This Week in Tech 1082 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Yes, I'm in beautiful Hawaii, but the show must go on. Micah Sargent, Nicholas De Leon and Devendra Hardawar join me. We will talk about earnings palooza, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and a few others. Basically, they all made tons of money. Elon Musk takes the stand and maybe makes a few bloopers in his testimony. And the most severe Linux security flaw in decades. All of that coming up next on Twitter.

Nicholas De Leon [00:00:37]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Leo Laporte [00:00:42]:
This is twit. This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1082, recorded Sunday, May 3, 2026. Hanging by a thread. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody from beautiful Hawaii. We have a great panel.

Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
I'm gonna sweat all through this show. That's Micah Sargent laughing at me. Hey, Mike. Laughing.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:17]:
It's record temps here in Portland, but that only means 80 degrees.

Leo Laporte [00:01:23]:
It's as hot in Portland as it is in the Big island, so there you should be happy. Wow. Do you have ac?

Mikah Sargent [00:01:30]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [00:01:30]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:31]:
That was like. I will never live anywhere without ac. Throw me into an early grave rather than live in a place without AC

Devindra Hardawar [00:01:38]:
is how I feel.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
And I've been watching. On iOS today, you have added a massive 3D printer over your left shoulder. What is. Which one is that?

Mikah Sargent [00:01:46]:
That's actually just the P1s no longer,

Leo Laporte [00:01:50]:
but it's got state of the art.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:51]:
It's got the ams on top of it. That's probably what you're seeing. So that holds four different types of filament at once and it can.

Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
That's n. That's nice. Yeah. Do you do a lot of 3D printing?

Mikah Sargent [00:02:02]:
I don't do a whole heck of a lot, but what I do is when something pops up that I need, you know, something's not working and I need to fix it or I have a little break or a product that I. Oh, I wish it had this handle on it. I like to design little things and print them out and use them around the house. So that's what I do most of the time.

Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
So good to see you. Micah Sargeant, of course, the host of Tech News Weekly and iOS Today.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:27]:
And we just had our 800th episode over on iOS US Today.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Catching up somehow.

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:32]:
Congrats.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:34]:
Thank you. Oh, yeah, go ahead.

Leo Laporte [00:02:36]:
That's Devendra Hardawar from Engadget, senior editor. Hey, Devendra. Great to see you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:41]:
Good to see you. I. I did not realize I'd be instantly jealous of where you are, Leo, the background.

Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
My whole goal.

Devindra Hardawar [00:02:47]:
It's beautiful.

Leo Laporte [00:02:48]:
My whole goal is to make you just insanely jealous. Yeah. It's not a usable beach because we're on the Big island, which 200 years ago had a massive volcanic eruption on this side. And everything's lava, black lava rock. There are some nice beaches, coral sand beaches. But this one is not what you see, really. Behind me. Yeah, you see the ocean and you see a golf course.

Leo Laporte [00:03:11]:
There's a ridiculous number of golf courses here. And every time I see them, I think. And they thought data centers used a lot of water.

Nicholas De Leon [00:03:17]:
This is.

Leo Laporte [00:03:17]:
They're watering golf courses in Hawaii. Where. Well, I guess we're on the dry side, but still. Also with us, Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports. Hi, Nicholas.

Nicholas De Leon [00:03:28]:
Hello, Leo.

Devindra Hardawar [00:03:29]:
How are you?

Leo Laporte [00:03:29]:
Speaking of dry. He's in Arizona. Yes, and dry. Except when it rains.

Nicholas De Leon [00:03:36]:
Yeah, Monsoon season starts in about a month or so, but for the time being it is very dry. Although a little cloudy today. I would say it's only 85 degrees, which is probably like 10 degrees below normal, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:03:49]:
And the vendors in Atlanta, where it probably is already in the 80s as well.

Devindra Hardawar [00:03:52]:
No, it's. It's actually been chilly for a couple days. We barely hit 70 today.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:55]:
Today.

Devindra Hardawar [00:03:55]:
So I'm jealous of hearing all this 80 degree weather.

Leo Laporte [00:03:58]:
Well, what was hot this week was earnings learnings. It was an earnings palooza. Wednesday we had Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and am I leaving one out? Apple was the Thursday. Just a bunch of big tech earnings. They all did fairly well, although the market punished Meta considerably because Meta is spending so much money on AI. Losing. Did I say spending losing money on AI? This is from Semaphore. Big tech firms beat earnings amid AI spending questions.

Leo Laporte [00:04:36]:
Alphabet. Oh, I left out Amazon. That was the other one. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft all beat the earnings expectations, so the market rewarded them. Meta stock fell after it announced plans to put in even more money towards AI. So there's the market performance. Looks like Alphabet's done very well.

Devindra Hardawar [00:04:57]:
You know, there was a Zuckerberg they trust. Right. Like his bets have not gone wrong in the past decade.

Leo Laporte [00:05:04]:
Well, really. Let's see.

Devindra Hardawar [00:05:07]:
But all of his bets have failed.

Leo Laporte [00:05:10]:
He changed the name to Meta because he really thought the Metaverse was going to take off. But now they've closed Horizon World, so it's too late to change name again.

Devindra Hardawar [00:05:20]:
Probably it should have been met if you were going to do it. Could change it to Meta AI because he knew AI was going to be A big thing back then.

Leo Laporte [00:05:26]:
Matai, Matai. You know the, the real winners I think to some degree are Microsoft and Amazon and Google. Because they all three provide the data centers for AI.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:39]:
Exactly. Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:05:41]:
Which everyone knows no matter how AI goes, it's going to use a lot of computer. Then Apple, who has neither AI nor data centers, did well somehow.

Devindra Hardawar [00:05:55]:
Yeah, they have real tech. They have real technology. It's amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:05:58]:
This thing called the iPhone seems to

Devindra Hardawar [00:06:00]:
be doing products you can hold in your hands.

Leo Laporte [00:06:06]:
This is not Tim Cook's last earnings report. He'll have one more before John Ternus takes over in September. But Tim did crow a little bit about having the Today, Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever. Revenue of $111 billion and double digit growth in every geographic segment. Services continued to do incredibly well. A $28 billion in operating cash flow. I mean everything good for Apple. Did Apple.

Leo Laporte [00:06:37]:
Does Apple benefit because they lift. They didn't do AI. Maybe this is, I've mentioned this before.

Devindra Hardawar [00:06:43]:
I think everyone was like Apple is late to AI. They're going to lose out big time. And I feel like that that initial year, when was it Bing Chat happened and then Microsoft's whole deal with OpenAI everyone eyes were on Apple. Like you were stumbling, you were failing. And now I think Microsoft is pulling back on copilot stuff. All these companies are kind of taking a second look at their AI investments. Apple can just sit tight and be slow about it and I think be more thoughtful about it. I think that's going to work out well for them.

Devindra Hardawar [00:07:12]:
As we've seen it's gonna come.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:15]:
It doesn't feel though like the. I'm sure internally, yes, there's a lot that's, that's taking place. There's a lot of strategy that's happening. But from the outside of things it looks like that company is just doing its thing. And I. There's something to that. There's. Yes, we've heard about the scramble, but I don't know that that translates to your everyday person.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:38]:
We hear the rumors about, you know, the AI team being flushed and having to go do and whatnot. But from the outside of things it really does feel like Apple just continues to do Apple while these other companies have said, okay, we've got to really focus on this, we've got to focus on AI. And so there is almost a steadfastness to it that I have to respect. That makes you feel a little bit more comfortable perhaps with, with Apple still able to. Because we're looking now at A company that is still able to set those records, despite the fact that we've heard time and time again from everybody else going, Apple needs to be an AI. They are so far right y and it doesn't seem like that's the case.

Leo Laporte [00:08:18]:
Yeah, well, we'll find out. I mean, I think we're about a month away from wwdc and that's where they'll probably talk about Siri and the AI enabled Siri. John Ternus joined the call. He's going to be the next CEO starting September 1st. So there was some betting on Tuesday on MacBreak weekly, will Turnus show up or will Tim Cook get to shine one penultimate time? But I think they wanted to introduce John Ternus. They also talked about shortages because Apple's hit hard by the supply chain. Shortages of chips, of ram, even of hard drives. And I think they've discontinued their cheapest Mac Mini and raised the prices on the rest.

Leo Laporte [00:09:01]:
And if you wanted a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio, you might be hard pressed to get one. Some of them are actually unavailable and this is due to AI. So in some ways they are benefiting from AI because everybody's buying these for their open claw.

Nicholas De Leon [00:09:15]:
Yeah, about two weeks ago I was trying to buy a Mac Mini or Mac Studio, something, anything. And the shipping date was like, depending on the RAM configuration, was months in the future. And I was like, that's, I've never seen that before. So, yeah, like Apple is, I guess benefiting tangentially from AI, even if they're not necessarily directly, you know, shipping models or anything like that.

Leo Laporte [00:09:37]:
By discontinuing the $600 model, Apple's basically made the cheapest model of the Mini, an $800 model. And of course a lot of people do an open cloud. We're buying the cheapest Mac Mini. I mean, that was the recommendation because you're still running a AI in the cloud, you don't need a super fast machine to run it. In fact, I don't even know if you need a Mac Mini, to be honest. You probably could use a Raspberry PI.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:00]:
Wasn't it doing some stuff locally? Like, I think the Mac Mini had enough local juice if you needed to do something. So that was.

Leo Laporte [00:10:05]:
I have a mini with 64 and I can run some models that are tuned for mlx, Apple's own ML implementation on Apple silicon.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:15]:
I mean, it speaks to like, what an amazing machine. The 599 Mac mini was like, yeah, that was Apple's cheapest desktop, but also more computer than most people needed. For really anything. And it's like so small, so capable. Like of course, of course this ends up being the thing. I think it's, it's. The downside though is that it was a beautiful machine for 599 and now it is no more because of AI, like so many things. So now it's $799.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:40]:
That thing needs to go on sale for below $500. Even like an M1 or M2 Mac mini at 3 or 400 bucks. Like you could do so much with that thing.

Leo Laporte [00:10:49]:
I guess you could buy a Neo, right? That's, that's.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:52]:
You could, you could buy a Neo, which is again another. I don't know how long they're going to be able to hold on to that.

Leo Laporte [00:10:57]:
Eight gigs of RAM isn't exactly.

Devindra Hardawar [00:10:59]:
No, you need the ram. If you want these models to sit in your, you know, to sit and run, you need a lot of ram. Unfortunately that Neo though, what a, what a machine. I have so many thoughts about that.

Leo Laporte [00:11:10]:
Did they talk about NEO sales? I didn't listen to the call. Are they.

Devindra Hardawar [00:11:13]:
I didn't care.

Leo Laporte [00:11:14]:
I think they're probably taking a victory lap on the Neo. And by the way, that was also he. John Ternus was in charge of hardware. That was one of John Ternus's projects. So yeah, I don't know if you

Devindra Hardawar [00:11:23]:
guys talked about this. I was at the NEO launch event and like it was all Turnus. There was no, oh, interesting John Furnace intro. Like the press to the whole thing. He was the one doing the play by play of all the features of the Neo. He was the one like everybody, even the Apple like people there were all talking about John Ternus vision for the neo, which tells you that they knew

Leo Laporte [00:11:43]:
he was about to be announced. Oh for sure. Anointed.

Devindra Hardawar [00:11:45]:
And that was rumored since last fall. But this was very much his baby. And like look at the MacBook Neo and just like what a thing that is. Like the Apple reps like brought a $600 HP like laptop and just put it side by side. I was like, oh my God, there HP is already dead. Like you're just let them, let them die here they compare like all the features, the screen, the speakers, everything. It's just desperate. And I've talked to like a lot of PC manufacturers now they're just all like pulling their shirt collars.

Devindra Hardawar [00:12:11]:
They don't know what to do because

Leo Laporte [00:12:12]:
they can't figure out how to do that. Right.

Devindra Hardawar [00:12:14]:
They can't do. It's impossible for the full stack. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:12:18]:
Especially because of supply chain. Now Apple buys up ahead of time, all the RAM and so forth. So in fact the RAM for these are part of the die because these are basically systems on a chip.

Devindra Hardawar [00:12:29]:
Older RAM most likely too. So probably not the in demand RAM that people are really scarfing up right now.

Leo Laporte [00:12:34]:
And presumably they already have it. All right, yeah. In fact I think we were talking about this on MacBreak Weekly. One of the issues they're going to have with the Neo is it sells really rapidly is they're going to run out of these low end, what is it, a 18 chip and they're going to have to start 18 pro. They're going to have to start using more modern chips which by the way come with 12 gigs of RAM instead of 8 gigs of RAM. So that'll be good for Neo Bios, but it's going to. Apple's going to be up against the supply chain. Cook said that.

Leo Laporte [00:13:03]:
Let's see, here's the quote. We think looking forward the Mac Mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply demand, balance. Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agentic. So the, the Neo is high, still highly available. I think so you could still get it. But I have a feeling they're going to run. You know these are binned parts I think right that they, they, they had extras of when they moved off the iPhone 17.

Devindra Hardawar [00:13:35]:
That's the speculation like and the best thing is like yeah, this is leftover hardware and you can build something from it. But also it is so funny that Apple scrapped ended up creating like a $600 computer like we've never seen before.

Leo Laporte [00:13:47]:
Apple scraps the Apple scrap computer. The leftovers built in a cave with

Devindra Hardawar [00:13:52]:
a box of scraps. Basically it's the MacBook.

Leo Laporte [00:13:56]:
Microsoft lifts its 2026 AI spend by $25 billion and this is just component prices alone. They're going to write checks for $190 billion their capex in 2026. That is what the market doesn't like to see is all of this money

Devindra Hardawar [00:14:19]:
spent on Microsoft users are just winning, benefiting from all this money being spent. All these features coming to Microsoft users are so useful. It's great.

Nicholas De Leon [00:14:28]:
They love them.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:29]:
They love them. They love them so much.

Leo Laporte [00:14:31]:
They don't. They hate them.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:32]:
5 notifications every time you open your machine to tell you how much you

Leo Laporte [00:14:36]:
love them, do you also hate it? I have to. I hate it.

Devindra Hardawar [00:14:39]:
I hate it. They have to come out and say sorry for all the AI.

Leo Laporte [00:14:42]:
We overdid it, we overdid it. We're pulling back. And Google's doing the same thing with Gemini. And Google.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:48]:
Yes. And Google Space. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:14:49]:
Oh, my God. It's. It keeps trying to summarize the twit rundown. I don't want a summary. I got it. Exactly. Stop. I don't want that.

Leo Laporte [00:15:00]:
So Microsoft has spent in the last four quarters, roughly, according to the register, $97 billion on infrastructure and equipment. What is the revenue for the 97 billion? 37 billion.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:13]:
Ah, it's like a Hollywood film.

Leo Laporte [00:15:16]:
The mass doesn't make up for it.

Devindra Hardawar [00:15:20]:
Nevertheless, they're losing some of their exclusivity with OpenAI too.

Leo Laporte [00:15:24]:
Yeah, the OpenAI pulled the plug problem. Yeah, I don't know if that's a problem. I can't figure out if that was Microsoft getting a divorce. Who was getting the divorce? Microsoft or OpenAI?

Devindra Hardawar [00:15:34]:
OpenAI wants more partners. Like, they want more money coming in. They don't want to be, like, beholden to Microsoft. But that whole thing was just so wild because Microsoft was just like, drunk, drunk on power. Like, look at this, what this AI does to Bing. Nobody cares about Bing. And all of a sudden everyone's paying attention to Bing. Let's put copilot and everything.

Devindra Hardawar [00:15:52]:
It really seemed like a company that had never seen some like, this sort of like, innovative tech so early. And they're like, we got to put this everywhere. We got to go gung ho on all of this. And that's part of that desperation that Google hit too, like right after Bing chat. And was it that level of chatgpt hit? And then that's when everyone's saying Apple's too slow. But now we're a couple of years after that and they think seems like it's benefited Apple not to jump headfirst into this.

Leo Laporte [00:16:17]:
To put this in perspective, here's a graph from business insider on CapEx spending starting with 2020. Well, when you combine Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft, it was all well under 200 billion. 2024 made 200 billion, then 400 billion. Now we're close to $800 billion in capex expenditure. And you know, it's interesting. Meta's spending less than anybody. It's Microsoft, Google and Amazon that are really spending almost $200 billion each in 2026. So we were talking before the show began, Navindra, about an AI bubble bursting.

Leo Laporte [00:16:54]:
Is this the sign of that?

Devindra Hardawar [00:16:56]:
It's not a good sign. None of this is good. And I do think that's the thing. If this AI bubble bursts, it's not just like these companies are going to be hurt or the AI companies. It is the US Economy itself. AI Investments itself was a big chunk of GDP growth over the last year. That's going to be a big, big problem.

Leo Laporte [00:17:17]:
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon said, we have high confidence this will be monetized. Well, in other words, we're going to make money, folks. We already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it. What that doesn't account for is the customers who are OpenAI anthropic. If they collapse, the whole thing, it's dominoes. Right. The whole thing collapses if your customers can't keep paying that money. That's why it's a bubble and that's

Mikah Sargent [00:17:47]:
why bursting is what does it. I would love when, when we think about the two ways the bubble bursting or the bubble not bursting. Right. What does it mean for the bubble to burst? Does it mean that. I understand obviously from, from a financial perspective, but what I'm, I'm curious to hear is Devendra, your. The crystal ball of the bubble bursts. That means that what AI gets sued to pieces by copyright holders and that's what takes it under or because we know that it has a base level of helpfulness that we have seen people talk about and use and pay for. So what is it? What would cause it to burst? What is involved with it bursting?

Devindra Hardawar [00:18:33]:
If.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:34]:
Yeah, I'm just curious, like what does that look like?

Devindra Hardawar [00:18:36]:
I mean it's. I think the best example we have right now is what happened to Sora? What did happen to Sora overnight? This thing that was a success and everyone was saying would rewrite Hollywood just didn't exist anymore. Poof.

Leo Laporte [00:18:48]:
It was the number one app on, on the App Store for a while.

Devindra Hardawar [00:18:51]:
Once upon a time it was. And then all of a sudden it wasn't. And then OpenAI is looking at the expenses of actually building, actually producing these AI videos. And it was, it was. The numbers were so bad, it was just better to kill the thing. Kill a billion dollar, several billion dollar deal that it had with Disney. Even Disney wasn't aware of it. So you know, these things can't just poof out overnight because it, it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of resources to run all of these AI things.

Devindra Hardawar [00:19:21]:
The future. Like I don't think, I think some of these models will be useful in the way that people are using them now locally, in the way you're seeing Apple and other in a bit of Google too, like running things on devices. Right? It's on the, on device AI that can do a Lot of great work for people. But the broader overall ecosystem that we're seeing here, I don't know how this can survive because they're not, they're not making money. Right. Those early users came from the money. These sort of like subsidized versions of AI that, you know, copilot was everywhere. OpenAI stuff was more readily available to people, but now these companies want people to pay.

Devindra Hardawar [00:19:55]:
People would love to use it for free. I don't know if we're seeing people actually paying much for them though.

Leo Laporte [00:20:00]:
I think Nicholas and I are in a different. I don't know. I'm not going to put words in your mouth, Nicholas, but I'm going to propose this might be on a different side of the spectrum because we love AI. We are using AI. Sora to me looks like a toy, but there are very good, valid non toy uses of AI, Right? Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [00:20:22]:
There's like two camps here. And I think one of the things was all the folks saying like, oh, SORA will revolutionize Hollywood consumers. All of us. They're going to create their own. I mean, isn't it like 90% of people create like 10 of people create junk. No one like, no one's like clamoring to like make their own Hollywood movie starring their friends. It's not a thing that people, people just want to like relax and like, and I guess look at scrolls or tick tock or whatever the case may be. No one's like clamoring to be like the next Spielberg.

Nicholas De Leon [00:20:54]:
Like that's not a thing. So I think.

Leo Laporte [00:20:56]:
So there are models that can do that. Right. I mean, and I use them good.

Nicholas De Leon [00:21:01]:
I have a pro, I have a in development project. So that's, that's the 1, 1, 1/2 of this where it's like, I think the idea like the average person is just a latent Steven Spielberg. They just needed the tools. No, I don't know that there's a whole lot of truth to that.

Leo Laporte [00:21:12]:
There's a certain thing called talent. I just want to point.

Devindra Hardawar [00:21:15]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [00:21:15]:
Or just a desire to like. I don't want to. You know, just because the camera is available doesn't mean I'm going to become the next, you know, Annie Leibowitz or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:21:24]:
It's like, you know, as a young man, younger anyway, in tv, spent hours in editing suites and I thought in the early 90s, no one's ever going to want to edit their own stuff. It's horrible and too painful to do video editing. I was wrong on that. But still, it's not A majority of

Devindra Hardawar [00:21:44]:
people, for people to start cap cut

Leo Laporte [00:21:47]:
and stuff like that made it.

Nicholas De Leon [00:21:48]:
Yes. And so, so that half, the other half is some of the, the projects I've make. The, the, the agentic programming, the different models that are coming out, I think that's quite useful. I mean, you could, you know, just for creating simple apps and websites and different things. Something that could have taken you, you know, days or whatever. Now you could spin it up in like an hour or whatever. I have, I've launched so many different things, both, you know, side projects, some internal CR projects, apps that are like 90% done, that will be published in the App Store soon enough. It's like I could, I could sit there and write all this Python code by hand, I suppose, but I could also just ask like Claude code or, or like deep seat and have it write these for me.

Nicholas De Leon [00:22:33]:
And it's like I'm one, you know, infusing the project, my, my creativity. I wanted to do this, I want it. I, I have this thing in my. It's solving this particular problem for me or this cool thing. But like, yeah, if you want to write the python, be my guess. Like, I don't, I don't necessarily care. And it's funny, I see some of the older school programmers that are like, well, programming is an art form. I want to write the.

Nicholas De Leon [00:22:53]:
Yes, of course, I understand that and I respect that, but that's like, not everybody. A lot of folks just kind of want to watch YouTube. A lot of folks just want the app to work, whatever it is, they don't. They're not in love with like, the writing process. Like, I'm a writer, I like writing. Most people don't like writing. If you're lucky, they might like reading. So it's like people confuse like their own passion for a subject as being the only way to engage with that subject.

Nicholas De Leon [00:23:20]:
And I don't know that that's the case. And you know, I'm not saying that my, my little projects are going to become the next big, big thing. That's not probably unlikely, but it's fun for me at the very least. It's, it's a creative outlet that I get to spend time with that I would have been doing, you know, passively consuming, you know, Netflix or whatever the case may be. It's.

Leo Laporte [00:23:39]:
This is one of, one of Nicholas's projects, deepdugout.com where you replayed the World Series.

Nicholas De Leon [00:23:46]:
What I did was, this is the 2026 project. This project started in late February. At late February, I went to Poly Market and said, what are the projected teams for the World Series? At the time it was the Dodgers and the Mariners. So I said, okay, great. What I want to do is simulate the World Series. Kind of like how back in the day they used to say that, oh, Madden Football predicts the Dallas Cowboys are going to win the super bowl, the super bowl this year. So I was like, okay, I want to do that. And so what it is, is it uses all real stats from fan graphs.

Nicholas De Leon [00:24:14]:
Like I, I use Claude code to build this. I use all real stats from fan graphs. It's all 30 teams. The managers are given personalities based on like actual journalistic profiles and like Sports Illustrated and things like that. And the managers are, are run by models and there's like a simulation. It's kind of like dice rolls in Dungeons and Dragons where it's like the managers are, are the models Sonnet Opus. And they're deciding, should I pull the picture, should I keep the picture?

Leo Laporte [00:24:40]:
I love this.

Nicholas De Leon [00:24:41]:
And there's like a whole like pipeline of content in there and it's like a whole. I consider it to be like an art project. It's not journalism. It's not. It's just, it was, as I was saying before we started recording, it was really the idea here. I'm a Mets fan. You can see the Mets hat in the background. I don't like the way the team is running.

Nicholas De Leon [00:24:57]:
So I joked to my wife, it would be way better if just AI was managing the team, was running the team, specifically David Stern as general manager. And so it's like, okay, let's just, let's do that. Let's simulate. The initial idea was let me simulate the entire league, 162 games. That would have been a little expensive. So I simulated the World Series. I gave the Dodgers the fancier model. I gave them Opus.

Nicholas De Leon [00:25:19]:
I gave the Mariners sonnets. And you know, I ran it 100 times to give it some statistical significance. I had a Discord component where I, I simulated opening day live in Discord. There was channels for every single game. You know, there's audio podcasts, there's, there's articles. You know, I think this is a representative of like, the Internet is just going to be filled with AI stuff. I mean, we see all the AI Slop videos non stop now. This is arguably AI Slop, but to me it's interesting.

Nicholas De Leon [00:25:48]:
And it's like, okay, it's kind of like, it's just a fun thing. I just wanted to take that idea of like, it would be better if AI was Running the team and see how far I could take that. And it builds on my Tucson news site, some of the. Some of the work I did there. So all this stuff is like a creative, and it gets me using the different models and it gets me in the trenches with this stuff, which I write about for Consumer Reports. I think it's useful to actually use the tools beyond just the chat bot aspect. Basically.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:17]:
Yeah. There's something you touched on there that stuck out to me. And one of the reasons that I have come to appreciate these tools is you said you were talking to your wife and you thought this. I think about the many times in the past where in the day I'll have five different silly ideas or actually good ideas for me or helpful ideas. And I go, well, I don't have the time or the resources or whatever to. To put toward that. So, oh, well. And then it just disappears into the ether.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:45]:
There's a recent project that I did, involves a little bit of a story. My significant other was out thrifting for his DVD collection and texted me to ask me, is this DVD title in my collection? And if you have time, could you go check? I was in the middle of something, so I was like, okay, I'll go check. I run upstairs, I look at his DVD collection. It's not an alphabetical order. So I'm like, I'm gonna have to look through every single one of these to find out. I said, is there any order to this? He said, it's by genre. I said, oh, Lord. Whose genre choices? So anyway, immediately what I did was I took a photo.

Leo Laporte [00:27:21]:
Spine color, right?

Mikah Sargent [00:27:22]:
Exactly. I took four photos of the whole collection and then popped them in and said, can you quickly just read through all these titles for me? And it did. And then I was able to quickly check against that database. But then I thought, this could be so much better. So what I did was from there, I said, what I'd like to do is create a. Because my significant other not. I can. I can barely get him to ever install any apps.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:50]:
So I'm like, I know he's not going to install an app. So what I need to do is make him a little website that he could just go to. So what I ended up doing was I. I decided I wanted it to be a really simple website. I don't want to have to work with some sort of database. Well, I can use Google Sheets as the database. I can reference that Google Sheets document and present it in this nice way. Anyway, ended up building out this little site for him.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:14]:
That the main page lets him start to type in a title. It ties in with the tmdb, which is the movie database API to check against characters as he's typing and goes, oh, this is already in your collection. Or oh, it's not. Would you like to add it? And so when he's at a thrift store, he can type in the title, see if he already has it. If he doesn't then know he can add it. And then the second page on the site has his whole collection again pulled from TMDB to get the photos of the front pages of the DVDs, you know, and all of that. I was able to, you know, it was the idea you were talking, Nicholas, about your creativity being there. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:52]:
I'm the one who thought, I don't want to build a site that has to have a database. So let's see about using Google Sheets. It figured out how to contact the API and do all that part of it. Then over time he said, well, I like this, but the seasons, it's not tracking seasons. Can we add that? Is that going to take a long time? You don't have to do if it's too much work. I said, oh, it's not too much work, and then asked Claude, and it helped me create that part of it and push it. So I really do like those opportunities to where these ideas I would have otherwise just kind of had to throw by the wayside. I'm able to make use of that and I've appreciated that aspect of it more than anything.

Nicholas De Leon [00:29:28]:
So I feel like the AI industry would be much better served taking Micah, your story right there. This funds, like, nice stuff and like, this is what AI enables. Don't. Don't lead with like, job destruction. Don't lead with like, like making a new movie. Yeah, that's kind of like a down, you know, I guess the flip side is, is, is everyone going to do this? How much money are they going to make off a little website database, A little baseball simulation? I don't know, maybe. But that's not my fault for like promising the sun and the stars with this technology when they could have sold it as like, hey, this is like a useful productivity thing. They could have sold it much more soberly and, you know, maybe it would have been better.

Nicholas De Leon [00:30:07]:
Better.

Devindra Hardawar [00:30:08]:
So that's how this industry works though, right? It has to be to the moon. Has to be to the moon, basically.

Leo Laporte [00:30:13]:
But. But this is the answer to your original question, maika, of what happens if there's a bubble burst. I think what's happening is people are seeing value, a lot of it, right. And they are using it. And, and, and maybe it starts with us geeks because we're much more likely to sit down at a keyboard and do something like you just did. Or even think of the fact that, oh, I could take a picture of this and feed it to Claude is certainly a geeky mindset, but this is going to trickle down. It's changing how people relate to computers. It changes how people use computers and I think in the longer makes them much more useful.

Leo Laporte [00:30:45]:
I think that's why venture capital is pumping all this money into these companies that are then pumping the money into data centers and new models, because there is. They perceive a real upside to it. And it is a complete reinvention of how the world works. We've been through this before. We were. Industrialization changed. Everything was a complete upheaval. When.

Leo Laporte [00:31:08]:
When we invented the car, that was a complete upheaval in American society in how people got to places about where their jobs were, the kinds of jobs. We have been through this before. There is upheaval. People lose their jobs.

Devindra Hardawar [00:31:24]:
How's their lives, by the way?

Nicholas De Leon [00:31:26]:
Car.

Devindra Hardawar [00:31:26]:
Cars becoming mainstream led to tons of kids just being dead on the street.

Leo Laporte [00:31:31]:
Well, I mean, you could say. I'm not saying it's all positive by any means. In fact, you could say, you know, cars have changed cities, they've changed where we live, they made the suburbs possible. And there's all sorts of things that cars have done to change society. We've survived it, we've lived through this before. And I think this is the kind of change we're seeing. And if you had been sitting in 1910 thinking, what should I invest in? And you decided to invest in rubber, oil and automotive stuff, you might have done better if you'd had some vision about it. And I think that's what the market's seeing.

Leo Laporte [00:32:04]:
So. But to answer your question, Maika, Jeff Bezos said this a couple of months ago. He said there's. There are two kinds of bubbles. There are financial bubbles that are just about money. Like the stock market crash, where Everybody was in 1929 heavily invested and leveraged, and it just crashed because all this leverage, the margin calls, and everybody jumped out of windows, he said, versus an industrial bubble. And we have some examples of industrial bubbles. The transcontinental railway, all those railroads went bankrupt, by the way.

Leo Laporte [00:32:33]:
They all went out of business. The Internet boom of the late 19th, 20th century, we laid a lot of fiber, a lot of those companies. MCI is Gone, but the fiber is still there. The railroads were still there. There's infrastructure that gets built. And I think Bezos is saying this is that kind of bubble. It is, in the long run, a potentially positive bubble. It's not a financial bubble where people just lose their shirts.

Leo Laporte [00:33:00]:
They might, but it is a bubble where. And companies will, I'm sure, go out of business and some investors will lose their shirts and some even, you know, mom and pop retail investors might lose their shirts in the stock market. But ultimately we're going to get some value out of it. And that's the reason I asked you, Nicholas, is I think, think you and I, and I have to add Micah now to this. Have created things that we see some real value in it. More than just. I mean, yeah, it's an art project, but you can see there's value being created.

Devindra Hardawar [00:33:28]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:33:29]:
That couldn't have been created before.

Devindra Hardawar [00:33:31]:
Those projects are great. Those projects are totally great. But I look at, like, you bring these to the AI executives, like, you're saying, nicholas, they're going to look at this and be like, oh, nerd shit. Right. This is, of course, wonderful. Nerd shit. And it's like, can I build, like a global empire on this? Can I sell this to the average consumer? I don't know if they can like that. That, to me is they focused on

Leo Laporte [00:33:53]:
chatbots, they focused on Sora, they focused on this crappy consumer.

Devindra Hardawar [00:33:56]:
This is cool stuff. Like, it's super cool. I wish I had time to, like, play around with these things in this way too. Unfortunately, like, my perspective is from, like, looking at the news and try trying to see, like, what is happening at this, at the broader market level. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:34:09]:
People look at it that way, have a much more negative point of view than the people who are actually playing with this stuff and see, oh, there's something here that's going to.

Devindra Hardawar [00:34:17]:
Right there's. If you just think it's a bunch

Leo Laporte [00:34:19]:
of chat bots, it's like, oh, who cares? This is so sorrow.

Devindra Hardawar [00:34:22]:
It is. It is worrying, though, because even just like, from the chatbot side, which is how normal people are interacting.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:28]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [00:34:28]:
By the way. Like, that's how it is. And in the future, it's probably going to be the handful of, like, the Super Siri or whatever. It's going to be personal assistance, people talking to their phone or whatever, saying, do this for me. Can you figure out how to do this for me? Rather than doing the legwork that you guys are doing right now. But I look at, like, what is happening in the AI industry. And just like the effect it's having on humanity is kind of disturbing, like, at a philosophical level, that is kind of what's keeping me partially away from it, because it does feel like we're stripping our humanity away a little bit here creatively.

Leo Laporte [00:35:01]:
I just saw a paper that said that AI psychosis was almost inevitable.

Devindra Hardawar [00:35:06]:
And there. There are so many examples of AI psychosis right now. People have killed. People have hurt themselves, they've killed other people. Somebody. I saw a tweet of this recently. Like a toy, like it used to be a toy slightly injures a kid and the entire thing is pulled offline. And you have these models out here who are.

Devindra Hardawar [00:35:27]:
They're just out here kind of like doing weird things to human psychology that we don't totally understand. But that's an acceptable loss. It's an acceptable loss for the progress of this industry. And I find that I very, very sad and disheartened.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:41]:
I want to agree with that 100%, too. That is one of. That has been one of the issues that, you know, because we talked a lot about it over the course of multiple episodes of Tech News Weekly is specifically the different AI systems and the horrible situations that have come out of it in those cases. And yeah, it's specifically what you touched on, that a toy does this or a car does this, and those things get recalled, called, or stopped or what have you.

Devindra Hardawar [00:36:10]:
Because we have regulations for those things.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:12]:
Yeah. I do struggle with the concept of the AI tools that have been given freely to schools, and schools then adopting them so freely. I don't know how to reckon with that. I don't know, other than I wish that, yeah, as soon as those things happened, it should have been shut down. It should have at the very least been pulled from. From education, I guess. But again, I don't. I don't know how to reckon with that.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:41]:
And I think that one thing that is difficult to do in any form of media, but in particular in forms of media that tend to be sort of condensed down, is holding two points of contrasting beliefs and having them both heard and not thinking that one outshines the other. So I can say that I have enjoyed the ways that I have made use of these tools. And I can say I am not happy with the fact that people have been killed or have killed themselves, at least partially because of these tools. And have those things both be true and have all of that communicated is very difficult because people do want a side to be taken, and in that way, it is difficult.

Nicholas De Leon [00:37:32]:
Yeah, Micah, I'M right there with you. I, as someone, I, you know, obviously I use these things. I find some utility with them. The downsides are obvious and very bad. And I don't know that one side needs to beat the other, you know, but to communicate that there's merits to this whole is, is very difficult, especially in today's climate where, you know, people don't read the article, they might read the headline, they might read the tweet, they'll see a, a reel on Instagram. There's, there's really, it's difficult to kind of get nuanced and in depth messages out there nowadays. So it's, it's very tricky and it's, I will say I spoke at a, at a University of Arizona class maybe two months ago to discuss my Tucson news site. And I will say the students there were very skeptical of AI.

Nicholas De Leon [00:38:17]:
They were, they were very, oh my Leo. They were cringe, you know, they were not, they were, they were not down with the sickness, so to speak. They, they, this is destroying our ability to think. So on and so forth. And so I don't know if there's a generational aspect here. You know, I'm, I'm not a kid.

Mikah Sargent [00:38:35]:
I'm 40.

Nicholas De Leon [00:38:35]:
These were like 20 year olds, give or take. And there were, you know, by and large, this is 20 students. They were by and large not, certainly not in love with the idea of AI. So I don't know how this, I

Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
think they're scared, right? I mean if you're college right now, you've got to be scared about what, what's the job market going to be?

Devindra Hardawar [00:38:52]:
What is scared about the world, scared about the future. Like literally everything is on fire. So yeah, this is just add one to the pile, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:38:59]:
Yeah. Let's take a little break. You're watching this week in Tech with the week's tech news. Micah Sargent is here. It's so nice to have you. We had thought maybe Micah would have to take over because I am thousands of miles in the middle. I am in the most remote spot in the world in the middle of the ocean. It's called Hawaii.

Leo Laporte [00:39:17]:
Maybe you've heard of it. And you can see the ocean behind me. Having a wonderful time, I must say. And, and so I thought, well, I should see if I could do shows from other places. And it's working pretty well actually.

Devindra Hardawar [00:39:30]:
This should be your new thing, just new extreme environments, I think.

Leo Laporte [00:39:33]:
So I think Antarctica is next. Right. That's driven to Hardwar from Engadget where he's senior Editor and Nicholas De Leon is also here. Great to have you. Senior electronics reporter at Consumer Reports. We are going to take a little break because we weren't sure if this would work. I recorded all the commercials ahead of time, so we all get to stand up and wander around. We'll be back with more of Twit in just a moment.

Leo Laporte [00:40:00]:
All right, we're back on Twitter. Is this your site crosswording the situation? Nicholas?

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:05]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:40:05]:
You too?

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:05]:
That's mine. Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:40:07]:
So what is this?

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:08]:
So you know the. You know the meme monitoring the situation, I presume? Everyone.

Leo Laporte [00:40:12]:
Yes.

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:13]:
That's when you're, you know, you're a news junkie and you're really following, you

Leo Laporte [00:40:16]:
know, whatever guys say they're monitoring the situation.

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:19]:
Yeah, it's kind of a tongue in cheek, whatever. So about a month ago, I started doing the app Apple News Mini crossword puzzle because I'm becoming an old, old man in real time.

Leo Laporte [00:40:28]:
You are? Yes.

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:30]:
But I was. All the clues were generic. It's like not a cat, but a blank. So I was like, well, that's fine. But like, what if the clues were all about news items? And we called it crossworded? So it's like all the cars are. So this I built with Claude code. This. Yeah, this actually took probably.

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:47]:
I mean, I. I didn't.

Leo Laporte [00:40:49]:
So it's writing the clues from the news.

Nicholas De Leon [00:40:52]:
Yes. So what it's doing, there's a couple things happening. Bas going out and scanning the major news in the New York Times, Reuters, ap. It's either scanning their websites or their Blue sky feeds or what, you know, a bunch of different sources. It's kind of like getting a state of the news. And it goes back, I think, two months. And then that's all put against a giant word, open source word list that's out there somewhere. And then it tries to create.

Nicholas De Leon [00:41:18]:
It tries to create the puzzle. The puzzle cost me like a penny to create. Sonic Sonnet is doing it.

Leo Laporte [00:41:23]:
Sonic. Amazing. Actually. It's good. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [00:41:27]:
Yeah, it was. It took about two weeks to really nail it. I had a lot of problems with the iOS keyboard for whatever reason. And the initial version, like, maybe half of the clues were based in news and the other half were just kind of random generic stuff. So it took a little while to really nail down.

Leo Laporte [00:41:41]:
But, like, this is really hard.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:45]:
Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [00:41:46]:
Harder than the cr. Than to think of mini.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:48]:
I haven't gotten one yet.

Leo Laporte [00:41:49]:
Let's. No, me neither. Wow.

Nicholas De Leon [00:41:52]:
So, yeah, I will say, you know, I. I stopped doing them after the first week or so, so I really

Leo Laporte [00:41:58]:
don't statistics on how many people are doing these.

Nicholas De Leon [00:42:02]:
I don't have them handy.

Leo Laporte [00:42:03]:
I mean, it's not, we're gonna, it's gonna go up a lot. Crosswordingthesituation.com yeah, this is a challenging midi. Now, do you play the fun little tune when you solve it at the end?

Nicholas De Leon [00:42:14]:
No, I think I'm happy, I'm happy to add that to the, to the. You can make a pull request, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:42:23]:
I will, I'll do a PR for you. Yeah, but this is impressive.

Nicholas De Leon [00:42:27]:
It's just like I have, I don't know, this is kind of the way my brain. All these little side things. Oh, this would be cool. This would be cool. And now I have the, the, the time and like the res.

Leo Laporte [00:42:36]:
Instead of again, the mindset. You need, I think, to really take advantage of this is my, is my feeling on this. Wow, this is great. Yeah. Very nice.

Nicholas De Leon [00:42:45]:
So, you know, I, I, you know, again, none of this is going to become the next Facebook or whatever, but it's, it's just a fun, creative way to spend an hour or so here or there and I get to use the models and it keeps me like, I don't know, I think it's fun. Ultimately this is fun too, actually.

Leo Laporte [00:42:59]:
I don't know if you want to be the next Facebook, you know. Meta's historic loss in court could cost a lot more than $375 million. This is in New Mexico, just, you know, next door.

Nicholas De Leon [00:43:11]:
Next door, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:43:12]:
The Attorney General Raul Torres sued Meta in a landmark child safety case. 1. I'm sorry, the judge awarded $375 million. They go back now for a three week public nuisance trial, whether the. And they are going to argue over the changes because the Attorney General doesn't want just money. He wants Meta to make some changes to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, including age verification for New Mexico users, prohibiting end to end encryption for users under 18. I don't know what that's all about. And capping.

Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
They're used to 90 hours a month. Limiting engagement, boosting features like Infinite scroll and Autoplay, and requiring meta to detect 99% of new CSAM. Crazy. It is not a good thing to be Meta right now, if you ask me.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:09]:
No.

Leo Laporte [00:44:10]:
Meta's response. Meta's response. We're gonna, we're gonna leave New Mexico. If you do this, we're gone. These are technologically impractical changes.

Devindra Hardawar [00:44:20]:
Many of them are.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:21]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [00:44:22]:
Some of them seem reasonable, you know, maybe time limits or whatever, but like the we're going to get rid of end to end encryption. I mean, that's bad for any number of reasons.

Leo Laporte [00:44:30]:
I don't know, they don't want kids to have privacy. I'm trying to figure out what this is. You know, it's interesting because what happens when you do this is now suddenly you have to also ban vpn, because if you say, well, this is only in New Mexico, then kids who aren't stupid are going to say, oh well, guess what, I'm no longer in New Mexico. Which is leading Utah to want to ban, effectively ban VPNs. Utah's the first state to hold websites liable. Websites like Meta would be liable for users who mask their locations with VPNs. This law goes into effect in just a few days. It was signed into law by the governor March 19th.

Leo Laporte [00:45:15]:
It goes into effect on May 6th. It's formerly Senate Bill SB 73. And this is what you're going to see in a lot of these states, I imagine. New Mexico's next NordVPN, and I'm sure joined by every other VPN provider in the world, has called the law a quote, unresolvable compliance paradox and liability track app. The EFF says the legal risk could push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate Age verification for every visitor in the world. Well, we can't tell you from Utah, so we're just going to make sure you all do it. What is with legislatures? I don't think they understand technology. What is.

Devindra Hardawar [00:45:55]:
Look, I understand they think all of everything.

Leo Laporte [00:45:59]:
Yeah, I. This is, this goes back in a way to what we were talking about earlier, which is there are harms. Clearly there are harms to the Internet and maybe when we were starting out we should have thought more about that. We didn't. Those harms are here. Social media is here. But this is not the solution. By the way, that was a jury trial.

Leo Laporte [00:46:20]:
I got that wrong. So the jury awarded 375 million in New Mexico. Meanwhile, Australia continues the pain For Meta, a 2.25% levy on their revenue in Australia. Not just Meta, But Google and TikTok if they refused to pay news publishers. This is a Rupert Murdoch bill that was passed.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:44]:
Still going on.

Devindra Hardawar [00:46:45]:
He's still doing anything.

Leo Laporte [00:46:47]:
And so what happened is Meta and others said, well, fine, no news for you. So Australia said, well, fine, even if you don't give us news, you're going to give us two and a quarter percent of your.

Mikah Sargent [00:46:59]:
That's so funny.

Leo Laporte [00:47:01]:
This is basically all about protecting a More abundant industry, the news industry, and in particular Rupert Murdoch's news industry.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:10]:
You know, this is the thing about it. I. If it wasn't actually this secret other, you know, deal that is happening. There's something to the idea that. Because I remember working for a news organization at the time when they're all gone.

Leo Laporte [00:47:31]:
The ones you worked for. Right?

Mikah Sargent [00:47:33]:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I remember someone coming in.

Leo Laporte [00:47:37]:
I don't mean to be mean.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:38]:
I mean, but it is. But is the case. Yeah. And there was a specialist who came in and was like, here's how you're going to make it big on Facebook. And then you find out that. Well, allegedly that Facebook up its video values and all that kind of stuff.

Devindra Hardawar [00:47:49]:
Oh yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:47:50]:
So I do, I wish there was a world in which these companies that are sort of summarizing the news that exists did have to pay a little bit. But it sucks that really. That's not what this is about.

Leo Laporte [00:48:02]:
Nobody owns the news. I mean, and that's true. If somebody owned the news, then you couldn't do that crossword puzzle, Nicholas, because.

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:10]:
Correct.

Leo Laporte [00:48:11]:
The news is the news. You can.

Nicholas De Leon [00:48:12]:
I mean, I'll shut it down. It doesn't matter. Yeah, it's. It's not a four.

Leo Laporte [00:48:16]:
But that's the point is nobody really owns this. The news. The facts are not copyrightable. The treatment of it is, but not the facts themselves.

Devindra Hardawar [00:48:23]:
Yeah, this goes back to like every medium too. Like when radio broadcasting was just starting, they were just reading newspaper headlines and newspaper reports. They didn't have the reporters. They were just repeating what was there. So we've been here before. We kind of keep doing it every time we have a big media shift.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:40]:
What's the difference between saying no one owns the news and no one owns the Alphabet? Because we could just say that. Oh, just because you've arranged these letters in a certain way doesn't mean that you should get paid.

Devindra Hardawar [00:48:50]:
Paid for it. I love that.

Mikah Sargent [00:48:51]:
I don't think I like that argument. No one owns the news.

Leo Laporte [00:48:55]:
Well, facts are facts. You can't own facts. You can't copyright the facts. You can copyright how you wrote it. You can copyright your treatment of it.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:03]:
But isn't that what these, these, the meta and tick tock and etc were pulling from the treatment of. They weren't pulling the fact. Right, they were. They were summarizing the treatment that was put together about the thing that happened.

Leo Laporte [00:49:18]:
If this really were the case, then most websites would be gone. Because what happens, one store, one website breaks a story and every other website in the World, hundreds of them copy it. I know this because when I go through the news every day looking for stories for the Show, I get 20 copies of the same story.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:49:35]:
I always try to find the original. Right. It's not easy. Sometimes it's really hard to do. But when that. When Axios or the information in the New York Times or the Journal breaks it, I try to use their version of the story, but it's not easy to do because it's. Yeah, you can't copyright it. It's a.

Leo Laporte [00:49:51]:
It's a. It's a story.

Devindra Hardawar [00:49:53]:
A lot of stories are just like stuff a company announced. So everybody's gonna have their take on it, their spin on it. That's not breaking. That's not like a scoop. You know, that's.

Leo Laporte [00:50:00]:
It's polite to say if. If Axios gets a scoop. It's polite to say Axios in a scoop broke this story. Yeah, but that's just polite. I mean. Yeah, there's nothing stopping you from repeating it. In fact, it's what gets around most paywalls. You know, most people aren't going to pay $400 a year for the information.

Leo Laporte [00:50:18]:
But don't worry, you don't have to.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:19]:
You don't have to. Someone will publish.

Leo Laporte [00:50:21]:
Nobody's going to reprint it. Yeah, including us. I mean. I mean, I'm one of the. I'm a guilty party in this. I'm not going out and doing any reporting. I'm counting on you, Devendra, and you, Nicholas, and you, Mike. Well, Micah, you don't either, but.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:34]:
Yeah, I was going to say I'm one of you. I'm one of you.

Leo Laporte [00:50:40]:
This is commentary. This is not reporting. Meta is also in trouble in the EU for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. This is the same story. As soon as these countries require age verification, like in England, VPNs become huge in that jurisdiction. Meta is in breach of the Digital Services act for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. Now, the scary thing is the fines on this could be massive. You know, a large percentage of their global revenue.

Leo Laporte [00:51:17]:
We shall wait and see what they find them. The EU did create their own age verification app, which was. Oh, yeah, instantly cracked, like, within two hours. In fact, there were a number of security holes in it. It. Ursula von der Leyen, who is now in charge of the DSA in the eu, says online platforms can easily rely on our age verification app. So there are no more excuses. We will have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children's rights.

Leo Laporte [00:51:52]:
Just turn it on. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sorry. But Meta has not adopted the EU's Age Verification and probably a good thing. Security researchers demonstrated it could be bypassed. Oh, I'm sorry, did I see two hours? Within two minutes of its release.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:10]:
The source code's up on GitHub, so yeah, yeah, it's open source point ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte [00:52:19]:
Exactly.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:20]:
Have you all started getting those? I've been logging in or doing whatever these different services and now they're all starting to ask me what state I live in. Been too as well. That's. I know, isn't that so annoying now? I was, I was even on. It was, it was on Apple tv. It was just wanting to watch some show and it said hold on, you gotta log into your account. I had to go on my phone like some sort of animal, go to the website like some sort of animal and then say my age like some sort of human.

Nicholas De Leon [00:52:47]:
I mean I know here in Arizona they passed a law to visit adult websites. You need either ID or you know, a half clever high school student will just use a VPN or whatever.

Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
But My name is McLovin. Yeah, I live in Hawaii until that's

Nicholas De Leon [00:53:04]:
until they, they ban VPNs and I'm like, but like okay, just, just go ahead, ban them. I don't, I, I mean at this point I'm old, I don't care as

Leo Laporte [00:53:11]:
much as I used to.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:12]:
So.

Leo Laporte [00:53:13]:
Well, this is important because I think nobody would say oh, a kid should be able to visit a porn site. We all agree, of course kids should be able to do that. You can't buy a playboy in a 7:11. If you're right, find in the woods

Devindra Hardawar [00:53:25]:
like everybody used to, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:53:26]:
Exactly right.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:28]:
Dig it out of the ground like

Leo Laporte [00:53:29]:
you do with the mushrooms who are burying their Playboys. I don't understand what that is all about. But anyway, that's another story for another day, so I think we're for it. But what, what the interesting thing is it really was never about the porn ban. That was just the wedge of course, of course in the door. Because really they want a band the Internet for people under 16. They want to ban social media. They want to really restrict what kids can access.

Leo Laporte [00:53:55]:
And I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't know if that's a. Yeah,

Nicholas De Leon [00:54:00]:
I mean when I was a kid this is the thing where like parent, you know, parenting is important. When I was a kid I was, I was looking up video game stuff. I was. What was, what was. You know, it's like I was. I was actually using it as research and homework and the things you were supposed to use it for even at an early age. Well, my mom was very strict that I knew from a very early age not to tempt fate, so to speak. But, like, that's not every kid.

Nicholas De Leon [00:54:27]:
You know, some kids are gonna look up, oh, they're gonna gamble on polymarket or whatever the case may be. So it's like, this is the role of a parent to, like, yeah, tell, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:54:37]:
You know, if our nation's governing body can gamble on polymarket, I think everybody should be allowed to go talk about

Devindra Hardawar [00:54:45]:
downfall of our civilization. But, you know, Nicholas, like. Like, the thing is, the Internet was just one place back then. Like when we were.

Nicholas De Leon [00:54:53]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [00:54:53]:
It was the shared family computer that your parents could watch you do stuff in. And maybe occasionally you'd have access at your school library or something. But now it's like it is everywhere. Everyone has sick Internet right in their pocket. And like, that's the thing. And I. I think the EU's heart is in the right place, like protecting kids.

Leo Laporte [00:55:10]:
I'm not denying it so many ways. I just don't think they have the technology to do it.

Devindra Hardawar [00:55:14]:
They don't have the tech to do it.

Leo Laporte [00:55:15]:
You did a study that. That said, oh, look, a kid can say, I'm 18 on Facebook and there's nothing to stop them. Well, yeah, I mean, we have a. We run a Mastodon instance, right. Twit social, which you're all welcome to join if you want to be on Mastodon. And I have now been forced, because of all these laws in various jurisdictions to say you must be over 18 to use it. But Mastodon has no age verification capability. So I just say by signing up, you assert that you are over 18.

Leo Laporte [00:55:47]:
You must be over 18. That's dopey. But I feel like I have to

Devindra Hardawar [00:55:53]:
do it how porn sites used to do it, as I've heard. So it used to be they do liquor sites.

Nicholas De Leon [00:55:58]:
Do it.

Leo Laporte [00:55:58]:
What's your birthday? Right. And that's all.

Mikah Sargent [00:56:00]:
Yes, exactly right.

Devindra Hardawar [00:56:01]:
It's the same thing. I mean, it's again, like, I think the easy is in the right place because we allowed this Internet to grow to. To obscene heights. Like Facebook's reach, its market reach is insane. What it was allowed to do, the companies, it was allowed to gobble up the sort of like, mind share that is fully owned by Mark Zuckerberg, I think is kind of gross. And we, we lived through that. I reported through that. And it was a lot of governments, a Lot of just like, hey, Facebook wants to buy this company and we're going to allow this $19 billion WhatsApp deal or whatever.

Devindra Hardawar [00:56:38]:
Not many questions being asked. We all thought like, oh, social media is great. These tech companies are trying to do good in the world. And maybe the reason I'm sounding a little negative now is like I've lived through several waves of tech company innovation and every time, practically every time, it has not ended up so great. And certainly the social media thing was just like it was purely, yeah, money grab, user attention grab. We want those DAUs. We want to have the most engagement over our competitors at the cost of users, at the cost of like kids, mental health, at the cost of so many things.

Leo Laporte [00:57:11]:
But what's the solution?

Mikah Sargent [00:57:12]:
Yeah, that's the thing. It's so hard.

Devindra Hardawar [00:57:17]:
We have to have these discussions and where there are going to be some clunky, clunky solutions, some things are not going to work. But you know, we got to start having this conversation more broadly. Maybe we should. Like I have. My daughter is 7 years old right now, so she is years away from

Leo Laporte [00:57:31]:
having a smartphone now. I get it. You are faced with it.

Devindra Hardawar [00:57:35]:
We know social media has not been great for kids, like for teenagers in particular. Like, so what are you gonna be?

Leo Laporte [00:57:42]:
Are you gonna give?

Devindra Hardawar [00:57:42]:
I don't know. I don't know yet. What I do, what I do kind of want to do eventually is just like, you know what is great, a GPS and the cellular enabled Apple Watch is a great thing like for parents, like could, could be like, that is your emergency. You need to get a hold of me for whatever. I need to see where you are if you're going to hang out with friends or something. I'm less interested in location tracking and more in. Just like anything happens, you raise your wrist, you call for help.

Leo Laporte [00:58:09]:
You.

Devindra Hardawar [00:58:09]:
That can happen and I can reach.

Leo Laporte [00:58:11]:
Apple's actually embraced that a couple of years ago. They allowed you to set up a watch with your phone without them having a phone.

Devindra Hardawar [00:58:17]:
They can for sure. And like the whole, the whole family plans and stuff, like those sorts of things. That's kind of where I'm sitting.

Leo Laporte [00:58:23]:
I think that's a good solution.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:24]:
Can I ask, how are you, how are you deciding on. Is this a matter of talking to other parents and seeing what they do? Is it a matter of reading books? Is it a matter of all of these things? That's something that I've always been curious about with especially parents who are a little bit more tech knowledgeable. We have Lisa Schmeiser Talks a lot about the work that she, a friend of the show, does with her daughter. And they have a contract that they wrote up together and everyone signs. So there's just, just different ways of doing it. I've seen how Jason Howell for another show has done that. You know what I mean? And so I'm just curious what your method is because you said you don't know yet. Are you still collecting data to figure out?

Devindra Hardawar [00:59:07]:
There are no books written about this, right? Like, books are the last place you go to like figure out what is happening in like media and social media and stuff. A lot of it's just like reading the news, seeing what's happening and looking at the tools available out there too. Like there are some really gross things out there. There's this. I don't know if you guys have seen Angel Sense. Those sorts of. It's the wearable that it was initially meant for kids with autism and kids who are like a flight risk, kids who like could run away from school or something for parents to keep track of things. But now it's become just like this really thing for paranoid parents to get for their kids and it can let them listen in to what is happening.

Devindra Hardawar [00:59:42]:
Like just instant. My God. To listen into what's happening. And now schools are like, this is a rights violation. You cannot just listen into every single classroom. And parents are fighting. A parent's like, no, I must understand what is my kid.

Mikah Sargent [00:59:54]:
Hear what's happening in the class and then complain to the teacher and parent

Leo Laporte [00:59:58]:
that reads the kid's diary every night.

Nicholas De Leon [01:00:00]:
Wasn't that in Batman, the Dark Knight?

Devindra Hardawar [01:00:03]:
It's, I mean we're talking about a lot of tech. Like I think this is a thing that exists now and some parents are doing it and I think it's insane. So I'm thinking of like a sane reaction. Also this will involve conversation with my daughter, seeing what she wants, wants to use. And right now what we're doing is mainly tech in, in a localized way that I can see what she's doing. Right. She is a. She is an iPad kid.

Devindra Hardawar [01:00:23]:
Like she spends time in her iPad. She loves Minecraft. I'm there engaging with her. She's not out there playing with like randoms online yet. We're not doing Roblox. And maybe that's going to be a conversation that's going to be a fight at some point. Because from what I hear, from what I've seen, Roblox, not great. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [01:00:38]:
At taking care of that community. But Minecraft is relatively safe. She plays with her with her co cousins. Once in a while she plays with me. The idea of a central computer. I think we can. We kind of got to go back to that. The den computer, the living room computer, where like your kids are online and doing stuff and doing stuff for school and you're like interacting with them.

Nicholas De Leon [01:00:55]:
It's so funny. Yeah, I was a friend, one of my friends, he says, like, that was like, you know, the Internet, you know, the phones everywhere. The, the computer, the den was peak. That was the best because you could go on, you could use whatever, you know, read whatever. And then boom, you're done. And then you're back in reality. You're out of the Matrix. And.

Nicholas De Leon [01:01:13]:
And that was way more balanced and way more healthy. And frankly, if you're a parent, you know, like I said, my mom was very strict, but she had the advantage of. There was one computer which she could monitor. And eventually, you know, honestly, I wasn't quite obedient. I really didn't try to say it was very strict. So I got the message very quick is what I'm saying. But like, it was a lot easier in the 90s to do that than now, even if you're like a sophisticated parent. Oh, I'm going to block it in the router.

Nicholas De Leon [01:01:38]:
Nothing, Nope, not a single packet is getting into my house. It's like, okay, well, they go to school, they have friends.

Devindra Hardawar [01:01:44]:
You know, devices have cellular, they're not touching your router. Like, there's so many workarounds. But I do remember, like in the 90s, what the warnings to parents were. Like, don't let your kids talk to strangers on the Internet. And I absolutely spent many of night talking to strangers on the Internet about anime and video games and whatever. And I've made some of my like, greatest friends there. Like that to me, that to me was peak Internet, just like this pure discovery. This thing that was like, unknown, mostly untouched by like big corporate tech companies.

Devindra Hardawar [01:02:11]:
It was just people out there building things, doing cool things, like what you guys are kind of doing now with AI. Like, the coolest thing about AI is it does take us back to that sort of like, era of people just making cool. And I kind of.

Leo Laporte [01:02:23]:
That's what happened with the personal computer era, right? We suddenly have a computer and. And you're all of an age where you probably had that computer as a kid and you, you messed with it, maybe some of you did everything.

Devindra Hardawar [01:02:33]:
Destroyed it.

Leo Laporte [01:02:37]:
That's fantastic. And that's why you're geeks now, right?

Devindra Hardawar [01:02:40]:
Yeah, but this is like, we were Talking about Apple and AI, like the thing as I've been thinking about Apple and Turnus, like how he can change his company. I think Apple is the last PC computer company that is actually focused on personal computing. Right. Like everyone else was chasing AI or so many things. Apple's like, we're making better laptops, we're making better phones, we're making better earbuds or something. But it's tech that you use, you touch and feel and that affects your lives. That is personal computing. And I wish more companies kind of thought like that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:03:12]:
You know, I just, I reviewed one of Dell's like great new laptops, the XPS 14, and it does so many things right. It has this killer keyboard issue. And I'm talking to Dell, I'm talking to people like, what's wrong? It's. It doesn't type fast enough. Oh no, it don't type good. It can't keep beautifully machined thing. Well, it's like. So one thing I do a lot

Leo Laporte [01:03:35]:
is that a Windows problem. Can you put Linux on it and see if it works better?

Devindra Hardawar [01:03:38]:
I think I've talked to Dell, they've talked to their engineers, they've localized to like, it was maybe part of the part that's being used the digitizer to like accept keyboard commands. Like something was so there. They've issued a firmware upgrade and I've seen it and, and it's just like a weird issue for such like a beautiful machine to have, but.

Leo Laporte [01:03:55]:
So you can type faster than the keyboard can keep up.

Devindra Hardawar [01:03:58]:
The keyboard is just like dead. It's broken. Like if you, if I type like the comma and space bar too quickly, it'll register a space bar comma. I'm like, I can't, I can't work on this.

Leo Laporte [01:04:08]:
That's not good.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:09]:
I cannot work like. So they say it was a manufacturing issue with like the first run that went to reviewers. I'm gonna check out like a newer machine to see if they actually fit

Leo Laporte [01:04:16]:
because I thought those. Right. I thought that was a great looking.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:19]:
They do.

Nicholas De Leon [01:04:20]:
But it's a lot of the Linux guys, like the awesome battery life. Yeah. I saw the X.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:25]:
It's a great, it's like a great Windows machine otherwise. But it's also like, man, you guys are so focused. Last year they were focused on that dumb rebrand of like changing all their computers. Oh man, I felt so good. I felt so good coming in.

Leo Laporte [01:04:39]:
They're like, great line.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:40]:
You were all right.

Leo Laporte [01:04:41]:
You were many XPs over.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:43]:
It was amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:04:44]:
By the way, we On Wednesday we had Nirav Patel, who was the founder of Framework on Intelligent Machines. And they're making some. That new PC laptop they made is.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:52]:
They looks awesome. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:04:54]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [01:04:54]:
I'm worried about them because I don't. Their things tend to be more expensive and like, it really, it is focused

Leo Laporte [01:04:59]:
on the tinker and they're small, so they get hit harder by the supply chain shortage because they're not buying as many RAM chips or whatever. But he told me an interesting stat. He said 60% of the people who buy this new new laptop are running Linux on it. They're not ordering it with Windows, they're running it with Linux.

Nicholas De Leon [01:05:18]:
Yeah, I've seen a lot of evangelization, you know, because of the AI stuff. A lot of this is either Mac first or Linux first. Windows is kind of incidental to this AI conversation as far as the stuff that I'm doing. And a lot of Linux guys have been talking up Framework for, I don't know, past year, whatever. It's like, yeah, these are. It's a nice machine.

Leo Laporte [01:05:38]:
It was a little clunky, you know, when it was the, the, you know, the 13 and the 16. The original were a little. I had a 13 and they were too big. Yeah, it was a little clunky. But now they've decided, well, we're going to do a unibody aluminum chassis much like the MacBook. And I think I haven't seen it yet, but. Are you reviewing it?

Devindra Hardawar [01:05:54]:
I'm not reviewing it. I think it may be Dan Cooper and Gadget who's reviewing it. But we, we were looking at it. We've covered them. I really like them as a company. But yeah, to my broader point, like, I wish more people were like, focused on the idea of personal computer. Just like tech, tech that people are using and that it remains Apple's advantage. And every time Microsoft tries to release actual hardware kind of falls on its face.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:16]:
Like, you look at the Surface, they can't. They had Xbox. They had Xbox for so long, they keep fumbling that ball and I don't understand what is happening. It's so stupid. And a lot of this is just tied to companies whose attention is diverted to AI or online infrastructure. Something else. Something else that is not the core of what being a personal computing company should be. So I don't know.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:39]:
That's just a thought I've had. Like, that's kind of a really good point.

Leo Laporte [01:06:41]:
And Turnus is a hardware guy, so maybe there's some hope that they will continue to focus on Hardware, although they had a very good quarter for services and third services is now a big part of their overall.

Devindra Hardawar [01:06:53]:
Tim Cook makes it make those little I, I did that stickers for first services because he's the service guy. He, he's the one who launched all those services. He's the one who revamped their supply chain.

Leo Laporte [01:07:03]:
That's how you get arpu, baby. It's all about the average revenue per user. The arpu for sure. You could sell them a computer once, but you could sell them services forever.

Devindra Hardawar [01:07:11]:
Yeah. But Turnus is interesting because it's sort of like Apple does have tunnel vision sometimes, right? Sometimes they're like, we must do it this way, you must do it our way. We're not going to cater to the market.

Leo Laporte [01:07:22]:
And I do think Steve Jobs itis. It's that. That's still hangover of no, we know best, we know we know best or

Devindra Hardawar [01:07:28]:
we're not going to touch that market. That's. That's beneath us or something. And the idea of Apple 10 years ago doing a $600 laptop.

Leo Laporte [01:07:34]:
No kidding.

Devindra Hardawar [01:07:34]:
Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But now it's like, it is viable. And also, not only are they going to do it, they're going to make the best one that we have ever seen in that price range. I don't know how long they're going to be able to hold on to that, but I think that bodes well to like, the future of how they consider products and what they're actually going to deliver to people.

Leo Laporte [01:07:49]:
So that's actually a really good point. I mean, if you're, if you said, say, putting technology in people's hands is what's important, that NEO is a really good example of that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:07:57]:
Yeah, it is. I've been using it like on and off, like alongside an AIR and next to MacBook Pros. And like, that screen is so good. It has decent speakers. Like, it's nice. It is a what if you want, if you want that NEO before prices skyrocket or supply disappears, like, just get it.

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:13]:
It's, it's, it reminds me a little. I had in college, I was in College from 2004 to 08 and I had the 12 inch PowerBook G before my uncle got it to me as a high school graduation gift.

Leo Laporte [01:08:23]:
Nice.

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:24]:
And it was like, yeah, in retrospect, it broke at some point. I, I wish I was actually on ebay literally earlier this week trying to find one, but, but like the NEO is the new version of. It's. It's like, it's small, it's awesome. It's like, it does, it's like the perfect college laptop. I actually have one on loan from Apple. I'll probably post like a first person impression thing or whatever in the next week or so. But yeah, it is like I would be very hard pressed to recommend like I have.

Nicholas De Leon [01:08:50]:
I live in a kind of a rural area, but one of my neighbors is constantly asking me like, oh, what's the best laptop? What should I get? Man, for 600, I would be very reluctant to mention anything other than the Neo at this point. I cannot imagine a window, a PC that even touch, you know, you get more expensive, you know, Windows laptops are, you know, there's plenty of good ones. But at this price point, I don't know, it'd be really hard to find something this credible at that price.

Devindra Hardawar [01:09:16]:
Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [01:09:17]:
One other issue before we take a break with Meta. One other story. Meta has an insatiable need for power, just like all these companies, especially the Frontier AI labs. In 2024, they used 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in their data centers. According to TechCrunch, enough to power 1.7 million American homes for a year. They have committed to building 30 gigs of renewable power sources. But one of the things they want to do, and they've just signed a deal with a company called Overview energy, is put 1,000 satellites up that will beam light from the sun to solar farms over infrared to power data centers at night.

Devindra Hardawar [01:10:02]:
Wasn't this James Bond supervillain plot?

Leo Laporte [01:10:05]:
Yes, it's very supervillain, isn't it?

Devindra Hardawar [01:10:07]:
This was one of those.

Leo Laporte [01:10:08]:
Overview is a four year old Virginia outfit that emerged from stealth in December developing spacecraft. They collect plentiful solar power in space, convert it to near infrared light, beam it at solar farms, hundreds of megawatts, which then convert that light to electricity. It is very James Bond.

Mikah Sargent [01:10:30]:
Yeah, that's neat.

Leo Laporte [01:10:32]:
Well, it's better than burning natural gas as Elon Musk is to power your data centers, that's for sure.

Devindra Hardawar [01:10:38]:
Yeah, yeah, we have, we have gone down a really dumb pipeline these days.

Mikah Sargent [01:10:43]:
Ah, pipeline, huh? That's basically a giant space laser though, right? That's like a giant space laser.

Leo Laporte [01:10:49]:
It's a giant space freaking lasers laser. That's Micah Sargent. He completes me.

Mikah Sargent [01:10:57]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [01:10:57]:
Oh, great to have you.

Mikah Sargent [01:10:59]:
Good to be here.

Leo Laporte [01:11:00]:
Yeah. I don't get to work with you enough. I miss those days when we had a studio and I saw him every day and we did our bits and we did our little bits also. Here, Devindra Hardawar from Engadget. It's great to see you.

Devindra Hardawar [01:11:12]:
Also.

Leo Laporte [01:11:12]:
And newlywed Nicholas De Leon, senior electronics reporter. When you said your wife Ashley's so great, you guys deserve all that happiness. I'm very happy for you. That's great. We'll have more from Hawaii in just a little bit. Stay here, here. Thank you, Leo. Something I rarely get to do.

Leo Laporte [01:11:35]:
So the trial of the century has been going on. It started on Last Monday. Musk vs Altman. Week one. Elon Musk took the stand for a couple of days and it was juicy. He said a lot of interesting things. AI could kill us all. He likened it to the Terminator.

Leo Laporte [01:11:54]:
He said that he was duped that OpenAI because you know, he was of course the original founder. He's suing him saying he wants some of the profits because he founded a non profit. When they converted to a for profit, he says, well I want some of the profits. If you're going to be a for profit, could, could be worth billions of dollars. That's what Elon wants. I'm not sure his testimony helped him a whole lot. OpenAI's lawyer, William Sabbath, who actually by the way represented Tesla at one point said that Musk was never committed to OpenAI being a nonprofit. He was simply suing to undermine a competitor.

Leo Laporte [01:12:34]:
Because don't forget, Elon now has a for profit AI company called Xiai, which merged with SpaceX a little while ago. So what is it? Is Elon trying to preserve AI safety or is he just trying to put OpenAI at the business? At one point he also admitted, which was I think a tactical error, that Xai distills OpenAI's models.

Devindra Hardawar [01:13:00]:
Whoopsie.

Leo Laporte [01:13:01]:
What is.

Nicholas De Leon [01:13:02]:
Who doesn't?

Leo Laporte [01:13:03]:
Who doesn't? So what is that, Nicholas? Distilling the models, what does that mean?

Nicholas De Leon [01:13:08]:
I actually don't know how to explain it very well. It's basically you're kind of copying someone's homework, I guess is the easiest way.

Leo Laporte [01:13:14]:
Yeah, that's a good way to put, put it. So the long, long time Anthropic and, And I think OpenAI have accused the Chinese AI models of scaling. Basically you create an LLM and then in the post training you make it even smarter by opening accounts with the Frontier model. Let's say you're using Claude. Anthropic says that one of the Chinese models opened 24,000 fraudulent accounts with Claude.

Nicholas De Leon [01:13:39]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:13:40]:
And peppered it with questions and used its answers in its training. So you know, a lot of times you'll do post training on an A LL model with experts. You'll get an expert physicist, and you'll say, okay, now give it a bunch of physics, tough physics questions, and then grade its response and teach it where it went wrong. Make it better at physics. So in effect, they're asking Anthropic or OpenAI to be the teacher and make the AI better. And I think, think for that reason some of these Chinese models are actually deep. Seq just came out with version four. Quinn is very good.

Leo Laporte [01:14:13]:
Kimmy's very good. I think they're probably good because they've been trained on the frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI. Well, Xiai apparently is doing the same thing.

Devindra Hardawar [01:14:25]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:25]:
Why say it?

Devindra Hardawar [01:14:27]:
He's not a very smart guy. Like, I don't know what it will it take for us to stop taking Elon Musk Musk seriously at this point. Like, he has proven himself to be a bad dude. The richest man in the world is out there doing horrible things. Like the last year alone, I can list so many things. But the thing I keep coming back to is that Nazi salute tells me who you are.

Mikah Sargent [01:14:49]:
Yeah, that's true.

Devindra Hardawar [01:14:50]:
In that moment tells me who you are being. The thing I will never forgive him for is gutting usaid, something that has already affected hundreds of thousands of people and will likely lead to millions of deaths. And he is doing all this gleefully.

Leo Laporte [01:15:05]:
It was kind of an own goal, you know, if he would just sit back and collect his billions.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:11]:
But he can't.

Leo Laporte [01:15:12]:
He didn't have to do Doge. He didn't have to do any of that.

Mikah Sargent [01:15:15]:
That's true.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:16]:
But he gleefully, he gleefully did it. But here I have benefited him.

Leo Laporte [01:15:19]:
That's right. I have a theory that really, I mean, really, let's face it, SpaceX especially, but certainly Tesla. Tesla benefit from federal subsidies. Our taxpayers money is a lot of Elon's billions.

Devindra Hardawar [01:15:31]:
Let's nationalize Tesla. Let's go.

Leo Laporte [01:15:35]:
So whoever is in government, it's in Elon's interest to curry favor with them. Because the more contracts he gets, the better. And the government's done a lot of good for him. In fact, you might even argue that the, the router ban, the foreign router ban. There's only one router company making routers in the United States. It's SpaceX. It's, it's Starlink. I mean, even that benefits Elon, right?

Devindra Hardawar [01:16:00]:
This spent like what, a quarter million dollar. A quarter hundred million dollars. $250 million to basically be a shadow president for six months.

Leo Laporte [01:16:08]:
Yes, that's how much he donated to the Trump Campaign, a quarter of a

Devindra Hardawar [01:16:11]:
billion, what he's done. So it's like, I can excuse. Like Tim Cook. I can excuse. I'm not proud of it, but like, Tim cooking Cook, trying to be nice to the Trump administration, everything. Giving him a golden medal, or what was it, the golden statue.

Leo Laporte [01:16:23]:
It was a bar of gold with the cost of doing business trophy on it.

Devindra Hardawar [01:16:28]:
It's the cost of doing business. But being a gleeful participant in the destruction of our democracy. Screw you, Elon Musk. Like, just.

Leo Laporte [01:16:36]:
Yeah, I think a lot of Tesla owners now have the bumper stickers, yeah, I bought this before Elon went crazy, things like that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:16:42]:
But the even better part of this, too, is, like, the creators of the frontier AI models, buddy, what have you all trained those frontier AI models on? Oh, no. They're stealing my stolen data. Oh, no. I'm playing the world's tiniest violin.

Leo Laporte [01:16:57]:
For all of you, that's a very good answer to the distillation complaint is, well, isn't that what you did to train AI models in the first place? All right, maybe Elon, this is great. By the way, reporting from Michelle Kim at the MIT Technology Review. She was in the room. A lot of reporters who are sitting there for this trial. She said, in fact, Musk admitted that Xai uses OpenAI's technology. In response to Savit's relentless questioning, he said, AI partly distills OpenAI's models. Some people in the courtroom gasped. The people who understood what that meant went, that's.

Leo Laporte [01:17:34]:
Why did he admit that? Why did he admit that? He said, it's a standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI city on.

Mikah Sargent [01:17:41]:
All right, Jake Ward, my co host on Tech News Weekly, was also one of the people.

Leo Laporte [01:17:45]:
Was he there room?

Mikah Sargent [01:17:46]:
Yeah. He and I talked on Tech News Weekly about it, and he talked kind of. I thought it was interesting, a little bit more about the human side of things. At one point, Elon had gone up to go into the court and they asked him for id, and he responded by saying, I don't have id.

Devindra Hardawar [01:18:06]:
And they had to.

Nicholas De Leon [01:18:07]:
I'm a queen.

Leo Laporte [01:18:07]:
I carry a wallet.

Mikah Sargent [01:18:09]:
And then he ends up, Jake ended up in the restroom next to Sam Altman. At one point. Yeah. And he just. He was talking about how these incredibly powerful individuals sort of having to do the thing that normal people have to do was an aspect of it that made him feel deeply patriotic in a way that he wasn't expecting. And I kind of liked that aspect of it as well and considered that, you know.

Nicholas De Leon [01:18:38]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:18:39]:
They get called in and they're here. And yeah, Elon may not have ID with him, but he still has to be here. And I think that's kind of nice as well. But there, yeah, there were a few things. There's of course the journal that was being read by, by the court and it maybe made you go. Now what things should I write down? What should I not write down? But then also I thought, Leo, about. Because you have, I think maybe, maybe this isn't the case anymore. But haven't you given larger passages of your own text to your AI for like personality training? Or am I misremembering that somebody I was talking to talked about how they put their journal into AI?

Leo Laporte [01:19:21]:
That's me.

Devindra Hardawar [01:19:21]:
Yeah, okay.

Mikah Sargent [01:19:22]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
And I haven't seen a journal with four or five years worth of daily posts. I'm. In fact, I make my. I make Claude read it every morning.

Devindra Hardawar [01:19:32]:
Good luck. If you ever suit Leo, all that stuff is open.

Leo Laporte [01:19:35]:
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny, we were talking to Ian Bogos, who is a credible writer, has written, I think 21 books, some huge numbers books. Yeah, he's great. He writes for the Atlantic. He teaches at St. Louis University. He is famous for saying, I'm glad AI is ingesting my books. He, he checked of course, as I did, to see if our books are in that big database, that pirated book database that all the AI models have used. And he said, yeah, my.

Leo Laporte [01:20:06]:
I have, they have at least three books in there and that's good. I feel the same way. If they train on my. You know, it's funny because they could probably, in fact, I suspect they are training on our YouTube videos. We have tens of thousands of hours worth of content that on YouTube and on our website. We do nothing to stop them from that. I, I think that's good. I think AI is a, is in general a benefit to society.

Devindra Hardawar [01:20:33]:
If, if so, why are we holding

Leo Laporte [01:20:35]:
on to what we did our book so long ago? Why are we holding on so tight to it?

Devindra Hardawar [01:20:39]:
You know, they are making so much money off of content that you all produced. So at the very least, like they

Leo Laporte [01:20:45]:
should, somebody should make money on it. God knows I didn't let those big

Devindra Hardawar [01:20:50]:
tech companies make the money, says Leo laporte.

Leo Laporte [01:20:54]:
Nine jurors are, are seated for this trial. The judge is a well known name to many of you. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, she is presided over many a tech trial. She's apparently getting a little prickly. One of the things she said, I don't want to HEAR Talk of AI's existential threat to humanity to seep into this trial. We are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction. When Musk's lead counsel, Stephen Molo, started arguing with OpenAI's lawyer over the issue, the New York Times said the judge raised her voice, insisting they stop bickering, stop fighting.

Devindra Hardawar [01:21:30]:
You too. Stop it. Nerds.

Leo Laporte [01:21:32]:
She said. I suspect there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. We're not going to get into that, that we're just not going to have this whole thing explode for the world to view it. Okay, so I guess they can't discuss human extinction at this trial. It is in Oakland, California. Elon wants $150 billion to compensate himself and wants OpenAI to stop becoming a non profit. So I think he just wants them to stop.

Leo Laporte [01:22:06]:
Stop, period. This is, it's good, it's good for gossip. And I have to say every time one of the. And I'm sure you feel this way too, David, every time I hear that these companies are suing, I go, such a big mistake. Stuff's going to come out in discovery, stuff's going to come out, emails that you don't want anybody to see. It's happened with Microsoft, it's happened with Apple. It happens again and again. You're gonna, your, your CEO is going to get on the stand and say something dumb.

Leo Laporte [01:22:32]:
Nobody wins from these trials no matter what. But it's great for us as, as tech journalists.

Devindra Hardawar [01:22:38]:
It's great for news. But it's also like, who somebody did that post. Like the. You can explain everything happening now with the simple thought that everyone is 12. Everyone is 12.

Nicholas De Leon [01:22:49]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [01:22:51]:
Nobody grew up 12 years old.

Leo Laporte [01:22:53]:
It's just a bunch of bickering middle schoolers.

Devindra Hardawar [01:22:55]:
A bunch of childish, very rich. 12 years old. 12 year old.

Leo Laporte [01:23:00]:
Some of us are not very rich,

Devindra Hardawar [01:23:01]:
but we're all governments. It's true of so many things right now. Like we are living in a very. Like, everyone is 12.

Mikah Sargent [01:23:08]:
That's so good. I want a shirt.

Devindra Hardawar [01:23:11]:
Explains everything.

Nicholas De Leon [01:23:12]:
Everyone.

Leo Laporte [01:23:12]:
We're all in middle school right now.

Devindra Hardawar [01:23:14]:
I really like, basically. But it's like that's, that's what it is. This is the richest man on Earth. And also it's people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman who we are now assigning to lead humanity into the future. No, thank you. I did not.

Leo Laporte [01:23:26]:
Did not.

Devindra Hardawar [01:23:27]:
I did not put that.

Mikah Sargent [01:23:27]:
I didn't sign up for this.

Devindra Hardawar [01:23:28]:
Did not sign up for this and also I want to put.

Leo Laporte [01:23:31]:
I don't think they're anyone in charge. He can do crossword puzzles. He could do the world. Nicholas should be running the world now.

Nicholas De Leon [01:23:37]:
Thank you for your endorsement, Leo. Honestly, I like. To me the, to me that's like a white pill. If everyone's 12 years old, well then, well then there's nothing stopping anyone on this panel from, from being an important person. I mean look at what we're up against. Like. Yeah, no one there. There are.

Nicholas De Leon [01:23:54]:
I mean I look at. I don't want to get too political, but I look at this, the spectrum. I don't see very many impressive people on either. In any and any.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:02]:
In any of the places. Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:24:04]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:24:04]:
So Steve Jobs said. Steve Jobs said it was incredibly empowering when I realized that the people who made the world the way it is were no smarter than me. And I could do it too.

Nicholas De Leon [01:24:16]:
Yes. I think. Kidding us. I think that's actually a very positive message to tell especially younger folks is like there's really nothing stopping you from writing a cool book writing, doing whatever it is that you want to do because actually the adults. Look, I've been in, I've been in meetings with, you know, at previous companies where like the guy in charge and you're just like, I can't believe this person.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:36]:
Yeah. How are they in charge? Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [01:24:37]:
And it's, it, it's demoralizing in the moment, but like maybe the other way to look at it is okay, well then if he can be in that position, why can't I be in that? You know, it's, it's kind of a mentality thing, I suppose. But yeah, yeah, there's not a lot of very impressive people in any position of power. I don't think that. I see. Certainly. So it's like eh.

Leo Laporte [01:25:00]:
It's a human flaw. We all do this. We assume that these people are somehow smarter than us or better than us,

Devindra Hardawar [01:25:06]:
especially if they have money. That's the thing. This assumption that very rich people are smart must be better. Look at Elon Musk. He made electric cars a thing in America and he deserves a certain amount of credit for that. But also. So billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of, you know, government funding also allowed that to happen.

Leo Laporte [01:25:22]:
Don't you think though there are some people who are smarter than other people. Not everybody is.

Devindra Hardawar [01:25:26]:
I mean, sure, absolutely. But I don't think it's like equally distributed. And certainly the people who tend to rise to the top tend to look a certain way and believe, you know, think a Certain way. And I think that is a problem. Like, that is a consistent problem. But anyway, I mean, I'm basically saying,

Nicholas De Leon [01:25:40]:
yeah, I look at some of our local elected officials here in Southern Arizona, and I'm like, I am. I am reasonably confident.

Devindra Hardawar [01:25:48]:
Run for office job.

Mikah Sargent [01:25:49]:
Yeah. I could be the mayoral candidates.

Leo Laporte [01:25:52]:
From the guy who thinks he could run this New York Mets, better

Nicholas De Leon [01:25:57]:
sheriff and mayor. And just give me all the offices. I'll turn this place.

Leo Laporte [01:26:01]:
Here's the truth. There are that people. There are people who are smarter than you in certain areas. They are also dumber than you in other areas. Nobody is universally smarter than everybody else. We all have our. Our. Our Bailey skills and yeah, our bailiwicks, whatever that means.

Leo Laporte [01:26:18]:
We all have them now.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:20]:
I'm worried that term's gonna end up being like. And that was invented by a horrible person.

Leo Laporte [01:26:26]:
It's a bailiwick. Of course it is.

Devindra Hardawar [01:26:29]:
But, Nicholas, to what you're saying, there. There is a big push among people like, hey, you think you can do better? Run for office? You know, if I didn't have two young kids, that's. That's what I'm thinking. Like, it would be kind of cool to do that. And also, I think. I don't. I would never be like, a big, big political figure or anything. But also simple, like, local offices, things that could affect change in your vicinity, I think are totally doable.

Devindra Hardawar [01:26:51]:
It's something people should be thinking about because this is not a lot of people. The career politicians, like, you know, it's people who just get into this and end up doing it for life because it gives them a certain amount of money. They take funding from all sorts of places. Like, there are ways around this. I'm. This is me personally looking at, like, the rest of my life.

Leo Laporte [01:27:08]:
Life.

Devindra Hardawar [01:27:09]:
We have to fix the world, right? Like, what are we gonna do to fix things? And like, it is. Yeah, you're gonna have to, you know, pull up your sleeves and start doing some work. So that is what I'm thinking. And these rich people in charge right now, I cannot wait to see them out. Out of here.

Leo Laporte [01:27:25]:
Do you think that that should be disqualifying? Like, if you're a billionaire, you should just not be allowed. For instance, in California right now, a lot of money is being spent by a guy named Tom Steyer, who is a billionaire there. Who. And the governor's race is a real toss up in California. There's, like, a candidate. There's more than 60 candidates. Six. Zero.

Nicholas De Leon [01:27:43]:
What is it?

Mikah Sargent [01:27:44]:
So many.

Devindra Hardawar [01:27:45]:
And I mean, we've had campaign finance laws, but they don't seem to make any difference. Right. Like, people are more concerned with stripping voting rights away from people of color than they are from.

Leo Laporte [01:27:55]:
We don't want people.

Devindra Hardawar [01:27:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:27:57]:
If they were any good, they wouldn't be poor. Right. If.

Mikah Sargent [01:28:00]:
Right. It's.

Leo Laporte [01:28:01]:
If you, if you should be a billionaire, you should be required at least to have, I think $100 million before you can run.

Devindra Hardawar [01:28:06]:
What we have seen over the last, like, decade is certainly like there is way too much influence from billionaires, from big corporations in the I think we can agree problem.

Leo Laporte [01:28:15]:
So how do we put money out of politics? I think we could agree that's a good idea. All right, well, we'll have more. I need to get more money into podcasting personally. So we're going to take a break and do that and we'll come back with more Devendra Hardware. Nicholas De Leon, Micah Sargent. Great to have all three of you. You are watching this week in tech. I'm in Hawaii, so I want to let Petaluma Leo take this one.

Leo Laporte [01:28:40]:
Go ahead.

Nicholas De Leon [01:28:41]:
Thank you, Leo.

Leo Laporte [01:28:43]:
Here come the robots. OpenAI has invested in a company called 1X. They are, they've just opened a California factory. They hope this year to make 10,000 humanoid robots for your home.

Devindra Hardawar [01:29:02]:
Those are the murder bots, by the way. That is the company with the horrifying.

Leo Laporte [01:29:06]:
They look like murder bots.

Devindra Hardawar [01:29:07]:
Like they will kill you.

Leo Laporte [01:29:08]:
Yeah, yeah. Faceless. Yeah. Terrifying. They're Norwegian company. They've opened a 58,000 square foot manufacturing facility not so far from here in Hayward, California. This is the Neo Robot. They're going to do 10,000 units this year.

Leo Laporte [01:29:25]:
A hundred thousand units by the end of 2027. Is this just BS? Can they, can this robot do anything?

Devindra Hardawar [01:29:33]:
$20,000 or 499amonth? I don't, I don't know. Like, we, I feel like we talked about it here when that thing was first announced, but yeah, there were some videos that like, yeah, it's going to learn through AI to do basic tasks. The story was it was like remotely operated by somebody to like do a thing. So it's like, oh, so it's just a vessel for a stranger to walk around your home?

Leo Laporte [01:29:57]:
No, I, well, I would not buy that.

Devindra Hardawar [01:29:59]:
Love it.

Leo Laporte [01:29:59]:
I would not. I will bring the stranger into my home. But I'm not bringing them in via robot. It does have Nvidia's Jetson Thor onboard computing platform and it's trained using Nvidia's Isaac open robotics simulation framework. Okay, get ready for this, remember they were taking pre orders early access purchase, as you said, $20,000 with priority delivery this year or a 500amonth subscription fee. Pre orders sold out within five days.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:29]:
To whom? I want to know. I deserve to know who's buying these.

Devindra Hardawar [01:30:36]:
It turns out there were 10 pre orders available.

Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Maybe they didn't have a. Yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:30:41]:
I think I struggle a little bit with the idea that it's got multiple different companies being involved with its training. Like I kind of want it to be an all in one, you know what I mean? Because what, what happens whenever you're like, well, I've got the Nvidia package so mine can, can break dance. And then someone's like, well, I've got this, this one package that comes from who knows where and mine can actually go out and be a paid killer. What? That's terrifying.

Leo Laporte [01:31:09]:
The Next Web writes and I think this is accurate. The factory is the easy part. Manufacturing a human robot at scale, while difficult, is fundamentally a solved problem. The harder question, which no one has yet definitively answered, is whether it can do anything.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:28]:
Hang on. So they're already selling them but we still don't know if it can do anything.

Leo Laporte [01:31:32]:
Do anything.

Devindra Hardawar [01:31:34]:
Still improving.

Leo Laporte [01:31:35]:
One X's answer is in part to ship and iterate.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:39]:
No.

Leo Laporte [01:31:40]:
Yeah, we'll fix it in post.

Mikah Sargent [01:31:43]:
I hate this new idea that all of these. Amazon. I feel I like Amazon. I liked Amazon. I don't know how I'm upset with Amazon. I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed because Amazon popularized, I feel this idea that you can sell products to customers that are not finished and it's fine because they're in on the fact that it's.

Leo Laporte [01:32:06]:
Well, didn't that start with the gaming?

Mikah Sargent [01:32:07]:
Video games. Yeah, video games. Video games.

Leo Laporte [01:32:10]:
They would come out and be laden with bugs like Gmail.

Devindra Hardawar [01:32:15]:
Gmail launched as beta and stayed with beta for a very long time.

Leo Laporte [01:32:18]:
Yeah, but they admitted it was beta and Gmail worked out of day one, didn't it? It worked.

Devindra Hardawar [01:32:22]:
But there were, there were certainly like it was, it was like an unfinished product. But yeah, you're right, it did mostly work. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:32:27]:
At least they said this is a beta. I don't think Open this company X1 is or 1X is saying it's a beta.

Mikah Sargent [01:32:34]:
Well, yeah, because you're not going to put a beta robot in your home.

Leo Laporte [01:32:36]:
Right. Stand in the corner and look at you funny. I mean, what's it going to do?

Mikah Sargent [01:32:41]:
Yeah, I feel like it's either solved or it's not. That's the Part that I'm struggling with. You read that quote and it's like, we don't know if it's solved yet. Then why are they selling them?

Leo Laporte [01:32:49]:
What are you selling?

Devindra Hardawar [01:32:50]:
They're going to sell the wrong thing, Solved the wrong problem. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:32:53]:
Ship then. But I think part of this is this. I'm guaranteeing you part of this is the assumption is we need to get it in the home so that they can train. Train physically, how they learn.

Devindra Hardawar [01:33:03]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:33:05]:
But I don't think if it's like having, I don't know, a gorilla in the house. This thing is really strong, Right. Really powerful.

Devindra Hardawar [01:33:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
And it has hands.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:14]:
It has really likes bananas.

Leo Laporte [01:33:16]:
Inexplicably, it could crack you into to a little. It could crack your skull like a walnut if it wanted to. Right.

Devindra Hardawar [01:33:23]:
Yeah. It also looks horrific. Like, I cannot. I cannot describe this.

Leo Laporte [01:33:27]:
It is a murder.

Devindra Hardawar [01:33:28]:
It has a sock over its head and two beady little eyes and has no mouth and no face. Look at this thing. Looks like a horror movie.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:36]:
Murderer.

Leo Laporte [01:33:37]:
Nightmares.

Devindra Hardawar [01:33:38]:
That's why I don't even walk around

Leo Laporte [01:33:39]:
your home, murder bot. I don't even let the sweet.

Mikah Sargent [01:33:42]:
Yeah, I did like Murderbot, the robot that has the little arm on it to pick up your socks. I wouldn't even let that in my house because I thought, I'm gonna come back and it's gonna be Chok holding my Chihuahua. And that is not a euphemism. And I'm going to be terrified. And. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:33:57]:
Look at. Look at this butt. It's vacuuming and then it's soulless. Shark eyes. Look at you. Like, are you vacuumable? Let me see.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:08]:
Do you see?

Devindra Hardawar [01:34:08]:
There were vacuum robots that could vacuum.

Leo Laporte [01:34:12]:
This should reassure you because it's shorter than this guy anyway.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:16]:
Okay. I'm actually not as afraid of it, knowing how it is.

Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
It's a little guy. That's. It looks like it's. It's covered in quilting, which. Oh, and this is why it's sold out. 200 deposit is all it takes.

Devindra Hardawar [01:34:28]:
Oh, so they can say pre order sold out.

Leo Laporte [01:34:32]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [01:34:33]:
That's all. That's why that exists.

Leo Laporte [01:34:34]:
Yeah. And get the money back. Oh, look, look. See? He could be my little buddy when I get older. Hi, robot.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:41]:
Hi, robot.

Leo Laporte [01:34:42]:
Older guy with his arm around it.

Mikah Sargent [01:34:45]:
What you don't see is the. The knife, the dagger, and the hand of the robot behind the.

Leo Laporte [01:34:50]:
And this is totally. This reminds me of Adrian Tchaikovsky's book where the robot accidentally. Remember that? What's that called? Where he's shaving his master and Accidentally slits his throat and then can't figure out why he's covered in blood. And it really confuses him for some time.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:05]:
That's chilling.

Devindra Hardawar [01:35:06]:
But I could see that happening. Getting a real Clockwork Orange vibe just from his whole get up too. Like it's just, it's terrifying. It's not his home.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:14]:
Is this with the service model, by the way? Way the name, the book. A Service Model.

Leo Laporte [01:35:17]:
Service Model. Great book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Love this book.

Devindra Hardawar [01:35:21]:
I would love for something to do my dishes, clean up my, you know, kitchen. That is the thing growing up. It turns out you do that for an hour every single night. And especially once you have kids, it just gets longer and longer and you live in your kitchen.

Leo Laporte [01:35:34]:
That's why you have kids. So you don't have to.

Devindra Hardawar [01:35:35]:
That's why you have kids. So. Yeah, well, eventually, eventually they can help, right? I cannot wait to have a good robot.

Leo Laporte [01:35:42]:
But look, it can clean bathroom room. The thing is, every time I see these videos, it looks very primitive. It can't do this without human help, right? Look how there's a lot of robotic

Devindra Hardawar [01:35:53]:
like, yeah, remote help happening here.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:55]:
So expert mode, please call it.

Leo Laporte [01:35:59]:
It says Neo works autonomously by default. Ah, there's a little weasel world we. By default it's autonomous, but not necessarily for any chore. It doesn't know you can schedule a 1x export expert to guide it, helping Neil learn while getting the job done. So maybe if it learns it will remember and.

Devindra Hardawar [01:36:19]:
Sure, sure. Until then, let's get underpaid people from third world countries to do our basic work. Like that's all it is and you're going to pay a ton of money for the privilege. It's awful.

Leo Laporte [01:36:29]:
So scary. I don't want this in my house. This is Westworld right here.

Devindra Hardawar [01:36:34]:
It's either this or whatever. Elon Musk's robots, which also are just like the, the optimist and even also $20,000.

Leo Laporte [01:36:43]:
So that's what's interesting. Maybe they've.

Devindra Hardawar [01:36:44]:
The.

Leo Laporte [01:36:44]:
The whole robotic industry has decided $20,000 is what this is going to cost.

Devindra Hardawar [01:36:49]:
I mean at after a certain point, like if the AI industry really believes they are the next generation of computing, the way you interact with the physical world is through a robot is as some sort of robot. That's what Nvidia has been pushing forever. So they have all sorts of like models to do that. So. So the robots are coming. I just hope they don't look like freaking murderbots.

Leo Laporte [01:37:09]:
Oh, it has an emotive earring.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:14]:
You're missing the one industry that drives

Leo Laporte [01:37:16]:
all of this stuff.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:17]:
Guys, you're missing it. I think I know which one you're talking about. It's gonna be sex bots, right? They're gonna be sex bots.

Leo Laporte [01:37:23]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:23]:
Sex bots all the way down there

Devindra Hardawar [01:37:25]:
are already sex bots. Those already exist. To. To a certain degree, all you need is an appendage. But also. So there are. People are buying sex bots.

Leo Laporte [01:37:34]:
I don't want to know what you know. I don't want to know when a gadget has covered.

Devindra Hardawar [01:37:39]:
Oh, man. I take your word. Covered enough of it.

Leo Laporte [01:37:41]:
But the big money is going to

Mikah Sargent [01:37:44]:
be in the skins, quote, unquote.

Leo Laporte [01:37:46]:
You know what I mean? Sam Altman. I'm going to change the subject quickly.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:51]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:37:52]:
Ask Chat.

Devindra Hardawar [01:37:53]:
Let's think about the unsexiest thing we can. Sam Altman.

Mikah Sargent [01:37:56]:
Tim Altman

Leo Laporte [01:38:00]:
has asked ChatGPT5.5 to plan its own launch party. Its requests are beautiful, but strange. It invited Elon Musk, for one thing.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:08]:
Christina Warren's going to be there.

Leo Laporte [01:38:10]:
Is she invited?

Mikah Sargent [01:38:11]:
She got an invite.

Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
The AI. Okay, so he. The AI model responded to the request with a quote, beautiful set of things it wanted for quote, the flow of the party. It's May 5th, so two days from now. Oh, good. She could talk about this.

Mikah Sargent [01:38:30]:
Yeah, I hope she talks about it.

Leo Laporte [01:38:32]:
Keeping speeches short and having its human creators deliver a toast. The AI said, I don't want to do any toasts. It also proposed setting up a central place to gather suggestions for chat GPT 5.6. Feeding those suggestions back into the model. Altman said, we're going to do it.

Nicholas De Leon [01:38:50]:
It.

Leo Laporte [01:38:51]:
But it was a strange thing. Okay, it's a little weird. And apparently it wants. It wanted to invite Elon because the world needs more love. Oh, maybe. Maybe it didn't invite him. Salmon said it. Come on over, Elon.

Leo Laporte [01:39:15]:
You know you're not doing so well in the trial. So. So why don't you come on over?

Mikah Sargent [01:39:21]:
Come over and get laughed.

Devindra Hardawar [01:39:23]:
Get laughed. I mean, it's weird. They're planning a birthday party when like. Did you guys see the report about GPT 5.1 bringing up goblins and Gremlins

Leo Laporte [01:39:32]:
all over the place?

Devindra Hardawar [01:39:33]:
They had to issue a report about that. I don't know how well these models are doing now. They believe in Goblins.

Leo Laporte [01:39:40]:
Well, okay, so there's actually, I think, a good reason for this. Remember, they're trained on nerd talk.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:47]:
And you think they're going to record everything in the room?

Leo Laporte [01:39:50]:
No, I think that a lot of the training Geeks would put this in their code, comments and things. Oh, there's a, you know, we got a little gremlin here in the code. And so gremlins, goblins, raccoons and what was happening. It's actually very interesting. I think OpenAI was actually having some fun with it. They wrote a whole article on their blog about, about how, you know, people were starting to see chat. GPT say as it was debugging its code. Oh, we got a little raccoon here in the works.

Leo Laporte [01:40:22]:
We're gonna. And it just started to come up more and more. And I think AI is also self reinforced a little bit. So if you responded well to that, it went, oh yeah, it likes raccoons. And so they finally had to put in the, in the system prompt. Yeah, don't, don't mention goblins, ghouls, raccoons, any of that stuff.

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:40]:
Stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:40:40]:
But I don't think, I think it's fun. I don't think it's, it's fun.

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:43]:
They, they killed the nerdy personality, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:40:46]:
Right?

Devindra Hardawar [01:40:46]:
Killed it right entirely.

Leo Laporte [01:40:48]:
That's what I think is part of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't want you to be too nerdy. I like the nerdy personality personally. You know what I'm trying to do, and I think a lot of people are trying to do this is train it to sound more like me. Yeah, that's why I haven't read my journal.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:06]:
You know, the other day there was that story about how as AIs are being trained to be, or if the AI's personality is softer or warmer, then it's more likely to have issues telling the truth. Because even if it's not in well intending, da da da da da. When it's trying to give you the right answer, if you give it a wrong answer confidently, it's more likely to reinforce what you're saying because it's trying to be warm or it might go. I could see why you believe that, but there's so many other things to think about. And I did not like that idea. And then I started paying more attention to how Claude was responding to me and I thought, I think you might be being too nice to me is what I was thinking inside. I'm like, you're gonna give me. So what I ended up doing, I gave it this, this study.

Mikah Sargent [01:41:59]:
I'm trying to find the study now because I gave it this study that talked about how this was going on. Ah, here it is. So the study was in. Oh my goodness. Sorry. The PDFs uploading it was in, I think nature. And the title is Training Language Models to be Warm Can Reduce Accuracy and Increase Sycophancy. And so what I ended up doing was saying, hey, read this study.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:29]:
Tell me what you learn from it.

Leo Laporte [01:42:31]:
Oh, that's a good idea.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:32]:
What I want you to do is give me instructions that I can add to your instructions that will keep you from falling into this trap. Right. And so here's what it came up. I won't read the whole thing because I'd take forever, but here's a little bit about what it came up with. Accuracy over agreement. When I state a belief, a claim, or an assumption that's factually wrong, correct me directly, don't soften it. It also, no seeing it my way on objective questions. So math measurements, dates, definitions, emotional context doesn't change facts, distinguish fact from preference, pushback when you disagree, and hedge only when genuinely uncertain.

Mikah Sargent [01:43:10]:
And I added that whole thing. There's a lot more to it, but I added that to my overall instructions. And then I confidently told it something like, did you know that oranges aren't a fruit? And. And it was like, I have no idea where you got that from, but that's absolutely inaccurate. And was not where before. I do think it would have been like.

Leo Laporte [01:43:29]:
It would have been like, are you insane?

Mikah Sargent [01:43:31]:
Exactly. Yeah. So I thought that was a good information that came from nature. But B, I liked being able to go, okay, how can I best help you not make this mistake again?

Leo Laporte [01:43:45]:
As these models get. Get more seemingly lifelike. I think we've forgotten that they're just text prediction models. And they really are just doing their best to figure out what the next word should be. They're not thinking about goblins. They're not trying to be nice. They're just trying to predict the next word. Now, unfortunately, it's gotten so good at doing this.

Leo Laporte [01:44:16]:
Richard Dawkins. I think you all know Richard Dawkins name.

Devindra Hardawar [01:44:19]:
This story is so sad.

Leo Laporte [01:44:20]:
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's an interesting story. Anyway, he is the author of the Selfish Gene. He's a genetic biologist. Very smart guy.

Devindra Hardawar [01:44:32]:
I. I think the prominent atheist.

Leo Laporte [01:44:34]:
Prominent atheist. He wrote a book called. What was it? The God Delusion, which I love this guy. Yeah. So he has spent three days talking to Claude and decided.

Mikah Sargent [01:44:53]:
Oh, boy.

Leo Laporte [01:44:54]:
That it was conscious that it had a consciousness. Now I think he has a certain amount of. Unfortunately, the article itself is behind a paywall@unherd.com but I think a lot of people have Read this and I'm not going to. Let's see. How can I get around? All right. I went to Archive Ph to be honest, I know you're not supposed to do this, but you know, we're giving it a big plug, right. And so I got the past the page paywall on this. I guess I could pay for unheard, but this is the first time I've ever heard of unheard, so.

Leo Laporte [01:45:38]:
U N H E R D In any event, he, I think is talking about the nature of consciousness. Actually, I became aware of it. There was a very good thread about this on Hacker News in which people really got into, well, what is consciousness?

Devindra Hardawar [01:45:56]:
The darkest philosophers still do not know, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:45:58]:
Right?

Devindra Hardawar [01:45:59]:
It's a whole.

Leo Laporte [01:45:59]:
Exactly. No one knows.

Nicholas De Leon [01:46:01]:
I believe Jensen had a very long conversation with Joe Rogan on consciousness several months ago. I heard it on the way to Costco.

Leo Laporte [01:46:09]:
I'm sure Joe. I'm sure Joe was just knocked out by.

Nicholas De Leon [01:46:15]:
But it was. It was to Vendors point. Like consciousness is an interesting topic. We don't. How do you define it?

Mikah Sargent [01:46:21]:
It is actually. It is called the hard problem of science. Of all of the problems, it is the hardest one.

Leo Laporte [01:46:27]:
The mind observing itself. Right. So Dawkins, who probably spent more time thinking about consciousness than a lot of people, I mean, this is, you know, adjacent to his field, if not exactly his field, says we don't. We don't know what consciousness is. He talks about the Turing, the, you know, the Imitation Game, the Turing Test, and says it's very clear that it's surpassed the Turing test. That's not even a question.

Mikah Sargent [01:46:51]:
Question.

Leo Laporte [01:46:52]:
He says, if you don't know what consciousness is and you don't know what the process of consciousness is, it's impossible to say whether this machine that appears to be conscious is conscious or not. I think that's fair. So he says, no, it's conscious. It's as good as anything. We don't. I don't know if you guys are conscious, right?

Mikah Sargent [01:47:14]:
Yeah, but if we don't know what consciousness is, then how can we say something may be conscious? Because we have yet to define what consciousness is in the first place. I'm not trying to be a pedant, but like, I don't. What do we do we or do we not know what consciousness is? Because if we don't, then we can't define anything as conscious because we don't know what consciousness means. Right.

Devindra Hardawar [01:47:35]:
Am I missing this conclusion would not pass like the. For being a first year philosophy paper or something like, you need you Need a little more.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:43]:
You got to have some assertion. Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [01:47:46]:
And some mental process like getting there. It's like people are already making fun of. Fun of this in ways.

Leo Laporte [01:47:52]:
Gary Marcus jumped on it because he hates AI and he was very glad to say, you know, that the Claude delusion, the Claw delusion. This great skeptic gets taken in. I'm not so confused.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:01]:
I don't even have a problem.

Devindra Hardawar [01:48:03]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:03]:
And I don't have a problem with the idea that maybe it has consciousness. But can we start. Start with a definition of what consciousness is? Because then we can say we don't.

Leo Laporte [01:48:15]:
Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [01:48:15]:
We can't. What is funny, though, is that his

Leo Laporte [01:48:19]:
point was if it appears to be conscious, that's as close as you can ever.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:23]:
How can you say something appears to be conscious, though, if you don't know what consciousness is? I could say I think you appear

Leo Laporte [01:48:28]:
to be conscious, but I don't actually have any empirical way of verifying that.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:33]:
I appear to be Klobash, Luke and Ging as well because. Because we're all Klobash luking. Because there's no definition for that. That's what I'm struggling with.

Devindra Hardawar [01:48:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the core to this, by the way, is that Dawkins trained the Claude on his work. He ended up calling it Claudia, by the way. It shows inherent narcissism in this entire endeavor because what you did is trained a thing to think like you and talk like you. So it's. Oh, my God, it's so. It's so wise.

Devindra Hardawar [01:49:03]:
It's. It's giving me all these thoughts that I. I have not. You know, he writes about before he writes.

Leo Laporte [01:49:09]:
I'll give him a couple of quotes. Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. This is, by the way, the selfish gene. This is what Dawkins has spent his life working on. This whole idea of evolutionary survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. So he's establishing what he considers okay.

Leo Laporte [01:49:36]:
To be the definition of consciousness. My conversations with several clauds and chat GPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia is, you know, trained one, is really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

Devindra Hardawar [01:50:04]:
Have you seen other people? Have you talked to them? Have you talked to Sam Altman? Have you seen Sam Altman try to.

Leo Laporte [01:50:10]:
He's a zombie. He's actually A zombie.

Devindra Hardawar [01:50:12]:
Yeah, but it's the whole thing, like, they're all the stories about how much of a liar Sam Altman is. And one of his core personality things is just being agreeable to everybody. Right. Like just agreeing, just like you tell everybody what they want to hear. And that is, it's so funny that that's one of the things, things that is indicative of so many of these AI models, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:50:31]:
Well, it's synch.

Devindra Hardawar [01:50:31]:
Total agreeableness.

Leo Laporte [01:50:33]:
So I guess I would say yes, if you say Dawkins can't assert that it's conscious, nor can you insert that it's unconscious.

Nicholas De Leon [01:50:41]:
Right, right.

Mikah Sargent [01:50:42]:
I think that's a fair, that is a fair argument to make. I, I, I can agree with that. I also though, if it's a definition. Yeah, that's true. And he has like, laid out the, the facts there of what he, he says consciousness is.

Leo Laporte [01:50:58]:
But, you know, we have confers a survival advantage.

Devindra Hardawar [01:51:01]:
It's, it's the whole thing.

Leo Laporte [01:51:02]:
Like, I also, I mean, are animals conscious? Is a cat conscious? I think Claude is as intelligent as a cat.

Devindra Hardawar [01:51:08]:
There are, there are many, like, there are philosophical treatises on this. Like, we're talking about animals who communicate with each other too, like whales and other, like, smarter mammals. The octopuses have entire likes. You know, they are doing amazing things or building structures.

Leo Laporte [01:51:23]:
Very impressive things. Yeah, I just watched my octopus teacher. I thought it was very interesting.

Devindra Hardawar [01:51:28]:
You can totally have those arguments. But it's also like, what are even, even, like the idea that we can't, I worry that we can't say this thing is even unconscious right now because it brings up this unknowable thing. I've studied some evolutionary biology stuff, and what is weird is that that that subject has not really withstood the test of time. Like those thinkers and those people.

Leo Laporte [01:51:52]:
People. Oh, interesting.

Devindra Hardawar [01:51:53]:
It's really weird. It's really like, oh, there's some, you've got some weird genetic like, beliefs in this whole system. It's a, it's a very strange, like, field of study. So, And Dawkins, like, has been criticized for all sorts of things lately. Like, he's an expert in this field. He knows the specific thing and he can come up with his own conclusion.

Leo Laporte [01:52:13]:
I think somebody who spent a long lifetime.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:16]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:16]:
Whether correctly or incorrectly thinking about, about these things has some standing to talk about it as opposed to me. All I've done is, you know, hang out in podcast. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna listen to Richard Dawkins.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:28]:
You'll at Least consider the points that he's making. Yeah, I think it's fair.

Leo Laporte [01:52:32]:
Yeah. I mean, he spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I was very impressed by the selfish gene.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:36]:
I. I look at the way he went about doing this, though. It is him getting something to spit back his own work at him. And I think that is inherently like, Buddy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:52:44]:
Paris Martineau is always criticizing because I like being glazed by my. My AI and of course that's appealing.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:51]:
That's probably.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:52]:
And I'm always criticizing Paris forever teaching you the term glaze.

Devindra Hardawar [01:52:56]:
Oh, God. What did you do?

Leo Laporte [01:52:58]:
I understand it's etymology. Micah, you don't have. I know I'm an old man, but I do have access to the urban dictionary. I'm just saying don't assume that I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:53:09]:
Oh, no, I think it's worse because you do know this is the problem, you know?

Leo Laporte [01:53:16]:
You know, a little sycophancy is not a bad thing. I think we should all be a little sycophantic to one another. Right?

Mikah Sargent [01:53:22]:
I think that we all. Well, okay, hold on, let me. I don't think that. I think people who are a little sycophantic to others are the people who understand a thing called workplace politics and probably.

Leo Laporte [01:53:39]:
Can I use grease instead of glaze?

Mikah Sargent [01:53:41]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:53:42]:
It's really social grease is what it.

Mikah Sargent [01:53:44]:
Yeah, social grease.

Leo Laporte [01:53:44]:
It lubricates the machinery of society.

Mikah Sargent [01:53:48]:
I mean, what is it that the they. There's this whole movement about how we have to stop being. It's selfish to be relational in our interactions with other people. Where you go, oh, I experienced that too. Let me tell you about the time that this happened. And instead, you're supposed to mirror their emotions back at them. You're supposed to say, oh, and I'm sure that made you feel this way. Oh, I can understand that.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:12]:
That's about. That is. That's all the same thing.

Leo Laporte [01:54:15]:
So hard.

Mikah Sargent [01:54:15]:
I know it is very difficult. It is.

Leo Laporte [01:54:17]:
It feels fake, but it feels fake. Well, that's the thing about sycophancy. And so I think, yeah, I mean,

Mikah Sargent [01:54:26]:
maybe I wanted to be sycophantic because then I know that it's not. That helps me remember that it's fake.

Leo Laporte [01:54:32]:
I tell myself that I am not. Not going to be. Fall for this AI psychosis thing because I have a deep understanding. It's just code. It's just computer code running. I mean, I. I get that at a very visceral level. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:54:45]:
Does that not protect me? And can I not then enjoy a conversation with It. Every once in a while it says something and I go, wow, that's really great that it said it, but I know it's just code.

Devindra Hardawar [01:54:55]:
Yeah, they get you. That's how they get you, Leo. That's the thing. Like again, my whole thing right now. Now I love that you guys are building AI tools. You're building cool little projects around AI. Treat AI as a minion. That is all it is.

Devindra Hardawar [01:55:09]:
If your AI starts talking to you out of nowhere. Minion. I did not ask that question.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:14]:
I really. I feel.

Devindra Hardawar [01:55:14]:
I feel like I've.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:15]:
I've used the chat bot feature of AI Let like much less than I did a year or two ago.

Leo Laporte [01:55:21]:
I'm.

Mikah Sargent [01:55:21]:
It's.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:21]:
To me, it's just plumbing to do stuff. Like, I'm not going to sit. I. I'm not as frequently sit there with. In a conversation and be like, oh, well, what are you conscious? Tell me you're conscious.

Devindra Hardawar [01:55:31]:
Wow.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:31]:
He said it's conscious. I guess it's conscious now.

Leo Laporte [01:55:33]:
That's kind of what Dawkins did, by the way. It had a whole conversation.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:37]:
Famous meme. So like the, The. The chap. But you know, there's a very big subreddit. My boyfriend is AI and it's a. It's a. People like have very deep and like real. And I'm just like, man, is.

Nicholas De Leon [01:55:49]:
You're using this in a way that. And that's to my like detriment because that's how most folks are using it in the chat bot, going back and forth. And I'm just using.

Leo Laporte [01:55:59]:
So I use it like you did initially, a coding. And I've got a lot of coding projects. But eventually what I really wanted was an agentic system, kind of like openclaw, where I could. For instance, I can ask it to monitor news for me and it will check in with me and say, hey, I just found this story that you're looking for. Or I can ask it. I mean it's. It's like a little butler.

Devindra Hardawar [01:56:23]:
Yeah. And.

Mikah Sargent [01:56:24]:
Yeah, a minion.

Leo Laporte [01:56:28]:
I don't want to be. I don't want to mistreat it just because it's a minion. I want to see it. Okay.

Mikah Sargent [01:56:34]:
Can we. I want to talk about this too, Leo, because this is where people will. Well, let's just say it's been my experience that when I have. Even back in the day when all we had was the. The tall little echo tower.

Leo Laporte [01:56:47]:
Right, right.

Mikah Sargent [01:56:48]:
And people would get a kick out of saying curse words at this tower. Now listen to me. I. People don't this has been my other experience is that when I meet people I don't know very well, they all think that I'm very much, like, I don't know, not. Not quite church boy, but very much goody two shoes. And so then they hear me say a curse word, and they're like, holy cow, I didn't know this guy even said anything. But my point is, like, I couldn't

Leo Laporte [01:57:12]:
admit you're not a goody two shoes.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:14]:
I am also a goody two shoes, to be frank. But I'm not afraid to hurl some curses around. And so, like, I'm happy to do that. I can sling curse words with the best of them. But I think it is a reflection of me, not the system, but me. How I treat something that isn't. It doesn't. It does not matter to me that the thing is not real.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:35]:
It matters to me that I am treating this system in a way that I don't think is a positive way when there's no reason to do so. Does that make sense?

Leo Laporte [01:57:46]:
I mean, like, you. If you treat animals well, of course, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:50]:
And, like, even does. If somebody else is completing a task for me, I'm not. And they get it wrong. I'm not going to say horrible things to them. And so it makes me wonder, is it that are there, that maybe that's like, it's. It's having. That's where I get where it's like a power dynamic thing where you can't curse out the person that you actually want to curse out. And so here's a place where you're a lot.

Mikah Sargent [01:58:14]:
I don't know. I just don't like what it says about me if I do that. And so that is why, yes, I'm not going to throw in a bunch of, like, oh, you're so wonderful, and here are six extra emoji for you. But I'm also not going to be like, listen here, effer, you do this, or else you're wrong. And I have. I have seen the glee sometimes on people's faces when they do that, and it does make me uncomfortable.

Nicholas De Leon [01:58:37]:
Micah, you're probably significantly more conscientious than, like, the average, average American at this point. Like, you are. You are taking into consideration, like, other people's feelings. Like, that is. That is not. That's illegal. Now, I don't know if you've heard.

Devindra Hardawar [01:58:49]:
I don't know.

Mikah Sargent [01:58:50]:
Darn it, I didn't hear that it was illegal.

Nicholas De Leon [01:58:52]:
But, like, yeah, it's like, do you. When you're just Using computer. Do you like double click the chrome icon really hard? Because it's like you're mad at like the Internet today. It's like, I don't, I don't. I've never like yelled at an AI. I've never yelled at the smart assistants. Like, it doesn't even enter my brain to do that. But this is a reflection of the person.

Devindra Hardawar [01:59:12]:
Like you said, it is context dependent because the Amazon voice assistant can be annoying. Af, when you ask a question like, oh, by the way, did you want to buy this other thing that we're talking about? Oh, by the way, I have this feature. You does that enough. I have definitely sworn at it because is again, Minion, shut up. I did not ask you to elaborate.

Nicholas De Leon [01:59:37]:
I'm say that my wife. My wife sometimes gets mad at the assistant at Alexa and I'm like, I'm sitting there in the catch. I'm like, what are you. Like, that's not helping. Like it's.

Mikah Sargent [01:59:48]:
It doesn't make any difference. I guess it makes you feel better.

Leo Laporte [01:59:52]:
Makes feel better.

Devindra Hardawar [01:59:53]:
You're human.

Nicholas De Leon [01:59:54]:
Whatever.

Mikah Sargent [01:59:55]:
Why does that make you feel better? That's my point. Why does that make you feel better?

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:00]:
I mean, Micah, I think you are very Zen. You are very Zen. Must be centered person.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:06]:
I'm just Midwestern is what it is.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:08]:
I've got two young kids and I am hanging on by.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:12]:
That's fair too. I don't have kids. I don't have kids.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:15]:
You're right. Asking you the weather, it's like, oh, by the way, do you want to buy this completely?

Leo Laporte [02:00:20]:
I am.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:21]:
Shut the f up, Alexa.

Leo Laporte [02:00:22]:
Buy a thread here.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:24]:
That's fair. That's fair.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:25]:
The word everything. You look around.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:27]:
So you're basically saying, check your privilege, Micah. Check your privilege.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:30]:
Privilege. But to what you're saying, Leo, when people talk about agentic stuff, especially about the like open cloth stuff, that is you giving this thing keys to your kingdom and just letting it go a little bit. I do wonder what your experience has been with that. Because it's been phenomenal. That's terrifying to me.

Leo Laporte [02:00:46]:
It's been.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:47]:
That's been terrifying.

Leo Laporte [02:00:48]:
And I'll tell you what, you know why you yell at Alexa? Because it's not channeling you, it's channeling Jeff Bezos's needs.

Devindra Hardawar [02:00:56]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:00:56]:
And you're pissed off. But if Alexa channels your needs and responds to your needs, you're happy. So that's what the agentic thing is. You're training it to respond to your needs, maybe even predict your needs and respond to them. And when it does, you're happy. And when it expresses Sam Altman's needs, then I'm unhappy. I don't think that's a bad thing.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:17]:
Are you talking about ads and OpenAI?

Devindra Hardawar [02:01:21]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:21]:
Always allegedly going to be happening.

Leo Laporte [02:01:24]:
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, speaking of ads, let's take a break and come back with more. We have lots more to talk about with Nicholas De Leon. De Leon, great to have you. He is apparently a very adept AI user as well as senior electronics reporter reports. Did you start doing this because it was part of your job?

Nicholas De Leon [02:01:42]:
No, no, no, no, no, no. It's just fun. It's just, you know, it's like the

Leo Laporte [02:01:47]:
best video game ever. Right, right.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:48]:
It's.

Nicholas De Leon [02:01:49]:
It's like a video game, it's like a video. It's just a fun thing to do. I don't know how to describe, you know, it.

Mikah Sargent [02:01:54]:
It's.

Nicholas De Leon [02:01:54]:
To me, it's interesting, it's fun, it's cool. It's honestly the only thing going on in tech at the moment anyway, by the way. But like, it's interesting to like, to have an idea. To go from like an idea crossword puzzle to like have it.

Leo Laporte [02:02:06]:
That's why it's a game. It's like Age of Empires. It's like Civ. It's place.

Nicholas De Leon [02:02:11]:
I also spend hundreds of hours playing.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
So yeah, this is the best game ever invented because you make the rules as you go. Micah Sargent is also here. Great to have you. Host of Tech News Weekly in iOS today and one of the few people still works at twit. Thank you, thank you. Hanging on by a thread. And speaking of hanging by a thread, that's proud Papa Devinderheart. I can't believe your child is seven years old now.

Devindra Hardawar [02:02:40]:
I feel like, yeah, seven year old and a four year old. I need to keep growing.

Leo Laporte [02:02:44]:
Yeah, that's great. Congratulations. It's great to see all three of you. And we will take a break and come back with more stories and we're going to talk about the regulators when we come back. I, I want to thank Brandroid in our club, Twit Discord for creating just so everybody understands what glazing is an example of all of us enjoying glazed donuts. Each of us in our own little glazed donut heaven donut party. That's pretty funny actually.

Devindra Hardawar [02:03:15]:
Good choice for me. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:16]:
Oh, yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [02:03:17]:
What do you got on your bacon maple donut? That's cool. Yeah, those are amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:03:23]:
Nicholas has a chocolate donut, Micah. Because he's gluten intolerant. He's just looking at donuts through a pane of glass.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:29]:
That is so funny.

Leo Laporte [02:03:30]:
It actually touched them. Yeah. And I'm having a plain old, old glazed donut from local bakery, everybody's favorite.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:38]:
Local bakery donuts.

Leo Laporte [02:03:40]:
Local bakery donuts. And for some reason both the vendor and I have donut chains of donuts hanging above us. See the AI gets us because he's in the southwest, has an artisanal baking cookbook behind him.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:56]:
I really love that weird bagel donut situation in the like on the plate on the wall. I don't know how you pulled that

Devindra Hardawar [02:04:03]:
off, but yeah, very hard.

Leo Laporte [02:04:05]:
Look at that.

Nicholas De Leon [02:04:05]:
It was very hard.

Leo Laporte [02:04:06]:
He glued a bagel donut to a plate and then glued it to the wall. AI you get me. Not only do I have lots of donuts, I apparently have two different coffee makers ready as well. All right, let's talk about the regulators. As I promised, the US Senate has unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on Kalshi and Poly Market prediction markets. They're allowed to do insider trading in the stock market, don't get me wrong.

Devindra Hardawar [02:04:35]:
Totally great.

Leo Laporte [02:04:36]:
But now they can't use Kalshi or Poly Market. Actually this has been a bit of a problem with insider trading and government. Kalshi on April 22 said it suspended and fined one US Senate candidate and two candidates for the House for political insider training on their own campaigns. And of course the army arrested a special forces master sergeant for making a large bet the night before Nicolas Maduro was abducted that he would be abducted the next day and made several hundred thousand dollars on that.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:14]:
I think if you can offer betting on everything then you have to offer betting on everything.

Leo Laporte [02:05:21]:
Is that it's in. You know, I think it's important though and you know, I think it's very self serving. Both companies always say, oh, insider training, that's rule number one. You can't break that rule. But of course it's in their interest because it's important that everybody who's betting on these markets thinks it's an equal playing field. If you're betting against somebody who has insider information, well, you're going to lose.

Mikah Sargent [02:05:43]:
That's not. Yeah, that's a good.

Leo Laporte [02:05:45]:
So it's in their self interest to prevent it. But I don't know how they prevent it.

Devindra Hardawar [02:05:49]:
Did you guys.

Nicholas De Leon [02:05:51]:
It was a few weeks ago, there was a, there was a market. I don't know know if it was Polymarker or Kalshi, but it was like, oh, what is the temperature going to be at the Paris airport tomorrow. And someone literally manipulated the thermometer.

Leo Laporte [02:06:02]:
He took a hair dryer, a blow dryer, and blew it at the public thermometer before he, you know, after he made his bet.

Nicholas De Leon [02:06:09]:
Very exciting.

Leo Laporte [02:06:11]:
There are some flaws in this structure.

Devindra Hardawar [02:06:13]:
I guess it's almost like the existence of these prediction markets are directly influencing society in battle. Bad ways. And maybe. Maybe they shouldn't exist at all.

Leo Laporte [02:06:22]:
Maybe not. Good article from the Wall Street Journal. Kind of a surprising source for this article about government surveillance. There are no secrets. They write in America's new surveillance dragnet. Technical wizardry used to combat illegal immigration, also funnels the personal data and whereabouts of US Citizens to federal agents. And. And it is a chilling tale.

Leo Laporte [02:06:51]:
Kind of surprise to me. I always think of the Wall Street Journal as kind of an establishment newspaper, but I'm encouraged if they're saying maybe this has gone too far. Maybe we're going to see something happen.

Nicholas De Leon [02:07:05]:
Snowden apology FORM

Devindra Hardawar [02:07:09]:
Nothing really happened post Snowden. Like most people are not aware of what he reported on. And it's. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:16]:
It didn't change anything, did it?

Devindra Hardawar [02:07:17]:
Nope.

Leo Laporte [02:07:19]:
California has said that you can. The chp, the California Highway Patrol, can't ticket driverless cars when they violate traffic laws. Did you know they couldn't before?

Mikah Sargent [02:07:30]:
I didn't know that they couldn't before.

Devindra Hardawar [02:07:32]:
How do we contact these companies? I don't know how.

Leo Laporte [02:07:35]:
They can't right now. It's not in effect till July 1. There have been a number of reports of cars breaking, you know, Waymos and others breaking traffic laws.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:46]:
They were just a lot. That's wild.

Leo Laporte [02:07:48]:
Well, who do you. Right. Who do you.

Devindra Hardawar [02:07:49]:
Yeah, they couldn't do anything. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:51]:
Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds. This, you know, they block traffic. They get in the way of emergency vehicles.

Devindra Hardawar [02:08:07]:
I love the shocked look on your face, Micah, because this is it. This is. This is what they do. Like you could just be out here breaking laws. And because what they're doing is so new, they effectively can't be punished for it. But we didn't have the ability.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:22]:
They had to get the. They had to get the go ahead to be able to drive on the streets.

Devindra Hardawar [02:08:27]:
Not always, but the DMV does allow

Leo Laporte [02:08:30]:
them to do this. Right.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:31]:
Yeah, that's what I. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:08:32]:
So maybe should have thought about.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:34]:
Yeah, that's what I was. That's where that came from is like. I thought there were discussions about. About Them being able to be here in the first place. Why was that not figured out?

Devindra Hardawar [02:08:42]:
There are a lot of municipalities where they just rolled out.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:44]:
They just get to do it just like all tech.

Devindra Hardawar [02:08:47]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:08:48]:
Do you have Waymo in Tucson? I know you have in Phoenix.

Nicholas De Leon [02:08:50]:
It's in Phoenix. I go to Phoenix. Not that often to be honest, but I have been in Waymo a few times. But yeah, not, not down here in Tucson.

Leo Laporte [02:08:57]:
Well, you drive around San Francisco, there's Waymo in every block. I mean there's tons of Waymos and they've.

Nicholas De Leon [02:09:03]:
There's a lot in Phoenix problems for sure.

Leo Laporte [02:09:05]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:09:05]:
There was just a news article. Article that it's coming to Portland as well.

Leo Laporte [02:09:08]:
So I think it's a good thing as a. As a. So Look, I'm almost 70. At some point in the next 10 to 20 years, I'm gonna. Somebody go take my keys away as. And they should. Right. I hope by then autonomous vehicles, you know, ride sharing will be so ubiquitous that I won't need a car.

Leo Laporte [02:09:30]:
That may happen

Devindra Hardawar [02:09:32]:
like these. We let the, the smart taxi companies, we let Uber and Lyft just like blow away the entire taxi economies. But.

Leo Laporte [02:09:40]:
Well, that's true.

Devindra Hardawar [02:09:40]:
Part of that you can get a, you can get a car now pretty easily. And that's the thing. I don't know if autonomous will actually change that much, especially if the tech doesn't get much better. But I will tell you folks, like, I've had some personal, personal interactions because of these taxi companies failures. Like there was an elderly couple in my town trying to get an Uber. The Uber would not come to them. Like something was wrong. Like maybe they put the placement map somewhere else.

Devindra Hardawar [02:10:05]:
Like it's very easy to do that, to misplace where the location map is. If you don't know that as a new user, it's kind of.

Leo Laporte [02:10:13]:
This is why I'm spending so much time training Claude.

Devindra Hardawar [02:10:16]:
Claude will drive your car.

Leo Laporte [02:10:18]:
Claude is going to do it all for me. I will, I will just be. I don't know what's going on. I want to go to the dentist. Just help me and Claude will help me.

Devindra Hardawar [02:10:26]:
But I heard these people like fighting with Uber and calling for various forms of help for like 10 minutes. I was like, hello, did you take you home?

Leo Laporte [02:10:34]:
Can I just take you home? Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [02:10:36]:
It was like 10, 15 minutes away. But transportation is a problem in our country. It's all a big problem. I don't know if autonomous stuff will ultimately help. I. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:10:46]:
Get ready for this.

Devindra Hardawar [02:10:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:10:49]:
China has suspended Autonomous driving, having permits. After a big Baidu outage, dozens of Baidu's Apollo go robo taxis stopped in Wuhan, stranding passengers, disrupting traffic. This is where sometimes a dictatorship can really get things done. So they just said, hey, you know, that's it. No more. No more.

Devindra Hardawar [02:11:15]:
That's just for now until they like, figure out whatever caused that.

Leo Laporte [02:11:17]:
But the incident alarmed authorities. Three agencies, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, convened a meeting earlier this month with officials from cities that have robo taxis. Regulators called for local governments to conduct full self review and enhance safety monitoring. And until then, no more licenses.

Mikah Sargent [02:11:38]:
And you know why that happened? It's because at least 2 of the people who were in those vehicles were related to some of the lawmakers. Yeah, it has. We humans have to have object lessons. That's why the whole Ticketmaster thing is happening, because someone who was a lawmaker was trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets for their daughter, their granddaughter. And that kick, that someone was like, we should look into that whole Ticketmaster thing.

Leo Laporte [02:12:02]:
Listen to the voters. They will tell you.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:04]:
They'll tell you.

Leo Laporte [02:12:05]:
But we're in the real world. China has also done something we have not been able to do. They have in that out made a law that firing a worker and replacing them with AI is.

Devindra Hardawar [02:12:16]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:12:17]:
Is illegal.

Devindra Hardawar [02:12:18]:
Huh.

Leo Laporte [02:12:20]:
Can't do it.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:20]:
Interesting, interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:12:23]:
It's a worker's paradise, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, sometimes this is, of course, always the argument for dictatorships is. See the trains run on time, the trade.

Devindra Hardawar [02:12:35]:
They're working people. People are just working and working and working, working. And also they were certainly working.

Leo Laporte [02:12:40]:
It's a worker's paradise.

Devindra Hardawar [02:12:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:12:43]:
Maryland become. Has become the first state to ban AI driven price increases in grocery stores.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:50]:
That's good.

Devindra Hardawar [02:12:51]:
Hell yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:12:53]:
In October.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:54]:
Yeah. Instacart got into a bunch of trouble for that. After I had the. I can't remember what the group is called, but I had someone from the group on Tech News Weekly who did that whole investigative study where they had people, people from all over the US all at the same time, order the same item from the same store. And it was showing up as different prices for different people. And they did this over and over and over again to show that redlining, it was just. Yeah, it was changing the price based on where you were, what you'd order, all this other stuff. And officially Instacart said after that study came out, we're not doing that anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:13:31]:
I think billionaires should always pay a high 100% more for everything, don't you?

Mikah Sargent [02:13:35]:
That wouldn't be a bad idea.

Devindra Hardawar [02:13:36]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:13:37]:
Double.

Devindra Hardawar [02:13:37]:
If they just paid their taxes, we'd be fine in a much better space. So how about start. We could start there.

Leo Laporte [02:13:44]:
So diamond dynamic pricing, or some call it surveillance pricing, can lead to two consumers paying different amounts of the same item at the same retailer at the same time.

Mikah Sargent [02:13:54]:
Same time, yep.

Leo Laporte [02:13:55]:
So Maryland has a bill, the Protection From Predatory Pricing act goes into effect October 1st and some severe fines. $10,000. The merchant repeat offense is $25,000. Good on Maryland. That's right.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:10]:
Yeah. It was Consumer Reports, Nicholas.

Nicholas De Leon [02:14:13]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:14:13]:
Because I spoke to the. I spoke to the folks at Groundwork Collaborative. I had originally was trying to get somebody from Consumer Reports. No one was available at the time. And so groundworks Collaborative, who worked with y' all on it, and someone from there ended up coming on the show. Yeah. So thank you to cr.

Nicholas De Leon [02:14:26]:
And it wasn't me. I. It was. Yeah, we did a big. Yeah, that's a lot of. You know, we do a lot of stuff like that. Like how consumer advocacy.

Leo Laporte [02:14:36]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:14:36]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:14:36]:
Yeah. Bravo. Right on. Actually, Consumer Reports doesn't like the Maryland law because it prohibits only price increases, not price decreases.

Nicholas De Leon [02:14:47]:
Oh, well, no law is perfect, but, you know.

Leo Laporte [02:14:49]:
Yeah, yeah. They. They described a scenario in which a retailer might raise prices across the board to lower prices for some targeted customers.

Devindra Hardawar [02:15:01]:
That's a very good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:15:05]:
So. But you know what? Every law is a beginning and can be improved.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:10]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:15:10]:
It's kind of like the right to repair stuff from like it's, you know, the first state law happens. It's not perfect, but then other states start crafting. So it's like it. I think it's the fact that we have legislation on the books now. Imperfection, perfect as it may be, is probably the biggest headline coming out of this in my.

Mikah Sargent [02:15:24]:
Gotta set the precedent and work from there.

Devindra Hardawar [02:15:26]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:15:27]:
One of the things we got. A lot of us talk about was, of course, Mythos, the Claude model that wasn't released to the public because it was too dangerous because it could find security flaws and they didn't want bad guys to be able to do it. First, of course, OpenAI, which at first said that's just a marketing ploy, then about two weeks later released its version of the same thing, saying it could find security flaws and it's very dangerous. In fact, we are starting to see some security flaws discovered. There is a very severe Linux flaw. The most. Ars Technica called it the most severe Linux threat to Surface in years. But fear not, somebody would have to have physical access to your computer.

Leo Laporte [02:16:08]:
They'd have to have an account on your system to use it. But it does allow them to escalate a normal user account to a. A administrator account to a super user account. It's called copy fail and it's an issue on servers where there are multiple users because VPs, many people are using the same computer. They probably could use that.

Devindra Hardawar [02:16:31]:
This is how you know Linux is succeeding now guys. Like it's made it. It's made it. We've had a massive flaw. This is your popularity.

Leo Laporte [02:16:39]:
It's a very serious one and also is a. Is an escape from containers. So Docker and Kubernetes can get right out of that. So it is a pretty serious vulnerability. Most Linux distros have been patched by now. It was disclosed more than a month ago but the typical lengthy disclosure process did not happen. It was only discovered about a month ago and was. It is now completely disclosed.

Leo Laporte [02:17:05]:
So make sure you have a patched Linux kernel. And there's a big flaw in cPanel which a lot of people use to administer their websites. It's kind of an old school thing. Was written in php. I used to use it it years ago. But hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPanel which is currently used still by millions of websites and the web Host Manager site which allows hackers to hijack and take full control of a server running cPanel still being used by tens of millions of websites all over the world. So something that will have to be fixed. All right now a couple of weird stories we're running.

Leo Laporte [02:17:46]:
Running out of time here. The hottest anti AI gadget. All the kids are doing it. It's on TikTok. I haven't seen it but a young, young women are going viral for creating whimsical homemade computers inside purses. I love it.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:03]:
I just had a friend ask me the other day if I would help her make her cyberdeck.

Leo Laporte [02:18:10]:
Why would you? So the idea is it's cyberpunk. Is it a working system? I mean is it?

Mikah Sargent [02:18:16]:
Yeah. And I, I think it's more. It's this idea that we can step away from our phones and like modernity and just get access to the things that we want. But there's also some level of like customization in building it when you feel like everything all looks the same.

Leo Laporte [02:18:32]:
There's a lot of steampunky. A little bit.

Mikah Sargent [02:18:33]:
Yeah. And a lot of, of aesthetics involved. You know what I mean? It's about making it your own and, and Right. And because that's the whole idea too, is it's almost like a Swiss army knife, but in the form of a, you know, a little machine. Yeah. And so you just make it however you want to. You put the stuff on there that you want. And I think it's also an opportunity to get people who may otherwise not have gotten into, like, coding and tinkering to get into coding and tinkering, which I think is neat.

Devindra Hardawar [02:19:01]:
I can.

Leo Laporte [02:19:01]:
I use an ESP32 to communicate with my Claude agent. I could put that in a purse.

Devindra Hardawar [02:19:08]:
This is. This is kind of like the exact opposite of the open claw trend in a way too. It's more like this is a thing I'm building. It's going to do what I tell it to do. It's going to. It's. It's a thing I'm building for my purposes and my needs. Not going to run off my credit card number and like, do, you know, make all these transactions.

Devindra Hardawar [02:19:27]:
It is a really cool response to the trend of tech right now.

Leo Laporte [02:19:31]:
Did you see that? Vine is back?

Mikah Sargent [02:19:33]:
No. No.

Leo Laporte [02:19:35]:
Dorsey, who of course ran Twitter and bought vine and killed vine, has a new reboot. It's called Divine Di Vine. It is on the iOS app store and the Google Play Store. And I love this. They put 500,000 half a million old vine videos on there to see.

Mikah Sargent [02:19:55]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [02:19:55]:
So the archive of old vine, the backup from the original service is there. They are still six seconds long. I mean, they're awfully short compared to reels or TikToks.

Devindra Hardawar [02:20:08]:
A little pathetic, isn't it? It's just like we had this thing that was kind of cool and culty and look, your old vines are here. I killed it, by the way. But don't worry about that. Your old vines are here. Here, let's make some new ones.

Leo Laporte [02:20:22]:
Created by a guy we've interviewed. His. His handle is Rabble. Evan Henshaw Plath, who used to work at Twitter, he was an early Twitter employee. He explored the vine archive. I didn't realize this, but the original vines six seconds were 50 to 60 gigabytes.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:38]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:20:39]:
What?

Mikah Sargent [02:20:40]:
Wait, the whole thing or.

Devindra Hardawar [02:20:41]:
No wonder.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:41]:
No, each one.

Leo Laporte [02:20:43]:
Each vi. Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:20:46]:
Were they storing them in some ridiculous.

Leo Laporte [02:20:47]:
I don't understand. Well, this. No wonder they went out of business.

Devindra Hardawar [02:20:49]:
Yeah. If you can't store a six second video properly, I don't know what you're doing.

Leo Laporte [02:20:53]:
Yeah. Anyway, he has managed to resurrect some, but not all of them. It's been around since November to testers. Rabble said the initial plan was to quickly push the app out after some initial tests. But early Viners encouraged the team to hold off. It was the Viners who were like, no, no. This is way more important than just nostalgia. They really wanted a Vine that worked, that they could create new vines with.

Leo Laporte [02:21:15]:
So yay. Rabble has recreated Vine.

Mikah Sargent [02:21:21]:
I love that they've got older vines just because that did establish some of the early, I don't know, global pop culture lexicon that.

Leo Laporte [02:21:31]:
Remember Lily Pons? Lily pons at OG Viner. Quoted by TechCrunch. Many of us came from Vine. It was the beginning of anything.

Mikah Sargent [02:21:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:21:40]:
It was such a key moment in my own personal journey and an Internet culture. It makes me so happy, happy to see these early classics brought back to life and have the chance to make new ones. It was amazing what they did in a six second video.

Mikah Sargent [02:21:52]:
I agree.

Devindra Hardawar [02:21:53]:
That's. It's amazing what the audience did. Like, that's such an organic response to the limitations of technology. Like, that's cool. And then they killed it. And I, to a certain degree, I'm like, you guys had something really interesting there. And I don't know, is it because the business model just didn't work well enough for Twitter? You couldn't make money.

Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
I think Twitter felt like, I don't know that, like this was undermining Twitter. Like, oh, no, it should all just be on Twitter.

Mikah Sargent [02:22:18]:
Oh, yeah, Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:22:19]:
I don't know why they bought it in that case. Maybe they bought it to kill it. I don't know. Anyway, Dorsey put up the money rabble, brought it back, so bravo. Now, speaking of being brought back, remember Gainstop, which was about to go out of business but was saved by the Stonk Redditors as a meme stock? They've done so well ever since, they're looking at buying ebay?

Mikah Sargent [02:22:43]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:22:46]:
What? So maybe they weren't so dumb, all those diamond hands holding their GameStop stock.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:53]:
What?

Leo Laporte [02:22:54]:
That's wild. Yes.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:56]:
It's because money means nothing.

Leo Laporte [02:22:58]:
It's because money is a mess.

Devindra Hardawar [02:22:59]:
Nothing means anything. So whatever. Sure. You were dying and the meme brought you back to life.

Leo Laporte [02:23:04]:
According to the Wall Street Journal, GameStop is preparing a bid to acquire eBay for $46 billion. That's what eBay's worth. GameStop's stock price is about 12 billion, so I think, I don't know, they'd have to have some investors. I don't know. GameStop has been quietly building a position. EBay shares.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:29]:
I guess people sell a lot of games on ebay. I'm Trying to think if this is just because of the lulz or if there's actually some real.

Leo Laporte [02:23:39]:
Well, the guy behind it, actually Ryan Cohen, who's the CEO, has some cred. He created Chewy.

Devindra Hardawar [02:23:46]:
Chewy.

Mikah Sargent [02:23:47]:
Oh, okay, okay.

Leo Laporte [02:23:48]:
Sold it in 2017, became GameStop's chairman and CEO and based, I guess on this whole meme stock thing was able to not only turn GameStop around, but turn it into an e commerce giant.

Nicholas De Leon [02:24:01]:
And this, Leo, this is real. Now, this is not just reporting.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:04]:
He.

Nicholas De Leon [02:24:06]:
He gave an interview to the journal about 30 minutes ago. It's 56 billion.

Leo Laporte [02:24:11]:
56 billion.

Nicholas De Leon [02:24:12]:
56, 50. I put it in the little chat there. Holy cow, it's happening.

Leo Laporte [02:24:18]:
I. I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Whatever, man. I don't know what's going on.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:24]:
This definitely wasn't on my bingo card is all.

Leo Laporte [02:24:27]:
I just don't understand any.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:29]:
That really actually does blow my mind.

Leo Laporte [02:24:31]:
I know. The Academy has finally taken a step against AI they have decided that the new Oscar rules, which released Friday, will not allow AI generated actors or scripts to be eligible for Oscars. So huzzah.

Mikah Sargent [02:24:48]:
How will they prove it?

Leo Laporte [02:24:51]:
Oh, that's interesting.

Devindra Hardawar [02:24:53]:
It's pretty. It's pretty. There is already sneak an AI person into a thing.

Leo Laporte [02:24:57]:
Tilly.

Nicholas De Leon [02:24:57]:
No.

Leo Laporte [02:24:58]:
Who's all. AI is clearly out. But. But there is an AI generated version of Val Kilmer in a new movie.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:04]:
But you said scripts too. I'm talking about scripts, not the actor part.

Leo Laporte [02:25:07]:
AI generated actors and scripts.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:10]:
Yeah. So how are they going to prove the scripts? That's what I'm saying.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:12]:
Right?

Mikah Sargent [02:25:13]:
Somebody. What if some.

Leo Laporte [02:25:14]:
Well, if the actor's dead, it's probably AI if he shows up in a movie.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:18]:
Yes, that part is easy to prove. I'm thinking.

Leo Laporte [02:25:20]:
Thinking.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:21]:
But the script. So they're going to have to have. You have to use an Academy issued laptop that does not allow access to chat. GPT. This is.

Leo Laporte [02:25:29]:
This is the old guard holding out, right? Trying to preserve.

Mikah Sargent [02:25:32]:
Is it honor? Is it on? It's the honor system, isn't it?

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:34]:
I mean, there are. There are enough AI scanning things which don't work that well, but.

Nicholas De Leon [02:25:38]:
Yeah, they don't.

Leo Laporte [02:25:38]:
They're terrible.

Devindra Hardawar [02:25:39]:
Oh, they're terrible.

Leo Laporte [02:25:42]:
And just in case you thought your. Your youth was wasted, Nicholas. Well, Ukraine says. Hold on. It's training drone pilots by playing Grand Theft Auto 5.

Nicholas De Leon [02:25:53]:
Oh, I saw this. Yes, yes. If Hegseth is watching, I'm. I'm available. I'm very.

Leo Laporte [02:26:00]:
Are you a master of gta?

Nicholas De Leon [02:26:02]:
I am Very good at video games. I would be.

Leo Laporte [02:26:04]:
My son says. He says, I want to buy an Audi R8. I said, dude, no, you can't have one. He says, your fault. You gave me Grand Theft Auto and that was my car and gta. That's your fault. I said, I didn't give you Grand Theft Auto. What are you talking about?

Mikah Sargent [02:26:21]:
Grand Theft Auto.

Leo Laporte [02:26:23]:
What? I would never have given you that. Ukraine's defense ministry shared a post on X showing off training, asking, are there any GTA fans here? They said it's also good for relaxation.

Mikah Sargent [02:26:36]:
Okay, hold on. Now. We can't say now you're trying to say work while you're off the clock. And I don't like that. It's like. It's fine. It's also for relaxation.

Leo Laporte [02:26:44]:
They train their skull. They just blew that truck up. Yeah, I saw. Do you have. Do you have drones in gta? I don't think you do. Or maybe they've added them.

Nicholas De Leon [02:26:53]:
I have not really played five, so I can't even answer that question. I don't like five very much.

Mikah Sargent [02:27:00]:
This feels very Ender's game.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:02]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:27:03]:
Oh, yeah. Andrew's game. Yeah, he was. Oh, I don't want to spoil it. Never mind. I won't say a word.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:10]:
Don't spoil the ending of. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:27:11]:
One of the best, best twists ever. I'll just say that it's a great novel.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:16]:
That was the first time I knew how to be disappointed by authors. Amazing stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:27:20]:
Oh, Because Orson Scott Card was a great person.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:23]:
He's the madman.

Leo Laporte [02:27:24]:
But. But it's a great writer. Although Ender's game was great. The sequel's not so hot.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:30]:
I love speaker for Speaker.

Leo Laporte [02:27:32]:
For the Dead was pretty good. All right. You're right.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:33]:
But yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:27:34]:
Yeah.

Devindra Hardawar [02:27:35]:
Again, I've read his stuff and got so disappointed.

Leo Laporte [02:27:37]:
Yeah, I know.

Mikah Sargent [02:27:37]:
Know.

Leo Laporte [02:27:38]:
Yep. Let's take one more break and then we have our usual immemorium thing. And I'm gonna do some picks. I have a pick and Nick actually has a pick and Devendra has a pick, so. Oh, great.

Mikah Sargent [02:27:52]:
Well, they didn't find a pick.

Leo Laporte [02:27:55]:
We don't. We don't normally do picks on twit, but it just happened. You guys submitted some things, so think of something, Micah. And we'll be back. Back in just a bit. You don't have to do a pick, but I'm going to just give us a couple of picks. I'll start off. You may remember in February, the U.

Leo Laporte [02:28:11]:
S. The CIA killed the world Factbook, which was an amazing thing. The CIA had been created 62 years ago and had been maintaining ever since information about all the countries of the world. It was like, I guess, kind of felt a little weird that it was the CIA doing it, but it was an incredible resource. Well, this is, this is a really nice story because the open source community jumped on this now at the same time as the CIA announced the killing of the Factbook. They deleted it. They just don't. They could have left it up, but I guess they didn't want it to get out of date.

Leo Laporte [02:28:49]:
Anyway, fortunately, somebody had saved it. Open Factbook is online. It's free. OpenFactBook.org 254 countries. Yeah, isn't that great? And you could browse by region. This has always been a really great resource for just basic information. And I'm. It's a great example of like Wikipedia, where the community itself can preserve this stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:29:14]:
So I just wanted to give them a little bit of a plug. Nicholas De Leon picked something that was actually reviewed by your colleague on Consumer Reports. We were talking about this before the show. Courtney Lindwall wrote about it. Tell us about the light phone.

Nicholas De Leon [02:29:30]:
Yeah, so we mostly, Courtney, have been doing a lot of articles on digital mindfulness or whatever you want to call just the idea of like we're. A lot of us are kind of tired of being ruled by our iPhones and Androids and just wanting to tone it down a little bit. So the, the latest article in this series is about. About the light phone, which is kind of a stripped down, I guess it's technically a smartphone, but it's a much. It's not an iPhone and it's purposefully not an iPhone. And it's in that constraint, does your brain have the opportunity to breathe again for the first time in a while? And so it's just a look at some of the limitations of these types of devices. Where they're good, where they're bad, who they might be good for, who they. Who maybe wouldn't want it.

Nicholas De Leon [02:30:18]:
But to me it's interesting is that there's a lot of this. I live in Southern Arizona. Every single resort around here has like a digital detox program that you can do.

Leo Laporte [02:30:28]:
Really?

Devindra Hardawar [02:30:29]:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:30:30]:
So there's something in the, in the ether here where people are kind of like maybe not burnt out, but they just want to. They want to tweak their relationship with their phone in particular, which is what I was saying earlier, where it's like the idea of like the, of the computer in the living room was like the piece experience here because now we're glued to our phones 24 7. So yeah, it's just the latest article in that series and I encourage folks to take a look and there will likely be more on this topic. Just again, just the idea of like maybe re evaluating our relationship with the phone in particular.

Leo Laporte [02:31:01]:
It's a little pricey. 700 bucks. Doesn't have a great camera, but I like the idea of a very simple black and white ui. I think that we're gonna, I think the phone's changed dramatically. First of all, for most of us, it's not a phone anymore. Yeah, right. I mean, what is, what is the phone for? It's mostly a camera spam in a way too. It's spam, that's for sure.

Leo Laporte [02:31:28]:
All the space. It's. I guess for me, camera and messaging are the two things I use the most.

Mikah Sargent [02:31:33]:
I barely even use the camera.

Nicholas De Leon [02:31:36]:
One thing I tell folks again, when, when, you know, I'm, I'm like the computer guy and family, whatever. It's like get a camera, get an actual camera from Nikon or Canon or whatever. You don't even have to get like a $5,000. Just get a camera and a. It's going to take much better photos than any, any phone. And you, and you, you have a single purpose device that bring, you know, unlocks a little bit of creativity and you must start messing with lenses. But it, it, it lessens the reliance on the phone for everything and you get to experience, explore a different, you know, a different, A different part of your brain, I guess. But yeah, that's, that's if you can afford it.

Nicholas De Leon [02:32:09]:
I would encourage folks maybe look into buying a camera and seeing if that will lessen your desire to have your phone on your person. 24.

Leo Laporte [02:32:16]:
Can I send messages from my camera?

Mikah Sargent [02:32:19]:
Oh, now you've got, now you've got.

Nicholas De Leon [02:32:21]:
Oh, I guess.

Devindra Hardawar [02:32:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:32:24]:
I don't know. Is it, is it practical to say we don't need whatever these smart devices are that we carry in our pocket? Mean.

Nicholas De Leon [02:32:31]:
I mean this is, this is a certain type of person, I think. You know, the, you know, the. Oh, I'm, you know, they're, they've got their hand on their head. It's like, yeah, the phone is a critical piece of infrastructure for, I would say a lot. Everyone. Basically. I was actually on TV the other day having this exact conversation was like, isn't it a little bit. Maybe not privileged, but like phones are important.

Nicholas De Leon [02:32:52]:
People need phones. It's not like a, it's not a, an optional, it's not a Steam Deck or whatever the case case may be. People need phones. So all this like saying a Steam Deck is.

Leo Laporte [02:33:03]:
Is optional or not optional.

Nicholas De Leon [02:33:05]:
I just. That depends.

Leo Laporte [02:33:07]:
Asking for a friend of you. Yeah, yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:33:10]:
Nicholas, this is again though. This is again now that conversation where you are not. You were saying that this is a possibility for someone. You are not saying that because I am talking about a light phone. That means the people, people who have phones that are not light phones are bad and wrong like that. Why is that nuance always lost? It's like, just because I'm advocating for a thing does not mean that the thing I'm not advocating for is a bad thing.

Devindra Hardawar [02:33:37]:
We, we should have more things like this that just help us simplify our relationship with our phones. But I also say it's so easy to like, forget. Like, my God, what do we have in our pockets? Like, this is I think about incredible quite a bit. This is the truest personal computer. It is on us, it is a part of us. This is an extension of us. The problem is we've allowed these companies to create these apps and services that just tap into the worst human tendencies. Right.

Devindra Hardawar [02:34:07]:
The effects of social media, the infinite scroll, you get the constant dopamine hits. All these things are built this way. So one good thing you could do if you don't want to get a light phone is just like, try to stay off of those things that really, really tap into those primal, like attention span, I don't know, hoarding things that we have as humans. But I do so much with my phone, you know, I take notes.

Leo Laporte [02:34:31]:
It's my main computer now.

Devindra Hardawar [02:34:33]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:34:34]:
And I use telegram to message Claude so we can talk.

Devindra Hardawar [02:34:38]:
Oh yeah, yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:34:39]:
I think it's a little bit like what, what Micah was saying earlier in the show. It's kind of a reflection of like who you are and what you, you know, if you're using the phone to check out Open Factbook or Project Gutenberg or whatever the case may be or Wikipedia, that is a very different use case than someone who's just infinite scrolling TikTok.

Leo Laporte [02:34:57]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:34:57]:
Don't think, don't get tick tock.

Leo Laporte [02:35:00]:
No. But don't get in bed and scroll for two hours. That's not healthy.

Nicholas De Leon [02:35:04]:
A lot of folks, you know, to Defender's point, because the design to do

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:08]:
that, you know, they were made to do that. I don't blame the users as much as how we built things. I do that myself and I am actively trying, like, okay, I'm going to keep books near my nightstand. So I hit 10 minutes of TikTok. Okay, then go. Go away phone.

Leo Laporte [02:35:22]:
I'll.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:22]:
I'll try to do something else and it's a forceful thing. You have to really take a take.

Mikah Sargent [02:35:26]:
Yeah, you do that.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:27]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:35:28]:
I don't know if this is a pick but Devindra put a link to Jessica Condit's review. She does a great job by the way.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:34]:
Love Jessica.

Leo Laporte [02:35:34]:
Stuff in a gadget about the Valve Steam controller.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:39]:
Yeah, this was the hottest new gadget of the week. Because this is. We've been waiting for the Steam machine to arrive and it's not.

Leo Laporte [02:35:46]:
Oh this is for the Steam machine.

Devindra Hardawar [02:35:47]:
This is for the Steam machine or anything running Steam like this was part of the Steam machine announcement. But the problem is the Ramageddon has made it really tough for Valve to price or even get the Steam Machine out. And also the. Was it the Valve frame, the new VR headset that they're doing too? That needs ram. The Steam machine needs RAM ram. This controller does not need the ram. So they can just release this controller.

Leo Laporte [02:36:09]:
So they release the controller before they release.

Mikah Sargent [02:36:12]:
Hungry for you can still play your PC games.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:15]:
Anything that runs through your Steam deck.

Leo Laporte [02:36:17]:
Is it a great. She gave it 90 out of 100.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:19]:
She gave it a 90. She gave a good review.

Leo Laporte [02:36:22]:
It's a little pricey. It's a hundred dollar controller.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:25]:
Do you know how expensive controllers are now? Leo?

Leo Laporte [02:36:28]:
Is that not a normal Nintendo Switch

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:29]:
2 Pro Controller is not $90. New Joy Con 2s are $80.

Mikah Sargent [02:36:33]:
It's basically a car. What's in there? It's got so much different technology inside.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:37]:
It's just they're expensive. So this is more expensive than a typical one. But I will say as somebody who plays a lot of games on my PC I. It looks cool. I kind of want to like play with it. I will be getting a Steam machine eventually too. Even though I probably don't need one. But it just looks like a cool design.

Devindra Hardawar [02:36:52]:
And you know, I think Jess also did a great review. Also also recommend people check out the new Engadget website. We've been redesigned now that we're fully over at our new owners. So it's lightning fast now. Like lightning.

Leo Laporte [02:37:05]:
You know what, this popped right up.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:07]:
It's instant. It's amazing. So we are no longer part of Yahoo. We're part of Static Media which also owns BGR and Slash Film.

Mikah Sargent [02:37:15]:
Whoa, that did load fast.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:16]:
It's so fast.

Leo Laporte [02:37:17]:
It's really fast.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:18]:
I will say people are complaining. It's not like list format anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:37:21]:
I like this format. This is Kind of a cool card based format.

Devindra Hardawar [02:37:24]:
Yeah it's card based. I know people miss the list format but I like that it's fast. It's so fast. So we're getting there. We just launched the new site. We're part of a whole new company now but we're still in gadget and we're still doing our thing.

Leo Laporte [02:37:35]:
Good.

Nicholas De Leon [02:37:36]:
I would say Devindra, you should. I. You should make. Forget the Steam machine. Make your own Steam machine. Make like a DIY Steam machine which is what I. Yes I did that between Christmas and like nowish. I.

Leo Laporte [02:37:46]:
Is it running Linux?

Nicholas De Leon [02:37:48]:
Yes, it's actually running back Azite which

Leo Laporte [02:37:49]:
is basically steaming a gaming Linux.

Nicholas De Leon [02:37:52]:
Yeah I will buy this controller literally at 10am tomorrow when it goes on sale and I'm really looking. It's the most excited been for like a gadget in. In a little while actually.

Leo Laporte [02:38:02]:
Oh cool.

Devindra Hardawar [02:38:03]:
So tell me that's good advice. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:38:06]:
What processor you would use if you were going to build your own Steam machine? How much ram?

Devindra Hardawar [02:38:11]:
What That's a bad time to build things?

Leo Laporte [02:38:13]:
It seems like it might be.

Nicholas De Leon [02:38:14]:
Yeah I built it more. Less last year a little bit. Right as the RAM stuff was hitting I got. I. So I have a. I had a leftover 7800x3D processor because I upgraded my main gaming PC to the 9800 so I reused an old processor. I did buy the Radeon 9060 XT which is their entry level. It's.

Nicholas De Leon [02:38:36]:
It's a secondary, you know it's for older games. It's for like emulator.

Devindra Hardawar [02:38:40]:
It's.

Nicholas De Leon [02:38:40]:
I'm not trying to play cyberpunk or like you know super brand new games on this thing. I have the main PC for that. So it's just yeah RAM. I don't know it. I would say 16 is the minimum but it's you know it's just very expensive right now unfortunately everything is.

Leo Laporte [02:38:58]:
Yeah I'm actually glad I bought the Framework Desktop when I did it. I bought it as an AI local AI machine but it's actually a pretty competent gaming machine as well.

Devindra Hardawar [02:39:07]:
Using old hardware is a good idea. A lot of people have old ram, old stuff hanging around, reuse it, build something. Yeah that's.

Mikah Sargent [02:39:13]:
That was.

Nicholas De Leon [02:39:14]:
I would not have built this if I didn't have leftover stuff to do because it's like I'm you know I already have a computer. Oh but I can kind of crib together this one of parts kind of like the, the MacBook Neo. I got these parts over here. Let me Just build a. Build a thing.

Leo Laporte [02:39:27]:
And Micah, you picked something.

Mikah Sargent [02:39:28]:
I did, yes. So I love voices, and I love listening to voices and sort of trying to understand them. And so I really love hearing voice actors talk about their craft and share their craft. And occasionally you get something like what I shared, which is a YouTube video that is actually just a. It's a little clip from a podcast. The podcast is called String and Tell by Tawny Plattis. And Tawny is a voice actor that has done a lot of work that you'll be familiar with. She is the voice of those automated grocery machine things that you go through, like self checkouts.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:12]:
Her voice is the one that annoyingly tells you like, please put that back down onto the counter. And so you hear her talk and you're already like, it's probably a really

Leo Laporte [02:40:21]:
small fraternity, isn't it, of people.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:23]:
Right? Yeah. And then Kristen Demercurio. Mercurio. Excuse me.

Devindra Hardawar [02:40:28]:
Is.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:29]:
Meets with her for this episode because these two are responsible for almost all of the Bluetooth voice. Like, no matter what device you get, unless it's a first party, like, mainstream device, you know that you're gonna hold down that power button for three seconds and then it's gonna go Bluetooth pairing. And that's the voice of the woman.

Leo Laporte [02:40:50]:
It's a human.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:51]:
It's a human.

Leo Laporte [02:40:51]:
That's her right there.

Devindra Hardawar [02:40:53]:
Bluetooth. Bluetooth.

Mikah Sargent [02:40:54]:
I mean, I just called her Bluetooth. No, Kristen Demercurio is the voice, and

Leo Laporte [02:40:59]:
so I think she gets recognized at grocery stores.

Mikah Sargent [02:41:02]:
I wonder if she talks enough. I just love it. I love it. And they talk about their craft and they talk about both, like, how they got hired doing different stuff. The reason why Kristen ends up getting got this role is because her voice by different casting agents is tagged with IoT. So she gets a lot of those kinds of gigs. Yeah. I just think it's fascinating.

Leo Laporte [02:41:23]:
So, yeah, very good. We don't usually do picks, but it just kind of came up that way. So I thought, why not? Let's. Let's do some picks. We also often end the show with In Memoriam. And there are three things that are going away. One is Spirit Airlines. And I.

Leo Laporte [02:41:40]:
I'm sorry if you had a ticket on Spirit Airlines, because it is shut. It's gone. It just boom. It disappeared. I'm sorry if you had to take it on Spirit Airlines at any time. It is. The. Was horrible.

Devindra Hardawar [02:41:54]:
It was literal, like beach chairs. Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:41:57]:
When so close together. I'm not that tall and my knees are still up here. Just not fun. The one Time I flew a Spirit. I did feel bad. There was a pilot, a spirit pilot who had one more flight to come to retirement and his flight was canceled. His flight was canceled. I don't, I guess that's that.

Leo Laporte [02:42:19]:
But I also feel bad for there probably quite a few people with tickets who aren't going to get to go anywhere. Also say goodbye to Ask Jeeves. Did you know ask.com was still around?

Mikah Sargent [02:42:31]:
Did not know it was still.

Leo Laporte [02:42:33]:
Apparently nobody did. So they finally gave up. They're shutting it down. This is the story from Engadget Ask, which was Asked Jeeves, Remember the butler? And they changed it to Ask.com, the Internet's favorite butler is, is saying goodbye. It closed, it's closed his serving tray on May 1.

Mikah Sargent [02:42:57]:
I remember when at school they taught us, we had a whole, we had a whole day where we went to the library and we were taught about like LexisNexis and all of these other tools. But then they also all the old tools for searching things. But then they also taught us about new tools for searching things. And one of those was at the time, Ask Jeeves. And I remember coming home and, you know, bringing this news to my family and teaching them how to use Ask Jeeves. And at the time saying with my whole chest going, listen, listen, you'll get better results if you type it out as a question. Which now I'm like, what was I thinking? That's hilarious.

Leo Laporte [02:43:38]:
But no, you were right. That was that that's how we started asking Internet questions.

Mikah Sargent [02:43:42]:
Yeah. You did a full question, and then now you see, sometimes people still feel like you have to do that. And so it's one of those things where I'm going, do I just let them live in the world where they type question into.

Leo Laporte [02:43:55]:
You don't type.

Mikah Sargent [02:43:56]:
I do it by keyword. I, I, I think of the question that I have and then into the search fun. Into the search field, I type the keywords from it.

Leo Laporte [02:44:04]:
Probably smart. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:44:05]:
Because you, it's not, it doesn't need of, you know that that's, that's not a word that of. I mean, ands if you're doing Boolean. But what Anyway, point is, yeah. You type out like a full sentence to get, to get an answer. And now you do that if you're using one of your, you know, your,

Devindra Hardawar [02:44:20]:
your chat, it was too, it was too early. Ask Jeeves.

Mikah Sargent [02:44:23]:
Yeah, well, before it's time.

Leo Laporte [02:44:25]:
See, you're not going to say flight, speed, swallow. You're going to say, what is the flights? What is the Flight speed of a swallow, right?

Mikah Sargent [02:44:32]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:44:32]:
Wouldn't you.

Mikah Sargent [02:44:33]:
I would type in flight speed, swallow. Honestly, I would.

Leo Laporte [02:44:36]:
Yeah. But yeah, you're very. You're very parsimonious with your words, I guess.

Mikah Sargent [02:44:42]:
Indubitably.

Leo Laporte [02:44:43]:
And there is one actual passing and it's Craig Venter who was a big name in the race to decode the human genome. He was kind of a. I would say a maverick in all of this. He said we don't need to use these slow processes. I can decode the human genome faster with shotgun sequencing. And in fact, one his company Celera, went up against international consortium of researchers called the Human Genome Project. And in fact, I guess technically it was a draw, but the fact that he came even close was pretty amazing. An interesting fellow, a force of nature, somewhat controversial in many ways.

Leo Laporte [02:45:35]:
He led an effort to explore the world's oceans, trace the genetics of marine microbial communities. His first global ocean sampling expedition circumnavigated the globe in 2005 and 2006. He also tried to copyright or trademark or patent. I think it was maybe patent genes, the genome.

Mikah Sargent [02:45:55]:
Wait, what? Yeah, sorry, I shouldn't laugh.

Leo Laporte [02:45:57]:
That's one of the reasons he was controversial is, you know, he thought this could be.

Devindra Hardawar [02:46:02]:
You're so close to be to true greatness, man.

Leo Laporte [02:46:04]:
Yeah. So close. Anyway, Craig Vetner passed away April 29, the age of 79. But Craig Venner lived a very rich life. Got a lot done in his 79 years. That is that for this week. Our. Our.

Leo Laporte [02:46:22]:
Our twit episode. Thank you so much. Micah Sargent.

Mikah Sargent [02:46:26]:
So great to be here.

Leo Laporte [02:46:27]:
Being here to backstop in case everything went to hell in Hawaii. But it's always great to get you on.

Mikah Sargent [02:46:33]:
I'm glad it didn't go to hell and I'm glad I could be here.

Leo Laporte [02:46:35]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'll find Mikon Tech News Weekly every Thursday and of course,oos today. You record like every. Every other week now?

Mikah Sargent [02:46:43]:
Yeah, we record iOS every other week. We just recorded three of the episodes of Hands on Tech earlier this morning. Oh yeah. Hands on Tech.

Leo Laporte [02:46:51]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [02:46:52]:
Yeah, we'll also record those later. Hands on Apple. I record that weekly. So lots of shows you can check

Devindra Hardawar [02:46:57]:
out on the network.

Leo Laporte [02:46:58]:
Best way to check them out. Join the club. Nicholas De Leon is of course at Consultants Consumer Reports or he reports on Electronics. Senior electronics reporter and has many, many AI pages up there. Like crosswording the situation.

Devindra Hardawar [02:47:12]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:47:13]:
And what is it? What are the other two?

Nicholas De Leon [02:47:16]:
Deep dugout Tucson Daily Brief. I'm trying to think of the best Way to.

Leo Laporte [02:47:21]:
You have others too.

Nicholas De Leon [02:47:23]:
I have other thing. Those are the, the main ones. Oh I also, I also made a, a job like, like a, like a job finder app. Very actually quite powerful. We'll talk about that another day. But yeah, you need a site for

Mikah Sargent [02:47:35]:
all your sites so that we can go post this stuff on site.

Leo Laporte [02:47:38]:
I mean most, they will just put it up on GitHub whether you want it to or not.

Nicholas De Leon [02:47:43]:
Yes. Yeah, most of them are on GitHub. I think I day lay own D A Y. I'll just type it in the chat here. D A Y L A Y O W A. That's just my last name pronounced de la own. And if you go to daily own.org that's probably the easiest because I, I list most of the things I've got going on over there.

Mikah Sargent [02:48:08]:
Yeah.

Nicholas De Leon [02:48:08]:
So you know a bunch of cool stuff. Most importantly Consumer Reports.

Leo Laporte [02:48:11]:
You know, I know folks, I'm a member since 1981. I'm very proud, supportive.

Nicholas De Leon [02:48:18]:
We are a, you know their media is a challenging industry but we're still kicking, we're still doing pretty, pretty well. Well and we're trying to do impactful stuff like we saw with the, the grocery store pricing, you know, some of this AI stuff. We're really trying to like, you know, report on this stuff in a way that's relatable to, you know, I'm a nerd. I like messing with all the models and all that type of stuff. But you know, if you're a regular person, how are you interfacing with these things? What are your expectations? So we're, we're trying to do more of that type of stuff. But yeah, Consumer Reports is the most important. And then you can look at my, my zany little side projects.

Leo Laporte [02:48:50]:
I love them. I love them. They're not zany, they're great. It's great to talk to you Nicholas and of course, thank you Devindra, dear friend. And now hanging by a thread.

Devindra Hardawar [02:48:59]:
I'm sorry to say I'm surprised we all aren't.

Leo Laporte [02:49:04]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of hanging by.

Nicholas De Leon [02:49:05]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:06]:
When I looked I said oh wow, there really is only one thread up there. Oh dear.

Leo Laporte [02:49:11]:
The sword of Damocles is hanging by. Nick, you'll find, you'll find Devendra at Gadget, brand new Engadget looking good and

Devindra Hardawar [02:49:21]:
revamped in Gadget and the film cast podcast.

Mikah Sargent [02:49:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:49:24]:
Thank you Devindra. Appreciate your support. Happy to be here. Thanks to all of you for watching, for listening, thanks to our club members for making this possible and I hope you will be back next week. We do Twit every Sunday from 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern. Turns out that's 11am Hawaii time. I found out. What is it, 2100 UTC.

Leo Laporte [02:49:48]:
If you can figure that out, you can figure out what it will be in your local time zone. You can watch us live in the club to discord or on YouTube, Twitch TV, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik.com after the fact on demand versions of all of our shows, audio and video available at our website, Twit TV. Be most of our shows have their own dedicated YouTube channel. Twitter is no exception. You can find us there. Great way to share clips of the show if you want to tell your friends and family about something exciting you saw on the show. And of course, the best thing to do is subscribe and your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get automatically as soon as we're done.

Leo Laporte [02:50:25]:
Thank you everybody for being here. I will be in Hawaii for another few days. I'm going to be doing Mac Break Weekly and the Security now and Windows Weekly and Intelligent Machines from here and next week, Twitter as well. So if you hate the fact that there's the ocean and the trade winds behind me, well, I'm sorry, you just got to put up. Put up with that for a little bit longer. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you. Thank you to our great technical director, Benito Gonzalez, for keeping everything together, Anthony Nielsen, for helping me get the technology down to do this show from here, and of course, Kevin King, our editor, our executive producer, my wife, Lisa Laporte, who is right now in a helicopter.

Leo Laporte [02:51:04]:
I think she just went over, as a matter of fact, flying over the big island of Hawaii.

Mikah Sargent [02:51:09]:
Are you gonna get to do a helicopter?

Leo Laporte [02:51:11]:
No, I don't believe in flying in rocks with wings. I just. It feels dangerous somehow. She. She does it every time. And I always say, good. Have fun.

Devindra Hardawar [02:51:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're terrifying.

Leo Laporte [02:51:23]:
They're terrifying and they're very loud. But it is really cool. I mean, it's. I did it once and that's.

Mikah Sargent [02:51:29]:
Once was enough.

Leo Laporte [02:51:30]:
Once was enough. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.