This Week in Tech 1029 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT. This Week in Tech, a great panel ahead for you. Brar Alhiti is here, so is Daniel Rubino from Windows Central, our attorney, kathy Gellis. We will talk, of course, about legal action, but we're also going to talk a lot about AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, the hottest AI job of last year is obsolete. This year, mark Zuckerberg says social media is over and an electric pickup truck you can pick up for just $20,000. Radio not included. All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:38 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1029, recorded Sunday, april 27th 2025. Never lick a badger twice. It's time for TWIT this week in tech, the show. We get together and talk about the latest tech news with my favorite people. Today, kathy gellis is in the house. She writes for tech dirt. She is a attorney at law specializing in all of the issues in front of us these days. Uh, kathy, it's great to see you, thanks for having me.

01:26
Yeah, your hair is growing back nicely. I like the curls. Were you that curly before?

01:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't think so. I feel definitely more poodle-y than I used to be.

01:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The poodle-y Kathy Gillis Also here. Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief at Windows Central. Hello, daniel, good to see you. Thanks for having me. Welcome back. Everyone here, yay, and a brawl heady who's doing double duty she hosted tech news weekly this week.

01:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Hello now, senior technology reporter, that's right, I'm honored for both to have been on. You know your program twice you're just a superstar you're a superstar, bra, and I'm gonna record that and play that whenever I feel down oh boy, there's a lot of news this week.

02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google's in the news. They had a good quarter mark zuckerberg's on trial. He says social media is over. Uh, apple is you know? Saying we're moving to india, uh, but let's, let's start with the wall street journal, which says the hottest ai job of 2023 is already obsolete. Oh no, I was learning to be a prompt engineer. And now those ais they're too smart, they don't need me anymore. I love these. Now those AIs, they're too smart, they don't need me anymore. I love these. I don't know why the journal does these. It's like this is the new lifestyle piece, isn't it? Prompt engineering jobs, once buzzy and high paying, are becoming obsolete due to AI advancements. You know why? Apparently, the AI model, according to Wall Street Journal, now intuits your intent, negating the need for specialized, prompt engineers.

03:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It seems pretty weird to have, like I understood early on, the prompt engineering stuff because people were creating, like, especially with the images, they would get very specific on the type of lens being used, the type of film to simulate. So I kind of understood that. But you would think that over time, yeah, the ai would get smart enough or just like kind of really figure out what you mean well, it also has enough inputs from it's talked to enough people.

03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it kind of knows what people want on, uh, this weekend's wait.

03:39 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Wait, don't tell me they were talking about um being polite to your AI.

03:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Cost money.

03:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, and then they were talking about how, like, yeah, it uses up resources and you know, ooh, we can make Sam Altman pay for it if we, you know, are really polite to our AI.

03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's so mean, that's like oh, let's make it more expensive.

04:00 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, yes, but then it was also pointed out and you know, I I think the joke was like you know, apologizing, and there goes one rainforest and stuff, so um, right yeah actually uh the economic time set a piece should give credit to the author.

04:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where is the author's name? I don't see it anywhere. But the author writes in the first person so I'm sure it's somebody. Maybe it's an ai. Um, apparently the author heard that researchers at Anthropic, the makers of Claude, were starting to study quote model welfare. End. Quote the idea that an AI might soon become conscious and deserve some kind of moral status.

04:56 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, yes, eventually, but this isn't. We haven't invented Mr Data yet. Like, if all of a sudden we do spawn artificial intelligence where there's sentience and signs of life and things like that, then yeah, okay, we build in the ethics for how we deal with that.

05:12
But at the moment we're just dealing with fancy software and you don't have to be polite to your basic program as it goes through the command, so you shouldn't have to be here. That's not what it is and that's not what it's for. And if we convince ourselves that, the more we think that AI is already in true artificial intelligence, I think, the more trouble we create for ourselves because we end up relying upon it for things that it just can't deliver on.

05:40 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, I just get really bothered by this. Everybody throws consciousness around, just like, like we even know what that is consciousness yeah, we don't know what it is, we don't know how to define it, we don't know how to measure it. Is it on the spectrum? At what point does it actually become conscious? Like we just don't know what will happen. Is the ai will get so good, it'll act like a person and we'll get tricked.

06:04
I think we're at that point actually don't you I mean when people yeah, when people are saying thank you and please that was a joke, right, you know, and it's costing a lot of money to do the processing right. People are already getting to that, that stage where it feels like you're talking to someone, and that will just continue to increase. But I mean they should build into these models. I get the idea too you eat you. You might want to be friendly to the AI, not because it's going to try to kill you, but because, like you, may be able to affect its behavior, just like it was another being Right. If you're always abusive to it, it might be mean back to you, but that should be something they could program around. But they need to figure out how this stuff works in the first place.

06:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't know how this stuff works in the first place, so I don't know it. I think this comes along with the terror. The same people who are concerned about you know ai being an existential threat to humanity, like we better be nice to it or it could come and get us. Um, I, yeah, as the, as the author, uh, ends up saying she cares more about carbon-based life forms. In fact, if ai gets smarter, we might even want to care more. Microsoft has finally pushed recall out into windows 11, so more people are going to now see ai. Well, maybe not, because it's just co-pilot plus pcs, right, correct, yeah, so that's a. Is that a daniel? A limited number of people? I mean, how? How well are those selling?

07:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
they're so, you know, getting to like the whole shipments and everything like that. They. We are seeing positive growth in the industry. Is it a lot? What?

07:39
really not yeah, yeah, it's been years of just kind of downward spiraling yeah, I think there's a lot of potential here now that there are some like legit features. Actually, I would say like click to do is actually more interesting almost than what's that, although. So click to do is sort of like google vision, uh, and circle to search, but it's built into your pc and it's built into the snipping tool too, so you can basically point it anywhere on your computer at the screen and basically inquire what is on your screen and ask for more information. You can copy text. You can do things like if you're on the web and you find an image say if it's a person you can like, right click on the image with click to do and then it'll take just the, it'll cut out the background and just keep the silhouette of the person and then you can just copy and paste that to another image. Like it really makes manipulation of data on a computer like to a whole new level, where before you'd almost need some more sophisticated skills.

08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is Microsoft doing agentic AI yet where, like it's the controls the browser and it goes out and does stuff for you. Is that here?

08:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They're getting there, so they did announce something similar to that For one. They're going to be delivering avatars pretty soon, which would be user choice, and they'll have a pre-selected bunch.

08:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you mean? Like co-pilot will have a face.

08:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes.

08:57
Oh wow, it'll be whatever you want. At first they'll go and give you a, a preselected bunch, just to get it out there, but eventually they're going to use the power of generative AI, so you could just tell it what you want the avatar to be and it'll generate it for you. I told them they should allow it so you can upload photos of like friends, family or animals. I want to make my dog my AI, right. Yeah, that's a good idea, actually. Yeah, so they're going to that stage and it is now going to that next level, right Beyond generative chat stuff, where it's going to start to actually proactively do things. I think a lot of this will have to come when they build it deeper into the operating system, which they're also working on. But yeah, we're getting there into stages.

09:37
But Recall, I don't use it a ton, but what's cool about it is you don't even notice it's running, it's just there, and when you bring it up, it's a beautiful looking app. They really did a great job of designing it and it functions well. There's no hiccups with it. It's really kind of remarkable technology. The only thing that's weird about it is yeah, you need a new PC, preferably an Intel one or AMD or Qualcomm that qualifies with the NPU, but something like my Core i9 desktop I'm on right now with a 4080 GPU doesn't have this, so it's like it's weird that my laptop has it, but my super powerful desktop.

10:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's more powerful, but it's not a copilot plus PC.

10:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it doesn't have a copilot button on the keyboard. So, yeah, so. Will they bring it to pc? Uh, desktop pcs? I don't know. Yeah, it's pretty controversial.

10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, uh, it's funny. On the one hand, it doesn't do as much as I would want it to do. On the other hand, it does way more than security people want it to do. It records everything that's going on, does screenshots and analyzes it with a variety of ai models and then it's queryable. It's a queryable database so you can say hey, on thursday I was looking at a website for uh razor blades. What was that? And it will. It will be able to answer that question can this be turned off?

10:56
yeah, it has to be turned on. Okay, so is it it's off by def.

11:00 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's object okay, because, um, this is not compliant with anything that lawyers use windows-based technology to do.

11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You cannot have an art of an ai not just lawyers, doctors, yeah, yeah, anybody who's got duties taxpayers yeah, it is locally processed, so this doesn't go to the cloud.

11:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
it uses the mpu and it's uh on an enclave encrypted on the chip itself and only the user with the who owns the computer.

11:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would that make it okay, Kathy, for a?

11:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
lawyer. I mean it helps, but I think the the the overarching concern I have is how little control I feel like I have over my data these days because, like I can't even figure out OneDrive, it keeps slurping up things I didn't even occur to slurp and some of the stuff is in the cloud, some of the stuff is not. It's very confusing. This makes me really, really uncomfortable because I have ethical duties plus, I want to keep my own stuff private and I'm having a difficult time controlling what goes where. I've got some ethical obligations to know how my technology works and control this data, and I'm not, you know, I'm reasonably with it and I am feeling like I'm completely at the mercy of this technology and I'm not going to be able to meet my ethical duties. This is a problem.

12:22
I think that and that I think it's a bigger problem than just this. The sense of loss of control that I'm having over so much of my technology, but particularly with what is where, is really alarming. Ai is not interesting to me. Until we solve, do I get control back over my tools? Then, when I have the control over my tools, then I'm much more on board with using all this fancy stuff that can do all these cool things, but we're leaping over a really important step and we're compromising how much we need that important step to actually be taking care of first.

12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was one of the original complaints was it was on by default and Microsoft responded by turning it off by default, which think is yeah, I don't even think. But that's what what I was saying is. That's one side of the argument that people say, oh my God. The other side of the argument, people like me who want more AI, say, yeah, but it's only on one machine. I want to to be really useful recall would be capturing everything I do everywhere machines.

13:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, actually, zach Bowden and I were talking about that on the podcast. He wants it like that too. So if I'm on my desktop but I was doing something on my laptop, I can recall the information from there. That may come down the road. I will say to address what Kathy was talking about. You know this has been delayed for almost a year because of these concerns, so they went back to the drawing board. Drawing board how it works is like when you get the feature on the PC or you're getting for the first time. It gives you a white screen and it clearly walks you through what it is where the information is. Then you can either enable it or don't. Even if it's enabled, it just sits there in the taskbar and you can right click and pause it and turn it off, and so if you're in a session you don't want it to record anything. You can do that as well. You can also tell it specific apps.

14:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want it to save it in theory, it's not going to keep track of your credit card numbers when you buy something right.

14:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It blocks out, like credit card information, social security numbers, all that uh, all that information is automatically blocked, uh, from it. So they have done oh, they do give the user a ton of control. To me it's very obvious what it's doing, how to turn it off, it's very easy to use, it's very fast too. But yeah, I mean, it's one of those things people can easily just turn it off, just like anything else in Windows, and never think about it again. But I think they did a really good job with you know, like I said, all the data is local, stays on that PC. You can't take it anywhere. It's encrypted. It uses when you even launch the app, it uses facial recognition before it even shows you anything, right?

14:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it has to use Windows Hello to unlock it. That's one of the reasons you need a copilot plus PC Right.

15:01 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That's a separate issue. Facial recognition on your devices is a Fourth and Fifth Amendment disaster, so I would never recommend that anybody actually.

15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you use a fingerprint reader?

15:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Absolutely not.

15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, because you only use a pin.

15:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Something where you enter. You have to enter information because otherwise this is the way it should be, but the constitutional case law at the moment is the. The way they're analyzing it is that action of entering data is constitutionally regarded as something different than using your biometric something in your brain is different than something that you I mean, I don't think that really works in terms of what the fourth and fifth amendments are supposed to protect, but at the moment that's the state of the case law hey, I'm glad.

15:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad they're at least doing that. I mean, there was some in some jurisdictions.

15:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
They say all right, we can compel you to have to give us your password I'm not entirely comfortable with the state of the law, even in those more protective things, but at the moment there is a schism, you are more likely, depending on whose jurisdiction is reaching you, to have protection if you enter, but that information, then if it's your essence is all of a sudden, if you're crossing the border. Open these things all bets.

16:08
And now crossing the border is to do whatever they want right, yeah, I mean, this is no way to run a railroad and we've got bigger issues here, but, given the state of the law, biometrics are just don't, don't.

16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is an interesting point we are at right now with ai, where, where there's people like you, Kathy, who say no, never, not on my watch, there's people like me who say I want more. I don't think AI can do everything I want it to do unless it has everything that I'm doing Now. I admit that people like you, Kathy, probably think I'm nuts because I'm giving bad guys and or the government access to everything everywhere.

16:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm not necessarily against your camp, but I'm also not in the camp that you think I am.

16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want the choice.

16:58 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think you want the choice, I understand that I'm kind of in the middle ground, like I'm not in the camp that is no AI ever and that's a very strong camp full of some really you know vehement, vehement opinions. I'm not in your camp where you know you're seeing the promise and the potential and willing to go along for the ride, cause this is kind of cool and exciting.

17:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where do?

17:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
you sit?

17:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where do you sit on all this?

17:21 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I tend to lean more towards the cautious end, but only because I have a personal bias as a writer where I'm scared that AI is going to replace all of us Take your job, yeah, so I tend to be a little bit more cautious about that.

17:35
So, and I also just I, I I don't personally tend to have a need for it in my everyday life, so that's why I don't really, I think if it makes your life easier and more helpful, I think it's easier to be like, oh, this is great. But I personally haven't found a reason to really tap into most of those tools.

17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would submit that probably nobody needs AI.

17:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's true, that is quite the Leo concession.

17:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I know, but you might want it Nobody needs a smartphone either either. Nobody needs an ipod either yeah, there was a period where I had to try to convince my friends that smartphones were going to be a big thing, that they're going to want one. They're like come on, but I need to email someone. I'll just wait till I get home. Why do I need to do it on my phone?

18:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's a period where a lot of people don't have a pc right, so I don't need the internet in the palm of my hand. What are you crazy?

18:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, it does make sense. I will say you know, I I do get the caution all that and you know that's fine. Like I always say, we, we need these discussions, they need to be public, we need to be um, you know up front with these companies about what we want, where we want to control our data at the same time. This is inevitable, like we're, it's just going to happen.

18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So darren oki, who is an ai advocate in our uh club twit discord, said nobody needs the wheel either. Leo, that's not a bad point. Not a bad point I.

18:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think the argument of who needs the wheel is there's more people than than who necessarily needs ai.

19:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I, I would you don't need a car, you don't need a bicycle, you can walk everywhere. I would describe you don't need a car, you don't need a bicycle, you can walk everywhere.

19:06 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean physical levers.

19:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't need a lever we can just call the thing ourselves, but that's, I think, his point, which is that AI is a lever right.

19:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I think there's a. The thing that frustrates me the most with AI is the giant disconnect between a lot of the excluding you, leo, but between a lot of the advocates for it and the people who are dead set against it. The dead set against it are missing that there's some really cool things that it can do. It's a helpful tool, and I think a lot of the zealots are also missing what the actual concerns are. I just want to knock everybody's heads together because I want to get the good without getting the bad, and I'm just watching everybody talk past each other because I'm not fond with how this is all getting developed and rolled out.

19:51
I am on team control. I want to have a lot more control over my devices, my data, my technology. With that in mind, I then want to go choose to use some of the cool things that AI can do, because that will be useful to me. But right now and I think this is also what a lot of the dead againsters are saying is we're feeling ruled by technology. We can feel ourselves losing control. We can feel ourselves sort of. You know people are pushing this on us without adequately regarding all the downsides that may be happening and controlling for them, and that's a problem, and that's also bad for the people who want to make AI and profit from AI. It's a dumb way to develop because all it's doing is antagonizing the public.

20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We haven't even mentioned the fact that, although you kind of referred to it at the beginning, it burns down rainforests at every turn. Actually, you had a story I thought was was kind of interesting in windows central, sam altman says open ai is no longer compute constrained, it's not struggling with computing power. I don't understand, daniel.

20:54 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I thought that was the big constraint yeah, well, microsoft was the exclusive provider for all of their systems.

21:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he says we don't have to get it from microsoft anymore. Is what he's saying?

21:05 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, Basically, they were saying they needed even more power. Microsoft wasn't able to meet that, so they go out to other companies and, yeah, request even more power. This is you know. What we're seeing in real time is the slow breakup of OpenAI and Microsoft. And. Openai is increasingly sees that it has a very bright future on its own. They're releasing. You know they're looking to making hardware with Johnny Ives Um.

21:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're going to make a device, what Like the kind of like the R one or the humane pin or something, an AI hardware Like. I think the thought is well, the smartphones, time has come.

21:44 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Now we're going to make an ai smartphone kind of something yeah, I'm a little skeptical of it, but we'll say some smart people doing that, uh. But yeah, they're also looking to, of course, doing their own social network. They said in a court case this week is that real, do you think?

21:58
yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, I think internally they're messing around that and they said in a court case this week that, given the opportunity, they would buy Google Chrome and make it an AI browser around open AI. So they're saying you know they're going from the whole. We're not a profit, you know to. Oh, we're going to turn into a massive corporation and make a ton of money. And then you have Microsoft, who doesn't want to be tied to someone else's AI, right? So Microsoft is developing their own, going down their own route.

22:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have their own models, yeah.

22:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And so they'll continue to go down that route and you see these companies split off eventually.

22:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny because the speculation for Apple we talked about this on Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly is that they do need to do the opposite. They need to stop relying on their own models. It's not going well. They need help. They need to go to anthropic and open ai and and everybody else and say you know, you guys do the ai. I don't know if apple will do that because of uh, privacy concerns apple's kind of between a rock and a hard place. I want to take a break because you mentioned the chrome thing. Before the show, benita said my producer, why would anybody want chrome? What? How can? But that may be what's going on. Everybody seems to want it. We'll talk about that in just a bit. Abrar Alhiti is here, senior technology reporter at CNET Great to see you. Daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief at Windows Central. And Kathy Gellis, attorney at LawCGCouncil C-O-U-N-S-E-lcom. She's also kathy gillis on blue sky. Kathy with thec. Good to have all three of you. We're gonna move on in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsor.

23:34
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26:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think one of the things google is saying is that they say you can't they say they can? They cannot yeah, no, it's like that's a weird thing only google can run chrome, says google I don't know if I buy that, but what it would be deprived of if it couldn't have it, given that web engines are essentially not interesting external software but so rolled into what you need for basic functionality of a whole lot of stuff.

26:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Parisa Tabriz, who's the general manager of Chrome at Google, says Chrome today represents 17 years of collaboration between the Chrome people Trying to disentangle. That's unprecedented. Part of the problem is Chrome is based on Chromium, which is an open source project, and Blink, which is the engine, also an open source project, and so it is technically not owned by google. Now, the fact is that almost everybody who works on those projects are is a google employee. So I but honestly, you've got the chromium, couldn't you? Just I don't get. I don't know what you're getting. When you buy an open source project, what are you getting? A bra? Who does this? Is the government not understand what's going on?

27:49 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yes, usually my take on these things, because, because the other piece of it is, you know, they have this idea where if, after five years, I believe, if things haven't gotten better in the search space, that they would then force Google to spin off Android. I mean, it's just like this, very like very drastic measures that they're thinking about, and you know, it's not surprising that they've ruled that Google is a monopoly. But I don't know what is solved if open AI then acquires Chrome. You know, I don't like. Does it? Has that fixed anything? I don't know.

28:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Judge Ahmed Me made a who ruled that google was a search monopoly. By the way, that's this case is a search monopoly. There's another case they lost last week that they were an ad monopoly, but that's a separate case. In this case, the government's meta is now doing the penalty phase like, well, okay, what are, what are the remedies? Going to be a three-week hearing and the government says, among other things, they want it to sell google and shares and share some of the data it collects to create the search results. It's also asked the judge not meta, the company judge, meta the judge to ban google from paying for search engine defaults. Now, I don't think this hurts google, but it sure hurts apple, mozilla and samsung app. It's estimated google pays apple what? 20 billion dollars a year.

29:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a big part of its services revenue and are they still paying for mozilla to create? They still give mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars a year without which there is no mozilla, there's no firefox so if google doesn't have chrome, it means that they're not funding the engineering work to develop Chrome and they're not funding these other browser Mozilla to build Firefox and like this is. This doesn't help the public. This remedy would make the public worse off.

29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that I hope the judge is going to be smart enough to know that, look, that's not, you got to, you got to support. In fact, I would say the judge should say no, google should give more money to firefox. Google, google should support the alternative. Um, it also. Uh, the government also asked the judge to ban google for paying. Oh no, we mentioned that. Uh, that would also apply to. We're learning now. Google pays a lot of money to samsung and others for them to use gemini, their ai product not surprising yeah, we're finding a lot of stuff out.

30:13
These trials are always kind of revelatory. Yeah, um, early uh. On friday a computer science expert for the justice department, james mickens, testified that google could easily transfer ownership of chrome to another company without breaking its functionality. Mickles mickens is a professor of computer science at harvard. The divestiture of chrome is fee. I want him to sound like the guy professor frank. The divestiture of Chrome is feasible from a technical perspective. It would be feasible to transfer ownership and not break too much.

30:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So that's not the whole object, the whole question I mean you're talking about, ok, antitrust wouldn't break much. It wouldn't break much. I mean, the whole point with why we care about having antitrust law is that consumers don't have enough market choices. So if you do a remedy that ultimately has the effect of eliminating market choices, you have not solved the problem. Yeah, that's the wrong direction, isn't it?

31:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, google says they invest hundreds of millions of dollars into the open source Chromium project. A thousand engineers within the division have contributed to the project. She says 89. Tabree says 90 of the code for chromium since 2015 has been has come from google. Um, although I think microsoft probably has contributed back some from its uh edge, which is based on chromium. Right, it does. Yep, uh, in internal documents, google says it intends to develop chrome into an agentic browser which incorporates ai agents. Um, in other words, google has plans for chrome's judge your honor. Please don't make us sell it. It's hard to think of what the remedy would should be or would be.

32:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Obviously, yeah, I, I I'm struggling with this too. You know there are. I don't like the idea of companies paying billions to other companies to use their product, their software. I feel like that is kind of unfair, right, even like with Gemini, right. So I don't have a problem necessarily that Gemini might ship with Android operating system and part of that Google suite of stuff. That's fine. But you know, like, microsoft has its copilot, right and so, but people have to go and download it and it's separate. It does. It is kind of unfair in terms of it doesn't really give Microsoft a shot at that. But I don't.

32:38
You know, the browser stuff, same thing. The problem with this is, you know, back in the day, microsoft got sued because they were bundling their browser into Windows and forcing it as the default option and people lost their minds over it. We're basically doing the same thing now, because a browser is basically almost an operating system at this point. It's so complicated, it can do so much stuff. I mean, that's what you know. Google has built an operating system around, almost. So now, within the browser itself, you're going to make it an agent of AI thing, right. So they're going to bootstrap all their services into that as well. So it continues to get more and more complicated and it favors that company.

33:17
And that's where this idea of a monopoly, I think, really starts to come to focus. But how do you solve that? Because starts to come to focus. But how do you solve that? Because there are alternative browsers. We had that great story coming up about being paid not to use Google search and how people were using Bing and like, hey, it's not actually so bad. So these services are out there, but it's hard to get people to switch to them. But I don't know, it's a very complicated problem. Same with the social network.

33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're talking about a study. This is is really kind of fascinating from the washington post. The government wants you to get paid not to use google search. A group of researchers say it's identified a hidden reason. We use google for web searches. We've never tried the other guys. We've never given them a real shot.

34:02
Now who paid for this study? I wonder, I wonder, if google had something to do with it. Um, uh, the research suggests our mass devotion to googling can be altered by bribing people to try search alternatives to see what they like. Microsoft may be paid for this, I don't know. Uh, about nine out of ten web searches we do is through Google. They have 90% of the web search market, at least according to the 2020 figures cited in the monopoly ruling against Google last year. Bing is just 6%. So a group of academics from Stanford, the university of Pennsylvania and MIT designed a novel experiment to figure out what might shake up Google's popularity.

34:43
They recruited 2,500 paid participants, remotely monitored their web searches on computers for months. You wouldn't like that, would you, kathy? The core of the experiment was paying some participants. Most received a mere $10 to use Bing rather than Google for two weeks. Now I'm going to ask our chat room. If I said I'd pay you $10 to use Bing for two weeks, I bet you, most of them, without even thinking about it, would say, oh no, no way. Bing's terrible right they may have never even used it.

35:18
Couldn't pay me to use Bing, but those people who did it 22% were still using it many weeks later.

35:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think this is where I think sorry, just like I think the issue with this too is, like it really there's that quote in there that the person tried and like Bing's actually not so bad.

35:36
And I think that's if you're at least in the United States. There's not a ton of difference between Bing and Google search. Sometimes they give you different results. It might have better results on one over the other, but I go back and forth and try them and I get different things. I like how Bing does images better than Google does in terms of browsing images and stuff. Right, so it's not like there's a drastic difference. I will say Bing is not as good outside the US as it is inside. This is an issue that Microsoft struggles with, so there, is that.

36:06
I think people do make a lot of like it's. I don't know. And whenever I hear people like Google search is so much better, I'm like no, it's not.

36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually gotten much worse. And it's got a lot worse. Yeah, I mean, I don't even use Google anymore. I use cocky and perplexity and I use AI to do my searching.

36:23 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This whole lawsuit is, I think, kind of ridiculous. I mean, even before we get into the remedy problem, where I mean what you were talking about about things being bundled together, it's a concept in antitrust law called tying, that if you if it's sort of a take it or leave it with this other to use this one thing, you now have to use this other thing and they're going to close out competitors who now can't compete on the other thing because nobody's going to choose to pay when they can get something for free. But I'm not entirely sure how a case saying you've got a monopoly in search is affected, or either it's the problem or it's the solution that you have to divest of a browser, unless they were really arguing that tying somehow created the monopoly in search. But I always found and I know the lawsuit changed over time, but when it was first announced. I have a TechDirt post from 2020 where I thought the original filing was just ridiculous in how they were arguing the monopoly in search in the first place and the headline on it is trademark genericide.

37:25
And one big way the DOJ admits that its antitrust lawsuit against Google is utter garbage because the way they drafted it was sort of by pointing out all the competition as part of their complaint, as evidence that there was no competition. It was bizarre, but look, ok, I can accept. Maybe you still, with a well-plaid complaint, can get that Google has a little bit too much marketplace power, but it clearly isn't a monopoly in that. We're talking about how you can use Bing and you can use Judge Mehta disagreed with you, though right.

37:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He ruled that they were.

37:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I haven't looked at the case because I need to see how the thing was queued up and what the actual legal questions were and what he was looking at, and there may be more tussling among the lawyers to figure it out. But I'm a little bit, I mean, and also now we're a remedy court.

38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We may be going up to appeals.

38:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, and maybe it's going to be looked at. We say that's nuts. If you are in a marketplace with other competitors and those other and your product is declining in market share while the other ones are already ascending, as a matter of law, can you have too much market power? But then, even if you say yes, then you get into the question of what's the remedy and just randomly gutting the company and slicing off other pieces that are going to have market.

38:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hard to come up with a remedy. This study led the Colorado Attorney General to ask the judge. He said I know what you could do pay people to use something besides Google search.

38:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, they can argue don't tie the things together. And then the remedy is like oh, you created a problem because you tied your search to your other products. And then the remedy is don't tie your search to the other products and make sure it's nice and easy that people can slide around and use some other ones. That would make sense, but that doesn't seem like what the issue is or what's on the table it's.

39:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what the remedy could possibly be. By the way, there are a lot of people who think chrome is worth something. Yahoo wants to buy it, open ai wants to buy it and perplexity wants to buy it. Openai wants to buy it and Perplexity wants to buy it. Incidentally, it's interesting the CEO of Perplexity, which is developing its own browser I think Comet is the name of it has been very open saying "'Yeah, we want to use Comet? "'so we can find out more about people? "'and sell product and ads at them'". Like he's being very open about it. Um, I mean, I guess that's what google's doing, but yeah, that's.

39:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
My question is just does the user experience get better because another company is now in charge? It would only get worse right like that's, if we're actually thinking about the impact on consumers and everyday people. If, if, in the end, you know that experience goes even more downhill, what have we solved?

40:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, yeah, here's the solution. Everybody's gotta get rid of all their browsers. We just all use chromium and everybody contribute to the open source project.

40:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
No, no, no it's links or bust. You know, maybe some gopher like let's just, let's just go back that way, lynx L-Y-N-X.

40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's talking about the command line text only browser. Yeah sure.

40:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's a deep cut.

40:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We didn't need wheels either.

40:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Right, it's all. We're back.

40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Netscape.

40:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Let's go Netscape. We'll make Netscape open source.

40:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Netscape is all fancy schmancy.

40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got to go up from. Firefox is open source, um, it's not just the mozilla foundation. There are a lot of spin-offs of firefox. I use one called zen that I love. Um, there's a lot of choice, but the truth is most people just use chrome, partly because you know it's got the brand, partly because google pays companies, especially phone companies, to put chrome, to use chrome, not notably not apple, but on all the android devices chrome is present a lot of times it's just simple, like people are just familiar with it, yeah, and they just like that experience.

41:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know, because, like I tell people all the time, I think brave is one of the best browsers out there. I love brave. They're doing some really creative stuff out there, yeah, and if you, if you go use it, it's like it's not just like Chromium, though, like they put in some like really cool features in there that no one else does. And then you have Opera. They have their new Opera Air, I think it's called which is a very unique take on a browser.

41:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a calm browser.

41:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah yeah, you can play music in the background, like it does. Like there's a lot of innovation in this space, which is great, and people just tried these browsers They'd be like, oh, these are actually pretty cool. It's not just like clones of the same browser, and Microsoft's Edge has done a ton of like innovation in there. There's like so many features that they built into it. But it's tough because you can tell people about all this, but then at the end of the day, they're gonna like, yeah, I know Chrome, I know where everything is, I know how we should point out that the trial only said Google has a monopoly in search.

42:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
This isn't really about Chrome well, that's why I can't figure out where Chrome.

42:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the judge recognizes that search is based on signals that Google gets from Chrome. So what they're trying to do is and and he and other remedies maybe a more sensible one is for google to open its search index. So I think this would be a great solution so that other companies can compete. You know, one of the people who testified in the trial was a browser company called uh. I paid for it. I loved it. Was it neva? What was it? Uh, it was a great browser. The loved it. Was it neva? What was it? Uh, it was a great browser. The founder said we can't compete because chrome is so dominant. There's just no money in it. So they actually abandoned the browser market.

42:53 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Um, so a huge critical question what is the browser that handles large amounts of tabs the best?

43:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because that's all that really matters it's totally all that really matters I think it's chrome, isn't it?

43:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I don't know. No, I think edge has done a lot of work around that because they well, they use the feature. But I think now it's part of the chromium thing where the sleeping tabs, where they get it back, yeah, yeah yeah where does it go back?

43:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I have a couple of use cases. One, the sleeping tab. So you it doesn't just chew up all the memory when you open more than a dozen. But the second thing is I'd be interested in who has a native tab handler that handles it really well.

43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm fond of Arc, which is a Chromium-based browser that I thought did tabs. They do vertical tabs very well and one of the reasons I'm using the Zen browser it's basically the Arc interface with the Firefox engine and I want to support a third-party engine. So take a look at zen browser. It's an open source, free project also like in edge.

43:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Right now there's a. You can hit the little icon at the top. It should be in your browser, if not in the menu called browser essentials, and it's a health system of the browser. So I'm looking at mine. I have a switch that save power with efficient mode and you can click on or off. Shows me 23 tabs are sleeping to save resources and it shows 85 savings. It shows me the memory being used uh, the tab performance is healthy right now, uh, so they have, like all these features built into it that help you manage the tech, because I'm one of those people I have I sometimes have 120 tabs.

44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why don't you close your freaking tabs? What are you doing? 120, that is nothing add at least a zero and you might get my current. Why, why, why do you have so many tabs? I'm busy there's no way in the habit if you have control w just control, w every time I close a tab.

44:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Gosh darn it. I totally needed that and like now I'm all interrupted, I'm not gonna be able to find it again. I have a lot.

44:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
See, that's why you need windows recall. It'll do that. You just tell what you were looking for.

44:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You guys are tab hoarders truly, I don't think I have more than like six open at a time ever.

45:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God, I believe in tab sanitation you get rid of. Get rid of the tabs you don't need. It's a good idea. Just clean up after yourself.

45:17 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So right now I do have more than normally. I'm 1200. I don't usually cross a thousand, but I usually hang out somewhere around.

45:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, for me, I think you need a better tool.

45:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't know what, what well, I do need another tool.

45:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Hence, that's the question you're trying to use ai now to group your tabs, which is pretty cool, I mean.

45:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I could group them. I want the control and it's just right now. I just don't have that control.

45:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um also our chat room is suggesting. I think search trip said opera does a good job with tabs too, Thank you. Opera is very innovative. I would look at Vivaldi too. That's a Chromium-based browser that has a lot of. I don't like it because it uses so much customization. It's like I feel guilty that I haven't used all the features and switched all the switches. All right, let's take a little break and somebody help Kathy with a tab hoarding, okay.

46:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't have a problem. I can quit my tabs anytime.

46:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not alone. A lot of our listeners tell me they have hundreds and hundreds of tabs open. I think Steve Gibson, our security guy, also does the same thing. But I do think that there is a trend of people closing their tabs more than they used to. I mean, I would like to. The young people are closing their tabs.

46:30 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Kids today? They just don't know Kids closing tabs. I mean, I would like to close. I'd like to be able to bunch them and manage them, because a lot of them are open.

46:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Firefox does that now and just waiting for me.

46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tab grouping and just waiting for me. Grouping, yeah, does it? Okay, I haven't figured out how to. It would be a good thing to have projects right where you have all the tabs, and I think that's why I use like zen and arc, because you can create, you can pin stuff that you always want and then you can create tab groupings, um, and so that you have different. You know, okay, it's, it's a little bit more compartmentalized. It's a first step to cleaning up.

47:05 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's an important step. I was talking about control. I know my needs. I just want to be able to be the master of the solution.

47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think a lot of people and I think it's writers will have a lot of tasks. It's like their research, and they'll have a lot.

47:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Is that right, Abrar? Oh yeah, Most of my coworkers are that way are that way.

47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, apparently I'm the only uh abnormal one. I don't know who doesn't have that, I think. I think when you're done, though you know like the pieces, then you should close it that's true.

47:30 - Benito (Announcement)
Yes, agreed, yes, hi, this is benito, I got one quick question for you, kathy. Uh, how many unread emails do you have?

47:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
oh, I'm I have more than 22 000, I mean in terms of unread a lot, but in terms of anything I need to read, right None I don't read at all.

47:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who reads at all anymore?

47:50 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, you don't clear it out. Like, I'm a zero inbox person, so I can't.

47:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I can't have a number next to my inbox. I can't yeah.

47:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I turn that off. It's too far gone. At this point I'm like 15 years, I think on email or something. It's just like it's too far gone. But it's kind of cool though, because I do go back to email.

48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a database. Yeah, it's a database. Yeah, I think that's a sensible use of email.

48:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I actually also like the. When they rolled it out a lot of people thought it was stupid, but it funnels into the five categories automatically if you said it and a lot of people mocked it. I actually find that extremely useful and generally pretty apt and controllable if it gets things wrong. How many?

48:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of you use gmail as your primary mail gmail.

48:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, I use it. I use it for work, but I use outlook as my personal outlook monopoly?

48:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
huh no, I'm just kidding, yeah no, it makes sense.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I. It's amazing how many people use Gmail I mean I use it as a client.

48:48 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I don't like to give out my Gmail address because I reserve the right to walk away from it, but it's a really nice client to just handle all the email that comes in.

48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I like to pay for my email because I think I want to own it. I don't want Google to own my email. I like to pay for it. I guess, with workspace and we and the company uses workspace, we're paying for it. It's the worst of both worlds. All right, let's take a little break. You're watching this week in tech? Uh, brahral heedy. Uh, it's wonderful to have you, daniel rubino, kathy gellis and, of course, you, dear dear listener. So nice to have you all on this sund afternoon evening, monday morning, depending on where you're watching our show today, brought to you by Monarch Money. I've been using this and I love it.

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51:42
Well, mark zuckerberg says social media is over, but 4chan's not. How's that about merging two stories into one big headline? 4chan is back online. It was hacked and it was, I think, wired. Declared it dead. Uh, all of the moderator emails were leaked that they call them janitors on 4chan, and rightly so, because it's kind of a mess. Uh, I'm not sure I'm happy that 4chan's back does. No, I know none of you use 4chan, but do you, for your jobs, ever visit? Nope, new, new, all right, well, 4chan was.

52:23 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's too chaotic for me.

52:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy yeah, it's crazy. Actually, I feel like xcom has become much like 4chan. I stopped using x for the same reason I it just. It brings me down, man, yeah, yeah, all right. Well, mark zuckerberg says don't worry, social media is over. As you know, meta is on trial this week, an antitrust trial. Have you been following this, kathy, or do you care? Oh, you're muted. Your microphone's been coming and going. Hello, push a button.

53:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Hello, push a. Button.

53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
User error. Sorry, user error. So have you been following the Mark Zuckerberg meta trial?

53:10 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Not that closely.

53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's funny. Neither have I. I don't care.

53:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other things I'm tracking a lot more closely that matters to my world and it just feels like so yesterday's issues Nobody's going to get any of the issues right. The one side is going to be wrong. The other side is going to be wrong, it's just not where. Like, I'll clean up the mess after they finish making it.

53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zuckerberg on the on the witness stand, admitted that social media is less social. He had to testify for 10 hours over three days last week. This is part of the ftc's antitrust trial against meta. Zuckerberg said. The company has lately been involved in quote the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what's going on, not so much about your friends, I think there's some validity to that, just based off of my own experience.

54:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Like, I spend a lot of time on TikTok, for example, and I don't want to see my friends as post on TikTok.

54:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's never been about your friends. It's never been about your friends, right.

54:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And so then I think what Instagram does, for example, is it copies what TikTok does, and so it wants to show you stuff from creators that you don't actually know, and so it's kind of Mark Zuckerberg's fault. I mean, I don't like you're the one who owns the platform that has been copying what other people are doing and and showing people things that aren't necessarily relevant to you. Know the people that actually know? I didn't, I did. Did he say that it was a bad thing that it's no longer?

54:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like that. He just says we've refocusedocused. I mean, really, the promise of facebook from day one was connecting people right. Connecting you with your friends, your family, your high school classmates, your college classmates, uh, your work colleagues, whatever. And for the longest time, the only reason I thought to use facebook was so you could stay in touch with those exactly absolutely but he says that over time that's an old idea, that over time people have started using Facebook less for that and more like you used to do that exactly yeah, they change your feed less because you're not seeing those people they did it.

55:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They did it to us, right, yeah they pumped in news for a long time. Then there was all this other distraction. They made it hard to find people, the people you follow their content.

55:27 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So it's like now they're kind of undoing that stuff, but it's a little bit too late, he has so little intuition for the needs and desires of his users and he keeps ending up creating the environment and then frustrating people. And he changes habits because we have no choice in it. Then those habits go bad. Then he complains about people aren't using the platform. If he followed what the users were doing and what the users wanted, he would have a successful platform where he wouldn't be saying oops right now and having people just wander away.

55:59
And now it's a lot easier to wander away because people are starting to wander away for political reasons and it's much easier because people are like. You know, is this really a loss for me? I'm not getting the value out of it that I either used to have or thought I would get, or even if I was still getting it, half the people I wanted to connect to they've all left. I mean, just how to not grow your site and just alienate your users because you just don't understand them and what they want and what they're going to use your technology for.

56:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A couple of weeks ago I was doing my taxes and I needed some entertainment and I just received an email from Dan Patterson has been on. The show was march 2009 and he said I was on with get this, jason calacanis, gina trepani, david prager, sam levine of freaks and geeks, lavar burton of star trek and kevin pollock, the comic and I thought, wow, that was a pretty good show. So I was listening to the show and the funniest thing, the big story, was the huge uproar over facebook. Moving to the news feed, do you remember that in 2009, that was the beginning of it becoming a different platform, and they were at the time. They weren't. There was no tiktok. They were jealous of twitter.

57:14 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, and right to some degree. I guess myspace was pretty much dead by then, yeah oh my, they'd MySpace.

57:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they were trying to be like Twitter, like no, not what, your friends, it's what's going on. They had, I think, the intuition probably correct that we wanted to be entertained when we picked up our phone.

57:31 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's all about time on site right. It was all about trying to create, give you enough stuff so you never leave the platform and your friends aren't doing enough to do that right, yeah if that's all it was, you just connect to your friends, all

57:45
right, I'm done. Let me go check out the news, let me go look at this stuff. You're leaving the platform and you know x is trying to do the same thing and that's the problem. But that's why we can't have nice things, because you create like a really cool tool and then it's like no, we need more. This is why, by the way, I still love drudge report. I will always defend this, because he never, like, did more than that site. He just creates that front page chain, never changed the font it even looks the same as it did 15 years ago right.

58:15
He didn't try to create a media company and try to create a magazine and he just stuck to it and it's still the same thing for 15 years ago. It's just awesome whether you agree with some of his politics or not. Actually he's been pretty funny lately but, like, I just appreciate the fact that he just stuck to that and it hasn't changed because it's you know who he's copying craig, newmark and craigslist, which never changed either.

58:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right, yeah, yeah, if, if somebody created a website where you would just follow your friends and family. The problem is you got the network effect like everybody's on Facebook. But if you could somehow magically change it so the Facebook were once again just your friends and family, would that be good? Would people want that?

58:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I think so there is I have been told.

59:03 - Benito (Announcement)
I think if all these services were just their original version of their services, they would still be pretty successful.

59:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know like if facebook was still regular facebook, if twitter was still regular twitter, if, like instagram was regular instagram, I think they'd all do just fine if you go to feeds on facebook and then you select friends, you well, there's still some ads, there's sponsored stuff in there, but this is basically people I follow.

59:26 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah.

59:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's the right and it's boring as hell.

59:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, see, I think I don't think I would enjoy that very much, because when I build, I do still go on X and I actually, like I'm all admitted, I kind of enjoy some of the viral stuff that I see on my feed and you go to the for you tab, not the tab, and I don't, I can't remember the last time I clicked on the following tab.

59:45
Um, I know which is, but I do. I do resent the fact that I don't see content for people. I follow on my for you tab as much. I actually really don't like that, but if I had to choose between the two, I'm more likely to laugh at stuff on my for you tab than I am on my following tab.

01:00:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, mark's right, you go there for entertainment. You don't go there to see what your family's up to.

01:00:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But I don't know. I get that from the people that I follow. Like I do want to see that and I think it's great.

01:00:12 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Maybe it's a better mix. I think it has to be a mix.

01:00:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
That's what you want to borrow right right maybe there should be a knob that you could say a little more of my following in there, would you? I want all the people that I choose to follow.

01:00:26
I don't mind getting extra with it, but I'm not getting the former, you know, and then like, depending on how much time I have, how bored I am, you know, give me more. Give me more because I ran out all my friend stuff. I don't mind having access to more, but I it's the more is coming at the cost of the basics of what I'm there for, and that's not helpful.

01:00:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And I feel like this conversation about what Facebook has become ties directly to another headline that came out of this trial about how Mark Zuckerberg feels like Instagram cannibalized Facebook's success, which is really interesting to kind of dive into his true feelings about an app that he spent a lot of money acquiring and then was like, ooh, this is complicated because it's not the app that he created and he has this connection with, but it's an app that was doing starting to really take off and kind of leave Facebook in the dust and and so to kind of see a piece of how he was thinking about Instagram was was a really interesting revelation.

01:01:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually his, the founder of Instagram, kevin Systrom, testified, and I don't think he testified in defense of meta, because he said basically once once meta bought Instagram, they starved us. Yeah, they didn't want us to succeed, they were.

01:01:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
They were basically killing or trying to kill instagram apparently yeah, apparently denied a lot of requests for more staff. But then that also makes me wonder um would instagram be what it is today without having been bought out by facebook, right? I don't? I don't know the answer they were tiny.

01:01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it was, I remember, because it was a billion dollars and I thought, for an app, for an app, a billion dollars for an app, of course, whatsapp ended up being like $32 billion, so I guess I was wrong about that. But even then Instagram had 15, I think 10 or 15 employees. It was tiny, it was small for a billion dollars and it's come out in the trial. Basically that the reason they bought it. They were threatened by it. They bought it to protect the blue site Facebook.

01:02:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
But then Instagram still grew right. It still became what it is today. So it's like this weird two-sided thing.

01:02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, systrom said he left Meta in 2018 because he felt like Mark wanted Instagram to die, although at that time Instagram was already 1 billion users. It was, it was all.

01:02:48
It was 40 of Facebook's size yeah and still only a thousand employees, compared to 35 000 at Facebook system, testified. We were by far the fastest growing team, we produced the most revenue and, relative to what we should have been at the time, I felt we could have been much longer larger. So he left, he left, um, so really one of the things that's going to come out of this case, I think. Who knows well, who knows, if the FTC will continue to pursue it. Maybe if mark zuckerberg gives donald trump enough money, they'll lose interest. Whatever. Uh, he tried, he tried facebook gave trump 23 million dollars in a settlement right and uh and millions for his inaugural wasn't enough. Trump even said I'm still a little mad at you, so, so trial continues, but it's likely that what they're going to ask for is a breakup of Facebook, instagram and WhatsApp three different companies.

01:03:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It'd be major.

01:03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be a big deal.

01:03:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Because, you know, going back to when Facebook first acquired Instagram, I think a big piece of why people then signed up for Instagram and masks is because there was that familiarity of like oh, facebook now has this platform that I had never heard of before, and then they kind of well, and look what happened with threads.

01:04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and threads grew instantly because it was your Instagram account.

01:04:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I mean, I'm sure we all remember that day that everyone just joined in like hordes and thought that Twitter was dead. Right, Because everyone was running threads and God, I can't remember the last time I opened threads. Now there was this moment of hype right, Because it was a clear connection between something that you were already using. So be interesting if that actually did end up getting separated.

01:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would there be? I guess there would be president Kathy for breaking the company up. I mean, that's what happened with Ma Bell, it's what happened with standard oil. I mean that's what antitrust actions often do result, and in fact the government wanted to break Microsoft up in the late 90s when they went after them.

01:04:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, how you break it? I think I'm befuddled by this splitting, slicing off Chrome, because in theory, you want to split up what you've overly dominated where you don't have enough. There's not enough diversity in the market. So it seems weird to say, okay, you've got a search problem, so therefore you should cut off another part of your company. Now what you were saying is that the chrome feeds into the search, but it just seems way too far removed to not actually solve the problem.

01:05:15
But you could see instagram, facebook and whatsapp being standalone companies yeah strong in their own right in three different areas I worry a lot about what would feed whatsapp if facebook I I essentially read that as a situation where facebook is subsidizing it I, oh, you know, financially is what yeah, yeah, and that is dominant and everywhere but the United States, right, all over the world.

01:05:42
Right and you kind of need it to keep going. But what's its standalone profit model? I mean, I don't really understand why Facebook? Well, I guess Facebook kind of wanted my read on it as they wanted access to the technology so that they could roll in the encryption into its messaging. And it's really hard to develop that from scratch, so better to buy somebody where you get all that IP and you can use it. And now Facebook Messenger is starting to encrypt stuff. But otherwise I sort of worry, now that they've done that, that they'll just starve the WhatsApp and that would be a big problem.

01:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'd almost have to tell Facebook to stop doing messenger to make whatsapp succeed. I haven't. I use whatsapp. It used to charge a dollar a year, which obviously is not enough what do they still? Do that I don't. I don't remember paying anything, but who knows, I've never paid.

01:06:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah, so it's free and it's it's a major medium in a lot of places where a dollar would be ridiculously expensive.

01:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And probably the reason Facebook continues to run it is they're getting ad information about you. They're getting location information. They can't see your messages those are encrypted but they're getting enough information to make it valuable for an ad play. There's no ads on WhatsApp yet yet, although they've made noises about thinking about that, but that's probably why instagram and facebook ads are so effective, because they've got even more information than just those two apps yes, people should just use telegram anyway.

01:07:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's a better app I love telegram.

01:07:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, even though it's, you know, there's issues, it's, it's not the thing that you can rely on for the yeah, like it may be good for as a communication. Somebody can read my messages.

01:07:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Really, I mean um, yeah, no, you, you, you need. I think the problem with telegram is it gives a false sense of security. And how much security you have in your messages, um, and you needed to not go in eyes open if you're using.

01:07:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's not as sexy as signal, but if you want real security, you use signal or I guess what's telegram's open source, though, right like you can go look at the code telegram, yeah, and they you, uh, roll your own encryption, which is not industry standard.

01:07:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's put it that way it's not. Yeah, it's probably not good. The way they defend is say, well, we've offered 200 000 so anybody can crack it. And no one has. But uh, the experts who've looked at it say this is encryption as written by somebody who doesn't know how encryption works it's just funny because on telegram I find the innovation of features is just oh, I love it ahead of what's happening. The group like groups and the stickers and the. Yeah, I agree.

01:08:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean they come up with so many ways to keep advancing. It's really interesting. I don't really use it, even for like that. I usually you know why messenger, because no one uses it not so much in this country.

01:08:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's quite popular in other countries telegram yeah yeah, yeah, I mean that's the key right you got to use whatever and I just use text messages, because everybody uses it.

01:08:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, so far as a personal messenger. I agree, there's a lot of competition in the united states. Sms still reigns there, or facetime or whatever. Uh, europe, whatsapp is definitely big for that feature. Telegram, I would say, got notoriety because of you can go find groups on topics of things you're interested in, including terrorism, oh yeah.

01:09:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's all sorts of skeezy stuff on Telegram. We know that, yeah right, and so you can join those groups. How do you stop that?

01:09:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. I mean that's just kind of the nature of the internet.

01:09:18 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The other thing about some of these things is you want something that's going to use the internet connection of your phone as opposed to the telephony aspects of the phone, because they tend to be cheaper if just by one data plan, and then you just stick whatever app on top of that.

01:09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why WhatsApp got dominant very quickly over SMS. But here in the United States it's free, so that's why it hasn't been dominant in the united states, I think, uh, probably just text messaging is dominant in the united states.

01:09:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Sms got a lot cheaper because it was really being overcharged for like right, but it's free.

01:09:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now it's free, it's functionally free, but it took a long time to get that yeah, I understand.

01:09:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, that's why it used to be ridiculously expensive. Yeah, that's the story of what's app.

01:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah that's why, and telegram and and all these other data-based messengers, but, uh, but those days are gone and the problem is habits die hard and there's a network effect. You've got to have the messaging system all the people you want to talk to use. And I would. I tried to. I did some years ago because I like you, I really liked telegram, daniel, and I tried to get everybody I knew to move to telegram.

01:10:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Nobody yeah, no, it's really hard.

01:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was like switching browsers my wife and I for a while use telegram with our son and we just end up text messaging.

01:10:36 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yeah I mean I would i't want. It sounds like it offers nice things as a communications client, but the thing, but the real need that I have is well, increasingly is security in the communications itself.

01:10:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you signal right.

01:10:51 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I use signal a lot and I prefer it to WhatsApp, which I used to avoid deliberately because it's um, it's privacy practices.

01:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're slurping contacts it's the best way to share war plans, I find yeah, yeah, yeah always many people, many people agree it's well I mean for.

01:11:11
For for people like you and me, signal is more than adequate right yeah uh, it is important for people to understand that if somebody's compromised your device that they can read your signal messages, it's only encrypted on the way between devices, but as soon as it gets to a device it's not encrypted. So you know. If you care that much, I would hope you would know about opsec and protecting yourself and so and maybe if you're in charge of a large nation security force you would also yeah.

01:11:41
I use Signal with people with whom I want to have a private conversation. There are not many of them. Everybody else, I just text and if you're Apple to Apple, it's encrypted. It says encrypted as Signal. It's as secure as Signal. I don't know, I think it would be fine. I like you, kathy, I find it hard to even care about meta anymore a meta of the company yeah, that's why I don't follow this trial it well, I feel like we should talk about it, especially when mark zuckerberg says social, so 2010 well it's I, I just can't tune into it a little bit.

01:12:20 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Because, well it's I, I just can't tune into it a little bit because other more things are breaking and um, and this feels very old news and you know, and they're gonna do whatever they're gonna do and right, this is also too early for me to like show up and what am I gonna do? Affect the outcome of this trial? At some point there'll be briefing. At some point there'll be amicus briefs, probably on appeal. You know like I'll, I'll care then I can't fix this now.

01:12:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, right uh, well, you do have a little bit more google news. We didn't get it all there. They decided not to uh abandon third-party cookies. They had this whole big plan for, uh, a privacy sandbox that was going to protect everybody and they were gonna get rid of third-party cookies. And then they talked to advertisers and guess what? The advertisers said don't. And Google said, oh, okay, and that's the end of the privacy sandbox.

01:13:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's pretty much how everything shakes out in the world, yeah.

01:13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Advertisers said, said no. So they said oh yeah, okay. And, by the way, google's quarterly results were out and they they topped wall street's expectations 12 revenue growth, 46 increase in net income earnings of two dollars and 81 cents a share. They had a great quarter.

01:13:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So there, so they're doj that's not gonna go as well when they get to the antitrust for the cert, for the um, for the ad right in this, but right, they're gonna do a 70 dollar sorry, 70 billion dollar, a little bit more.

01:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
70 billion dollar stock buyback program. Uh, which shareholders love and of course it helped their stock price. I don't usually do financial news but it's, you know, in in the context of what we're talking about. It's good to point out they're doing just fine search numbers growing. They are using ai now in search. Have you uh tried the google a? You can't. Are you eating rocks? Are you putting Elmer's glue on your pizza? They've gotten past that now, yes or no?

01:14:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yes, they have gotten past it, although there was that headline. I don't know if you guys caught it this week, but people noticed that with AI overviews, if you type any saying like never like a badger twice, or whatever, and then you type meaning afterwards, that it's like oh, this saying means it makes up an answer, roll with it, so.

01:14:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
so that's kind of fun, but it was really bad, and this was only a couple of weeks ago, so I imagine it's still bad with anything involving location. I wanted to find something. What was it like? Swimming programs in northern New Jersey? It could not deal with location. It was it like acknowledged where I was asking them for, but it was giving me ones that were like down the street from me, which is California. And then, even when I'm like, no, near this town in New Jersey, it like was finding stuff like at the other end of the state. So no, the AIs. Well, actually that was a complaint about the search in new jersey. It like was finding stuff like at the other end of the state, so, um, no the ai is. Well, actually that was a complaint about the search, maybe not even the ai, but they're not wrong, though you really can't lick a badger twice you can't.

01:15:30 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think it's hard to get it the first time they don't like it.

01:15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really, they really don't. Uh, this was hysterical, so they came up never wash a rabbit in a cabbage. An ai overview said the never wash a rabbit in a cabbage. And AI overview said the saying never wash a rabbit in the cabbage is a humorous way of saying that bathing rabbits is unnecessary and potentially harmful.

01:15:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Okay, can I share something that's totally exposing myself? But sometimes when I'm writing and I want to include some sort of saying and I just want to make sure that I have it correctly, I will Google it just to make sure that I didn't make that up. And I have noticed that AI overviews will always support whatever I've typed and been like yeah, this means this, but then I scroll and I see that no other result has that exact thing.

01:16:13
There might be. Like you know, if I'm right, then it shows that, if I'm wrong, it shows the tweaks, it's a new way of hallucinating. Exactly. So you know, we're all so thrilled. But yeah, the AI overviews are everywhere, to the dismay of a publisher.

01:16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, that's an issue you know, and I have to say I am guilty because I use perplexity or chat GPT for a lot of my searching and, honestly, I'll end up never going to the site. They extract the good stuff from your beautiful site, yep, and sometimes they'll give you credit, they'll say a bra or all he says, but usually not Usually not yeah. And you don't get the link Exactly.

01:16:54 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I'm picky. There's a couple of instances where I really needed something that was that brief, and what it is ending up summarizing is maybe also something I could see in the snippet preview and that's all I needed. But I don't trust the AI most of the time. So, and in fact, one of the things I do appreciate is it's got like little links for where it got. Whatever it is attempting to tell you is reality and it's necessary, like especially if it sounds good, I need to follow that link because I don't trust what it's giving me otherwise. So in small instances where like yeah, thank you, I don't need to go click on that thing, that I just needed a teeny tiny bit from. But if I needed more than a teeny tiny bit, I have to go follow it because I can't trust it.

01:17:39
And sometimes you can tell, because you look at the summary and then you look at the results and they don't match.

01:17:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean that's true too. I mean, there's definitely different levels here of search and information processing that people go through. If you're going to buy a brand new car, you're probably not just going to look at the AI. It gives you a little paragraph and you're like, all right, I'm going to go buy that one. You know, you're probably going to then go down the funnel of like, reading reviews, and then maybe going to Reddit reading personal experiences and all this. I will say, though, you know this idea that well, sometimes the AI is inaccurate. It's like well, luckily we have no issue with disinformation, with just search. Yeah, a lot of humans are often inaccurate. I mean, how?

01:18:26
often do you ask for directions and they give you and they send you the wrong way. I mean, just do the research yourself. It's like my common expression on the internet, you know, like, oh, you don't believe in climate science. I did the research and it's like so. I mean, people are already searching and getting very wrong answers.

01:18:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You did see the MyPillow guy use an AI to write a brief in his case.

01:18:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh, my God.

01:18:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I didn't. The judge found nearly 30 mistakes, including cases that do not exist.

01:18:55 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Again at this point. This is inexplicable.

01:18:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Learn your lesson yeah.

01:18:59 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I mean, this is the first couple of times because, like one of the first was Michael Cohen or his lawyer got hallucinated in five cases, but the fact and they kind of got off lightly there was a little bit of sanctions for some of them, of like I think they have to pay the other side some money for the time spent responding to it.

01:19:15
But you know, okay, fine Mistakes were made. To still be making the mistakes at this point is inexcusable. I've done this a couple of times where I speak to some law students about I do a day class on AI and legal ethics and I run through the ethical rules governing the practice of law and talk about different ways that they're going to implicate that AI, using AI in some context is going to implicate one of these laws, and we talk through them and work through them and at this point there is no excuse to just forge ahead and being oblivious and pretend that the ethical rules aren't implicated at all, because they're almost all implicated, not just the case hallucinations you know what I always say you can't let lick a badger twice.

01:20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I just. I think that's pretty obvious by now. Let's take a little break and we'll have more to talk about in just a bit. You're watching this week in tech our show, this time brought to you by our friends at out systems, the leading ai powered application and agent development platform for another 20 years. This has been a long time.

01:20:25
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01:21:56
Visit OutSystemscom slash twit to learn more. That's OutSystemscom slash twit learn more. That's outsystemscom slash twit. Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech and you support us when you go to that address, outsystemscom slash twit. Thank you, outsystems. One more Google story I left out and I feel bad about this one those Nest thermostats you bought back in the day. They're gonna stop supporting them on october 25th the first and second generation nest learning thermostats and it's going to completely stop launching new nest products in europe. So I had a bunch of those thermostats. I didn't bring them when, when we moved, but uh, I'm glad, I'm glad I didn't. What do you do if you have a nest thermostat, first or second generation?

01:22:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, I mean I used to have a nest thermostat and they're they were gorgeous hardware. Yeah, I mean it worked really well and there's like no reason to replace it outside of forced obsolescence here, which is really kind of disturbing.

01:23:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it'll still work as a thermostat. You can turn the knob. You just got the surface, but it won't receive updates. It won't be supported in the apps, the Nest and Home apps.

01:23:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
If it's not receiving updates. This is a liability to have in your house, because it's still connected to the network and then anybody else is resetting your, your point.

01:23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but you can tell it to turn wi-fi off. Yeah, turn off the wi-fi, and then you're gonna have, you know, basically a thermostat, a knob, a knob on your wall, a beautiful, beautiful knob welcome back to 1950 yeah, retro great yeah, it's just something.

01:23:45
I always do these stories because it's something to remember. When you buy an iot device, you're buying software that's gonna at some point the company's gonna say yeah, that's it on that one. Pretty much it is that way from now on. Right, you said that pc shipments are are uh going up, daniel, is that?

01:24:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
because yeah, so, yeah. So some caveats here, right. So we've got to always we use the proper word here shipments, right? So shipments are definitely different than sales, and so we have seen a. I believe it's between well, depending if you're going with canalysisys or Counterpoint, I think it was yeah, it's between 6% and 10%. That's a big jump.

01:24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's people shipping their PCs into the US for later sale. It's putting them in the supply chain, yeah.

01:24:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So there's a lot of thought here that of course companies are building up stock because of the threat of tariffs, because those tariffs could literally double the price of a laptop, in which case no one's going to buy them. But if they're already here then it's not an issue. In fact, microsoft is we've been reporting going to be launching new Surface devices. They presumably brought a bunch already into the country here. That will last them a couple months for sales. But if this goes on for six months, you know, then they're going to run out again, you know. So then there's an issue there. So you know this is good. They are expecting. You know, like I've mentioned this before, there's three things kind of really driving this. One Windows 10 is coming to end of life for consumers. You know, technically it's a security thing and they should upgrade or switch october what?

01:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
25th, it's the end of the line for windows 10.

01:25:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah and so, but for enterprise this is critical, right, they don't really have a choice. They need to go buy new laptops.

01:25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're also coming up on the, you know, five years after covid, where so many companies bought new laptops for employees that's what depressed the market for those five years is that people bought up in 2020, and then they said, well, we're good for a while but five years, is that when people typically kind of renew.

01:25:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, that's the upgrade cycle. Pretty much, obviously, companies want it to be less than that. That's always a challenge, but it's usually about five years. So you have that. And then, of course, you have the Copilot 8 Plus, copilot Plus PCs, which is starting to drive Now. Up until very recently there wasn't much reason to get one of those PCs, but now, with Recall and Click to Do and some other features that are coming, there's a lot more argument to kind of get this PCs, especially for businesses who will value with them. I would also just say know laptops for the first time and this includes apple, of course too. With these new processors we're we got to the point where this is like the dream laptop you can get are you talking specifically about the snapdragons?

01:26:35
yeah, yeah, but even intel too. I mean, what I'm saying is like you're getting like legit 10 to 15 hours of battery life now out of a laptop, even on the Intels, yeah, yeah, I'm actually really surprised with that. I'm using the ThinkPad X9. Yeah, so it's the Core Ultra Gen 2. Gen 2. They did a lot. The gap between what Intel and Qualcomm is in terms of battery life is pretty narrow now, wow, I'll still say qualcomm, yeah, I'll say qualcomm has advantages and uh, heat and uh, I think they're a little bit more responsive in my opinion, but their intel is still doing quite well here. But you can now get a laptop that gets like 10 hours of legit battery life, that has a beautiful display really good. You, you know quad speakers. It's like this is what we've always dreamed of a laptop of actually being versus like, oh, it gets me about four to five hours of battery life, right, and that the cameras are really good, you know. And now you're getting this AI stuff, so it'll be interesting to see if consumers buy them. What happened?

01:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why this leap in technology? Did Qualcomm drive this, but the release of the snapdragon elite?

01:27:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
well, I think apple did really right I mean apple, the apple bringing over the a series, developing the a series and then translating that to the m series. Really, you know, I mean there was no comparison between an m1 and an intel processor it's really just night and day, yeah you know.

01:28:00
But now qualcomm has come out with its Snapdragon X and they're going to come out with their Gen 2 this fall, which I heard is a significant jump. They're using the Orion version 3 cores where they're skipping version 2. For those it's going to be very comparable to the M4.

01:28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why competition is so good right. It drives people to do better. Now Intel's been struggling mightily.

01:28:24 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Not so much in the PC chips. They struggle because the fabs are extremely expensive and they're trying to build that out. They also have some other businesses, including server. They really kind of missed out on AI. You know so that those aren't doing well. Really kind of missed out on AI, you know so that those aren't doing well. But if you look at the numbers, even on their latest reports, the chip sales for laptops and PCs have actually been positive. For them Interesting it's the rest of the business that's been struggling. But I'm actually really surprised with their Gen 2 chips for Core Ultra. They're a lot better than I expected them to be.

01:28:59
But yeah, I mean it's a great time to buy this hardware I'm using right now. Actually, I have it right here. This is the Asus who. I was never a huge Asus fan, but this is the ZenBook A14. And it was announced at $899. It's actually going for $999. But the thing gets like 15 hours of battery life, has an OLED display. It's absolutely gorgeous and it's going to come down in price, I think, pretty soon as well, and it's just like for below $1,000, you can get a laptop that I regularly use, even though I have like two or $3,000 laptops to use.

01:29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much is AI driving these sales? Are people looking for machines that can do AI?

01:29:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think businesses are more so than consumers. I think consumers are definitely like it's a buzz thing. They don't understand it's practical applications. What do you mean? I already have chat GPT. Why do I need a? You know. So I think Microsoft needs to, you know, something like recalls and click to do.

01:30:00
Some of these features, as they come online could potentially drive sales, but I think we still need that quote unquote killer app for consumers to be able to see that. But we're seeing more and more. You're going to start to see some major photography and video apps start to use the NPU, which is really going to be the big deal here, because NPUs are so much more efficient than a GPU for processing AI and when you're using local processing for images or video like that NPU, it's going to just make a world of difference for creators and I think that's really where you're going to start to see this stuff is. For people who use their laptops for media creation, You're going to have so much more advantage with ai and specifically the npu hardware that's built onto these chips that's a really good point.

01:30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was thinking oh you know, most people use the ai on the server. They're not running a agent ai locally, they're not running local models, but they are in some cases with software, things like image editing software that is local yeah, topaz I use.

01:31:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Uh, it's a. They have an amazing tool. Yes, yeah, their upscaler app is insane. If, if no one knows, go go look up topaz ai I've played with it, wow, yeah yeah, it's like I find photos from 15, 10, 10 years ago, whatever digital.

01:31:20
They'd be like little tiny things and you can upscale and create some really good quality work out of them. They just literally came out a couple days ago with their arm version, arm 64 version, for qualcomm chips for one of theirs, and you know you're going to start to see them start to use the npus more on this stuff.

01:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like this is so you're going back to old images that you took and using the topaz ai upscaler to fix them and you're getting good. Here's an example from their page of a bird and with the ups, so it's a little blurry right, it's probably a telephoto shot with the upscaler the detail and the feathers and everything suddenly becomes clear.

01:31:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, it's a, it's a noticeable difference you're seeing stuff like that, uh, in your, I mean actually kind of like a personal story, but my best friend's mother passed away number of years ago, and this was back before we barely had digital cameras, and so we had some. I had a smartphone photo, or he had a smartphone photo that was really just not great quality, and he gave it to me and I used this app and played around with it and I was able to create a very usable recreation of that image that looks significantly better. So being able to do that with old photos and old digital photos is really kind of uh, just cool technology.

01:32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they also have general photo and video editors too right, that just do all the kind of Photoshop stuff as well, topaz has been around a long time as a plugin company, but they've really jumped on this AI bandwagon and I think they're doing some so, as is Adobe. I mean, so is everybody really?

01:32:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yep, although it's interesting Adobe's primarily using the GPU, they're not really committing to NPU usage because I think most of their audience is so built in to using the GPUs already, whereas someone like Topaz is new, but they're leaning heavy into AI, which benefits the NPU more so.

01:33:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they have hardware requirements or is it just slower if you don't have the horsepower?

01:33:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I think it's just probably slower, um, because right now I use two topaz but I have a 4080 gpu and you can hear the tensor core is going when it's doing stuff, which is kind of cool, but with an npu it's going to be a lot different. Yeah, I love the tensor core sound. It's so great. Um, yeah, and you're going to see stuff like even like virus scanning, uh, email all this kind of stuff will be offloaded to the NPU. A lot of security software that runs in the background on your computer could be offloaded to the NPU.

01:33:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be much more efficient, so you really are going to want to have that capability on your next computer.

01:33:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, how about more RAM?

01:33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as well. Right Is that.

01:33:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, the Qualcomm laptops all ship with default 16 gigs of RAM. There's no such thing as an 8. Is that enough? Yeah, I think so, although Zach Bowden just wrote an article on our site talking about he thinks 24 gigs of RAM should be the new standard.

01:34:12 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Are we going backwards, like weren't we going to a point where all the chipping had been separate and we were busy putting it all on one main chip, and now we're sort of like, oh wait, separate might've actually been the way to go, and so we're.

01:34:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's still. I mean, it's a little bit of both. They're still technically on one SOC, but it is. They have an Intel's on this too. They call them actually chiplets. They've actually broken up the components, but the reason they've done that is so they can shut them off when they're not being used for a greater power efficiency, which is really kind of cool. So that's how Intel does a lot of its power efficiencies it turns off certain parts of the chip and we're talking like milliseconds of time, but over time that adds up to a lot. So when you buy like a Qualcomm laptop, you're getting their GPU, their their npu and their cpu, as well as their image processing everything all on one single chip. So it's still there.

01:35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't pull them out separately, but um and then, if you want a heavy duty machine, you might get a gp, a discrete gpu, from nvidia down the road, but those are very expensive. Apple has this kind of secret thing that I think the secret sauce that I think might help them in the next couple of years, which is their all their memory is unified memory, so it is available to both the gpu and the cpu, which means you can have and as many of my macs are 64 gigs, some of them are more, you could have a 90, 92 gig, 96 gig mac and most of that memory would be available to the ai in the gpu.

01:35:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, and that is. We've seen that with amd aim, some amd yeah, amd chips, you can do that.

01:35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unified memory is really a very powerful tool in certain situations, having more ram available to the gpu. Apple's solution to this tariff problem is to and this is a surprise say they're going to start moving their phone manufacturer away from China to India.

01:36:12 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I believe that's something they've been toying with for a while, is this idea of diversifying their manufacturing. But obviously this is the big push that gets them to like really ramp that up. Yeah.

01:36:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They, you know they, like their laptops, are made in Vietnam. Now they have iPhone assembly in Brazil, india, vietnam as well as China. But they're now saying we want to make every us iphone in india. Yeah, which is that's a big change. Yeah, right, yeah, some it's. Ironically, some of this was due to tariffs. You know, brazil and india have big tariffs for hardware not made in those in those countries. So apple initially opened plants there so that they would be able to make them locally. But now it's turning out oh, that worked out pretty well. There's also been a lot of fear about what's going to happen to Taiwan, I think, and Apple's chips are made in Taiwan by tsmc. So, yeah, it makes sense for a company to do this. I'm surprised that Apple is as far along the path as they say they are.

01:37:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
They say as soon as next year they will be able to assemble all US sold iphones in india yeah, I guess the the really drastic thing is how quickly they're they're pushing this yeah, they have to double the iphone output to do that yeah, now it's wild, and I think I believe I read about something related to them also bolstering us based manufacturing too, which is interesting.

01:37:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So well, this is. You know, the whole point of tariffs was to get the iphone made in the us, right? Yeah, ain't gonna happen. Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that we don't have the capability for a variety of reasons. So really, in a way, it's backfiring because now apple's going to make them in india right another foreign country. Yeah yeah, it didn't bring those jobs to the united states. Where it can. Apple's making stuff in the us, but it's a very small number of things. Yeah, um, that didn't work yeah I mean maybe in 10 years we will be making the us.

01:38:09
I don't know, but uh, experts seem to agree that making an iphone in the united states is non-starter, at least for a while I mean the.

01:38:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
The strength for china here was that not only did they do the manufacturing, they supplied all the parts, including the rare earth mineral metals, for these devices, and this was all in like shenzhen. So if you ever want to just go build something electronic, if you go to shenzhen like it's all there, it's all there, you can get your screws, you can get your screens, you can get the glue, you can get the factory to assemble it all, you can get the stuff for the chips. Yeah, your processors come from taiwan, like it's all right there, and that all reduces the cost. And even if you move to india, it's like okay, but you're still gonna have to import you know various uh components there almost all of them will come from china, right?

01:38:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, yeah, you're just assembling in india and yeah, that ends up.

01:39:02
You know, the most important thing is to not make the iphone more expensive for consumers but, I look like that's gonna be like 60 million iphones sold in the us annually, uh, and they intend, they hope they're gonna have to not only double their output, they're gonna have to not only double their output, they're gonna have to build two more factories uh in India to do this. And, by the way, the factories are being built by the Chinese company that makes the iPhones in China, foxconn so, and others, but Foxconn is building.

01:39:30 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Tata Electronics it's just an Indian company is also building uh assembly plants yeah, the expertise to manufacture those, to make the plants, who manufactures those, is an entire skill. Like they say they, we don't even have the companies here in the us who could even make the plants and all the tools to assemble this stuff, let alone then build it out and then hire all the staff and bring everything in. It's a very complicated thing and China really has dominated that market, kind of closed the loop on everything there.

01:40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is still a 26% trade tariff with India, so Apple does not dodge the bullet entirely, but it's better than 145%, I guess, which I think at that that point, no one would buy an iphone if we're 145 more expensive. That's just not going to happen yeah, 26 is a big jump. I think people would still buy an iphone just really just not as many so if an iphone costs 2,500 or 3,000 dollars, it becomes like a rich people thing.

01:40:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah but then what if somebody cut?

01:40:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
our rate.

01:40:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I'm not that rich, I know what if somebody pays you to use an android phone?

01:40:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
and then, ah, give me ten dollars a week and I'll think about it I just I didn't even buy one of the um the flippy phones that I really, really want to have, because I want a smaller phone and I I wanted the ones that could bend in the middle so they fit in my pocket better and I couldn't spend that money on the phone.

01:40:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You didn't need a flip fold. You mean a flip phone, you mean a folding phone a folding phone? Yeah, there's a big difference if you meant something like this is the samsung flip right.

01:41:07 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I wanted something like that and but the price point is just insane where I can't justify spending that money on a phone and carrying around something worth that much money in my pocket. It just didn't. It didn't make sense for us. It was worth also more than my laptop. So I like which I'm built to sort of protect the laptop because oh, that's the expensive one and the phone is the cheaper, and so it's really upside down.

01:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but neo's right. I know people with two hundred thousand 000 watches on their wrists, which seems to me insane for a number of reasons but you know, that's, I guess, a way of showing your affluence, I guess, right as as a three thousand dollar iphone well, and then wait till apple makes a foldable phone itself, and then see how much you spend next year.

01:41:55
That's what the rumor is next year and that will be. See, that's another way you can handle. That is by making it so many different features so different that you can't compare prices right. Of course it's $3,000. It folds.

01:42:08 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The $3,000 for a phone is not. There's still a lot of economic harm going here because it's not like Apple would love to sell the number of iPhones it sells for more money than it sells them. But at a certain point you stop selling the units and so, okay, you sell one unit for all the money that they need to make, but they don't get all that $3,000. That's going to go to the tariffs and much more expensive production. So Apple is going to basically be losing their ability to profit because their profit margin on every unit is not going to be much bigger than it is, but there's going to be so many fewer units sold because the market for three thousand dollar phones is tinier than the market for the phones at the current price point.

01:42:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break. Uh, then I'll ask you if you got your nintendo switch first. You're watching this week in tech with kathy gallus and a brawl heaty. I like to throw bonito. You're good, benito though you keep up fast.

01:43:05
He's good, isn't he? I do the. I do a different order each time and uh, and it still doesn't throw him in. Daniel rubino from. Uh, look at that from windows, windows Central. Very good, vignette is the best. Our show today brought to you by Drata.

01:43:19
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01:45:14 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And if not, that I'll use the Asus ROG Li, because it's which is just a.

01:45:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steam Deck under running Windows.

01:45:21 - Benito (Announcement)
There's no Mario Kart in Steam, daniel, there's no Mario Kart.

01:45:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no Mario Kart. How are you going?

01:45:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
to live. You know, it's funny because I actually do have a Switch. I bought one years ago, before there was a Steam Deck, and I even bought the Pokemon Limited Edition one, even though I don't care about Pokemon or know anything about it, but I love the colors and I loved it. I used it, but I never used it really to play Nintendo IP. I can't stand Nintendo IP. I liked Luigi's Haunted Mansion that was about the only one but I used it because and to Nintendo's credit they got a lot of independent games on their store. That was basically like a valve steam store lights and so I used that for a long time and I generally enjoyed it. But then steam deck came out and I just gave me everything I really wanted see, I bought the animal crossing version.

01:46:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, see the colors. Uh, and I have to say, in covid this was kind of a lifesaver because I can. I could play games on my switch and and and zone out Right and just build my little animal crossing village, but I hadn't played in quite a few years. It's apparently sold out Now.

01:46:32
The switch to pre-orders at everywhere Gameop, walmart, target, best buy and many of the retailers went down during the pre-orders which, by the way, were delayed. Uh, they opened them after all on the 24th. This week was going to be april 9th. Uh, you could only pre-order it if you had a long time switch account and you'd played 50 hours or more of switch games in the past year. So they really eliminated scalpers, which I think was very smart. Nevertheless, the the stores went down. There were crowds. Uh, it was crazy.

01:47:08
I still am waiting for my email from nintendo to allow me to buy one. I hope I can get one. They did not raise the prices which some thought they might, due to tariffs on japan. Uh, still selling the console for 450 and the bundle with mario kart world for 500. But good luck getting it. Did anybody chat room? Did you get your switch twos? I want to want to know anybody. Yeah, yeah, I feel like to me. I like the switch better than the steam deck because the games are made for that size screen and that device, whereas steam deck I was playing games that were made for big screens and big computers, and I just it felt.

01:47:51 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, you do have the the steam deck verified thing, so when you're looking to buy games they can be optimized for Steam Deck. Like developers can do that. Yes, and you get a little thing. So it depends. If you're playing really old games you may struggle to do that. I play. I have had no issues with it. I think Steam Deck is the best of both worlds Well, so long as you're not into the Nintendo IP, but I like that Steam.

01:48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deck. Should I play Anselda? Okay, no, I try. So I'm a big. I play Valheim on a 55-inch monitor and I tried to play on the Steam Deck. You know, same with the Xbox. I can't really play on the Xbox. I think that's the thing, Leo, Like you have to look for games that are good on steam deck design stuff like hades. Hades might be a good game on steam, but hades is great on the steam deck too. Exactly that's what I mean.

01:48:45 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That's what I mean, yeah, yeah and so I mean on the switch as well, though. So yeah, I think the advantage was that. You know, especially now with the the windows pc versions coming out, there's just a lot more options. You know, like I had the first switch, as I just mentioned, but the ergonomics on that thing are atrocious so I had to buy like yeah, the clip-on like handles for it.

01:49:05
The display resolution was terrible, the audio wasn't great. Steam deck, you know, made all that better and now you have like with the pc versions, like, um, lenovo's legion go is an 8.8 inch display.

01:49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's huge right yeah, you have all these choices yeah, yeah.

01:49:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So you have all these different options, which I think is that's the beauty of a pc market, is you can get these different designs and choices to what you prefer, right, whereas the switch you're just going to get what they like. I'd even like how the the um controllers came off of the switch, like I understood the purpose, but I never used it like that. But I hated it because it just made the device super creaky to use. So when it came out, the light version, I was like even more enthralled because I'm like okay, this is what I want. I just want a handheld device, not something that turns into a console, you know right actually I use it that way, though.

01:49:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to get the new switch is because it's 4k on my tv if I dock it. I don't know, I don't know. Oh, here I am in my little town. I'm ready to go wandering. Oh, there's a message. My phone is ringing. Whatever could it be, it's timmy. Okay, it's a really dopey game and I apologize, can't play it on steam deck, though I gotta say so, japanese. All right. Uh, what else? I got distracted. I apologize.

01:50:37 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Um, oh, you wanted to talk about the twenty thousand dollar pickup oh, I just thought it was interesting so this is one way to get around tariffs by uh, something made in the us like this twenty thousand dollar pickup truck I I I saw the article for it and I saw some people speaking like, yes, if I needed something, that's exactly what I would get.

01:51:02
And I was reading it and I came away from the article really rooting for their success, where one of the things they're basically talking about and kind of getting back to our conversation about bundling is that cars have gotten gratuitously overcomplicated and you really the function of what you need is not that significant. You need something that goes with fuel efficiency and safety and this has enough modularity to it that everything that you want to have your vehicle do on top of that can still have that happen. But you can pick the stuff that you want and you can do it a lot more via aftermarket things. You can do it yourself, um, that you don't have and you and in that article they talk about like from the founders, talking about like the car companies keep ramming so much down your throat. I think they call it as the curation of what you get when you buy a car is my bmw.

01:51:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Initially they wanted to rent you seat warmers like it's built in, but you had to pay a monthly fee to use them fortunately there was such. There were such complaints that they abandoned that. But it is the case that as soon as you go in, you're getting upsold. You want the better stereo right. You want the leather seats right. You want the paddle shifters, not just the upselling.

01:52:14 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
It's's also that what they were talking about is like you'd get these combinations. Let's say, you want like the shiniest and the permeist of all of it, and it's like, yeah, you get it in two colors because, like the way it's curated, if you want that package, then you can get this one with these two things, and like you're still not getting the choice that you want to have, whereas if you start with just sort of the basics, you've got the chassis of the vehicle, it's got the wheels, it's got the engine.

01:52:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you can add things to it to make it the car that you really need. Don't worry about the color, it's not painted, and so they're.

01:52:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
they're thinking that basically that's going to make financial sense. You can still have a pretty one. You just get, you achieve your prettiness, not by paint you would. And because the article yeah, you wrap it because they were also talking about in the verge article that um, building a paint factory like one of the reasons, the cost the paint shop's very expensive in the assembly line exactly paint factory. That's why the cyber truck is on is unpainted right.

01:53:10
So what they're talking about is and then there's also talking about how the factories themselves can be much, much smaller. Buildings like much easier and cheaper to build the factories because they don't do the steel. I don't follow this completely, but the way the metal works in a normal car, they're not using that material where they don't need to and the material they are using you can use a much smaller footprint that doesn't need to have such a big factory in order they're molded of plastic yeah, and I was wondering about that.

01:53:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said they're passing all the crash, uh test things, but they're injection molded polypropylene composite material, which makes them more durable and scratch resistant. So maybe you don't need to paint that um and they're saying saturn, did that? Remember the saturns had plastic panels, yeah, yeah.

01:54:03 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So there's a whole bunch of things. We're like if we just break down a card of what we basically need, it's basic simplicity. It's going to be a lot cheaper to produce and you can still end up with something fancy if you want.

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know where they're smart? Uh, they don't have a radio or stereo or entertainment system. They just have a place for you to put your phone.

01:54:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's all people need right like, but really isn't that right, I mean, and no one wants a touch screen either.

01:54:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, the phone does everything I want it to do. It'd be nice if I could maybe put a tablet there or something, so I have a little more real estate talking about modularity.

01:54:41 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So basically you can add a graphic screen if you want, you can add bluetooth speakers, so like everything. Because I was kind of like a car with no radio really like I remember my dad's car in 1981, like that was kind of annoying. We didn't have a radio in it, but it's electric, uh he survived and um, and you know you can add one and it's, and it's also going to be like third party.

01:55:02
Modularity is like a huge thing to to have in cars yeah, that's kind of interesting, that's a kind of interesting idea, I think, and it's chinese repair is built in like they basically will have that, unless it's involving, like, a safety system or electrical or something like that, you can do it yourself and we've got youtube videos for you to watch like they, they, really they, they. It's like what a car really should be and we've just gotten away from it because we've just put all this overtone on how we do cars I will also say one of the big things and this is still why I'll defend Tesla a bit was they got rid of dealerships?

01:55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Dealerships are really the big.

01:55:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
that's the big block to a lot of this stuff, Like the reason why it's so hard to get these upgrades you want and all that, it's because you have to go in, you have to negotiate. It's just a nightmare. I stole, you know, I bought my Tesla in 2019. It was everything I wanted. I just went online, clicked I wanted it. Here's $200. Gave them my old car, did the financing all within like 20 minutes. Picked a car I want. I didn't have to talk to a human being and then I got a text message that the car was ready and I just went, picked it up and that was it. And it was just like it goes to show you what you can do it. Even the software updates right, they just go right to the car. But it's the automotive companies and the dealerships I mean, if you guys remember I'm sure leo, you remember it they tried to block tesla sales in texas absolutely didn't have it

01:56:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, because of dealers. Some states it's against the law to sell a car without a dealer. Wow, yeah, because the dealers went and lobbied the state legislatures saying no, no, it would be unsafe. You shouldn't be able to do that.

01:56:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So I'm all for this. I mean, it reminds me it's basically the PC model, right? If PCs came out and now look at like especially for gaming, right, like there's like 9,000 million accessories you can buy for a desktop PC, you can build them the way you want, you can have glass screens and all this LED stuff, it's all because of people came out with the format and then allowed innovation to happen through third party developers and it's basically an open system. So I think this is great for cars. You know, yeah, you start off with the basic thing that you can afford, and this is also good for people who can't. They want a car, but they can't afford a forty thousand dollar one, but they want one and they can build it out over time as they get more money like that 27.5 before your rebate, and those rebates are scheduled to expire, so you it may end up being more expensive.

01:57:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, but I think this is one of the benefits of an electric vehicle, because basically they're golf carts and you just put more you want to put. A tesla is a golf cart with a fancy computer system on it. Really, I figured that out when I got my first tesla. I went oh you know, that's all it really is it's really no maintenance and there's no maintenance tires yeah, uh, they say they can make it safely.

01:58:00
I like yours. Before the show, we were talking a little bit about it, daniel. You said this is going to create a, a raft of third-party businesses. Based on yeah, it should it be successful based on upgrading this, the. The best-selling vehicle in the united states by far is the ford f-150 pickup. It's a big pickup, but people like trucks. Right, they want to.

01:58:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They don't need them. Every day I see people with pickups. I'm like why do you have a pickup? You don't need a pickup I kind of want it's.

01:58:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every once in a while you want to haul something you know a little larger. You want to take this sofa down to the dump or whatever. It's kind of nice to have one. It's good to have a friend with a pickup.

01:58:38 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I found you really only need a friend with a truck. You don't need the truck itself, right?

01:58:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but hey, somebody's got to buy it, your friend's got to buy it.

01:58:46 - Benito (Announcement)
I mean, what's important for the for this? For this, though, is like the standards of the pieces need to be set so that, if other other companies start making modular cars, all the pieces work for all the different cars Wouldn't that be awesome.

01:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say, for instance, they have an SUV upgrade that adds two seats.

01:59:00 - Benito (Announcement)
That's the PC market you're talking about, though, daniel. Like, all the parts work together with all the other companies.

01:59:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're compatible. Yeah, so we need EV compatibles like PC compatibles.

01:59:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
The only difference is, I would say, is the PC market. That functionality grew with the PC market. That functionality grew with the PC market. Where are we talking about an existing market of huge car manufacturers? Big market, yeah, and you would have to get them to all agree to step back. But if this was the first time we're talking about cars and they're like, oh, have you heard about getting a car, I would say that, yeah, you'd have the chance here to make that happen. But now that you already have all these businesses, I think getting them all to agree on that would be unless the government forced it.

01:59:39 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, I mean, what's the evolution that will happen for this? So you've got this company that's going to take a leadership position. I think they're going to decide, given their ethos and also the economics, that is in their interest to have open standards for their cars because it'll help sell more cars and they'll still be first to market on cars that can take these standards. So I think they are actually. One of the things I really liked about it is I think they're betting the business on business choices that are actually much better for the public and the market and I want that to succeed. I want that to be the market where we stop having everything being so monopolized and proprietary. So this is really exciting and maybe with that company leadership, they will see it is in their interest to. Basically, you know we've innovated it, but here's our open standard.

02:00:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we buried the lead on this a little bit. I did so intentionally. First of all, the name of the company Slate Truck. It's based in Michigan and who's the primary investor? Jeff Bezos.

02:00:35 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. I mean it is the Amazon model a lot of ways, I bet you'll be able to buy it Suddenly.

02:00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It gets a lot more interesting, doesn't it? Yeah?

02:00:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, I would say that Get a prime delivery yeah.

02:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean.

02:00:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I would, oh yeah, but I think it's not that. I think that everything he does is smart. He's going to find a nut every so often and you know, I think this is a smart play and you know, I I think there's a reason that, like, money is getting attracted to it because if this succeeds, it's a path to success that's been under exploited and if it can succeed, I think it's good for everybody so bezos hired a kind of a skunkworks or built a kind of a skunkworks in 2022 called rebuild manufacturing, uh, and this came out of that skunk works.

02:01:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a, it was kind of a spin-off, uh. But there are other uh investors, including the owner of the dodgers and the ceo of guggenheim partners, mark walter thomas, tall lead investor. Um, so it's, it's an interesting idea. I wish them well. They have, they've raised a lot of money. It's. This is not just some guy in a in a garage who said you know, I think I could build a cheap electric truck.

02:01:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
This is an interesting play and this would also like it, because he can give uh elon musk a bit of uh ribbing. Oh he loves doing that since they're already competing and with the space stuff, now be the car market, Right, but it goes to show you. I mean, you know, for all of Musk's, you know issues, you know Tesla did significantly disrupt the car market and I think for the better. There's still a lot that needs to be done, but this is I give him a lot of credit.

02:02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, I hate and I hate doing it, but I give him a lot of credit.

02:02:15 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Sometimes the things that we want to give him credit for were things that other people did and that he's taking the credit for.

02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, maybe, and he's certainly got a lot of federal funding to make it possible, but I think without Tesla I don't know if you would have the EV boom. The first EV I bought was a Tesla Model X and, I'll be honest, this is back in 2015, before we really knew the full Elon story. I was kind of moved. I was in tears. I took a tour of the factory in Fremont and I thought this is amazing. This guy is changing the world.

02:02:44 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
And they were built here in the United States.

02:02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and that was a weird thing too.

02:02:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I was just going to say because oh sorry. No, I would just attribute it more to the bones of the company at the. I think the reason where this falls down is when we think it's the cult of personality and that his personal, yeah, hanging in and his personal his personal money would be the differentiation I'd make. There's some really cool things with what tesla innovated, without making it the cult of personality he wrote the checks.

02:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just like jeff bezos if slate truck becomes a thing, jeff's going to take the lion's share of the credit even though he's done none of the engineering. And I think it's the same thing. There is something to be said for the guy who puts up the that takes the risk and puts up I think he was also a pretty good marketer, though, so like we can't take, and he's a very good.

02:03:34
I mean, oh yeah, yeah, we do have a couple of tesla stories we'll get to in just a moment. But uh, first we're going to take a word from our sponsor. It's great to have all of you, great to have you club twit members. You know, thanks to club two, we're able to stream our show now on eight different platforms. So if you want to watch live on a sunday afternoon from two to five pm pacific five to 8 eastern, you can. Club twit members can watch in our club twit discord. But we've also got youtube, we've got twitch, we've got tiktok. Is it tiktok up? Today we put in the tiktok computer over here.

02:04:04 - Benito (Announcement)
I don't know if they not yet up today not yet.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, we're still working on that. Tiktok wants us to use tiktok to stream it, so we have a dedicated machine over there in my corner. It's going to do that soon. Tiktok xcom we got, we've got linkedin, we've got facebook and we've got kick. So seven right now, soon to be eight, different platforms.

02:04:25
If you're not yet a member of club twitter, I really would love to have you in the club. It makes a big difference to us. Lisa just told me uh, it is 25 of our revenue now, so it's a significant portion of what we do and we need it because, uh, the ad revenue, as much as we have, does not pay for everything we do and we want to do more and thanks to the club we are, we're able to. We have some great events. Uh, the untitled linux show, which is in our club, just celebrated its 200th episode. Congratulations to the guys. We've got a photo workshop with chris marquart coming up on thursday. Uh, we're gonna assess your um, uh, seasonal pictures. Seasonal was the topic, that's, I'm sorry, friday, may 2nd at 1 pm, pacific. We also have uh, stacy's book club coming up on the 16th really good book. I do recommend it. I've've just finished it.

02:05:15
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02:05:50
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02:08:32
I saved the Elon news for the end of the show. There is actually quite a bit. Um, there is a tesla whistleblower who says uh, elon wanted to use ice to deport her and her team for raising an issue about the brakes. Uh, she's a former tesla engineer, christina ballon, who was fired in 2014. She said at that time, elon threatened the entire team with deportation because they took her side when she brought up a brake safety issue directly to Elon.

02:09:05
Now, one of the things, one of the magic things that Tesla is famous for. Elon has said it many times in meetings and stuff is, my door is always open. Meetings and stuff is, my door is always open. If there's a problem, I want you to talk to whoever needs to be talked to, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy where you are in the hierarchy, even if it's going to me. He sent out an email to the entire company to that effect in 2013, so she saw the email.

02:09:33
She said she went to meet with musk because she was concerned. It was actually a problem that happened, uh, in other vehicles too. I think toyota had a recall because the floor mat could get stuck under the brake and she felt like that was something that she was worried about with the floor mats on the model s. She said tesla had chosen suppliers based on friendships, not quality, so she made a meeting with elon to tell him about it. She says when she showed up to the meeting, it was instead attended by a lawyer and some large men in uniforms probably security team.

02:10:12
But okay, tesla forced her to resign her position. During that meeting, she says the lawyer threatened to deport many members of her team who are currently waiting on green card applications if she didn't resign. Now this is just I gotta say it's just a whistleblower accusation, but uh, I think I think maybe now, with what we've seen in other circumstances, it starts to ring a little bit more true. For instance, doge has done quite a bit to help Tesla's business. You actually wrote about this, kathy, at TechDirt.

02:10:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Not that bit, but about.

02:11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, tesla, we'll get to that then. Okay, it's not related, but Tesla did get the feds to weaken the rule for self-driving vehicles for reporting. A new autonomous vehicle framework would make it easier for Tesla and other companies to research self-driving cars that don't meet all federal safety standards.

02:11:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
this is particularly seen as a boon for elon's promised tesla automated taxi fleet I don't know if this will help people who are already feeling um uneasy about self-driving cars if the regulations are knocked down um, and I'm sure companies like waymo that have kind of had to get all those regulations probably aren't thrilled. But you know, now someone like tesla can kind of swoop in and uh do away with all that.

02:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the new rules would allow companies like tesla not just tesla, other companies to to shield from public view crash details, including the automation version involved in the incidents the narratives, that's the word they used around the crashes, on grounds that information like that is confidential business information. Waymo and Zoox will no longer need to report crashes that include property damage less than $1,000. Yeah, all of this benefits elon's business and, uh, this is this is the kind of self-dealing I think that's going on. In fact, I honestly think this is what doge is really about not saving money. It hasn't at all. Doge is. Doge is about other things entirely.

02:12:33 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Now we get to your article, kathy yeah, um, so well, there's a whole bunch of things, but, yeah, they've been in all the agencies doing all the things. Uh, and that's a problem because, um, from where they derive the authority to show up at these agencies and do anything? Um is seriously questionable. And it would be questionable even if they showed up, truly, were functioning in advisory capacity and saying agency, you really should do this, you should fire all these people, you should cancel all these contracts, this and the other thing.

02:13:09
Agencies themselves are still limited in terms of what they can do, and there's this big act called the APA that tends to govern most of this that agencies can't be arbitrary and capricious in what they do. And he's been going in and getting the agencies to do all sorts of things, and this is creating a lot of litigation because everything that the agency then does is arguably in violation of the law. But a set of these lawsuits are going in because what the agency has done by giving the Doge members themselves access to these databases, is also protected by the Privacy Act, because what the Privacy Act says is government is collecting a lot of sensitive data for very specific things. Like I put in my piece, if you need social security benefits. You're going to give the social security administration a whole bunch of information so they can give you your benefits, but the Privacy Act basically says you've got these buckets of information and that the agencies themselves are required to basically keep that information in the bucket very, very secure.

02:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kind of siloed in effect.

02:14:19 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Siloed and siloed even within the agencies themselves, where it's not even within the Social Security Administration. You know people didn't have, oh, all the Social Security people can have access to this data.

02:14:32
No, it was really metered out in terms of what training you needed to have, what jobs you had, what credentials, and even then you were still limited, so you couldn't get access to too much and that's how they did business, which protected the data and was also what complied with the Privacy Act laws, and you couldn't go agency to agency with all this data, except under very specific narrow things that do not apply here, with all this data, except under very specific narrow things that do not apply here. So Doge swooping in and a coming from outside the agency and getting into these buckets is a problem, and then they're also potentially taking the data out of the buckets and doing other things, like there's all these articles about the super databases they want to have to like help figure out in the name of efficiency, right In the name of efficiency, right in the name of efficiency.

02:15:17
So. But there's a number of problems, and in this piece in particular, uh, with the litigation that's about the privacy act, and so there's a bunch of those cases. Um eff is involved with one which is challenging doge's access to um opm, which is basically hr for the government the office of personnel management.

02:15:37
Yeah, and then this piece that I wrote the article about is they had got, they'd gone into the social security administration. They wanted more access to the social security administration, but there was a TRO that ended up on the books in March. And then, um, the outcome of that TRO was the judge said if this, you need to tell me if you needed more so I can analyze what you would need it for. And apparently, in one of the declarations that followed was yeah, these four Doge people need access to not just an aggregate, the Social Security data, which was you know you don't get access to the identifying data data, which was you know you don't get access to the identifying data. You get access only to an aggregate where you can't, you know, chase down a specific person. And they said these four people need access to the personally identifying information because we need to look for fraud. And the judge said in passing, as part of this hearing, you know she's like no, you don't get access to the data to then go investigate for a crime. So she denied that.

02:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a fishing expedition right it's a fishing expedition.

02:16:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I thought that was a really interesting thing that came up. And it came up and then was kind of ignored because the rest of the litigation is really about the basics of the injunction and the basics of the Privacy Act claims and things like that. But what she ended up pointing out was the echoes that the Privacy Act has with the Fourth Amendment, because the Fourth Amendment is the big constitutional thing that articulates essentially a right of privacy, although it's not phrased that way. But the people are allowed to be secure in their papers and effects from the government unless the government has probable cause that there's a crime and that they do a search and seizure with particularity. So they still don't get to go on a fishing expedition and they got to have some good reason to be doing any investigation at all. So what do you have now? You have the government, has this data that is collected essentially with the consent of the person. But the person is consented because it's a very limited consent.

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We assumed we'd be protected.

02:17:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Exactly Our privacy.

02:17:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, and you have no choice, by the way.

02:17:46 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
And you have no choice, by the way, but the privacy, if you want social security.

02:17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got to give them that information right.

02:17:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Right and the Privacy Act basically says we are going to make this a viable arrangement for everybody so that they can give this consent and the government can collect this data and do the job, providing benefits for the public. So what Doge was sort of saying is yeah, well, now that we got this data, we've got all the evidence of the crime and they're like we want to look at the. You know, we want to violate people's privacy in order to look for the crime. And she kind of points out in passing no, no, no, that's the other way around. You have to have reason to suspect there's a crime and then maybe you get to look at the data.

02:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the same reason the courts prohibit police from saying we would like the location information. For everybody who was in the vicinity of that bank robbery last night, that's a fishing expedition.

02:18:34 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
In that case, I think one of the issues is it just doesn't have the particularity of what they're looking for. Like you really have to have some sense of who did the thing that was wrong.

02:18:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you looking for?

02:18:43 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
The probable cause that this person did this crime and then you get the warrant, can't say that when it comes to digital stuff, the state of the law is appropriately protective and these Privacy Act cases really are just dealing with a statutory complaint rather than a constitutional one. But I thought it was interesting to note that colloquy between the judge and Doge and that echoes of the Fourth Amendment are showing up, where this is why we have the Privacy Act. It's so important because the people are supposed to be secure in their papers and effects, to not have the government like know what's going on with all their their private matters, and and it's to make it that you know we can give up some privacy to the government without putting ourselves in jeopardy from what the government could do punitively If so have the courts about us.

02:19:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have they nipped it in the bud?

02:19:35 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Well, in this particular instance, the TRO turned into a preliminary injunction restraining order.

02:19:40
Yeah, yeah. And now there's a preliminary injunction and the government is appealing what I do not know. And then the appeals court asked for briefs on whether the injunction should be stayed, and I actually don't know the latest on that. I forgot to look today but court listener hadn't updated. I feel like it was missing something. So I don't know what's going on, but I think it's enjoined at the moment. But we'll see what the I think this is one that's in the Fourth Circuit. So we'll see what the Fourth Circuit does, whether they're going to stay it while the appeal pens or or whether that'll hold, but then they'll still do the appeal thereafter.

02:20:14
So all this is late breaking and everything is happening. Meanwhile, the one about OPM that I know about that EFF is doing. They just filed their official brief for the preliminary injunction and I think they've all. They either have a TRO already or I think another case produced a TRO and they're using that for the moment. So you know, tune in Monday or Tuesday and it all could be upside down and different. But I did think that what the judge was saying and this issue that surfaced is a really important one that the public should realize. There's reasons we don't want the government poking around and things, and if Doge is doing the poking, that is a problem.

02:20:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and we talked last week about the story, which has since been suppressed, by the way. I think fully covered up that Doge when it got into the National Labor Relations Board, exfiltrated a huge amount of data to addresses unknown and then gave access very quickly to an account from Russia to the NLRB database. Something weird happened.

02:21:13
Something weird happened. Rb database. Something weird happened. Uh, unfortunately, the whistleblower that uh told us all about it has been uh, uh, shut down pretty effectively by uh sissa, who said we're not going to investigate our cert, we're not going to investigate that, so um we just don't know. I think that's the thing that's scariest. We don't't know who these Doge guys are, what they're doing, who is this?

02:21:42 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
big balls. And why should he have access to my Social Security information?

02:21:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there's starting to be discovery in some of these cases to get at some of this information, but the ships have sailed move so slowly that at this point, and trump's moving so obviously so quickly, probably with the intent to bypass any, uh, any restraint?

02:22:02 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
well they are. They are when they play games with the restraining orders, but they are actually abiding by they are abiding um, but yeah, this is all very upside down and yes, the courts are a little slow and a couple of the conservatives on the appeals courts have been a little slow to appreciate what's going on. But because I think basically, injunctions really should have been offered like trs, really should have happened right out of the gate, and particularly for a lot of the agencies and a lot of the riffing there's enough time.

02:22:30
You can stop, you can pause for a moment figure this out you don't have to do it today there was a ton, exactly, there was a ton of damage where bells have been wrong, um, but there is still time to stop some of the other ones, so we'll have to see. This is all playing out, but I cannot unring the bell cannot unring the bell.

02:22:49
Um, yeah, this, none of this should have happened. None of this has been legal. And let's say, you know, we get through this and we're able to sort of clean up the mess when the dust settles, I think a lot of the wrongness of a lot of what's going on will eventually get addressed, but they're going to cause a lot of damage in the process and there's a whole bunch of problems at it, like are they firing people? Are they just violating their privacy? Are they affecting their payments? Are they making them dead? Because, oh, that was the other thing I pointed out in the post where I said they're abiding by the injunctions, but how did all those people end up on the dead list? Like, that suggests that they weren't maybe abiding by the injunctions quite as well as they really needed to. Um, so we'll see what happens if there's any adjudication on that front it's uh.

02:23:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Back in february, when all this began, elon musk uh tweeted on x that the irs's direct file had been deleted, and that day I went out and I mentioned it on the show. I went out and tried it and I was able to set up and start a direct file. Well, maybe elon knew something, because this week the president announced that, yes, they were going to kill irs's free direct filing for your income taxes, pushing you back to those paid alternatives like intuit nature on our block, and, uh, I don't. You got to give me a reason why that was a good idea right, although I'm sure intuit was probably thrilled.

02:24:19
Oh it's a great. It's great for h and r blocking into it turbo tax. Loves it.

02:24:23 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yep, they've been trying so hard to bury those programs.

02:24:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They pretended it didn't exist. They, you know they claimed they had free options. Every time I, you know, I pay my mom's taxes through turbo tax good luck getting it for free. Yeah exactly. Mom's taxes through TurboTax good luck getting it for free. Yeah, exactly, uh. And I thought gee, that's great, that's how it should be that's how it is in most developed Nations.

02:24:45
Uh, you have a system that you can file through the, uh, the tax authority, not here. All right, I I promised I wouldn't get upset. Keep my blood pressure low. Just calm down, leo, it's going to be okay. Thank you, abrar Alhidi. It's always.

02:25:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You know, you have such a calming voice, I always feel better when you're on the show Again, coming from you, it means a lot.

02:25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the kind things that you're saying are I've put many people to sleep in my many years of broadcasting. I don't mean that you just lower the blood pressure.

02:25:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yes, exactly, we all need to relax a little bit sometimes.

02:25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So great to have you Senior technology reporter. Congratulations on the promotion. Thank you so much. At CNET. Who owns you now? Zdnet? Ziff Davis.

02:25:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Ziff Davis. Yeah, just try to keep up, okay. I know it's jarring do you work with jason heiner? Is he? Is he? Yes, yeah? Yeah, he's under the same umbrella as us, which is great because you know we worked back together in the cbs interactive day. So, yeah, I love jason yeah, he's great.

02:25:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's a really genuinely uh good person yes, as are you obviously.

02:25:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Thank you so much. Well, it takes one to no one, so thank you well, many would disagree, but thank you they're wrong they're wrong.

02:26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am not one to lick a badger twice, I just want you to know, never forget yeah never forget daniel rubino, editor-in-chief of windows central magazine, a consistently reliable source for windows news, and it is. You know, it's got microsoft's gotten a lot more interesting in the last few years, haven't they?

02:26:19 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
yeah, I mean this ai thing they were in the right place at the right time and they're. They're a really good place to kind of exploit the technology for yeah, you know, yeah, I love it uh their article uh on recall is on the front page, windowscentralcom.

02:26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thank you so much, daniel, as always, for your expertise I appreciate you having me as always? Yeah, it's always a good time yeah, and kathy gillis, our, our internet attorney. She writes for tech dirt. She, uh, do you? Do you actually practice or do you spend all your time writing for um?

02:26:52 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I like I I prefer to do fix it for everyone. Advocacy and whether that means writing protector. But I do, I do practice like I write. The amicus briefs count as practice, and that's a good point.

02:27:04
And I do some work with other lawyers and other projects, like I'm working on a memo which gives some advice, and so I can do other projects, but I prefer the you know, the writing, where I think that's the way that I can make a difference. And so I like flexing the fat muscle comprehensively, just for whichever audience you know is best to tackle at that moment scotus has been, uh, fascinating.

02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, what's your scotus report card now?

02:27:28 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
um supreme court of the united states well, they, they, they have created a mess for themselves because they, they, they have discounted their own precedent and got an extremely micromanaging and also a way that is really unprecedented.

02:27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the fight over the word facilitate you're talking about?

02:27:45 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So I think I'm referring more to the shadow docket, like the shadow docket they don't like calling anything the shadow docket. They think that's not a real thing. But basically there was always a mechanism that when getting things in front of the Supreme Court was a very slow, selective process, but every so often something would be an emergency and break and need some sort of quicker attention, and so the shadow docket was always kind of there.

02:28:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then it's kind of the emergency. It was the emergency thing. Urgent cases.

02:28:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
But then all of a sudden, you know, people were started splatting all sorts of stuff there and they started answering it. So now you're in a position where, um, basically everything, including every case that trump is litigating right now and every order that comes out of them, he keeps complaining and taking it up and up and up, and he's taking them all up to the shadow docket. There's like 11 things on the shadow docket right now now is that a sink?

02:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
will a single justice rule on the shadow dockets or do they all get involved?

02:28:44 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
so it kind of depends to the extent that we can discern any viable rules from this um coming out of there's a justice who's essentially on duty for every secret court and but for the, the big and for some stuff they will either say yes or no by themselves, and usually just for an administrative stay or something like that. But, um, but for anything that's more than like a day's pause, they generally end up referring it to the whole court. But there's some question of whether they've really got the internal procedures to make sure that that happens. There's some suggestion and we'll never know that when it was coming out of the um turn the planes around order, that something had gone up to um justice alito. And did justice alito actually refer that to the whole court or did he sit on it? Because we didn't get the the ruling from that court until like 1 am in the morning, which is just how did that happen?

02:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
according to scotus blog, seven pending doc uh shadow docket cases and six of them are trump cases yeah, and he's keeping them busy and of course they've been very busy 81 denied applications as well.

02:29:50 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
So they uh, well they always turn down a lot of stuff, but at the moment, because they've said yes to so much via the shadow docket, trump is basically running to the shadow docket on everything, and so my tech post earlier in the week was RIP Justice Roberts, summer vacation.

02:30:06
Because all these cases are going on, all these, and are they going to be enjoined, and we've got some time to sort out whether you know the rest of the litigation, or are we going to be in emergency mode for everything? And I don't think there's going to. If they aren't enjoined, the plaintiffs are going to run to the, to this, to the shadow docket, but if they are enjoined, then trump is going to run to the shadow right.

02:30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's going to end up there one way or the other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, kathy, thank you. I really appreciate the work you do at TechDirt. I read it religiously.

02:30:40 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Oh, and let me wish everybody a happy World Intellectual Property Day for yesterday.

02:30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it was also Independent Bookstore Day, so you could have celebrated both by going out and buying somebody's intellectual property at an independent bookstore.

02:30:57 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Yes, I'm very cynical about White Bow's desire to make sure that we have this day celebrating it, but that's why I'm wearing this is white. This is white bows holiday white bow invented this and then, one of what I consider the ironies of the universe, they decided that my birthday should be the day that, oh happy birthday.

02:31:12 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You're in the lead there.

02:31:13 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
Happy birthday, yeah so when I throw my parties I try to get themed ip cakes. Um, I mean, I, I sort of invent them but like safeway sold a john deere cake, so I did that because I celebrated of the 1201 rulings. Uh, one year I got, um, I had a campbell soup can photograph printed on a cake because warhol was pending. So I try to make it.

02:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was on your cake this year?

02:31:39 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
I haven't had it yet, so I can't tell you, because it's going to be suppressed for everybody. But but I do know what it will be.

02:31:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So next time you have me on now.

02:31:47 - Cathy Gellis (Guest)
You can ask me how the cake turned out.

02:31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Belated happy birthday, kathy. Thank you. It's great to see all three of you. Thanks to all of you who join us every week for this week in tech. We really appreciate it. Tell your friends. It's the way to keep up on what's going on in the world of tech. There is a lot. It's been a very busy last few years.

02:32:06
We do the show every sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 pm, pacific 5 to 8 eastern, 2100 utc. I mentioned you can't watch live, but you don't have to we. It is a podcast. It has been for 20 years now, which means you can download audio or video either from our website, twittv. There's a youtube channel dedicated to this week in tech. It's a good way to share clips with friends, uh, if you want to turn them on to the show, and maybe something that we talked about today, uh, and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Do me a favor, though when you get there whether it's itunes or pocket casts or overcast please leave us a five-star review.

02:32:42
Will you tell the world? You don't have to write anything if you don't want to, but just tell the world, as we want to spread the word. We're here every week talking about a very interesting time in tech, thanks to our wonderful panel, thanks to you for joining us, thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our fabulous producer, lisa Laporte, our fabulous executive producer, and who's editing it today. Is it Kevin King going to be chopping out the bad words? Okay, so thank you, kevin King, for doing what you do. We appreciate it and we will see you next time. And now, as I have said for 20 years, now, in our 21st year, another twit is in the can will see you next time. And now, as I have said for 20 years, now, in our 21st year, another twit is in the can we'll see you next week.