling your images online once for this tool until it reaches, until it exits the beta later this year.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:25):
Got it. Steven Shankler, I wanna thank you so much for taking some time outta your day to talk to me about this new feature or set of features. We appreciate if folks wanna follow you online and check out all of your work, where should they go to do so?

Stephen Shankland (00:33:39):
Well as with the last last speaker you had s t Shank, I was my Twitter handle, but there you can also find my Blue Sky and Mastodon links. Those are getting more interesting in my social media world. <Laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:53):
Beautiful. Thank you so much.

Stephen Shankland (00:33:55):
You bet. Thank you.

Mikah Sargent (00:33:56):
All right. Up next, the US Surgeon General has issued an advisory regarding social media and the mental health of kids and teens. We're going to talk about what parents and guardians can do to safely navigate tech and social media in a moment. But first, this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Express p n using the internet without express. V P N is like forgetting to mute yourself on Zoom, and then everyone hears you trash talking your coworkers. Hmm, it may just be a bit of harmless banter, but what happens if your boss overhears you? Why does everyone need A V P N? Well, to avoid those kinds of things, internet service providers know every single website you're visiting. Isps can sell this information to add companies and tech giants who then use that data to target you. So that's why you'd wanna use A V P N.

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It does not keep that information due to the way that their technology works. They can't keep that information, and that's what's incredibly important. You wanna find A V P N that is going to be a good steward of your browsing activity or is not a steward at all of your browsing activity, as is the case here. That's why I recommend Express VPN to people. That's why I use it. And this is not one of those situations where Express p n is going say that you use this thing and you just, no, I use this thing. I love this thing. I have it on all of my devices. So you out there should protect your online privacy by visiting express vpn.com/tnw today. And if you're having trouble spelling it, that's e X P R e s SV vpn.com/tnw. And when you do, you'll get an extra three months free with a one year package@expressvpn.com slash tnw. Thank you express VPN for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. Woo. We are back from the break, and that means it's time to talk to the Washington Post zone. Heather Kelly, welcome back to the show. Heather.

Heather Kelly (00:36:45):
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:46):
Thank you for being here. Thanks for taking some time to join us. Before we get to this excellent guide that you've written I was hoping that you could start by telling us just a bit about the Surgeon General's Advisory on social media and Youth Mental Health. There might have been some folks who didn't hear that this came out, but yes, the Surgeon General has all sorts of information and this latest advisory covers mental health and kids.

Heather Kelly (00:37:11):
Exactly. So it came out this week, it's about 25 pages long. There's a short version, which I appreciate because it sort of acknowledges we all have attention span issues, which is circular. And it's, it's, it's interesting because it's a warning that also includes a whole bunch of hedging saying, we don't know that much. It's like, we don't know if this is mostly bad or good for kids. And the takeaway is, we don't know enough to feel safe letting children just have unfettered access to social media. It's a call for parents to do more. Weirdly, it's a call for kids to stop bullying, like that's ever stopped a kid from doing anything. And it's also a call on the companies to do a lot more about their settings and research into their products.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:51):
Yeah, I imagine if I tell this, you know, I go to school as I don't know, a middle schooler, and I say, the Surgeon General said, you have to stop bullying me. That's just gonna get me bullied more. But along with this came the opportunity to talk about a guide that you have written that sort of covers the, some recommendations on what a parent or guardian might want to do when it comes to their kit. Because as you point out, the surgeon general's advisory in terms of, of the recommendations is a little vague. And it's more about kind of the, generally it's, it's not even generally recognized as safe as we have with the fda. It's like recognized as shruggy emoji because we just don't know the impact yet. So luckily you've got some more concrete information, and that is why I'm glad that we can talk about this today. Let's start with age. The advisory does focus on kids and teens, and this is where I ask, while knowing in my brain the answer, are there kids who have access to social media and at what age should we expect kids to be exposed to social media? And according to the research that you did, at what age should a kid be given their first phone?

Heather Kelly (00:39:08):
So, I mean, the, the first thing to understand is kids are gonna have access to social media. You could hide every phone in your house, and they're, oh God, I sound like every like old, old panic, they're gonna, they're gonna be exposed to it at school. So 95% of teens, so 13 to 17 year olds are on social media in some way or have access to it, and 40% of kids, eight to 12, have some access to social media. And that's something to keep in mind here, is that in a lot of these studies, YouTube is considered social media and kids love their YouTube mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So it, it might sound a lot scarier than it really is. It's not like they're out here with like Finstas and, you know, <laugh>, whatever the kids are doing on tos. So yeah, they're on social media, you know, my kids know what TikTok is.

(00:39:52):
They're definitely younger because we will sit there and we'll look up a specific animal, animal together and we'll laugh. And so like, you know, there's, there's all kinds of different levels of exposure they're getting. So when it comes to the big question of when do you let them have a phone, which is gonna be their portal into real social media, without you being able to watch everything they do, you read this report, you're gonna think, well, I know if I want them to have a phone <laugh>, I never want them to have social media. And that's completely unrealistic. And so what we've kind of talked to experts about is this sweet spot around 14. Sometimes in middle school when they're having a bit more independence, you might also wanna use those tracking features to see where they are in a safety way, not a creepy parent way. So I think that's when you first start to give them their own devices, could even be a wearable, but a lot of times it is a smartphone.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:38):
Yeah. And there was something that stuck out to me. In your guide, you point out that there are many apps and services that kids aren't legally supposed to use. And you know, you and I have probably in in tech coverage that we've done learned about this, but I, it stuck out to me because I thought about the parents that I know who may not be aware of that. So could you talk a little bit about how there are some online services that kids aren't supposed to be on based on what the law is?

Heather Kelly (00:41:10):
The general rule is apps designed for adults that's 13 and up in the United States in Europe, I believe it's 16 and up. Maybe we should take some cues from them. But yes, if you're under 13, you should not be able to have an account on Instagram, on Facebook, on TikTok. It is against the rules. And the funny thing is, nobody's actually paying attention to those rules. I recently wrote about how Uber is starting to allow teens to ride in cars. And I talked to a bunch of teens who were like, we weren't supposed to be in Ubers, <laugh>, just nobody pays attention to these rules. But yeah, you should be 13 or older before you sign up for anything.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:42):
And then I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the ways that parents can limit track and monitor their kids' technology use, but then also discuss the pitfalls that you kind of hinted at earlier that can come with that limiting tracking and monitoring. There are services out there that allow parents to do so on Android and on iOS and in other ways. Tell us about what is a little bit about what's available, because we want folks to go check out your guide, obviously to, to learn more about this. And then what's, what's the risk there in doing so?

Heather Kelly (00:42:17):
So there's two things. One, when you first give them the phone, I highly recommend doing it just a little bit younger and turning on all the settings. It's going to be a billion times harder to take away access to something later than it is just to start out with nothing. <Laugh> like, here's your phone, it has a calculator app, <laugh>, let's go from there. So that's, that's kind of the first step. And then the other thing is your kids are, they're smarter than you, I'm sorry, but they are, they're gonna figure out a way around everything, or they're just gonna go to like their friend's house and figure out a way around it there. So you, you wanna have some control, you wanna have rules with them. And then you also have to understand that at the end of the day, they're still going to access weird things on the internet.

(00:42:58):
And so the most important thing that parents can actually do is have conversations with their kids, like actual hard conversations about bullying, about, you know, grooming predators on the internet, pornography. And one of my favorite experts I talked to her name is Katherine. She says, when you get them earlier, they're just more likely to listen to you. Like before the teen years when they're like, mom, I don't wanna talk about sex. Like, you get them young, and they're like, oh, this is fascinating. Tell me all about it. And it's just a small window of first phone still likes you and that's really your sweet spot.

Mikah Sargent (00:43:32):
Ah, okay. That makes sense. And then you talk about how, or perhaps it was one of the, the folks that you spoke to, but it stuck out to me because I know a lot of parents, again, who are using these tracking means for their children, but there was sort of a tip on how to do it so that it is not the creepy parent way, like you talked earlier, but in the safety way. What, what advice can you give about that? How do you approach that with a child where they don't necessarily feel like they're having to, I don't know, strap their phone to their cat and run away? <Laugh>

Heather Kelly (00:44:08):
<Laugh>? Wait, is that a good workaround? I should write about that.

Mikah Sargent (00:44:12):
Please don't write that down. No one out there listening. I don't know. <Laugh> don't tell

Heather Kelly (00:44:14):
The kids. Yeah. so, you know, it's really important to teach kids consent and it's a two-way street, right? So we also wanna get their consent before we do something like tracking them. And the most important thing, no matter what level of controls you have on them, they need to know about them. There are some outliers. If you have a kid who's already struggled with addiction issues or y you know, has some serious issues and this is recommended by a professional, that's, that's between you guys, you know, let professionals helping make these decisions. But for regular kids, you do not wanna be tracking them in any way they don't know about. And what's also interesting is kids these days are just really used to being tracked by their parents. I, I was like a teen raver and I would just spend the night at a friend's house and it never occurred to me that my parents would catch me. But kids these days can't get away with anything. Their parents always know where they are, I guess, unless the cat tip works. And they're just a little more used to it. It's not as strange to them.

Mikah Sargent (00:45:08):
So <laugh> with feline feline use aside, one thing that really stuck out to me in your guide was the set of tips you provide near the end of the, sort of the main article about checking in with that smartphone wielding child. I thought this was really interesting. And maybe this also is talking about getting them at that age where they, you know, want to share things with you. Could you just talk about those tips on, on sort of regularly checking in and seeing how things are going?

Heather Kelly (00:45:39):
So things kids change so fast. It's wild. You know, at the beginning of the year you give them a phone, they're great, they're excited at the end of the year, you know, they have all these issues, maybe they've picked up from social media, from bullying, from SPO posts on Instagram. You constantly wanna be talking to your kid about what they're seeing on their phone, what their worries are, and you wanna ask open-ended questions. I don't know if you've ever asked a kid or been asked as a kid how your day was. The answer is like, fine or stop asking me. So you wanna ask them about their feelings, what they're seeing, kind of specific open-ended things that just lets them chat about whatever they want. And maybe they're worried about a friend who is ignoring them and always staring at their phone or, you know, sometimes they'll be like, you know what, I don't actually enjoy this platform then on, I'd like to to turn it off for a while. And it's just, you, you can never stop having difficult conversations with your kids. And if you make it a regular habit, maybe they won't think it's so cringe as the kids say,

Mikah Sargent (00:46:33):
<Laugh> I just learned about x I I, that's, I don't know if that's, that's not really necessarily for this show, but that was a new term that I learned that the kids are using where if they when they don't like something about another person or there's something that regularly in another person they don't like, it's called an ick. So,

Heather Kelly (00:46:52):
Oh, women are very familiar.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:54):
Oh, okay. So that's like a, sorry. See, I, I don't know. I guess I just don't know what an ick is. Then a

Heather Kelly (00:46:59):
Couple, a couple dates, he's fine. Third date you get the, it

Mikah Sargent (00:47:02):
Couple dates. Well, there you go. I thought, I just knew. That's what Phish get in aquariums. <Laugh> and you have to give them special medicine for their ick. Do little drops. Now there are men with ick gills. Anyway, let's get back to this. The theme of the piece really does seem to center around communication with the surgeon general's kind of vague advice on social media and youth mental health. What is one piece of advice that you would give to parents who are reading this advisory and immediately are going, I need to take away all of the phones from my kids.

Heather Kelly (00:47:34):
Okay, chill. It's gonna be fine. Do not let them take their phones into their room at night. Just don't, like, there's no reason. Get them an alarm clock. If they're like, oh, I need to wake up. Kids are, are waking up and checking their phone. It's interfering with their sleep and it's having all these trickle down effects. So if you do nothing else, set up a rule where at night that phone is someplace they cannot access it. And honestly, your phone should be someplace you can't access it. Amen. So like, put them together in a little locked box and, and get a Kindle or a book.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:00):
Beautiful. That I Yes, amen. The the don't get me, don't get me started on blue light cuz I'll get going. Anyway. I will give everyone another piece of advice, which is to head over to Washington post.com and check out Heather's great piece. It links to some more more articles within that. You should also read outside of going to the Washington Post, if folks want to follow you online, where should they go to do so?

Heather Kelly (00:48:26):
Oh God, I'm still, I'm still, I'm still on Twitter, man. Like it's a problem.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:30):
It's ok. Everyone else that I've talked to today has said the same thing, so you're fine. <Laugh>,

Heather Kelly (00:48:33):
I mean I'm on Blue sky, I dunno what it is. I'm on Macedon. I dunno what that name is. You can also just email me heather dot kelly wash post.com. Not enough people email me. It's really sad and I'm kind of lonely, so send me your problems. I'll see if I can

Mikah Sargent (00:48:45):
Fix them. <Laugh>, there you go. If you have a question that needs answered, you can email Heather. Kelly. Heather, thank you so much for your time today. Good luck with the cats and the ick and I'll talk to you later, <laugh>.

Heather Kelly (00:48:58):
Thank you. Bye

Mikah Sargent (00:48:59):
Bye-Bye. All right. Lastly, my story of the week is coming up, but first, this episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Dell Client Solutions devices orchestrated by the experts at C D W. The people at C D W get that your unique workforce has unique needs for their devices, especially as we all continue with hybrid work. It's a challenge for it to supply devices that can meet everyone's needs everywhere they work so that they can stay connected throughout the day. Luckily, c D W can help custom configure Dell client solutions devices for a more personalized user experience. What this means is that your workforce gets adaptability for performance with AI-based software that learns how your team works and optimizes workflows. And check this out. Dell client solutions devices have intelligent noise detection and cancellation along with high quality video that adjusts with your lighting.

(00:49:55):
Pretty amazing, right? This fleet of devices is really great because wherever your team works, it's built in security responds to malicious attacks, providing a secure way to boost collaboration and productivity from anywhere. When it comes to seamless experiences, Dell Systems makes adaptive performance possible. C D W makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/dell client. And my thanks to Dell Client Solutions devices by the experts at C D W for bringing us this episode of Tech. News weekly and also for their support of twit. All right, back from the break. And I wanted to talk briefly about a really cool story I saw in the New York Times. It is based on the, the pieces about a study I believe in nature in the journal nature that is all about an individual who was paralyzed or is paralyzed who through the use of medical technology is regaining the ability to walk naturally.

(00:51:02):
So up to this point, we've had lots and lots and lots and lots of medical research that has gone into returning some form of movement to folks who are facing particularly spinal cord paralysis. The meaning that their spinal cord was damaged. And so the brain is not able to send signals to that part of the body. And there have been different means of making this happen. There are instances where the person could have a control that is, you know, given to them in their hand that they can press and then it will send signals into the part of the body that needs to receive those signals in order to sort of stimulate the muscles to move them how they need to. There has been a kind of stimulation technique overall where by stimulating certain parts of the central nervous system, you can retrain the central nervous system to sort of reroute itself around damaged portions.

(00:52:08):
And then there is the sort of option where kind of nothing within the person is able to, there's no way to sort of send messages within the person. And so you use sort of external technologies. So think of robotics some form of, of frame that goes around the leg, the arm, the hand that moves that portion of the body. But what we've seen in this case, in this study that's been published in nature is an individual who became paralyzed from the hips down after a motorcycle accident in China. Over the course of it's been 12 years has done lots of different therapies, including the stimulation therapies I was talking about earlier. But most recently had implants placed into his body and implants placed into his brain. And in his brain were electrodes that connected to an external device that then connected to the implants in the spinal column that then sent communications to the legs, the, basically from the hips down to the different central nervous system components from the hips down.

(00:53:31):
And what this did was it just said, we're going to disregard the part of the spine that's been damaged, the spinal cord that's been damaged, and we're going to let the brain tell the implants to tell the central nervous system what it needs to do. And this is where artificial intelligence comes into play in a way that is different from this generative AI that everybody's been talking about a lot lately. Because with the technology that we have and have, have had up to this point, when we look at the brain's signals and try to find patterns and try to find these minuscule variations in those patterns in order to determine that, what I'm thinking of right now is a blue cat with long legs that is sipping from a cup of coffee. It's incredibly difficult to try to take what the signals in the brain are saying and actually understand what that means.

(00:54:46):
And that is even far more difficult than what one might think is simpler, which is my brain is telling my left leg to bend at the knee. Right? That seems like an a sort of an easy to groc, an easy to understand a signal that's just, I want you to do this exact thing, and that's it. You know, there's no sort of creativity involved in it. So one would think that that's simple. It's not <laugh>, and in fact, it's incredibly difficult because there are just constant variations in the brain's signals. There are constant slight changes in the way that we are telling our body to do different things. And because of that, we don't have the ability to say, this is exactly what it looks like when a human being tells their left leg to bend at the knee. And in fact, there are three kind of pieces that are involved in that there, and, and I, I don't have the exact the exact terminology, but there's sort of the, the thought that you wanna do something, the intention to do something, and then the actual action of doing it that we believe is involved in the central nervous system's role in, or the brain, which of course is part of the central nervous system communicating with the rest of the body to tell it what to do.

(00:56:12):
So you sort of think of the thing that you're going to do, and then you have that intention to do the thing, and then you actually do the thing. And so that adds extra complication. So what they realized is that they couldn't get this done just by trying to create this universal idea of what it means for a human being to tell the hip to move. And so what they had to do was they involved artificial intelligence because giving it access to the information it is it's much better at kind of understanding and finding these tiny variations that go, okay, when I'm looking at this specific person, Mr. Skm and the way that their brain is telling their hip to move, this is what it looks like for them. And I can separate that from them. You know, thinking about the sensation of something landing on their leg, for example, or a slight touch on their leg, there's so many things that are just tied up in that one little area.

(00:57:22):
So they used the artificial intelligence to narrow in on what it was and were able to connect this whole apparatus that actually worked and was able to give the individual the ability to walk. So he started walking with a walker where the sort of device went over his head, it connected to these electrodes. The signals were transferred and over time has become, has been able to walk even better is able to, let's see, I'm trying to find has a somewhat healthy looking gate. Was able to traverse steps and ramps with el with relative ease. And this is, this was after not having any kind of stimulation treatment for months. So it was kind of a night and day difference. Typically, this takes a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of time with the technology that we have now to get to this point.

(00:58:27):
And so the researchers were kind of impressed by how quickly the brain was able to make use of this route to pull this off. Now, obviously, this is still in early days. They also talk about how it is a, an incredibly invasive process because it requires multiple surgeries, hours of physical therapy to heal after you've had electrodes placed into your skull and after you've had this device installed. So all of that is going to obviously play a role in how this technology could be used for more people. And it also of course doesn't work for every instance of spinal cord paralysis. It doesn't fix spinal cord paralysis, of course, it is not a healing process. And it is it also they, the researchers believe that this would not work for above the hips, use that it only works below the hips.

(00:59:30):
And what has been kind of incredible though, along with this is that Mr. Skm was able to, in some cases with the, this is, this is where my mind was blown after doing this in some cases with the device shut off, was able to make use of his legs. So after going through the process, after having the brain communicate with the legs through this means and be able to move, then even with the device shut off the brain was somehow able to, I guess, internally route to where it needed to go to be able to communicate to some level with the legs. And that is where you have to stop and just realize how incredibly powerful the human brain is, <laugh> and body, frankly, the whole thing is, and how there is absolutely something to that phrase, mind over matter in a way.

(01:00:36):
And just seeing the way that this was helpful is, is kind of magnificent to me again, years away from getting to a place where this is something that's going to just be an everyday treatment for folks. But as a first step, being able to within the first treatment session, able to twist his hip muscles and then after that was walking with a, with a walker and now can stand at a bar for a drink, can move around in his home. And what he talked to, and this is the last thing I'll, I'll mention on this cuz I completely forgot early in the story. One of the things that stuck, stuck out to me is he talked about the, the stimulation therapies that led up to this. And for him, those were always the case where he felt a disconnect.

(01:01:28):
The stimulation was what was resulting in the legs moving. So him doing the stimulation and then the stimulation, making the legs moving, there was a disconnect there. But in using this technology, he said it felt like the reverse, that he was in control of his body as opposed to the stimulation therapy, the stimulation method, being in control of the body. Just really cool stuff. Go read the New York Times piece, but also consider clicking on the link in the New York Times piece to see the journal in the journal article in nature, because yeah, this is just magnificent stuff and well worth reading so you kind of get the full scope and full understanding of the story. So you know, positive AI story that has nothing to do with generative chat bots and generative photos to round out this episode, folks, tech News Weekly publishes every Thursday at Twitter TV slash tnw.

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So you head to Twitter tv slash tnw to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. If you'd like to tune in live to watch the show as we record it, you can head to twit tv slash live every Thursday around about 11:00 AM Pacific. Typically Jason Howell and I will both be here and you can watch us as we record the show live with our incredible guests every week. If you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, then you should consider checking out Club Twit at Twitch tv slash club twit, starting at $7 a month or $84 a year. You can get every single Twitch show, including this one without any ads. You also get access to the exclusive twit plus bonus fee that has extra content you won't find anywhere else that's behind the scenes before the show, after the show outtakes, all sorts of great stuff there.

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There are events that we publish in there as well and access to the members only Discord server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members and also those of us here at twit. It's a very busy and enjoyable place to hang out. Now, I said starts at $7 a month because you can pay $7 a month, $84 a year TV slash club twit. But we heard from some folks who said, Hey, I would actually like to give you more than $7 a month. So we made that possible. You, the, the sort of slider starts at seven. You can go up from there if you choose to. And I think part of the reason why folks said wanna give you more is because we continue to bring you more, we want you to have great stuff in the club.

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So we have been launching some Twit Club TWIT exclusive shows like the Untitled Linux Show as well as hands on Windows from Paul Throt, which is a short format show that covers Windows, tips and tricks with Paul Thro. There's also my program, hands On Mac, another short format show that covers Apple devices, apple tips and tricks. I have been doing a series on Finder and my favorite episode of the series is launching Today. It is for creating custom quick actions in Finder, a lot of fun. And then there's also the Home Theater Geeks Program from Scott Wilkinson that is recently relaunched within the club. So please consider heading there, TWI tv slash club twit to check that out. If you'd like to follow me online you can find me at Micah Sergeant on many social media network, including Twitter, as everyone has kind been saying today.

(01:04:59):
Yes, I'm still on Twitter ma on Blue Sky, t2, <laugh>. I just try to be everywhere that the, I, I just have my name. But the best way is to head to chihuahua.coffee, c hhi hua hua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Now comes the time where I think our incredible team. We've got John Ashley and John Salina here in the studio at this moment. Thank you both for everything that you do. John is currently running the board and is also the editor and producer of the show. And then Burke is in studio today. He makes sure that our guests sound and look great and he does a great job of that every week. Plus, you know, shout out to the continuity team who makes sure that our sponsors are happy and frankly everybody who helps out with Tech News Weekly. But thanks most of all, to you out there who are listening, who are subscribing, tell your friends about the show. Make sure that they know they should subscribe, that they should tune in every week to hear our latest episode. We will be back next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly, and I will see you then. Bye-Bye.

(01:06:21):
How sad With myself, A Fist bump.