This Week in Tech 1109 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.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. I'm Father Robert Balisere, the Digital Jesuit, in for Leo Laporte. And boy, do we have a special episode for you. We've got Ian Thompson, we've got Alan Malventano, and a special guest, David Hewitt, a true geek, will be joining us for a panel about the top tech stories of the week. We've got AI tsunamis, we've got an NVIDIA honeypot, the new MacBook Pros, pour one out for the Cybertruck, remembering Aaron Swartz, planet hunting, and so much more. TWiT is next.

Iain Thomson [00:00:34]:
Podcasts you love.

TWiT.tv [00:00:35]:
From people you trust.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:00:38]:
This is TWiT. This is TWiT. This Week in Tech, episode 1109, recorded Sunday, November 8th, 2026. Looks like a fish, steers like a cow. It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech. It's the show where we take a look at the hottest stories from the week with a distinguished panel of uber geeks, geeks and nerds. And I've got the most distinguished panel with me. I'm Father Robert Balisere, the Digital Jesuit, in for Leo Laporte.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:13]:
He's currently negotiating our peace treaty with our AI overlords. But while he's gone, I get to hang out with some of my favorite people, starting with Mr. Ian Thompson. He is a journalist who has been covering science, technology, aviation, pretty much anything that moves a nerd's heart for 30 years and includes 15 years as a writer and editor of the Register. Ian, it is so good. I can't remember the last time I worked with you.

Iain Thomson [00:01:38]:
I was gonna say, it's been a while, ever since you went off to Vatican City. Then it's just like we've had very few meetings, but always a pleasure.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:47]:
Yeah, I meet interesting people here, but I mean, The geeks, the geeks are the ones who really do it for me. So—

Iain Thomson [00:01:52]:
Geeks and nerds, can't go wrong. Speaking

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:54]:
of geeks, I've got someone who was actually, I believe, on the 8th episode of, uh, the first show I ever did with the TWiT TV network on This Week in Enterprise Tech, Mr. Alan Malventano. Now, he has had careers in the US Navy and in the NSA. He was recognized for his contributions to the industry with awards from Micron Technology. He was the co-host of This Week in Computer Hardware with Patrick Norton and The technology analyst at PC Perspective. At least that's what I remember before I left the wonderful United States. Alan, how are you, my friend?

Allyn Malventano [00:02:25]:
I'm doing pretty good, brother. How's it going over there in the Vatican?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:02:29]:
Okay. Very good. Although Benito and I were taking a look at some of the images that you sent us that we're going to take a look at at the bottom of the show. And we have to say, both of us were a bit jelly.

Allyn Malventano [00:02:40]:
Sorry. Sorry.

David Hewlett [00:02:42]:
More than a little bit, Padre.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:02:44]:
More than— that thing is just amazing. You're gonna have to describe it to us when we get there. I will. But before that, we gotta introduce the last member of our panel. I wanted someone special, someone who I've actually known for a while, I've worked with, but oddly enough, we've never had him on TWiP. Mr. David Hewitt. He is the star of stage, screen, and TV.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:06]:
The very first time I saw him was in a 1997 indie sci-fi horror horror film called Cube, which has become a cult classic. And since then, he's become a regular— he was a regular part of the Stargate universe, starting on 3 different shows, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, and Stargate Universe, as well as the acclaimed Dark Matter. He's also played in movies like The Shape of Water and The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But really, he's a geek. He's an actual geek. Hewitt, you kind of remind me of someone like Henry Cavill, who— Thank you. He doesn't just play a geek, he has geek interests. You really are a maker.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:03:39]:
You really like to put stuff together.

David Hewlett [00:03:42]:
He's so unfair because you shouldn't look like that and be able to be a nerd like that. I'm afraid I got the classic nerd look as well. Yes, very much so, very much so. I was listening to screensavers back in LA when I was an unemployed actor, had nothing else to do, and I've sort of been sticking with it ever since. I'm kind of fanboying a little bit about this. I had you on

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:08]:
Padre's Corner, but that's back when that was just a passion project. I can't, I can't understand why I never had you on Triangulation or on Twit or any of the other, like the DIY show that I used to do. I think that was a really big—

David Hewlett [00:04:26]:
Didn't we do a Triangulation? I thought we did a Triangulation.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:29]:
Did we do a Triangulation?

David Hewlett [00:04:30]:
I don't remember. I'm old.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:04:31]:
It's been, it's been too— I've been here for a decade now, so it's hard. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:04:35]:
Trust me, I just had a random bite you on the backside 'cause I was judging a competition at MIT. And I noticed this kid was staring at me and it was just like, what the hell's going on here? Um, and then he just came over and he said, you're Ian Thompson off Twitch, aren't you? It's like, yeah, I've been listening to you since I was a kid. And it's, oh, for goodness sake, bugger off, please.

David Hewlett [00:04:56]:
I get, I get grownups coming up to me and saying like, oh my God, my dad used to, I used to sit with my dad and watch your show.

Allyn Malventano [00:05:03]:
Oh no.

David Hewlett [00:05:04]:
Like, yeah, shut up.

David Hewlett [00:05:06]:
So, uh, we have, we had David Hewlett here on last, was, uh, March 2nd.

David Hewlett [00:05:11]:
Oh, there you go.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:12]:
Oh my gosh. It was, and now I remember. Oh, that was sick.

David Hewlett [00:05:15]:
It was triangulation, right? Was that it? Yeah. It was. That was it. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh, look at, look how young we looked. How much hair there was. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:22]:
I only had 2 chins. God, that's so long ago.

David Hewlett [00:05:26]:
I've now discovered how to hide them. You just grow this a little long and they're just—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:30]:
I have to grow a beard. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:05:32]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:32]:
Or I could just kind of like do that. It's,

David Hewlett [00:05:35]:
but yeah, you got the collar thing, but it's an unforgiving collar. It doesn't, it's not good for hiding, you know?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:39]:
It's not flattering.

David Hewlett [00:05:40]:
You need like ruffles or something.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:05:41]:
I, I did wanna say, I pick up on something that both of you have said. The reach of Twit is crazy. I get recognized here all the time by fans of the network, and I haven't worked for Twit for a decade. So yeah, there's a lot of excitement.

Iain Thomson [00:05:57]:
It can backfire. I mean, I was coming back from the Google Christmas party about, God, about 10 years ago, and was waiting in line for a burger, slightly the worse for wear, it has to be said. And somebody came up to me just like, you're on Twit, aren't you? And I was just like, oh God, I'm too drunk to deal with this.

David Hewlett [00:06:15]:
Oh God, what do I do?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:18]:
Well, you just hope that it's not one of the people you ripped apart on the show. It's true.

Iain Thomson [00:06:22]:
I mean, yeah, it's, it's okay. I mean, that has happened with time at the Register. I was on a trip to Cancun with Kaspersky and was talking to a bloke and he goes, oh, I was on Microsoft. I was at Microsoft. He goes, oh yeah, you quoted me on the Register once. I didn't enjoy it.

David Hewlett [00:06:38]:
Great.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:40]:
Hey, at least it's honest. Well, gentlemen, now that you know your fellow panelists, shall we get in? There's a lot of news to cover. There is, oh yeah. And I do wanna try to get through some of it. All right.

David Hewlett [00:06:50]:
Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:50]:
So let's kick it off with pouring one out for a downed soldier. One of the homies is now gone. That's right, Elon Musk has officially pulled the plug on the Tesla Cybertruck, stating that production capacity at its Gigafactory is going to be switched to its robotaxis. Now, at best, the Cybertruck was controversial. By some accounts, it was an ugly, buggy one, be truck that ended up being a death trap, but it definitely has started the conversation. Now, as it was being released, Musk had estimated that they were going to be building between 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year. That's right, he expected it to be that big of a hit. In reality, by estimates, Tesla has sold fewer than 39,000 Cybertrucks in 2024, 20,000 in 2025, And about 3,500 in the first quarter of 2026.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:07:45]:
I mean, you're seeing 50% year-over-year drops each and every single time. Now, of those vehicles, the 62,000-plus vehicles that were sold, about 1,300 of them were sold back to Musk, to SpaceX. So there was a little bit of inside dealing here. The vehicle has been recalled 11 times, and the price, which was originally supposed to be $30,000, sub-$30,000, jumped up to $100,000, $120,000, $150,000 depending on which version you wanted. Now, I want to say and ask any of you, there's still about 10,000 Cybertrucks that were produced that were never sold. Would you be willing to buy one on a deal?

David Hewlett [00:08:25]:
Absolutely. Sorry. I just, I mean, to me, it's like, it's like a collector's item. It's like a big nerdy disaster. And I, you know, I feel like I'd love to own a piece of that history. I don't know if I drive it,

Allyn Malventano [00:08:40]:
There's only one catch. It's only one catch, David. Yeah. It wouldn't actually fit in your garage.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:08:44]:
That's true. It's massive. It's huge. Yeah, that's true. It's really, I was not prepared for how big they were when, when I first saw one in Las Vegas at a convention and it was parked inside of the garage of the Fontainebleau because they have flash fast chargers. It's, it's massive. It's like the size of 2 passenger cars. Mm-hmm.

David Hewlett [00:09:02]:
It's like Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. It's like a sci-fi movie. It looks like it should have like some kind of a, of a laser weapon on the top. And, you know, it's, but I, but every time one passes me, I think, I think, oh, there's a— there's someone with some issues.

Iain Thomson [00:09:15]:
I mean, it looks like it was designed by Minecraft. And, you know, it's also illegal in the UK and the US, in the— and the EU, because we have this weird law where a car has to be designed so that if it hits a pedestrian, the pedestrian has a reasonable chance of surviving.

Allyn Malventano [00:09:30]:
Doesn't slice

Iain Thomson [00:09:31]:
it. Which doesn't happen. A British friend of mine described them as wank tanks, but—

David Hewlett [00:09:37]:
I think that's the most accurate description for sure. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:09:40]:
I've heard wank panzer. That was another one. Yeah. Pretty good. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:09:44]:
But also, I mean, I saw one, I saw one with a, I bought this before Elon was crazy sticker on it. It's like, which is not true. Didn't exactly, because it came out after he did the, I'm from the heart type thing. So, you know, I've seen that

David Hewlett [00:09:59]:
too. And the first thing I thought was, you jerk, you're trying to like, you can't back. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:10:03]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:10:04]:
Ian,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:05]:
stolen valor.

Allyn Malventano [00:10:06]:
I bought, I bought a used Tesla one week after that happened. I got the best deal ever.

Iain Thomson [00:10:10]:
Oh no.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:12]:
No, yeah, it's true. If you can

Iain Thomson [00:10:13]:
do it,

David Hewlett [00:10:14]:
but he hacks them, like he plays with them.

Allyn Malventano [00:10:16]:
Yeah, I just do it. I'm a car guy. I don't like the polarizing— Cybertruck's fine with me because of the polarization of it and the perception of it. That's the reason I probably wouldn't have one. Right. If that didn't exist, I probably would have one. If it wasn't all the everything, take everything else out of it, like all the politics and all the other stuff.

David Hewlett [00:10:38]:
Well, once it gets musky, Yeah, it's too Musk-y.

Allyn Malventano [00:10:40]:
Yeah, it's like the tech in it is pretty cool though, is the thing, right? Like all-wheel steering, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:46]:
Yeah, if it, if it didn't have that baggage, the Elon Musk baggage, and let's say it actually sold near the price point that he originally stated, let's say you could get one for $35,000.

David Hewlett [00:10:56]:
Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:57]:
would that be worth it? I'd probably have— let's, you know, put everything else aside. It's ugly, but it's a, it's an inexpensive EV. Would you buy it?

Iain Thomson [00:11:04]:
I'd rather have a Roadster, to be honest.

Allyn Malventano [00:11:07]:
Well, that's fair too. That's fair too. You mean the original one, not the—

Iain Thomson [00:11:11]:
Well, not the mythical one. Not the flying one down the road.

Allyn Malventano [00:11:15]:
The mythical kickflip Roadster, yeah.

David Hewlett [00:11:17]:
Oh my God.

Iain Thomson [00:11:18]:
Oh God, no. Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:11:21]:
Which, by the way, when did he become David Blaine?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:11:25]:
Well, I mean, okay, so maybe you can confirm this, Alan. Someone told me that the cold gas thrusters that were used to do that that the amount of charge that you would need in those thrusters, that was like $10,000 worth of fuel. Is that true?

Allyn Malventano [00:11:41]:
No, it's just nitrogen.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:11:43]:
Was it just nitrogen? Someone told me it was air. It was actually just compressed nitrogen.

Allyn Malventano [00:11:47]:
No, no, no, just compressed nitrogen. That's just straight, straight, straight gas. No, yeah, they didn't have any propellant.

David Hewlett [00:11:53]:
Oh, then it totally makes sense then.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:11:55]:
It's

Allyn Malventano [00:11:56]:
okay, now David's gonna get one, right?

Iain Thomson [00:12:00]:
In order for that demo to work, didn't they take an enormous amount of weight out of the vehicle in the first place. Most— there were no seats, there was no interior lining. Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:12:12]:
basically cut

Iain Thomson [00:12:14]:
right down as well,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:12:15]:
because when they did the barrel roll, there's no way you could get a vehicle that, that's that heavy to roll like that. So they had to considerably lighten it. It was basically just a shell.

Allyn Malventano [00:12:25]:
Yeah, most likely.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:12:27]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:12:28]:
And you can tell, like, when it came down and landed, like, It, the way that it bounced, like there wasn't even really a suspension in that thing. Right. Like it was just like a go-kart basically. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:12:39]:
I mean, cool demo if you weren't trying to sell me on an extremely expensive vehicle. I mean, yeah.

David Hewlett [00:12:46]:
Doesn't exist.

Allyn Malventano [00:12:47]:
Like the, in the, in the, in the basement of the Petersen Auto Museum, FYI, uh, if you find yourself in the LA area, that's in the basement is where the original Roadster is. That they showed off. There's one of them just sitting down there.

Iain Thomson [00:13:00]:
Well, I mean, I interviewed Dan O'Dowd, who's one of Tesla's biggest critics. You know, he's Musk's least favorite billionaire for pointing out that Full Self-Driving doesn't work. He owns 3 Roadsters. He thinks they're fantastic. And he's got 3 of the originals because he found them in a shipping container in Singapore and immediately bought them because they were things of beauty and they made electric cars sexy.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:13:21]:
The original Roadster was an absolutely gorgeous vehicle that I 100% would buy.

David Hewlett [00:13:27]:
I like Tesla. I mean, I like— we do. We don't have a car. We just do like, you know, we Uber around or whatever, rent a car. And we've had Teslas numerous times. And the nerd in me loves them. I love the giant, you know, with the sunroof and the technology and the cleanness of it. But it— yeah, my wife hates it because she likes driving.

David Hewlett [00:13:49]:
I hate driving. Like, as far as I'm concerned, let them, you know, let our AI overlords do the driving for me.

Allyn Malventano [00:13:55]:
I had this— Yeah, I had the pleasure of witnessing Hewlett in the Model 3 that I drove to Canada with and then drove him around and threw it on the autopilot. And he was like just beside himself. It was literally turned into Rodney right in front of me. Yeah. Like,

David Hewlett [00:14:11]:
you also told me not to press the button at the, at the— remember that, right? And we went to the side.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:16]:
Did it say Ludicrous Speed?

Allyn Malventano [00:14:18]:
No, no, I didn't bring that one. That's an anecdote.

David Hewlett [00:14:22]:
It had problems with the road though, didn't it? Weren't there some issues of some sort?

Allyn Malventano [00:14:26]:
This was early, early, early. Early days, like Autopilot and stuff. Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:14:31]:
I just love that idea. I mean, for someone, you know, I'm polar opposite to my wife on this. My wife loves driving, cannot stand it when the car nannies her about how to drive. Whereas I'm, as far as I'm concerned, if I could have it drive for me, I would do that in a second.

Iain Thomson [00:14:47]:
Oh God, no, I'm with your wife on this. I like stick shift Mazda Miata going down, engine braking around corners, having some real fun with it.

David Hewlett [00:14:55]:
My wife got a speeding ticket in England, and then out of, out of, as, as, so as a protest, she went to the class that she was forced to go to in a Morris Minor. She showed up at a race, at a racecourse in a 1,000cc Morris Minor to take the, the test that they make you, they make you do. And everyone's like, oh, they do a physical test. Okay. Or maybe she just had to go.

Iain Thomson [00:15:16]:
I got my one and only speeding ticket in the US, and the only thing I had to do was 5 and a half hours of traffic school. And it was hilarious because the videos were clearly made in the 1990s. You know, there was the, the distracted driving course. There's, you know, there's the jock and his hot girlfriend in the seat behind him, and then the nerdy, the nerdy girl in the back. And he reaches into the glove compartment to pull out a CD. It's like, really? Oh my God, when was this made?

David Hewlett [00:15:43]:
Did John Cleese make them as part of his industrials? Uh, that would be— that would be—

Iain Thomson [00:15:47]:
Oh God, no. I've had to watch many John Cleese videos, and they're generally fun, you know.

David Hewlett [00:15:52]:
Not the, not the driving school ones though.

Iain Thomson [00:15:55]:
No, no, the driving school ones were— they're kind of like, um, when I moved over here, I had to take mandatory, uh, sex discrimination, uh, online courses.

David Hewlett [00:16:03]:
Oh yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:16:04]:
And it was just— you could have summed up 3 hours of training with don't be a wanker. But you know, it was stuff like, is it acceptable to say, hey, you've got a cute ass? And it's just like, no, no, it's not.

David Hewlett [00:16:17]:
Oh God. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:18]:
On that note,

David Hewlett [00:16:19]:
yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:20]:
let's, uh, let's, let's finish pouring one out for the, uh, for the cyber truck. Yeah. And actually, let's do a real pour-out because this is one that was brought to my attention by, uh, by Ian, and it is important. This would have been the 40th birthday of Aaron Swartz today. Now, if you don't know the Aaron Swartz story, it's important that we keep telling this. This should be part of geek lore because it's important. Aaron Swartz was the co-owner of Reddit until it was sold in 2006. He continued to develop with the company until he left in 2007.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:49]:
He was also the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign and a research fellow at Harvard's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption. So you could say that he really wanted to fight the power. He was really all about challenging authority. He was really about disrupting norms, and he wanted to expose corruption wherever it existed. Now, on January 6th, 2011, Aaron was arrested for breaking and entering an MIT data closet and downloading JSTOR. That's an academic database. academic journals with a guest account that he properly got from MIT. He was charged with multiple felony violations, including wire fraud and several violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and of course breaking and entering.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:17:35]:
And on January 11th, 2013, facing years in prison and what many would later call a far overzealous prosecution, he took his own life in his Brooklyn apartment. Now, there were major issues with the prosecution. First of all, They said breaking and entry. The closet was unlocked, so by definition it's not breaking or entry. And these are academic journals. These are academic journals that you should be able to get. He was trying to release them. He was trying to free information that we've already paid for because these were studies that were created using our tax dollars.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:18:08]:
And so the EFF really tries to make sure that people remember the story of Aaron Swartz. Ian, You wrote a story about Aaron like years ago.

Iain Thomson [00:18:18]:
Uh, I, um, I'm all thanks to my wife for this because we were supposed to be— the news broke on Friday night and we were supposed to be going sailing with friends on Saturday, and I just said that I, I can't go, this has to be written up, um, and spent the day on it because it was just so infuriating. You know, as you say, these are taxpayer-funded studies. If he downloaded them one by one by one. It would have been totally legal. And they were threatening him with 35 years in prison on felony counts. And then they said, well, we'll give you a plea deal. 6 months inside, but you have to plead guilty to felony counts, which rules you out of an awful lot in America. But he was just— I mean, he helped co-write RSS, for goodness' sake.

Iain Thomson [00:19:04]:
Yeah. At the age of 14. This was an absolute prodigy. What he was doing was minor compared to what you see AI companies doing now when it comes to mass scraping of scientific papers, everyone's articles, everyone's, you know, intellectual property. As I say, he, as you said, he would have been 40 today. And we lost a generational talent thanks to an overzealous DOJ who, to use one quote which hasn't been substantiated, somebody they wanted to make an example out of. And he hung himself because he was facing the end of his effective life.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:19:41]:
I mean, the example was ridiculous. It was— the example was you can't have the information that you paid for. Yeah, it was, it was so maddening to see this play out. I mean, I remember when the indictment first came down and it was, it was like, wait, what? This is illegal? How can this possibly be illegal? And it really did come down to the fact that they didn't like that he automated the task. You know, if it took him a long time, it'd be fine. And now, as you said, corporations automate that task en masse. They do it. That's how they train everything.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:14]:
But it's okay for a corporation to do it. It wasn't okay for a teen prodigy to do it.

Iain Thomson [00:20:18]:
Well, I mean, the academic publishers— sorry.

David Hewlett [00:20:21]:
Yeah, sorry. You're about to speak.

Iain Thomson [00:20:23]:
I mean, the academic publishers settled with him. They didn't want to press charges, but the DOJ did. I'm sorry, interrupted. Go ahead.

David Hewlett [00:20:30]:
No, just the research paper thing drives me crazy because, you know, I mean, for someone like me who's doing— I talk to a lot of scientists and engineers and stuff. There's a lot of papers to read. Uh, I mean, the, the hoops you have to leap through to get to that stuff, which is all stuff that should be— I mean, this is just stuff that— Yeah. This is valuable stuff that the, the world needs, and it's being— what should be illegal is, is people, you know, uh, hoarding this stuff and, and forcing people to pay ridiculous amounts of money to get to it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:20:57]:
Didn't JSTOR make an agreement with OpenAI not too long ago to open up all their journals?

Iain Thomson [00:21:03]:
Oh, that I didn't hear.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:21:05]:
Okay. I, I can't, I can't, I can't verify that, but it was either OpenAI or Anthropic. But when I heard that, that, that made me think directly of Aaron. I was like, oh, okay. So he just— It's okay for them to do it. A decade and a half. Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:21:17]:
Well, maybe there was money attached to it and it wasn't for him.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:21:20]:
Sad.

Iain Thomson [00:21:21]:
Well, no, but, but I mean, the whole academic publishing industry is a scam. They take publicly funded research, they pay academics nothing to edit it and fact-check it, and then publish it at a huge markup. And even then they get it wrong. So we saw with the Lancet anti-autism study, which somehow got through, you know, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of children have died thanks to that, because academic publishers couldn't do their due diligence. And You know, to have Aaron hounded to his death for this is just— it still makes me angry. I'm sorry. It just still grips my muffin in a very bad way.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:22:03]:
Alan, do you want to take the last word on this?

Allyn Malventano [00:22:05]:
Hold on. I have a perfect example. I was just trying to find the email on it. Okay. So for whatever reason, just me being a geek or whatever, I was digging into like cycle lifetimes of lithium batteries because as a geek, as one does, as one does, right? Apparently, I was doing this back in November of 2023. And I had to dig for the request. Because 2 days ago, I had reached out in November of 2023 to the author of that paper because I couldn't get to it. Because it was behind some firewall.

Allyn Malventano [00:22:38]:
And all I saw was a summary. And I was like, man, it'd be really good to see those charts in that paper. And I reached out to the author, whoever, like, the researcher was, 2 days ago I got the thing like, here, I have granted you access so you can download a copy of this paper from the thing. So somewhere this person was going through their emails and like, this person would really like to read your paper. You know, that knowledge would have been great to have.

David Hewlett [00:23:03]:
So I haven't checked that. Yeah, I haven't checked that in weeks.

Allyn Malventano [00:23:06]:
Yeah, or 3 years in this case, right?

Iain Thomson [00:23:08]:
I mean, for any journalist watching, The trick of this is if a paper comes out, it's behind a firewall, get in contact with the academic and they will give you a copy free of charge.

Allyn Malventano [00:23:17]:
That's what I did. That's what I was trying to do, right? But even for that example, it kind of fails, right? Because there's, you know, there's an extra hoop to go through. And, you know, I'm not going to put the blame on the academic for not seeing the thing for 3 years or however long, right? Like, it's more like that shouldn't have been a blocker in the first place, right? Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:37]:
So when I've had to access academic papers that I can't get my hands on, my organization does have a cheat because I can contact Georgetown or Boston College and say, can you make the request for me? Because that goes through really fast when they know it's academic to academic, they respond more quickly.

Allyn Malventano [00:23:54]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:23:55]:
Really? I mean, you can't just say, hang on, this is the Pope City calling. Maybe you can make that available to us.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:02]:
That might get other questions. Mostly this is not real, right? It's, hmm. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:24:07]:
Oh, okay. Fair enough.

David Hewlett [00:24:08]:
I've never made the connection with the AI though. That was the one. I think that's, that's shocking to me when you think about it because they're exactly the same thing is happening on a much larger scale. Oh yeah. And that is, there are huge amounts of money involved. They, they're, they're not going to jail.

Allyn Malventano [00:24:22]:
Yeah. I guarantee you full copies of JSTOR are sitting in the training databases at multiple companies.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:27]:
Yep.

Iain Thomson [00:24:27]:
Oh, definitely. I mean, I mean, you remember all the kerfuffle about Napster 25 years ago? It was just like stealing music is a crime. And it was just like AI companies, unless we do it, it's a function. We're like,

Allyn Malventano [00:24:38]:
We're like so past that now. Now everybody just has music.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:24:42]:
For a month, Meta was the biggest torrenter in the world. So yeah, go figure. All right, I do want to move on to something fun before we jump into, uh, some election results. I know we got to cover them because there were some very, very important technology-related, uh, election results. But before we get that, how about a fun thing? Have you ever wanted to worry— work on exploring space, about expanding the boundaries of human knowledge? What about the understanding understanding of exoplanets, those planets outside of our solar system.

Allyn Malventano [00:25:13]:
You're getting David so excited right now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:25:16]:
I know, this is his thing. You can with CHOPS. David, do you want to tell us what CHOPS is?

David Hewlett [00:25:23]:
I don't know how to say it. I thought it was CHAOPS but they have this terrible— I've got to say, I love everyone at ESA, I love them. But my God, they're terrible at naming things. They're like the McKays of naming things. They are as bad as my character on Stargate was. But this program is brilliant because for someone like me who is sort of outside of this stuff, I pretend to be smart on television. This allows you to sort of almost pretend to be smart in real life because what they're doing is they're giving us all this data that this Cheops thing has come up with, which is they were focusing on these possibly habitable planets. But there's all this background information and they've got people, you go in and you look at the output from these stars and every so often you'll see this this very distinct dimming that happens, and that is most likely some kind of a planet or something coming in front of the Sun.

David Hewlett [00:26:19]:
They've got us nerds get to go in, look at this data, and start picking them out for INSA and for this whole citizen science approach to stuff. This Zooniverse thing is brilliant. You can get all of these citizen scientists into action and we get to do stuff that That is gonna actually contribute to us discovering planets and how solar systems work and such. And I had Sarah Marquez in charge of getting this information out and got in contact and walked me through the process of doing this on a stream the other day. And I just, oh my God, it's so much fun. Literally, you see this sudden drop and you're like, Call it Hewlett, you know what I mean? And if they do make a discovery, if they do find out that these are specifically planets, if you're involved in that process, you will be named in one of these papers that you won't be able to get to because they'll be behind a paywall. But your name will be on some of this stuff. And it's citizen science.

David Hewlett [00:27:28]:
It's so much fun, certainly for a nerd like me.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:27:31]:
We should say that the satellite was first launched back in December of 2019. It was supposed to last 3.5 years. It's now been 7 years, it's still going strong. And the name actually stands for Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite. The method that Hewitt is talking about is called transit, the transit method. And that's when you watch the output from a star and then you look at a planet transit the star. Now, from that, because you can already tell pretty much how big that star is going to be, you'll know how long it took for it to transit, so you know its orbit. You'll know its mass and you'll know its volume because you can look at the at the radius of that transit.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:28:12]:
By doing that, you can figure out its density. And if it's a high-density planet, it means it's rocky or metallic. If it's intermediate, you've probably got ice and water. If it's low density, it's probably a gas planet. So it's, it's wonderful. Now, I know— I think right now there's, there's something like—

David Hewlett [00:28:26]:
You get these spikes too.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:28:28]:
Yeah, that's right. But, and they, they've asked volunteers to come in and take a look at the feed. So they've got 1,255 volunteers right now You could volunteer and be your own little astronomer.

David Hewlett [00:28:41]:
This is the second round of data too. They got through the first stuff so fast because people were obviously excited about this. It's also just really fun. You're literally looking at stars in the far distant galaxies and you're seeing spikes like solar flares and stuff. It's glorious, absolutely glorious.

Iain Thomson [00:29:03]:
It reminds me of SETI@home back in the day.

David Hewlett [00:29:07]:
It's that kind of approach. Yeah, it's that approach again. Of course, my first question being the nerd that I am was like, well, why don't you just get AI to do this? They were like, well, there's a subtlety to it. Some of the stuff is about trying to get a consensus from people that we are in fact seeing a transit or is it the vehicle moving? Perhaps it could be used for training data later. The fact is that we need— they actually need human brains on this stuff, which is, which is kind of fun.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:39]:
So how does that process work? If you think you have detected a transit, do you, do you like clip it and send it to everyone and then they look at it?

David Hewlett [00:29:48]:
Or yeah, basically it walks you through the whole thing. There's a nice little tutorial at the beginning that walks you through, shows you what sort of potential things to look for are, um, and then you'll just say, do you see something, basically. And if it's anything of interest, and then you— it has a little pencil system, but you just draw your little square around it and then submit it. And what I would recommend for people is you want to submit it and comment, because that's the fun part. Because you can go and say like, oh, I saw this, it looks like this. And then you'll see there are other people who have commented, and they'll say like, oh, you're right, that's a transit. Or they'll say like, nah, you idiot, that's just the satellite rotating back into position or whatever. But you actually learn.

David Hewlett [00:30:28]:
I found myself learning stuff. While I did it. It's such a better way to spend your time than playing Candy Crush or something while your kids are making you watch football or something.

Allyn Malventano [00:30:43]:
Look at you doing deep space exploration.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:46]:
I know, right?

David Hewlett [00:30:47]:
About time.

Allyn Malventano [00:30:49]:
Finally. Your cover story is legit now.

David Hewlett [00:30:52]:
That's it. I've backed into my Stargate role.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:59]:
Well, gentlemen, that's the top of the show. It's, it's been fun. Now we got to get serious. But before we get to that, before we start jumping into some of the breakdown on what the 2026 elections did in the tech industry, let's take a moment to thank our sponsor, Leo. Who is it? Thanks, Leo. I think Leo's coming back, Benito. He's gonna be back this week, right? Because if it's not, I, I'll do his hosting duties again. I don't mind doing that.

Benito Gonzalez [00:31:27]:
Oh, he's coming back this week. He'll be back for Security Now on Tuesday. I think Tuesday will be his first day back, so he'll be on for MacBreak Weekly as well.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:31:36]:
Oh, fantastic. Oh, gentlemen, we got to move to something that could get a little sticky. We're going to try to keep it civil because there was a tsunami during the 2026 elections. And no, I'm not talking about Republicans and Democrats. I want to stay away from that. I'm talking about the tsunami against data centers specifically. It was actually a bigger wipeout. Now, on November 3rd, 2026, there were 41 ballot measures in 10 states that dealt with banning, approving, or advising data center projects.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:32:07]:
We had 21 in Ohio. There were 7 in Illinois. There were 4 in Maine. There were 3 in Kansas. Then Canada— I mean, it's Canada— California, Florida, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. Now, some of the measures, like the one from Alhambra, California, were relatively straightforward. The measure called DB would just prohibit data centers within the boundaries of the city. Other measures, like the one from Illinois, would have advised officials to permit the construction and operation of new data centers in the township.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:32:37]:
So essentially, they were asking people to give them permission to court data centers. Still others, like the one from Sunbury, Ohio, would ban specific types of data centers. Those were— that were above 25 megawatts. Now, in some instances, the vote was about banning data centers. In others, it was about giving permission to policymakers. And in a third category, there was partial bans of certain classes. There was also a fourth category, votes to stop specific projects that were either in planning or currently in construction. Now, we did the story on intelligent machines this week, but the votes weren't completely counted.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:33:12]:
Now they are. No measures supporting data center construction have passed. Zero. Now, all of the votes being final, we now know that they went 1 from 41. There was one vote that they did did win, but it didn't really support data centers. Only Harwood, North Dakota, population under 800, kind of supported data centers. They voted against an initiative that would have, quote, required additional review before city approval of industrial developments, including data centers, unquote. So they didn't really vote for data centers.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:33:45]:
They just said, we already have a review process for anything that comes in that's industrial. So we, we don't want another. We don't want to add yet another responsibility, another cost for doing business in our extremely small town. Now, there are 3 more votes before the end of the year, and there have been 6 special votes before the November elections. That means that data centers could potentially go 1 for 50 for the year. In fact, they probably are because there's such a big backlash. Gentlemen, did, did you expect that? I mean, I did not expect it to be such a clean sweep of just hatred for data centers. This is not the state level, this is not the federal level, this is where people live.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:34:30]:
This is the locals. These are cities saying we want nothing to do with data centers.

David Hewlett [00:34:35]:
Yeah, it's weird. I, I, it's funny, I found it a little bit— I, I find it a little disturbing because, because I feel like, I feel like we're focusing on the data center, not the reasons why we have these data centers. And I, I feel like it's just a very easy It's an easy target for people who just go like, no, AI bad, data center bad. You know, I just feel like it, it wasn't particularly nuanced and it was easy for people to just to sort of like bring out their pitchforks and stuff, which is maybe not a popular take on it. But I, I'm just concerned that it was— it just, it felt, it felt reactionary rather than thought out. I don't know why we have to specifically target data centers. I mean, you know, target any, any as you, as, as you know, as your last example said, If you've got the proper process in place to analyze incoming projects, then you should be fine. You check the environment, you check your power, and all the rest of it.

David Hewlett [00:35:30]:
I don't know why you would specifically focus on data centers. This seems like a way around— this just seems like ripe for misuse in my mind. But they might have

Allyn Malventano [00:35:39]:
done it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:35:39]:
What about that, Ian? Is that just— I'm sorry, Alan, did you want to? Chime in?

Allyn Malventano [00:35:44]:
Yeah, I will say there's, I mean, there's a recent history thing that might have resulted in a bad rap for this in particular, and that's because there are some data centers that have been built in ways that either had like a bunch of turbines running outside instead of using the local grid, or like things that are doing like—

David Hewlett [00:36:00]:
Was that Musk? That was Musk.

Allyn Malventano [00:36:02]:
That was one of a couple. I mean, there's a few. It's not just Musk. Yeah. Um, but I mean, there's cases where, you know, people that used to do Bitcoin mining and whatnot and do those things where you have you know, about a million or so 10,000 RPM fans spinning in a building that you can literally hear from like miles away, right? Right. Like, so there's— some of that has happened and it takes a few years for that, you know, those stories to sort of propagate through society. And then when you get the next round of, I want to do another type of that building, you know, the assumption is kind of like that it would work the same way when it might not necessarily. work that way in reality, right?

Iain Thomson [00:36:40]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:41]:
I mean, is this just knee-jerk? I mean, it does seem like an outsized backlash, really.

Iain Thomson [00:36:48]:
It's one of those— God, I hate to use the word culture wars terms, but it has become one of those things. I mean, on one level, data centers, we need them to a certain extent. We certainly don't need them at the rate they're being planned to scale out. And if you're building them in low Yeah, having, you know, the decibel level of a jet engine, you know, a mile away from your house, I can quite understand people being against that, particularly when the only benefit you get is Copilot being rammed into everything on a Microsoft, on a Windows operating system.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:24]:
It's on Notepad. Why is Copilot in Notepad?

Iain Thomson [00:37:28]:
Don't even get me started, mate. I mean, seriously, the whole point of Notepad was it's low tech.

David Hewlett [00:37:34]:
It's like taking Emacs and saying, right, Did they learn nothing from Clippy? Like, I feel like he's just, he's just, he's back. He's back in the form of AI now. Oh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:37:43]:
I wish Clippy was AI.

Iain Thomson [00:37:45]:
Well, I actually bought a, a friend of mine's wife was reminding this when they had their first kid. I was at Microsoft for the launch of HoloLens, went to the store and bought her a baby bouncer with Clippy on the front saying, it looks like you're raising a child. Would you like some help with that? But yeah, it's Clippy on steroids. But I think the problem is that the— in a rush to attract data centers to particular areas, local governments have played fast and loose with the rules, particularly when it comes to sound, water use, and electricity use. And that has caused an enormous amount of resentment against these things. And also, they just don't create a lot of jobs. Once they're built, these things are designed to run with like a dozen or 2 dozen employees. It's not like you're getting good-paying jobs coming out of this.

Iain Thomson [00:38:39]:
You know, they will bring in someone from, you know, one of the coasts to run the data center. And you've got a couple of people plugging in server racks and taking them out. But there's no real jobs in it. I don't understand why they're bringing such huge tax breaks to build there. And ultimately, they have to be self-supporting. You know, you can't build a data center that sucks power off the grid and raises prices for everyone and expect it to be popular. You know, by all means build them, but you've got to make them self-powering either by modular nuclear reactors or, you know, by some other way. I mean, the nuclear reactor space is looking really interesting at the moment because the data center builders are just kind of like, yeah, we could probably do with this.

David Hewlett [00:39:21]:
Ontario is doing it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:22]:
Ontario is doing it. The only thing that has the energy density that they need. Yeah. I mean, you need something like a nuclear reactor unless you've already got a massive solar farm or several large turbines already to go.

David Hewlett [00:39:32]:
So, but even that, it's Microsoft bought a plant, right?

Iain Thomson [00:39:36]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:39:37]:
Yeah. Yeah. Microsoft bought a power plant and no, Patrick, I know you—

Iain Thomson [00:39:42]:
my island. Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:39:44]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:39:44]:
Yeah. Bad PR move, you know?

Allyn Malventano [00:39:45]:
I guess. Yeah. Patrick, I know you led this with saying like, okay, well, it's not like Democrats versus Republicans, but I do think there's some bleedover, right? We saw what happened with that election. We don't need to get into that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:55]:
There is bleedover. Right? Definitely.

Allyn Malventano [00:39:57]:
But if, you know, you have like one party that's really been leaning into like, oh, we're gonna support this, maybe even to a fault, possibly. Right? And like, so they're tie— one side's tying themselves to that thing. And then if you have generally the population has vote, has, you know, voiced their cumulative, you know, whatever opinion here, and we saw what happened last week. Right? So that same sort of thing. And also throw in, I mean, Flock cameras advertise that they use AI to do this And obviously that's not doing well either. So if somebody's in a city council or a place where there's gonna be some sort of community vote on a thing, as soon as you say AI data center, like, well, you said AI, it's tied to these other things. Like, you know where everybody's mindshare is gonna be right now?

David Hewlett [00:40:39]:
Well, and AI become—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:41]:
AI data centers are unpopular for Republicans and Democrats. I mean, half of those votes were in Ohio, super red Ohio. And they trounced every single one. So what I mean by it's not really correlated, it didn't become part of the culture war in that, oh, if you hate this, I must love it. And if I love this, you must hate it. Fair point. No, this was just, no, we hate it. We hate it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:41:06]:
We don't want this.

Allyn Malventano [00:41:07]:
Everybody hates it.

David Hewlett [00:41:08]:
And I think they symbolize sort of this overreach by large corporations that we feel like we have no power over. And then they suddenly, now they're showing up in our backyard and building noisy, eco-unfriendly, whether they're data centers or warehouses or whatever. I mean, I think this is— that's what my concern with focusing just on the data centers is. My concern is that— so they'll now start calling them— what is the new one now? They're AI campuses of some sort? Like, I mean, so as long as they're not building a new data center—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:41:38]:
Wait a minute. Renaming it fixes the problem. If they're not AI data centers, if they're information campuses, Because it's all good, right?

David Hewlett [00:41:45]:
Data warehouses, they're going to be— I mean, what's the— this is my concern is I feel like we've just—

Iain Thomson [00:41:50]:
Bitburns.

David Hewlett [00:41:51]:
Yeah, Bitburns. Oh, beautiful. Beautiful. That's it. Ian for the win.

Iain Thomson [00:41:56]:
Well, no, but I mean, there is an element of Salem witch trials about this, you know. I mean, yes, we do need a certain amount of data centers. And quite frankly, if you're in North Dakota, you've got the space to build one of these things and you've got nature's own cooling system to keep the damn thing cool. It may suck water out. And that is a big problem, particularly in grazing territory. But, you know, there is a place for these things. But in Richmond here in California, you know, we've, you know, they've just passed a ban on data centers. And people were just like, wow, you know, you're turning away from technology and you're at the edge of Silicon Valley.

Iain Thomson [00:42:35]:
It's like, no, we're one of the most densely populated cities on the planet. And amazingly enough, nobody wants the sound equivalent of an airport right next to their house. You know, America has space. We can build these things. It may not be as profitable to build them in, you know, the remote outskirts of nowhere, but you've got the space, why not use it?

David Hewlett [00:42:56]:
They're gonna be in Canada. That's where they're gonna be. I mean, we've got in Ontario, they've got, you know, we're basically, Carney is basically welcoming them here because we've got huge amounts of space. We've got resources. I do worry about the environmental impact. I, you know, at a time when we, I feel like we should be more focused on that, we've just figured out ways to spend even more more time, energy, and money on destroying the planet rather than actually fixing it. But the fact that we're— Ontario has nuclear power already. I think it's like 14% or 15% of our energy comes from nuclear power.

David Hewlett [00:43:31]:
And they're experimenting, I know, with these modular reactors specifically to power— these aren't specifically for AI data centres, but they're looking for that as a possibility going forward, these modular ones. I think they have 4 different units right now or something. up there. Like, I'm kind of hoping I can sort of sneak in with— hopefully there's like a Stargate nerd who works there or something. I can sort of go and say like, you know, hey, let's see what's going on, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:52]:
So, well, I should, I should mention that in— on— we covered this story on intelligent machines, or at least the start of the story on intelligent machines. And the question was, well, why are there so many votes? You know, why does there have to be so many different bans of data centers or disapprovals of data center campuses? And there's actually a reason when we got there. There's a, there's a story behind that, and that starts with, uh, The Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure. It was an executive order signed by President Trump back in 2025. And essentially what he was trying to do was to clear the path for data centers. He wanted as many data centers built as possible. And the theory was the only thing preventing them is the fact that there's a lot of regulation. You have to do environmental studies, you have to make sure you have the power, you have to make sure that you've got—

David Hewlett [00:44:37]:
All that nuisance.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:38]:
Exactly. All that stuff. And so So he actually directed the Secretary of Commerce in consultation with the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to provide loans, grants, and tax incentives. And he asked the EPA to basically just sort of clear the way. Let's let's get rid of those pesky environmental studies. One little problem, and that was that the federal government does not control those things at the state and local level. So the EO was essentially. Neutered.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:07]:
There was nothing it could do because even if you've got the permission of the president, you still have to go into the locale and actually ask the people in that city, "Is it okay for us to build here?" They didn't figure that out. Now, it did come to a head earlier this year in 2026 when New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order of her own. It created a one-year moratorium on the creation of data center projects within the state. state that were above 40 megawatts of power. Now, I think this is important. This is a very important distinction. Ian, you brought up, well, we need data centers, we can't get rid of them all. But there seems to be this classification between a regular data center, the one that we would know, the one from, you know, Google 20 years ago that might run 10, 20, maybe even 30 megawatts, and the new generation of data centers, AI data centers, that are going to be running 400 megawatts, 800 megawatts, 2 gigawatts, 4 gigawatts.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:06]:
Those are truly invasive. I mean, not just the amount of power that they require, but also the amount of noise that we generate. And we're gonna get to that later.

Iain Thomson [00:46:15]:
Well, I'd also question whether— sorry, go on.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:17]:
No, go. No, no, I wanna hear it.

Iain Thomson [00:46:18]:
Okay. No, I mean, I would question whether these mega data centers make sense on an economic level in that if you consolidate all this stuff, stuff. They bought all these GPUs, they need to use them somewhere. But it just seems to me that from what I know about AI and from what I know about technology, having smaller localized data centers spread around gives you much lower latency and gives you much, you know, in the end, much lower pissing people off factor, for want of a better word.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:47]:
And that would work really well for inference. So if it's just querying an existing model, that works really well. But when you're doing training you need the biggest data center possible. Yeah, I guess. It's not about— it's got— I mean, the interconnects have to be really, really fast if you're gonna be doing the training in anything less than years. So that is a thing. I'm sorry, Hewitt, you were saying?

David Hewlett [00:47:07]:
No, I just— to me, I love the idea of the small. I feel like in a way that's where we're moving anyways. I mean, we've been sort of pitched this idea that we're gonna have some kind of like oracle that's gonna be able to do everything. And what we're seeing and what we saw with computers as well, when computers showed up, it's like, you know, it was gonna do everything. And then we discovered that it was better have specific, you know, specific machines to do specific things. Well, we're finding that with the AI as well now where people want, they want a, they don't need, they don't need it to know everything. They just need to know what they need to know. And that can be a much smaller model that doesn't require these massive, I mean, yes, to train them, I guess originally, but, but I mean, maybe this will push things in a different direction.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:47:45]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:47:45]:
Did you listen to Sam Altman's tone deaf podcast where he's like, I don't understand why consumers are keeping Keeping RAM in their own homes. Yeah. Right. Just slow.

David Hewlett [00:47:55]:
You are so selfish. We are so selfish to have gaming PCs.

Allyn Malventano [00:47:58]:
Nobody should have all their storage—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:00]:
Oh, don't. Oh, stop it. That is humble bragging.

Allyn Malventano [00:48:03]:
Oh, what? Nobody.

Iain Thomson [00:48:05]:
I've got some 5.25s around the corner, so I'll bring those out.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:09]:
But— Unacceptable.

David Hewlett [00:48:10]:
Yeah. I've got my CERN tape backup of some of the data.

Allyn Malventano [00:48:13]:
I see it up there.

David Hewlett [00:48:15]:
Yeah. See, it's like somewhere in there. Yeah. There it is.

Allyn Malventano [00:48:17]:
There it is.

David Hewlett [00:48:18]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:48:19]:
I mean, a lot of AI scholars have been so concerned about the paperclip problem. You know, where if you ask an AI to produce the most efficient way to produce paperclips, it will suck resources out of the rest of the planet to produce paperclips. No one ever thought to ask the CEOs about this because it seems they're even worse. You know, I mean, it's—

David Hewlett [00:48:37]:
I would argue the stock market's been doing that for years anyways, basically turning our wishes into, you know, destructive forces.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:44]:
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting. Leo really advocates for local running of LLM models. Here, we do that almost exclusively. All of our models are local. They don't touch the internet. And like you said, I don't need an LLM that does everything. I just need it to do what I want it to do, but do it really well, really well. And if I can train that—

David Hewlett [00:49:04]:
You train your own models?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:49:04]:
Leave it alone. Oh yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:49:07]:
You can fine-tune them. You can fine-tune them, not train from scratch, but you can fine-tune them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:49:11]:
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:49:12]:
Well, kinda. You can, if it's small enough, You can train your own from scratch.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:49:18]:
Yes. We may have access to a couple of interesting locations.

Allyn Malventano [00:49:24]:
I can see it now, but basement of the Vatican's just got a, just an enormous, just, you know, huge data center.

David Hewlett [00:49:30]:
It's like Padre on a Segway going through like passing through all the servers. Yeah. You

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:49:35]:
know, after we didn't need the super collider to create antimatter anymore, we had a lot of free space. And so, you know, we filled it

Allyn Malventano [00:49:41]:
up. Yeah. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:49:42]:
Yeah. But it's kind of like the old mainframe versus desktop PC thing. You know, it's like Anthropic and OpenAI. are pitching themselves as the mainframe for AI. And then people discovered, hey, we can do this on our own computers, smaller, less efficient slightly, but I don't have to pay tokens through the nose. So why not? And I think that's the way the market's going.

David Hewlett [00:50:01]:
Yeah. And what tone-deaf Altman talking about, the, the, the, the, the Armageddon is, is basically, and how selfish we are for wanting it ourselves, is just, is just his way of saying, use ours. That's really it, isn't it? It's all—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:14]:
yeah. I, I will, I will offer a word of defense for— by the way, he calls himself Ram Altman now. Uh, just—

David Hewlett [00:50:21]:
ah, very good. Yeah, very

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:22]:
good.

David Hewlett [00:50:23]:
Very nice.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:23]:
But yeah,

David Hewlett [00:50:24]:
yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:24]:
I could see in his mind he, he wasn't necessarily saying you shouldn't have memory in your computer. He was saying from an efficiency perspective, it is better to have rare resources in a place where they're used 100% of the time than in an application where they're used 5% of the time. That makes sense. It's still extremely tone deaf. It's— I wish his PR person had listened to his talking points before he went on. I think the podcast was called The Cheeky Pint or something like that.

Iain Thomson [00:50:53]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:50:53]:
Oh God.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:54]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [00:50:54]:
And it was cheeky. All right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. It backfired spectacularly. And he has since come back out and said, no, no, no, I actually want everyone to have RAM. You should have all the RAM that you want, which I think is also another mistake.

David Hewlett [00:51:07]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:07]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:51:08]:
I mean, the thing is, yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:51:10]:
Sorry.

David Hewlett [00:51:12]:
Ian and I have exactly the same timing. It's amazing.

Allyn Malventano [00:51:15]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:51:15]:
We're all being terribly British about this as well. But I would say, well, yeah. But I mean, the one thing is I want RAM because I like gaming. I like doing video editing. I like doing a whole bunch of things that aren't AI related. So I get your point, Padre, but at the same time, he can bugger off.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:32]:
No, exactly. And then ultimately what it comes down to is you shouldn't have said

David Hewlett [00:51:36]:
Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:36]:
yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you remember when Pope Francis had that, uh, that Wednesday address where he said people who have pets and treat them like kids are selfish? Oh, it was one of these things where it's like, I understand what you're— what you said. I know why you said it. You didn't need to borrow that problem. That's kind of how I feel about this. Yeah,

David Hewlett [00:52:01]:
yeah,

Iain Thomson [00:52:01]:
yeah. I mean, I like Pope Francis a lot even though I'm not religious, but I have to say that's a bit— yeah,

David Hewlett [00:52:07]:
yeah, yeah. Don't mess with cats. Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:10]:
yeah, exactly. And I'm taking care of the cats 20 feet away.

David Hewlett [00:52:13]:
Yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:52:14]:
My wife's a cat woman and she would just be like— and a lapsed Catholic.

David Hewlett [00:52:18]:
You married Catwoman?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:20]:
Oh, you married a lapsed Catholic?

Iain Thomson [00:52:25]:
Well, no, seriously, 5th date, uh, because this is, is timely because November 5th in the UK is Guy Fawkes

David Hewlett [00:52:31]:
Yes. Uh,

Iain Thomson [00:52:32]:
and I, I took my then-girlfriend, now wife, on our 5th date to a Guy Fawkes Night celebration on Muir Beach. And she's like, well, what is Guy Fawkes Night? It's like, well, um, we burn a Catholic in effigy and dance around the flames and then set off fireworks.

David Hewlett [00:52:48]:
Worst day ever.

Allyn Malventano [00:52:50]:
Run, Patrick.

Iain Thomson [00:52:51]:
Oh no, no, no, it got worse because we then went to a British pub and I spent 5 minutes ranting about the fact they put sweet corn in shepherd's pie and it was shepherd's pie made of beef, not— so it makes a cottage pie. God knows how she married me, but still, you know, here we are.

David Hewlett [00:53:05]:
You know what she's getting into at least, I guess.

Allyn Malventano [00:53:07]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [00:53:08]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:08]:
I only eat shepherd's pie if it's been made with traditional ingredients like Spam.

David Hewlett [00:53:14]:
Oh,

Iain Thomson [00:53:15]:
now I do love me a good Spam Padre, but I do love a good— I could love a Spam— a good Spam sushi, um, and fried Spam with eggs.

David Hewlett [00:53:26]:
Spam, Spam and eggs, Spam, Spam, Spam and eggs.

Iain Thomson [00:53:29]:
I do want to—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:30]:
I want to ask you all a question that's related to this story before we, we back out of it. And that is, there was one vote that I find particularly interesting, and that was the vote in Perry, Ohio. 87% of the voters approved a measure that would require any data center developer seeking tax breaks— so this, if you come in and saying, I would like a tax break on the land, or I would like a tax break on utilities, whatever it might be— If they ask for that, they are required to give a guarantee, a bond-backed guarantee for any claims of jobs, tax revenue, or other benefits. Now, I love this because this is, this is essentially saying put up or shut up. If you say that you should be able to come in because you're going to generate 10,000 jobs and $2 million worth of tax revenue a year, and you're not going to—

Allyn Malventano [00:54:21]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:21]:
Give us a guarantee, a money-backed guarantee that if you do not If you do not meet those requirements, if you do not meet your expectations, then we take the bond. If that happened, or if anything, if the data centers actually offered a profit share where they said, look, we will work with the community, we will share our profits with you because we are in your neighborhood, we're in your locale, we're part of your neighborhood, would that change people's perspective? 'Cause right now it kind of seems like They're just— they just want to use our power, they want to use our water, and then they want to create a product that will take our jobs and we get nothing.

Allyn Malventano [00:54:59]:
I think that's fair. I think that's fair for— that should be fair for anything, not just specifically about AI detectors.

David Hewlett [00:55:04]:
Exactly.

Allyn Malventano [00:55:04]:
Yeah, right. Like any, any, you know, you're going to give a big tax break to Business X, whatever the business is, it doesn't matter, right? Like if they're going to make some claims or promises or whatever, then yeah, I think that's fair to hold them to it. Makes sense to me.

David Hewlett [00:55:17]:
This is this fallacy that these companies work in some kind of a vacuum. I mean, the reality is the reason why they do so well is because they've got an educated population. They didn't pay for that. They've got, they've got a safe, safe environment to work in. They didn't pay for that. I mean, this, you know, this doesn't happen. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. There's, there's, there's, you know, we've already given them a tax break, you know, by, by giving them freedom and the, and the workforce and resources to make to make any of this happen.

David Hewlett [00:55:46]:
It seems crazy to me. Oh my God, now I sound like a Canadian.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:48]:
No, to Ian's point, I mean, to Ian's point, when he asks why they wanna build inside of cities or near cities, it's because they don't wanna build their own infrastructure. They don't wanna build the power infrastructure, the road infrastructure, the utility infrastructure. So they're leeching off of the community. They should give something back, just saying.

Iain Thomson [00:56:06]:
But I mean, we've seen this particularly 'cause I'm based in the Bay Area. We saw this in San Francisco when Twitter, moved into the Tenderloin and got an enormous, I think it was a 5 or 10-year tax break because it was just, it was gonna bring exciting hip young people to the area, neglecting to remember that Twitter caters its own staff. So nobody was eating outside the company. Yeah. They basically got off their Uber, they went to work, they went back and went somewhere else. And we're seeing the same thing with data centers. There's no real benefit. And I do like this idea that you've gotta actually show there's a benefit.

Iain Thomson [00:56:43]:
I mean, you remember when Amazon was looking for a second headquarters and all these cities were bending over backwards offering everything but the kitchen sink. Oh my God, it was terrible. Yeah. And for what? You know, it's like, give it, you know, Amazon's not short of cash, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:56:59]:
New York rejecting that proposal was one of the best things that they've ever done. And really, over the years, it has shown that it's paid off because yeah, they were gonna get nothing. They were gonna give all these tax breaks, they were gonna make all these concessions, And they would kind of have the nebulous promise that, hey, maybe this might increase your tax base. We don't know.

Iain Thomson [00:57:19]:
Yeah, if Amazon actually paid taxes. But yeah,

David Hewlett [00:57:22]:
there's that wonderful Jon Stewart, um, one of the Jon Stewart episodes where, where he talks where they, they were, you know, these big— the big brains behind AI were all brought together to discuss stuff. And they said like, look, spend $158 billion and we'll give you a superintelligence. And then And everyone will have their— then we'll have everyone have the universal healthcare and income. And he was like, tell you what, why don't we skip the AGI and just go straight to socialism if that's what your future is anyways? That's where this is leading. You know, it just feels like a bunch of weirdos in control of a huge amount of money and resources that are, as always, overpromising and underdelivering. I mean, it's, it's, it's just getting— I think we're all a little tired of it at this point.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:58:11]:
It does feel a little exhausting, right? I mean, everything is AI now, and we— I think even the common person knows it's unsustainable. The hype that we have right now, it feels good because, hey, the market's going up and maybe my investments are doing okay, but I, I don't think anyone believes there's real substance behind this and sustainability. I do love it though.

David Hewlett [00:58:32]:
I do love it. I use it all the time. Like, I use various forms of AI all the time. I mean, for someone like me who is, who's Like, for any decisions or any information that I get from these things, no one's going to die. Planes aren't going to drop out of the sky because I got a quote wrong when I talked to a European Space Agency person. So for me, it's wonderful. I don't have the education I need. I need help figuring out all the science and technology that I'm talking to these people about.

David Hewlett [00:58:57]:
So it is wonderful as a resource for me for learning the background information on a lot of these things and also helping organize my, you know, bag of cats that is a brain. So it's been— it's wonderful for me. It's wonderful for coding. I think there is definitely a place for it in the same way that computers— when computers first showed up, you know, they were going to do everything. And at first they replaced, you know, accountants and secretary pools and typists and things. I think there's— I think there's definitely a place for this AI. But right now I feel like it's, as you say, it's the Clippy. It's just being forced down our throats on everything there.

David Hewlett [00:59:33]:
It's a— it's a— it's a solution looking for a problem in many cases. But I think where it is a solution, it's— I think it could be very valuable. And I do think it's a— it's— it's a ma— it is a massive, you know, almost evolutionary jump for us, I think. I mean, for the first time, we're dealing with a tool that can build tools. I mean, that's extraordinary.

Allyn Malventano [00:59:53]:
For— Yeah.

David Hewlett [00:59:54]:
Sorry, Al.

Iain Thomson [00:59:56]:
For

Allyn Malventano [00:59:56]:
me, it's— it's been an incredible force multiplier.

David Hewlett [01:00:00]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:00:00]:
Like, just ridiculous. I have a reverse engineering background from my prior I have like all these other backgrounds and I'm a reasonably techie guy. And like for a lot of these things, there was just, I've been fortunate to get better over the years about realizing like, okay, I cannot rat hole myself down this particular thing. I just do not have the budget or the time to like do this project. It would be really great. I know, I know I could do this. It would take too many weeks, that sort of thing. Right.

David Hewlett [01:00:27]:
You're learning to say no?

Allyn Malventano [01:00:29]:
Well, no, no, no, no. That's That's the thing that, well, I still have to do that somewhat, but now I'm able to be like, okay, for example, my monitor had a weird bug. I reverse engineered the firmware of the monitor and fixed it myself with the help of AI. Could I have done that myself? I have that. I have the know-how to do it, to have done that. It probably would've taken me a month.

David Hewlett [01:00:50]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:00:50]:
Right.

Iain Thomson [01:00:51]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:00:51]:
It took this thing like half an hour.

David Hewlett [01:00:54]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:00:54]:
With, you know, with my maybe 5 minutes of my actual concentration and looking and seeing, oh, what to figure out now. Oh, try looking over here, you know, and send it off on another little mission for another 5 or 10 minutes and then come back and check on it, right? And sure, I mean, the longest it took me was the fact that I had to like literally do the flashing of the firmware process to like update the monitor, you know, and it took a couple of tries, you know, it was a little buggy and I was like, oh, it's doing this thing weird. Okay. You know, and figured that out. And getting back to your earlier point, or actually several of your earlier points about like things being a little local, I did it all local. I didn't use, you know, really fancy, uh, you know, Frontier models or anything. It was all local. I sort of have that.

Allyn Malventano [01:01:34]:
I try to do it like as much as possible local AI.

David Hewlett [01:01:37]:
I wish I could do it local, but you've got all the RAM.

Allyn Malventano [01:01:40]:
Sorry. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:41]:
You're, you're hoarding the RAM, man. Come on. You gotta share.

Allyn Malventano [01:01:44]:
Now here, here's what's hilarious. I'm, I'm fortunate because I, I, I tended to like my media server that was only intended to just be media serving and NAS duties. Like when I built it, because again, I'm a crazy storage person. Like what did I do? I put like a half a terabyte of RAM in it, but I did this like 3 years ago.

Iain Thomson [01:02:02]:
Good timing. Very good timing.

Allyn Malventano [01:02:03]:
See, that's the thing I did. I did all this stuff. I just happened to be like crazy about the perfect things.

David Hewlett [01:02:10]:
Oh my God. You have more hard drives than I've ever seen.

Allyn Malventano [01:02:12]:
Well, yeah. And I've been selling off all my hard drives because I didn't need all that space. Well, here's, here's what's funny. So when I left Intel, I was like, hmm, what do I do with this Intel stock? It's kind of burning a hole in my pocket. So I flipped it into hard drives at the time. And so at some point I had 11 petabytes in my basement.

Iain Thomson [01:02:34]:
And so— Sounds perverse, even though it isn't.

Allyn Malventano [01:02:38]:
And so then, and so then eventually I was like, this is a little ridiculous. I shouldn't have to have— I'm in like North Like, I'm in Northern Kentucky. I shouldn't have to have the window cracked in my basement in the middle of winter to keep my house cool. Uh, so I'm gonna just be a little more reasonable about this. And so I, you know, started selling that stuff off. When did I start selling it off? When everything started going crazy, right? Like, yes. Okay. So I've basically been, you know, breaking even or maybe even fortunately doing a little better.

Allyn Malventano [01:03:10]:
I imagine there's a bunch A bunch of computer geeks that are going through their basements right now.

Iain Thomson [01:03:15]:
Well, given the way Intel sold 51 terabyte SSDs. Got

David Hewlett [01:03:20]:
out at the right time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:03:23]:
Yeah. I mean, I'm probably an outlier on this as a journalist, but yes, I use Intel, as you put it, as a— sorry, AI, as you put it, as a force multiplier. But in some regards, it's almost more trouble than it's worth. Because AI is very good at some things. But when it comes to researching articles, and I will never use AI to write an article over my dead body, but it's just so buggy, particularly for breaking events, because it's all 6 months, a year behind in terms of training data. So yeah, I'll use it for research. I'll use it for suggestions. But any publication which is using AI to actually write breaking news articles isn't worth the time spent to read it.

Iain Thomson [01:04:11]:
You know, it just doesn't work.

David Hewlett [01:04:12]:
Yeah, and anyone can do it. That's the other thing is, right? I mean, as soon as you've got— I mean, if you're— what are you competing with? I mean, to me, the, the value of— the value of a human— of human insight and, and, you know, a, a human perspective or a community perspective on something, it's so much more valuable. Now I'm kind of excited about it because I feel like it, it could potent— I know, yet there's obviously huge issues with— I don't understand how anyone is a, is a journalist anymore. I mean, it's just like you're, you're competing with, you know, you know, kids in their basement, you know, doing reviews and stuff. But I mean, but it—

Iain Thomson [01:04:44]:
And asking Grok, is that real?

David Hewlett [01:04:45]:
That's exactly— well, that's, you know, but I think so. I think even more so, people are going to, they're going to value, they're going to value things that— they're going to value art made by humans. They're going to value you stories that they know are innately human. I think they always will. Theater was going to disappear because movies showed up and then movies were going to disappear because TV showed up. Then the internet was going to kill all of that and look what happens. All of a sudden stage plays are bigger than ever. When I got into a band as a kid, the drum machine was going to replace me.

David Hewlett [01:05:21]:
I went to see Beck the other day and he had a full orchestra and like 4 different drummers and percussionists. I mean, we love this stuff. We're still human. We gotta—

Iain Thomson [01:05:29]:
Well, I mean, David, you're as big a nerd as I am, I think. I mean, you've read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

David Hewlett [01:05:33]:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:05:34]:
Where there is, you know, a complete industry of, yeah, you buy a printed paper newspaper. And I was, I, I was at the, I was at the, the AI Engineer World Forum in July, and we actually produced an 8-page printed newspaper for an AI conference, and it went down gangbusters. People were grabbing them off the stands because they like the retro to it and they like the fact that somebody actually was willing to put it down on paper and lock it in. And while I— part of me doesn't miss paper publishing because that's where I started, and if you made a mistake, it was locked in for eternity. But on the other hand, it was really nice to see it back. And I think that, as you say, that kind of handcrafted stuff is never going to go away.

David Hewlett [01:06:21]:
Yeah, I think there might be more of a value to it because of this stuff to some extent. I mean, I hope so. We'll see. I mean, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:28]:
Well, let's go ahead and put data centers to bed for now. We are coming back. There is actually 2 more massive data center sections of the show. Go figure. But before we do that, and before we get to something a little lighter, uh, can we take just a moment? Because I'd like to talk to Leo again. He's, he's got some more news we need to hear from one of the sponsors of the show. Thanks, Leo. Now I think we've talked about data centers long enough.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:53]:
I want to talk about some um, non-related tech, specifically Apple. Now Apple made a big announcement because they've released their brand new MacBook Pro with Pro— what is it— Pro LED XDR display. Oh, it's beautiful. Now it comes in 2 versions, comes in a 14-inch and a 16-inch. The 14-inch weighs in at about 3 pounds, the 16-inch weighs in at about 4. Uh, they've switched from Mini LED, which was already pretty good, to OLED, which is Absolutely gorgeous. That allows them to reduce the thickness and the weight of the screen because they don't need a backlight. Now, perhaps a reminder of how OLEDs work and LEDs work.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:32]:
LED, you had you need a backlight to be able to shine through the the array so that it can filter out the colors that you're not supposed to see. An OLED doesn't have a backlight because the OLED elements themselves are what emit light. It allows you to have true blacks. It has allows you to have really rich saturated colors, and it actually uses less power. power. Now, peak HDR brightness is 2,000 nits, reflectance is about 1%. Performance is unchanged because it's still using the M5 Pro and the M5 Max chips. But the big change is touch.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:06]:
That's right, for the very first time, a MacBook Pro comes with a touchscreen. Now, Apple is selling it as a secondary input method. I think they don't want to really play it up so much, especially since Steve Steve Jobs famously said he hated touch. He thought touch was the absolute worst way to input data into a computer. Now the retail price is gonna start at $2,899 for the 14-inch and $3,400 for the 16-inch. Gentlemen, are any of you gonna be picking one of these up?

Allyn Malventano [01:08:38]:
That's painful.

David Hewlett [01:08:40]:
I, that hurts. Just, yeah, listening to you say that, I just, I love the sound of these things. And he's, you know what, it's funny, I always thought that was a bit snobby of him to say that about the touchscreen, Actually, his point was more about the ergonomics of it, which I understand. Like, you don't wanna be using a computer with your hand like this. I totally get that. Um, you're gonna get tired of that pretty quick. But they're, they seem to be smart in that, as you say, it's a secondary thing. Like, they're using it as a, as a secondary way.

David Hewlett [01:09:05]:
Like, if you think of it, you can tap something and you've got that as an op— as a, as an option.

Allyn Malventano [01:09:09]:
But it, but it, but it's not a, but it's not a convertible, right? Like, it doesn't fold. It doesn't.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:13]:
Nope.

David Hewlett [01:09:14]:
No.

Allyn Malventano [01:09:15]:
See, that's a shame.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:15]:
It's a MacBook.

Iain Thomson [01:09:17]:
Yeah,

Allyn Malventano [01:09:17]:
yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:09:18]:
No, I mean, we used to have a phrase at the Register, which was the Cupertino idiot tax. And it is a phenomenally expensive machine for what it is. I mean, I use an X1 Carbon with a touchscreen and it cost me less than $1,500. The idea that you would spend over $3,000. And as Alan pointed out, not even for a convertible, you know, I mean, they're taking the piss on this. They really are. And I'm sure the screen is lovely and I'm sure Apple People will love the operating system, but come on, you know, there's a limit to how much you can charge,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:55]:
especially

David Hewlett [01:09:56]:
since

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:57]:
they're just about to release the new M6 chips. And do you wanna buy this and then have it outdated the moment that they release a regularly priced MacBook?

David Hewlett [01:10:06]:
Yeah, they're gonna be jumping 6 and going straight to 7 or something, aren't they doing something weird that way?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:10]:
I thought I saw 6 on the map. I, I could be wrong. Yeah, I try not to pay attention too much to Apple stuff just because my brother-in-law is actually a senior engineer at Apple. And I, I, I have to be very careful about what I say because I don't wanna accidentally say something that he told me is— that would be—

David Hewlett [01:10:25]:
Ah, wow. That's good. So we should just keep you talking. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:10:27]:
Yeah. Just keep talking. Keep, get him, get him liquored up, David.

David Hewlett [01:10:30]:
What else did he not say?

Allyn Malventano [01:10:32]:
Yeah. Um, let

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:34]:
me ask, do any of you right now use a touchscreen laptop? I, I've got 2.

Iain Thomson [01:10:40]:
Yeah, I use one of those. I love mine.

Allyn Malventano [01:10:43]:
Yeah. Most of mine are touchscreen. I don't necessarily use the touchscreen part of it, but those that I do have that are touchscreen typically are convertibles that like pop up.

David Hewlett [01:10:51]:
I have the iPad, which, right. I love the iPad.

Allyn Malventano [01:10:52]:
Love it. Um, I, I bought—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:53]:
every once in a while I forget that my, my laptop is touchscreen and then I'm doing something that I'm like, oh yeah, it's easier doing the touchscreen. So it does come in handy. I don't use it all the time, but it is nice to have it.

Allyn Malventano [01:11:05]:
I still, I still have it somewhere. I, I bought the first, uh, when Lenovo did like the Yoga, like second gen, I think. Yeah. Yeah. It had like an optional OLED screen. Right. And we were, we reviewed it at PCPer and I was so impressed with it. I didn't even really have a need to carry a laptop around and I still bought one myself.

Allyn Malventano [01:11:23]:
'Cause it was like, wow, this is, the screen was just like amazing at the time. Like, it was like, it's like your first look at OLED. It's like, ooh, right. Everything's so clean and sharp and everything.

Iain Thomson [01:11:34]:
Yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, if I'm using the laptop in bed at night, you know, and I don't want to have a mouse on the duvet, then yeah, touchscreen is perfect. If I'm using on BART, for example, on the way into work, then yeah, touchscreen works really well. You wouldn't use it as your primary input device, but it's really handy to have.

Allyn Malventano [01:11:51]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:52]:
And I think they used to call it gorilla arm. Like if you're going to be using a touchscreen all day.

David Hewlett [01:11:56]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:11:57]:
Yeah. What makes me so upset that it's not a convertible in that case is because I saw demos and videos of people using the touch integration and like Apple did as Apple usually does, and they have all this background on other touch devices. Right. And so like, it looks like it's beautifully implemented, right? Like probably as good as you could get, get as far as that. Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:17]:
They don't wanna confuse their iPad market. I mean, the iPad one needs to— Yeah. So

Allyn Malventano [01:12:21]:
listen, listen, maybe you're right. Maybe you're right, Padre. They're already eating into it with the, with the phone.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:26]:
That's, that's right.

Allyn Malventano [01:12:27]:
Right. With the foldable, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:29]:
So a $2,000 phone, a $4,000 laptop, it's really starting to that up. Why

Iain Thomson [01:12:35]:
don't we just sell them our children?

David Hewlett [01:12:38]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:12:38]:
Arm, leg, kidney.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:12:39]:
I couldn't get that much. You could get like an older iPhone maybe.

David Hewlett [01:12:43]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:12:44]:
The thing is, I mean, I used a Surface laptop for many years, which had this built in, you know, as standard. And the fact that Apple is now coming around to touch shows, I think, 2 things. First off, the iPad market is dying on its backside because they I had a friend come over from the UK last weekend and he carries an iPad, but only to use on the plane or in transit because for serious work he uses his laptop. But also Apple is coming late to this and they're charging a massive premium for it. And I'm not quite sure the market's ready for that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:20]:
It sounds kind of weird that they're trying to tout this as, oh yeah, this is a revolutionary new thing. And yet it's like, oh, Yeah, we've only had it for 20 years, but, but cool. Yeah, please. I

David Hewlett [01:13:30]:
feel like it'll be beautiful. Like, there's— the best laptops I've ever had were always, were always Macs, and the Macs were just absolutely beautifully made, but they were always far too expensive. And this is like, the base level of these are, are that cost.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:43]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:13:43]:
And we're not even talking about maxing them out.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:45]:
I do wanna point out one thing. Benito, can you, can you bring up a photo if you've got it of, of the back of that laptop, of, of the new laptop? Because there is a very unique feature about this, and that There was a model where they removed the glowing Apple. Oh,

David Hewlett [01:13:57]:
sorry.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:58]:
Users did not like that. So on this model, the glowing Apple is back. But here's the thing, it's not LED, it's OLED, which means they actually had to add another lighting element to make that thing light up.

David Hewlett [01:14:10]:
Oh man.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:14:10]:
Because you can't do it the other— the old way was just to let the, the, the backlight light bleed through the Apple. So they had to add something to make that thing light up.

David Hewlett [01:14:20]:
So. Oh my God. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:14:21]:
Yeah. No, I mean, I'm still waiting for— oh, sorry.

David Hewlett [01:14:25]:
We go.

Iain Thomson [01:14:26]:
Oh, okay. I'm also waiting for the iFixit report on this, on how repairable it is, because—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:14:32]:
well, exactly.

Iain Thomson [01:14:34]:
I mean, I've— this is the problem. I mean, I love my X1, but repairability-wise, if you want to get to the keyboard, I've got to take out and replace 87 screws just to clean the keyboard. And Apple's going to be worse because they've got their own screw types and they hug, they hard glue things to the motherboard. Yeah. So it's like you're spending 3 grand on a laptop you can't repair. The battery is going to go after 2 or 3 years at best.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:15:04]:
It

Iain Thomson [01:15:05]:
just seems like an enormous waste of money.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:15:09]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:15:09]:
Yeah. The battery life is a concern too, because the batteries always seem to fail. With the, with the Apples eventually. I— the thing, the thing that really struck me on this one weirdly is the name. That's so not Apple. Like, why don't—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:15:22]:
They don't, they don't like adding a bunch of letters. It's the MacBook, it's the iPhone. So—

David Hewlett [01:15:28]:
But why isn't it like the MacBook Touch or something? Like, why isn't it— I don't know, like, it just feels like you could have marketed that so much. This feels so non-Apple. Like, this feels like a— this feels like a Google product, you know what I mean? The launch, you know what I mean? The way it's, it's, it's It's confusingly named and not particularly well marketed for something that sounds— look, I'm drooling over the specs. I'd get this thing in a second if money wasn't a concern. I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:15:53]:
mean, I can get a 50% family discount, so I might actually try.

Iain Thomson [01:16:02]:
But I mean, I get what you're saying.

David Hewlett [01:16:03]:
And we're all your children, right?

Iain Thomson [01:16:06]:
I mean, I get what you're saying about the naming because it seems like, um,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:10]:
yeah,

Iain Thomson [01:16:11]:
Tim Cook on steroids. I remember when Cook took over from Jobs and The Onion had a marvelous headline about Apple's latest keynote, and Cook walked on stage, oh, and one other thing, here's a new iPhone. Anyway, right, you know, new management at Apple seemed to have forgotten that, you know, pizzazz factor.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:30]:
The art of the show. Yeah, they become like Sam Samsung. Sam, do you remember when Samsung did that Broadway thing and they were trying to be Apple cool and it was just, it was 45 minutes of cringing? Oh yeah, cringeworthy.

Allyn Malventano [01:16:42]:
I remember that.

David Hewlett [01:16:42]:
Or that Google event. Those re— those recent Google events have been pretty extraordinarily awkward as well. I mean, oof.

Iain Thomson [01:16:49]:
Oh yeah. Well, I mean, the last, the last I/O was painful. Uh, was it? A, because, well, A, because they've, for the last couple of years, they've been doing it in an open-air amphitheater down in Mountain View. View, which I have to say, if you're covering the event, is an absolute bastard because trying to use a laptop in either pissing down rain or bright sunlight is not recommended. But they just, they don't have the naming strategy. They don't have that cool factor. And I honestly can't think of any technology company which is still cool, you know, that's still got it. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:24]:
It's not Tesla anymore. It's not Apple anymore.

Allyn Malventano [01:17:27]:
No,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:27]:
no, it has never been Samsung. Yeah, you're right. I don't— what's the cool tech company now?

Iain Thomson [01:17:33]:
I really can't think of it. You

David Hewlett [01:17:35]:
know, what happened?

Iain Thomson [01:17:38]:
Oh yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:39]:
Maybe like the AI cycle has short-circuited because there was, there's always been like the one tech company that everyone's like, oh yeah, their stuff's top-notch.

Iain Thomson [01:17:47]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, but

Allyn Malventano [01:17:49]:
yeah, I don't,

Iain Thomson [01:17:50]:
not anymore.

David Hewlett [01:17:50]:
It

Iain Thomson [01:17:51]:
seems

David Hewlett [01:17:52]:
again, I feel like whenever I've used the Apple Apple products, like whatever, like I like my iPad, my my computer. I you know I have the M two, I guess. It but but it's and it's it's beautiful when it's working. It's beautiful. It's beautifully designed. It's all the rest of it. But but it doesn't have the same kind of you know I don't I don't know that I'm going to be holding on to it as long as I held on to the old MacBooks from from you know what ten years ago or so. Right.

David Hewlett [01:18:19]:
I mean those those last those last run Intel Macs, they were bulletproof. I mean, they just, you just went and went. It was amazing.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:27]:
Now we don't have MacBooks anymore. We have MacBooks from Temu. Yeah, you see, I mean, actually, someone in the Discord pointed out there is one company that does have the cool mindshare right now, and I think they're right. El Dudo Rino says BYD.

David Hewlett [01:18:47]:
Oh my God.

Iain Thomson [01:18:48]:
Yeah. If you could actually get BYD in America. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I've got friends in the UK.

David Hewlett [01:18:54]:
They're coming to Canada apparently.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:56]:
I spent a month in Asia. I was doing work in Asia and it was all BYD vehicles and they're amazing. They're so good. They're comfortable, they're feature-packed, they're safe and they're cheap. And yeah, why are we not having those right now?

Iain Thomson [01:19:10]:
Well, because Elon's got the presidency here and so we have tariffs.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:14]:
I mean, yes, that's the real answer. But yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:19:16]:
No, I mean, it's the same thing in the UK. I mean, I talked to my friends in the UK and they're like, you know, we've got a BYD, you're not going to believe what it does and does this and does that and it's great. And it was so cheap. And yeah, I mean, if, if the problem is though, if America opened up its car industry to Chinese imports, the American car industry would be dead almost instantly.

David Hewlett [01:19:38]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:19:39]:
Because they can build them cheaper, they can build them better. And I mean, coming back to what we're talking about—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:44]:
The Japanese car industry did that to us, you know, in the '80s and the '90s. And then the American manufacturer had to adapt.

Iain Thomson [01:19:51]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:52]:
And so we're protecting them from adapting, which we shouldn't do, because they're— it's been one bomb after another. They've just been screwing— instead of giving us cars that last for a long time and that are safe, they give us the next version of the Charger SS or a Hellcat. It's like, well, how about actually looking what people are wanting to spend money on? Yeah. And then go with that.

David Hewlett [01:20:12]:
It's F-150.

Iain Thomson [01:20:13]:
Like Cybertruck.

David Hewlett [01:20:14]:
Sorry, it's F-150.

Iain Thomson [01:20:15]:
It's like Cybertruck.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:17]:
Although, I mean, I see, I see Alan boring holes into my eyes here. So, because he is a car guy, so he might actually like a Hellcat.

Allyn Malventano [01:20:25]:
No, no, I wouldn't. I mean, they're nice, but I wouldn't like— not for me. I like cars that can turn.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:35]:
Both directions?

Allyn Malventano [01:20:36]:
Both directions, yes. Not just left.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:38]:
I like cars that can turn. Okay.

Iain Thomson [01:20:40]:
10 years ago, we tried doing car reviews and And Ford sent us the 2015 Mustang, which everyone was just like, oh my goodness, you've got a Mustang. That's great. And the bloke who turned up was just like, this is the first car we've done with a limited slip differential. It's like, you kidding? Mazda was doing those 20 years ago. And, you know, you tried it and great American muscle car in a straight line. Nothing can beat it. Looks like a fish, steers like a cow. And, you know, I mean, it was just a terrible— I mean, the car door panels weren't even properly aligned on one side.

Iain Thomson [01:21:19]:
And you're just like, this is the best you can do? And I think the Chinese are going to beat us hollow on this unless we open the market up to competition and American manufacturers have to get smarter.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:31]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:21:32]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:32]:
Protectionism never works.

David Hewlett [01:21:35]:
And it's weird to think that China might be the cool tech place now. Like, that That's like, how weird is that? I mean,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:40]:
and because they haven't been focused, they haven't been focused on being the cool tech. They've just been building the tech that works. That's a good strategy.

David Hewlett [01:21:48]:
There was an amazing book that I read called, I think it's Breakneck, about the, the, the, the, it was basically comparing America and China as, as just as both as governments and as powers and as best business, you know, business leaders. And they were saying how America focuses on the inventor, on the eureka moment, on that lone genius that creates a new product and changes the world. China perfects it. They don't put as much weight on the idea that one person invented something. Their concern is how do we shepherd this along and make this better? How do we iterate to make it better? Yeah. That's where they see the value. value. And I think we're realizing now that maybe we should be more focused on that because— and now there's obviously issues there because—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:38]:
Good point.

David Hewlett [01:22:38]:
Patents, copyrights, you know, human rights, all that stuff, and it becomes an issue. But, but at the same time, they're, they're engineers where America has become lawyers, you know. So there's a different sort of approach.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:50]:
Bankers.

David Hewlett [01:22:50]:
It's an amazing book. I recommend it. I highly recommend Breakneck. It's, it's really— it's a, it's a—

Iain Thomson [01:22:55]:
But I mean, it's very similar to the Apple strategy. You know, Apple didn't invent the smartphone. iPhone. Apple didn't invent the media player. They certainly didn't invent the touchpad, but they made them A, cool, and B, really, really good.

David Hewlett [01:23:08]:
Yeah, you're right.

Iain Thomson [01:23:10]:
Yeah, I mean, when the first iPhone came out, a friend of mine, uh, Jono, when he left and went to analysis, he cited the iPhone launch as his greatest mistake ever because he's like, it's a 2.5G phone in a 3G Doesn't have a keyboard, and it's got 4 apps, and that's it. And he was just like, yeah, mea culpa, I was wrong on that. But Apple, yeah, took the smartphone and perfected it. Took them— I mean, I had about 5 different media players before the iPod came out, and then iPod beat them all hollow. You know, and they made the tablet, you know, better than anyone else. So China is doing just this at the moment.

David Hewlett [01:23:51]:
I went all in on the, uh, on the Newton.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:23:57]:
No, I had a Palm, a Palm Pre. Come on.

David Hewlett [01:24:00]:
Oh, I went to, I got to there eventually. But, but boy, it took me a while to get that, that heater pack outta the back of my, my, my large jean pocket.

Iain Thomson [01:24:07]:
Palm IIIx. I had a Palm IIIx with a portable keyboard and I loved it to death.

Allyn Malventano [01:24:12]:
Oh God. I had a, I had a Palm Pilot.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:14]:
I wish I had kept my Newton. I, I wish I had kept it.

David Hewlett [01:24:16]:
I've got it. I've still got it. Yeah. I've still got I still it. got it.

Allyn Malventano [01:24:18]:
This, this was amazing back in the day. I had a Palm Pilot and then later on I had a Dell Axim. Oh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:23]:
I love those.

Allyn Malventano [01:24:24]:
Really nice, you know, and it had like a CompactFlash and like an eMMC card slot or something like that. And I bought the IBM MicroDrive. I had like 5 megabytes. Oh yes, yes. 5 gigabytes. A little hard drive in the side. A 5 gigabyte hard drive in a Dell Axim with a copy of Wikipedia on it.

Iain Thomson [01:24:44]:
Wow.

David Hewlett [01:24:45]:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Allyn Malventano [01:24:46]:
Hold on, hold on. Out to sea on the submarine with no internet. Oh, I had, I had, I had people coming to me at one point. I had the captain come to me, hey, can I borrow your, can I borrow your Axum, Melvin Tyler? Like, I want to look something up on your, on your pocket brain. I said, pull it out. Like, here's the internet, here you go.

David Hewlett [01:25:06]:
Wow. But we literally had the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Allyn Malventano [01:25:10]:
Oh yeah, somebody would, somebody would ask, man, I really wish I knew the lyrics to that song. Oh crap,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:16]:
I got them.

Allyn Malventano [01:25:17]:
Hold on, let me see if it's on Wikipedia. There you go, here you go. Yeah, I was totally Urkeling it up, man. I was like—

Iain Thomson [01:25:24]:
And

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:24]:
actually, for Alan, it would be appropriate if he had a sticker on the front of it that said don't panic with the—

Allyn Malventano [01:25:30]:
I mean, you could have—

Iain Thomson [01:25:32]:
you want to separate and then— yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:25:34]:
Absolutely.

Iain Thomson [01:25:35]:
We forget how good some of that old tech was. I mean, I was going through the box of cables and old and dead tech, and I've got a 2 gigabyte PCM CAA card in there, which was like black magic in the days of floppy drives. You know, it's like, oh yeah, let me copy that movie for you. You know, the Palm Pre, I totally— the Palm Pre was one of the only 2 occasions the launch of the Palm Pre, there's only 2 occasions this century where I've stood up and applauded at a press conference, because that is abominable for a British journalist. But I saw that coming out and I loved my 3X so much, it was kind of like, yeah, okay, I'm giving that a clap. Wow. But we had, you know, we had very good tech. It was dirt cheap, you know, Palm 3X powered by standard batteries.

Iain Thomson [01:26:23]:
Yeah, you know, and you could take it, I mean, I was on a flight to Finland to see Nokia and I got a little portable keyboard and you plug the 3X into that and I was, you know, writing an article and people were looking over the back of the seat just like, what black magic is this? Because laptops then were like, you know, an inch thick and had the battery life of a gnat's fart. So, you know, it's just, yeah, one of those things. But we've gone forward, but we haven't necessarily gone all the way forward, we've gone backwards in some areas.

David Hewlett [01:26:55]:
Look at people's fascination with cyberdecks.

Iain Thomson [01:26:58]:
Oh

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:59]:
yes,

David Hewlett [01:27:00]:
you know, cyberdecks, like, that's like all the— my son came up the other day and said, can we build a cyberdeck? And I was like, I love you, you're the son I always wanted. You know, like, that's a— you know, I, I think that there's a— there's, there's an interest in that kind of stuff. And that, that reminds me of the old— I mean, I had the BlackBerry, I had the BlackBerry pager where they had the little— it was like the, the one of the first ones that came out.

Iain Thomson [01:27:21]:
You were drinking?

David Hewlett [01:27:22]:
No, no, no, no. I was, I was, I was an actor pretending to be a stock person on television. I was like a stock derivatives trader. And so they gave me one of these like original early models for it, um, and then asked for it back 5 years later when they realized what my cell phone coverage, my— what the, uh, charges were. I had everything on it. It was amazing. But yeah, I think this is definitely a retro feel, like people want to go back to that kind of

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:27:45]:
I think it actually really pertains to you as the most actor-type person, the most artist-type person on this panel. There was a little story that developed in France last week. And, yeah, it does involve AI, but it really is more about taking advantage of systems. Now, the Prix Goncourt is the most prestigious literary award in France. It has been won by people like Marcel Proust for his 7-volume novel In Search of Lost Time that he wrote between 1913 and 1927. It was an absolute masterpiece encapsulating so much about French culture. You have Simone de Beauvoir for The Mandarins, which is her book that explored the interactions of— the complexity of human relationships and societal norms. And then you have Then a Canadian, you Jean Genet, who won had it in 1957 for Marguerite Duras, who wrote The Lover, which I can only assume, with a name like Duras, was about her time fighting in the Klingon Insurrection War.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:44]:
But that prize has been used to sort of pin those works that are of seminal importance to the French people. The latest winner was a man by the name of Philippe Jaeneda, and I'm sorry, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, with his novel The Unknown Woman of the Quai de Javel. Now, he won because the Académie Goncourt removed the book of a competing author from the competition list because they had a tool called Pangram that had determined that it had a lot of AI assistance. AI had helped to put it together, helped to write it too much. And so they didn't want anything to taint the competition. It is such a prestigious competition that they took But Philippe has admitted that he actually used ChatGPT for the novel 3 times. He claims that he was trying to, quote, play with the readers, and he also claims that he revealed the truth to the judges on the day of the award after he had received it. Now, I got to ask, because it is— this is so emblematic of what's going on in the world right now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:56]:
This is a prestigious award. It's been around for more than a century. It's something that they really rely on to give them sort of the bellwether of where is our culture going. And they had one very simple rule, which is it's got to be written by a human. It cannot have anything to do with AI. And yet we now know that that tradition has been broken. And by the way, he didn't tell them about it until he had already received the award. Hugh, I want to come to you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:22]:
I mean, if this is an expression of the high— one of the highest forms of art and they're using AI, and by the way, he says he's okay with it. He says, I don't think AI can be held back. We can't pretend that it doesn't exist. You have to use it. But first you have to acknowledge it. Is that what we have to do? Does Hollywood have to say, look, this is just going to happen. You're just going to have your likeness used. You're just going to see AI-created content.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:30:46]:
I think that's a very good question. Or do we push back?

David Hewlett [01:30:50]:
I think it's a combination. I mean, I've got to say that when you have to use AI to find out if something was written with AI, it makes me question, you know, the whole thing. Because if it's so good that you can't tell, I mean, if it's truly a book that is better than everything else we've seen, then we need to really question, I think, where we stand in the scheme of creativity. Maybe creativity is something that we can't do. Something that isn't just innately human. I worry that that's— you know, I don't know that that's the case. I hope it's not. You know, but when it comes to— I think when it comes to using other people's likeness and that kind of stuff, there are rules.

David Hewlett [01:31:26]:
And I think that if this guy went into a book writing competition knowing that he wasn't supposed to use AI and used AI, then, yeah, no, that's just— you're not playing by the rules. But I think there's something to be said for what happens when— what happens when you're What happens when we can't tell that something has been written by AI or filmed by AI or created? You know, at that point, if it's— if we enjoy it, what does it matter what tools were used to make it?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:50]:
That's actually very healthy. Yes. I mean, we are so caught up on, that's AI, that's AI slop. And then you've got the entire comment section saying, no, this predates AI, or no, I actually saw this, or no, I was there. But if you enjoy it, if it moves you, if it's art that makes you think, think that's okay, right? Or do we say, no, it has to be human?

David Hewlett [01:32:13]:
I interviewed an actor friend of mine, Kara Gee, from The Expanse. Amazing, amazing woman. It turned into a parenting podcast because one of the things she mentioned was that her kid, his favorite— his or her, I don't remember— favorite thing on the internet was these weird AI-generated videos. Her first instinct was like, whoa, okay, no, no, no, no, no, no, no child of mine. Then she went, my God, is this rap from my parents? Is this just— we don't— it's just that it's not ours, we're worried about it because we don't understand it. I don't know, I'm not saying that I— I go back and forth on this stuff. I love it, I hate it. The number of bad short films I get sent that have been generated by AI and people go, Huh? You worried about your job? I'm like, no, I'm worried about yours because you're spending too much time making bad stuff.

David Hewlett [01:33:05]:
So

Allyn Malventano [01:33:05]:
there's, there's, there's somewhat of a light counter to that. So if you've watched any of the Gossip Goblin videos on YouTube, this guy's, this guy's basically working on a movie right now, but he puts shorts on YouTube occasionally, and almost every single one of them have, number one, been pretty good quality, and number two, been good enough, like, storyline-wise To where every, almost every one of them, like, I want to see that whole movie.

David Hewlett [01:33:31]:
Oh, see, there you go.

Allyn Malventano [01:33:32]:
It's just like, see, right, just like really good concepts, like actual, like character, like actually cool, you know, cool stuff, right? Um, actually, David, I think I texted you one of those like about a month or two back, that one of those videos.

David Hewlett [01:33:45]:
So one of those?

Allyn Malventano [01:33:46]:
Okay. Yeah, it was one of those.

David Hewlett [01:33:47]:
I wonder if that was like, I wonder if it was one of those ones that I went like, yeah, sure, Alan, whatever.

Allyn Malventano [01:33:50]:
No, no, no, no, no, they're pretty good. Good ones.

David Hewlett [01:33:53]:
Like, yeah, 2 Mel Ventano.

Allyn Malventano [01:33:55]:
Sorry.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:56]:
But I mean, we've also got the other side. I mean, yeah, if it moves you, great. It's, it's art. It's wonderful. However, you've also got the Odyssey clone that Musk tried to create with Grok.

David Hewlett [01:34:05]:
Oh my God.

Iain Thomson [01:34:06]:
Oh God. Did you watch that? That was so bad.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:34:09]:
It was painful. I

David Hewlett [01:34:09]:
mean, yeah, it was longer than the, than the 3-hour Odyssey. It was like, it's harder to get through 7, whatever, 7 minutes than it was. Well, a friend of mine once said that there's nothing longer than a bad short film. And I think that was the perfect example of that.

Iain Thomson [01:34:24]:
No, that's fair enough. I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:34:25]:
mean, this doesn't even qualify as a student project. It was so bad. Everything about it was bad. The only thing that was good was like, okay, yeah, it looks photorealistic. But other than that, there was no soul. There was no, there was no story.

Allyn Malventano [01:34:37]:
So this is the issue.

Iain Thomson [01:34:38]:
But I mean, I think this is the problem with the original competition in that if you, the rules lay out explicitly no use of AI, It's a really dick move to turn around after you've won the prize and say, well, actually, I did use GPT—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:34:53]:
Yeah, that's obvious.

Iain Thomson [01:34:54]:
3 times. You know, that's— but in terms of AI generation, it's the coming thing. We can't fight against it. I do worry about actors having either selling their rights or, you know, having their image rights stolen and being used in other performances. I think that needs to get sorted out. out, you know, right quick. But, um, there are actors who are willing to sell out. And honestly, back in the day when we still had GPS, you know, GPS receivers, I would have paid a lot of money to have Barry White doing my instructions on the road.

Iain Thomson [01:35:30]:
You know, turn right nice and smooth. There was a—

Allyn Malventano [01:35:35]:
there was a guy— that wheel over— the guy that did, uh, what's the name of that, the skeleton dude on that late show?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:44]:
Oh, uh,

Allyn Malventano [01:35:45]:
uh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:46]:
Craig, uh,

Allyn Malventano [01:35:47]:
Craig Ferguson Show. And then like he had his little skeleton sidekick.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:50]:
Geoff, Geoff, Geoff,

Allyn Malventano [01:35:51]:
Geoff,

David Hewlett [01:35:52]:
Geoff, Geoff Dunham or whatever his name is. Or—

Allyn Malventano [01:35:54]:
No, no, no, that's different. That's a different—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:56]:
Geoff.

Allyn Malventano [01:35:57]:
Geoff. Yeah. Um, and, uh, the guy, the guy that did that voice does like a killer Morgan Freeman. And he did some— these, this is going like 10, 15 years ago back. There's YouTube videos of this guy doing a Morgan Freeman Geoff GPS voice.

Iain Thomson [01:36:11]:
Oh wow.

Allyn Malventano [01:36:11]:
And it was, it was just so funny because like you see a guy trying to drive the car and the Morgan Freeman thing, so you can turn right or you can turn left, you know, just like doing the whole thing. And at some point, at some point in the video, it goes, you can get busy living or you can get busy driving. That's great.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:29]:
I want a GPS voice of Matthew McConaughey from the Lincoln commercials.

Allyn Malventano [01:36:34]:
Oh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:35]:
I just turned left? Or should left just turn me? You know, just nonsense stuff. Just—

David Hewlett [01:36:40]:
Isn't he one of the guys who sold— he sold his likeness to AI? Did he? He's there.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:45]:
Did he?

David Hewlett [01:36:45]:
I think he's the one. Yeah, his voice.

Allyn Malventano [01:36:47]:
McConaughey or Freeman? It might have been Freeman.

David Hewlett [01:36:50]:
McConaughey. McConaughey. He— or he's patented something and sold. So I can't remember what it was, but there was— it's the weird thing is, as an actor, when you sign a contract, you often sign a contract for all future possible uses your— which, which, you know, I, you know, we talked about Cube earlier. When Cube came out, we, we built the website for it, which people didn't do for films at that time. So we built a little, a little website. We had little forums and all sorts of stuff. It was a lot of fun, a lot of fun to do.

David Hewlett [01:37:19]:
And, um, and as a result, when they signed the contract to distribute the film, I got the digital, the digital rights to Cube. They had to talk to me before digital. Of course, it didn't mean any— it didn't mean any anything. That was how little we understood about how these things were going to be used. That was at a time when you had to convince studios that they needed an internet presence. They're like, well, why would we need that? It's like, just the people. I think a big part of the success of Stargate was that it was happening in tandem with the rise of the internet and the public's use of it.

Iain Thomson [01:37:55]:
A big part of how Monty Python got— how the Monty Pythonists got so well off in the '80s and '90s was because they got paid a flat fee for the, for the shows. They didn't get, you know, royalty rights or anything. But the BBC didn't understand what VCRs are, and so they got all the rights to the videos, and they made bank in the '80s and '90s selling Monty Python videos. Um, and then of course streaming came along, and, you know, um, Eric Idle is now complaining that he's meaningless, which is a crying shame. But I mean, it's the way of these things, you know, and this is— it's going to go the same way with AI, as you point out, you know, David, that— I mean, if you're, for example, an extra on a film set, you have to sign away your rights to use your images on future productions, which is going to kill the extras industry.

David Hewlett [01:38:52]:
Background performers are I mean, that's, you know, we used to, you know, it used to have scenes with 1,000 people in the background. Now you have scenes with like 10 people and they just move them around. That was CG though. I mean, that had happened, started happening even before. But, and I remember the backlash on that as well, where CG was gonna replace everybody and we weren't gonna need actors even for that. So, I mean, again, I still feel like we come back to that human element, you know? Yeah. I think that is A big, a big part of it.

David Hewlett [01:39:21]:
Hi. So I've never published anything

Iain Thomson [01:39:23]:
that's been written, but

David Hewlett [01:39:24]:
I think the real issue here with the media creation is that it's the volume. Like these, the AI can pump out so much more than people can pump out that it's going to be impossible to like tell, like, and it's going to be mostly AI. And that I think is the issue.

David Hewlett [01:39:40]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:39:41]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:39:42]:
And then once you flood the market with low quality.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:45]:
Yeah, that's not good. That

David Hewlett [01:39:46]:
WALL-E future of us just watching screens of AI-generated stuff going, yeah, like what has that—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:52]:
Gentlemen, we gotta move on to a story that the, the chat room keeps requesting, and that is to talk about Jensen Huang. Yes, we, you knew, you knew it was gonna happen and we gotta cover it because NVIDIA is a big, big company and this is a big, big story. But before we get to that, let's take another break and toss to Leo so he can tell us about another sponsor of this episode. episode of This Week in Tech. Thanks again, Leo. Now, this story is developing. Actually, it just released right before we started recording this episode, and that is that Nvidia has agreed to cooperate with the probe of Jensen Huang's relationship with someone who has been identified as a Chinese spy. That's right, Nvidia's board of directors launched an independent investigation into allegations that Chinese intelligence recruited a businesswoman by the name of Alice Wong, no relation to Jensen, with close ties to Nvidia's CEO to gather intelligence about him.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:50]:
Now, Nvidia and America's advanced artificial intelligence technology have been on the table. They've been very much interest of by Chinese intelligence, and that's what they were after. Now, the allegations raise questions about whether China attempted to use a personal relationship with one of America's most influential technology executives to obtain sensitive information and potentially influence U.S. policy on exporting advanced AI chips to China. Now, how did we get here? We got here because Jensen has apparently acknowledged that he had a relationship, he had infidelity with Alice Wong. We know that the United States government has been investigating her for quite a while now, more than a year, and her business connections with some interesting groups, including a data center company by the name of Megaspeed, which may have been helping Chinese companies circumvent the American restrictions on advanced AI chips. The whole thing started in late 2024 with an investigation by the Commerce Department of the United States of the Megaspeed data center in Malaysia. Now, what they found was interesting because when they came to visit, they found a lot of the purchased hardware from Nvidia, which should have been deployed within the data center, still in boxes, still in pallets, still bundled up.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:10]:
That led them to believe that the data center was not actually a real data center, that most of the equipment was going to be shipped out. It was just a transit point to get restricted technology into China. Now, in 2025, that investigation led to Alice Wong. She was questioned and released. In 2026, the investigation expanded from the Commerce Department to the Justice Department. They realized this is no, no longer just an issue of about technology going missing, this could actually be a criminal investigation. In spring of 2026, Alice Wang was named as the— as a Chinese intelligence operative who had been assigned to honeypot Jensen Huang. Now, Trump knew about it allegedly a year ago but decided not to take action because at the time he was conducting high-level talks with China on trade, and he didn't want to disrupt those talks or Nvidia's business, Nvidia's profit.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:08]:
He knew that if you take down Nvidia, you're going to cause quite a ripple within the AI industry, which was propping up our economy. Now that it's coming to light, now that you can't avoid it, you have 3 Republicans running House Intelligence Committees rushing before they lose their seats to request closed-door sessions with Jensen and Nvidia's security procedure people. Now, important, it has not yet been determined, that Jensen released any material that Chinese intelligence was looking for. He didn't necessarily disclose any secrets, but this looks extremely, extremely bad. Gentlemen, I wanna open this up. That's the background. That's where we are. Ian, I know that you really were hot and heavy about the story, and you too, Alan.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:55]:
What do you got? Where do you wanna go with this?

Iain Thomson [01:43:57]:
Well, I've gotta say, when I was having a shower before coming on, I was thinking of the puntastic things that could be had, you know, Jensen puts his wang in the wrong place. And unfortunately someone on Twitter has got 2 wangs don't make a right. But look, you know, it's—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:15]:
Wow.

Iain Thomson [01:44:16]:
I mean, if you look at the actual stats, coming back to your point, Padre, Malaysia and Singapore are importing, I think they're the 3rd and 4th largest importers of GPUs. And I'm sorry, That doesn't ring with either their data center footprint or their likely GPU use. So this is— this looks like a clear case of sanction busting. In terms of the technical details of the GPUs, unless Jensen gave his password to this woman, then I think we're probably safe on that front because he's not going to be getting the detailed GPU documents. needed. But the shock horror thought that China might be using espionage to get ahead in the chip game is not exactly news. But it's just, it was fascinating that, I mean, literally an hour before we were on air, Nvidia came out and said, yeah, we are investigating this. And for them to make a public statement on a Sunday like this shows that this is a very serious problem.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this This could be the worst case of sanction busting I've seen. And then we've seen arms transfers, but this, when you've got countries, nation states that are actually in a race to AGI, this kind of looks treasonous. I don't want to say that. It's not treason, but it's bad. It's really, really bad. Alan, you've dealt with sensitive equipment, sensitive information, sensitive technologies.

Allyn Malventano [01:45:45]:
A time or two.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:47]:
Yeah. A few times.

David Hewlett [01:45:48]:
We call him Alan Honeypot in Allentown.

Allyn Malventano [01:45:50]:
Oh, great. I

Iain Thomson [01:45:51]:
was going to say, if you have anyone coming coast getting up.

Allyn Malventano [01:45:54]:
No.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:56]:
Where would you rank this?

Allyn Malventano [01:45:58]:
I mean, it's not a great look, you know. I mean, I don't— I will say this, I don't even— they— I think she's suspected of being like— I'm not even sure what the real story is there on that. I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:13]:
mean, they, they've called her a spy, but I mean, how do you, how do you verify that?

Allyn Malventano [01:46:16]:
That's the— yeah, so I don't even— it's It's weird. I would have thought that it would have been like multiple layers of bulletproof, relatively bulletproof, uh, security and background investigations just to be able to get to him. So I'm kind of surprised on that, on that front, you know. Um, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:34]:
It does seem a little weird because, I mean, if she was in business with Megaspeed in trying to bust sanctions and trying to use that as a transit point to get technology into China, she wouldn't need to have a relationship with Jensen. Yeah, it was— that's just— that's a business relationship. So that was really weird.

Allyn Malventano [01:46:52]:
It seems— it seems like an odd angle. Like, I just don't— yeah, yeah,

David Hewlett [01:46:57]:
I don't understand how— I feel like there's a snobbery that comes with this, that there— that is, you know, as an American, I think I'm allowed to say that I think we, we, we think we're just so good at this stuff that China can't figure it out.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:09]:
That's true.

David Hewlett [01:47:09]:
That's true. I just— I don't believe for a second that they can't work this out. With the amount of resources and time that they've got, this just seems like a tempest in a teacup. I don't understand what this— do we really think that he's interested in a few hundred chips going the wrong way? Nvidia's worth more than Canada, which I don't quite understand, but literally it's worth more than Canada. I just don't think this is a— I mean, I don't know. It just feels like we're making a huge fuss out of something that I just don't— I think it's probably happening in a much subtler way than this.

Allyn Malventano [01:47:49]:
Maybe. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:51]:
I do want to point out one thing, and that is that the biggest person, the person who has moved the most amount of advanced hardware to China is Donald Trump. You will remember that when he first put on the restrictions, that China couldn't get any AI chips. Yeah. There was a $300 million investment in his crypto company from a Chinese company that I think had a gross total income of like $1,000. It was, it was a shell that gave him $300 million in his crypto company, and suddenly he released restrictions on advanced AI chips, at least for a while. So while this looks bad, and yeah, this is, this is always bad anytime you have companies that are trying trying to circumvent any sort of restrictions on exporting technologies. I'm kind of with David in saying, yeah, okay, well, what was the real harm here? I mean, they had the chips. They already had the chips from Donald Trump.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:45]:
As Ian said, no one got design specs. They didn't get the password to be able to download how they can manufacture their own chips. So this is just—

Allyn Malventano [01:48:55]:
And that's the other thing. Jensen's not going to have that, right? Yeah, exactly. He's not the one doing that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:59]:
CEOs don't carry that around.

Allyn Malventano [01:49:01]:
Right. Yeah, that's, that's why it's so striking.

David Hewlett [01:49:03]:
It's not on a keychain that he carries with him all the time.

Allyn Malventano [01:49:05]:
Yeah, it's in his little briefcase.

David Hewlett [01:49:07]:
That's what we do in movies.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:09]:
Yeah. You need his fingerprints, his biometric information is, you know.

David Hewlett [01:49:13]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Iain Thomson [01:49:13]:
I doubt he was collecting fingerprints if the allegations are true, certainly. But I mean, the fact of the matter is China is desperate for advanced chip technology. Because the second it gets the ability to produce chips at maybe 70, 80% of the quality of TSMC or Nvidia, then Taiwan's toast. Because they know if they invade Taiwan, the chip fabs are going to get blown up. And they're perfectly willing, I think, to live with that. Because if they're the only supplier of high-end chips after Taiwan blows the fabs, they win. You know, it's as simple as that.

David Hewlett [01:49:49]:
I had not thought of that.

Iain Thomson [01:49:51]:
Yeah. So if there is nowhere else for people to go, nowhere else is producing these kind of chips in volume, you would have to buy from the Chinese. So, and at that point, Taiwan becomes moot.

Allyn Malventano [01:50:03]:
I will say

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:50:04]:
that I would also— I'm sorry, go ahead, Alan.

Allyn Malventano [01:50:06]:
Yeah. It's, I mean, okay. So if you have a country that has a harder time getting resources, especially this particular country, you find interesting things actually comes out of that. Different point I'm trying to make here. But like, for example, like DeepSeek. DeepSeek. Yeah, there you go. You nailed it.

Allyn Malventano [01:50:24]:
Right. This is an AI model that's relatively small, can be hosted locally, but it wasn't until they— so DeepSeek themselves about 2 weeks ago now, I think, released this report on DeepInfer, which is basically their recipe for like, okay, how do we serve this thing at scale. And the more you read that report, the more you realize that that model was essentially, aside from the fact that's a decent all-around model, was architected specifically around efficiency of serving at scale, right? Mm-hmm. Like they can, I mean, it just runs circles around everything else basically. Uh, it's just ridiculous how, how good that can scale on very limited amounts of hardware, like relatively smaller compared to, you know, another model of the same size would require way more storage space, way more memory, like to actually serve at scale. Like it's just very interesting.

David Hewlett [01:51:19]:
And it's open weights too, isn't it?

Allyn Malventano [01:51:21]:
It's open weights. DeepSeek is open weights. I'm running it. So

David Hewlett [01:51:24]:
yeah. This is what I mean is like, I just, I feel like, like, I mean, we've got these closed models run by, as we've established, some pretty weird and not entirely trustworthy people who I'm not I'm not sure how they would deal with honeypots either. Um, you know, and whereas with closed models that we don't have any control over,

Allyn Malventano [01:51:44]:
right,

David Hewlett [01:51:44]:
when they're maybe not quite as good, but certainly for most of us, certainly for me, I could be using a Chinese OpenWeight model without, you know, people would be worried about, about security. But I mean, Facebook, like Meta, people using Muse. Yeah. I've been playing with Muse. I, I, even Meta terrifies me just as a, you know, having my information and not looking after it well. So it just feels like this just, I just, I don't see this as the problem. I think that, I think it's, maybe it's a distraction. I don't know.

David Hewlett [01:52:17]:
I mean, you know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:19]:
Yeah. Everyone's kicking up this as a big story because it does involve the biggest fish in the AI barrel. It does involve the thing that the, the world economy seems to be really speeding towards. And so yeah, it's salacious. It's salacious information. Yeah, a CEO got caught in a honeypot. It's not the first time it's happened. It's not going to be the last time it's happened.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:39]:
But like most of you—

Allyn Malventano [01:52:41]:
Pretty high profile though.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:42]:
Yeah, it is. It's crazy embarrassing. I think the biggest consequence Jensen's going to face is with his wife.

Iain Thomson [01:52:50]:
Um, yeah, damn, that divorce. It's not like he's a president. Very expensive.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:55]:
Extremely expensive. Yeah. Multiple billions and billions and

Iain Thomson [01:52:59]:
billions. Amazon level expensive. And hopefully she—

David Hewlett [01:53:01]:
Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. That's gonna be—

Allyn Malventano [01:53:03]:
oh yeah.

David Hewlett [01:53:03]:
I wanna train to be a lawyer. Maybe AI could treat me to be a lawyer so I could represent her for, you know, cuz that's gonna be one hell of a—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:09]:
He's gonna use an AI lawyer. Those are, those have been really, really getting better.

Allyn Malventano [01:53:13]:
Yeah. Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:53:13]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:13]:
They, they very rarely hallucinate briefs anymore. So,

Allyn Malventano [01:53:16]:
you know.

David Hewlett [01:53:17]:
That's right. Citing nonexistent, uh, uh, yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:53:21]:
Nonexistent case law. Yeah.

David Hewlett [01:53:22]:
Yeah. I love that.

Iain Thomson [01:53:24]:
All right. Just goes to show, I mean, there, there isn't enough blood to fill both heads at the same time when it comes to some men. And it's just, you know,

David Hewlett [01:53:32]:
yeah,

Iain Thomson [01:53:33]:
you know, I mean, you're—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:53:35]:
there's no shade like British shade. I'm just gonna say that.

Allyn Malventano [01:53:38]:
Yep.

Iain Thomson [01:53:39]:
Yeah, but I mean, come on, it's— these things happen. But as, as, as we've agreed, he's not going to have access to the full technical specs. What it does open interesting possibility for is that that could then be be used, uh, if she's got— if she had access to his email, that could be used for very targeted spear phishing against certain people. True. And it's like you get an email from Jensen saying, I've just heard some bad things about this, can you just tell me what's wrong with this and how you're getting around it and how the chip design works? It would be unusual. It should set off a Chinese military parade of red flags in any security-conscious person, but these things have been shown to work in Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:23]:
they do them because they work.

David Hewlett [01:54:25]:
Alan, how— I'm curious to know, like, how difficult, once you've got the chip, like, if you get, if you get one of— access to one of these chips, or, I mean, can you reverse engineer them? Can you— I mean, how difficult is it to do that kind of thing?

Allyn Malventano [01:54:37]:
So, um,

Iain Thomson [01:54:39]:
sorry,

Allyn Malventano [01:54:40]:
who were you asking?

David Hewlett [01:54:40]:
I was asking you because I, I figured that would, you know, you've, you've, you've been, you've been there before.

Allyn Malventano [01:54:45]:
Well, I mean, just get the chip. Like, if you just have the chip is one. Like, you have to go— so like, I worked at Intel. I never saw a chip schematic. Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's no— there's so many layers to get to those people. Literally. Right? Like, literal, literal layers. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:55:03]:
Like, I mean, just, it's, it's over there. It's off, you know, another building. For a lot of the cases, the IP, like the intellectual property, like it never literally never leaves the building for some of that stuff, like for some of that stuff, you would physically have to go somewhere, right? It's not just like, oh, I know the CEO, he has it sitting on his laptop. Like it just does not.

David Hewlett [01:55:21]:
And you can't just throw a chip down and have— Oh yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:55:24]:
And not only that, but you need to have the capability. Where are you going to, like Nvidia is using TSMC and like other fabs to like manufacture this stuff. You don't just go and start cooking them in your basement because you found the, because you got the chip diagram, right? It's like you need an, it's entire process and system and ecosystem and all these things.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:42]:
Even if you had the complete chip spec, yeah, you would still need the process to be able to manufacture the chip. And that's— it's not as— you don't just have a printer, right? You actually do have to plan out your lithography. So yeah, yeah.

Allyn Malventano [01:55:56]:
And like ASML or the other company, the company that makes the actual, you know, chip, like, they're in the Netherlands, aren't they? Well, I mean, they're—

Iain Thomson [01:56:04]:
yeah, they're here. It's everywhere. Dutch company.

Allyn Malventano [01:56:06]:
Yeah. Yeah. Um, but like, I mean, where are you going to go? Like for most of these things, you have to go and like consign with somebody or sign up with somebody that's going to actually produce it for you. And they'd be like, you're going to, what are you going to just go knock on the door? Hey, can you make this same schematic that you're making for NVIDIA right now? Here, I made this myself. They're going to know.

David Hewlett [01:56:26]:
Right. Why are we worried about Jensen then? Why aren't we worried about honeypots at that level, which no one's going to see? It's going to be much much less local.

Allyn Malventano [01:56:33]:
That's why I've already had them. That's why I don't think it's like about chip design, right?

Iain Thomson [01:56:36]:
I mean, we haven't, we, we haven't had honeypots, particularly ASML, but we have had at least one occasion where they managed to buy a chip fabrication vine to get around a plant, a machine to get around sanctions, but only one. Because in all fairness to the Nederlanders, then they were, they locked down on this very quickly. But we've had a couple of cases where former ASML staff have moved to China and brought some intellectual property with them. But it's not enough. As Alan points out, it's not just a question of just, oh, we can build this now. You've got to have the schematics, you've got to have the understanding, you've got to have the layered levels of process design, and you've got to make them all interconnect in the right way. China will get there at point. I have no doubt.

Iain Thomson [01:57:28]:
But it's the harder we can make it for them to do that, the better everyone's going to be.

Allyn Malventano [01:57:33]:
This reminds me of a similar scandal that involved the Navy and submarines and Toshiba. So if you look up Toshiba— Oh, the propellers! Yeah. So at one point decades ago, Toshiba bought a big huge CNC that was designed to make very large items, and they thought, you know, that the auspice of the purchase was under, oh, it's just like a machine to like machine stuff. Okay, but it was a purpose-built machine that Toshiba was buying that was specifically designed to create the submarine propellers for the Navy. Hmm. And so if it's a purpose-built machine, now it's a little different. Now it's a little easier for you to just look at that thing and figure out, oh, it makes a thing of this exact shape. Oh, right, okay, right.

Allyn Malventano [01:58:28]:
Yeah, that was a big scandal.

Iain Thomson [01:58:30]:
I mean, you're the expert on this, but I mean, my understanding is the submarine propeller is probably one of the most important tools on there for keeping submarines silent.

Allyn Malventano [01:58:39]:
Yes.

Iain Thomson [01:58:40]:
You know, if you're going to avoid cavitation, if you're actually going to be able to cruise the seas without setting off a arms. The propeller is what it's all about.

Allyn Malventano [01:58:47]:
Yeah, I served on a ballistic missile submarine, which had one of the more sensitive designs, and every time we'd go into the dry dock, they had to have a big deal about making sure that thing was covered up. Like, there was a covered dry dock. Like, they went through the— to make sure it was like in a building where the dry dock was inside in Kings Bay, Georgia, so that way, you know, you can't have like satellite photos or people just easily just like, you know, trying to get, you know, snapping a shot of it. Yeah, yeah, sneaking pictures of it. Yeah. And I had to, I had to be careful. My collateral duty on the submarine was ship's photographer. So, you know,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:19]:
stand right underneath that. Let's, let's get a shot with the whole group.

Allyn Malventano [01:59:23]:
Basically, yeah. There were, there were, there were times where like the captain wanted to do some briefing and like specifically asked me to go and take a picture of the propeller. Cause like we were like, we actually changed it out at one point.

David Hewlett [01:59:33]:
Use me for scale.

Allyn Malventano [01:59:34]:
And I was, I was like, yeah, I was like, I was like, do you, Are you sure? And he's like, I'm the captain, like, you have my permission. Like, yes, I got you, you know. And go into it and be really careful about what I do with that, with that, you know, eMMC or MMC card at the time.

David Hewlett [01:59:49]:
Can we see that photo?

Allyn Malventano [01:59:50]:
No, you can't see that photo.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:52]:
He put it on Twitter. It's on Twitter. Don't worry.

Allyn Malventano [01:59:54]:
Oh yeah, it's everywhere. It's all everywhere now.

Iain Thomson [01:59:56]:
I'm just amazed that ballistic missile submarine had an official photographer in the first place.

Allyn Malventano [02:00:02]:
No, there wasn't an official. That's a Federal duty. That's the thing. My job was to run the reactor plant, but I happened to be the geek who was the only guy that bought a digital camera when they first came out. And so then the captain caught wind that like, oh wait, there's a guy— I don't have to wait till we pull in to like get the film developed anymore? Oh.

David Hewlett [02:00:21]:
Oh wow.

Allyn Malventano [02:00:21]:
Okay, you're, you know, Melvin Tannell, congratulations. You bought that camera and made the mistake of bringing it out underway on the submarine to show it off. Now you're You're also the ship's photographer. Have fun.

David Hewlett [02:00:32]:
Were you burning music CDs for everyone as well? Was that part of your job?

Allyn Malventano [02:00:36]:
No, no. I was the guy that installed Age of Empires on one computer in the ship's study.

David Hewlett [02:00:42]:
Oh,

Iain Thomson [02:00:42]:
nice.

Allyn Malventano [02:00:43]:
And that computer was no longer used for doing any coursework after that point. It was just playing Age of Empires.

Iain Thomson [02:00:50]:
I was gonna say, the average Age of Empires game takes about an hour and a half, so that's a hell of a time.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:55]:
Was it decommissioned with thermite? Is that the standard?

Iain Thomson [02:01:01]:
Well, you say that, but I went to a DEF CON talk a few years back where they were talking about what would you do in a data center if a 3-letter agency started knocking on the door with sledgehammers? It turns out thermite is not a good way of destroying hard drives.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:15]:
No, it'd be terrible. It will go off. It'll go off to the sides. You'd have to make it pool on the drive.

Allyn Malventano [02:01:22]:
Yeah,

David Hewlett [02:01:22]:
I mean, I love that you've thought about this.

Iain Thomson [02:01:25]:
Oh, this was a guy called Zoz who talks an awful lot at DEF CON. But I mean, they discovered the best way to do it was a shaped charge surrounded by shaving foam to direct the, uh, the foam through. But that's not really useful for data centers. But, um, during the talk, basically he has an arrangement with the local, uh, police and their explosives guys, and they allow him to use the range because they him and he'll pass on knowledge. And the talk, I highly recommend it. It's online at the moment. But yeah, actually, I mean, acid won't work. Thermite won't work.

Iain Thomson [02:02:02]:
Dynamite certainly doesn't work. Drilling a hole through the drive definitely doesn't work. You've really got to completely destroy the thing.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:11]:
We came up with a really good solution that works quickly, but will fail under further forensics. Uh, it was basically a glitter cannon with tiny aluminum particles. So you let everything run, keep it on, and just turn it on. Just let it blow. It will kill every bit of electronics. However, drives and memory, there's, there's a good chance that they won't short out completely. So that you'd still have a problem, but it will kill everything in the data center.

Allyn Malventano [02:02:39]:
Yeah. You want to know, you want to know the simplest, but also the hardest to pull off Correctly method.

Iain Thomson [02:02:46]:
ACID?

Allyn Malventano [02:02:47]:
No, you don't have to destroy a single thing except for a set of encrypt— a set of decryption keys if everything was encrypted. Like, as long as you can make sure— as long as you can make sure that everything's encrypted and you can make sure that all those keys get purged from everything possible and overwritten.

David Hewlett [02:03:02]:
If it's ransomware, basically, that's—

Allyn Malventano [02:03:04]:
Well, sort of. It's the reverse ransomware. You ransomware yourself, basically, right? Like, you free ransomware all of your You can only access it with the key, right? And then if the key's gone, it's gone. Nobody's getting it. You're not getting it either, right?

Iain Thomson [02:03:20]:
Maybe not for 20 or 30 years, but yes.

Allyn Malventano [02:03:22]:
Yeah, you have to wait for a while.

David Hewlett [02:03:24]:
Sure. The quantum computers to catch up.

Iain Thomson [02:03:27]:
Oh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:28]:
we are gonna have to unfortunately skip a couple of the stories towards the end of my rundown just because we've been having too much fun. I did want to get to one One more data center heavy story just because it is kind of fun. I geek out over stuff like this.

David Hewlett [02:03:44]:
Now that we've destroyed them, now we figured out how to destroy them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:46]:
Now that we've destroyed them, let's figure out how to make them better. No, but okay. Now it is common knowledge that data centers suck a lot of power. They need power, especially the ones that are being used for AI inference, training, simulation, and analysis. They're gonna need a constant source of power. And we're not talking about that 10, 20, We're talking about hundreds of megawatts or even gigawatts. Mm-hmm. Now, the early 2000 data centres would operate on that 10, 20 to 50 range.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:04:13]:
But right now, the average AI data centre on an AI campus is running between 200 and 500 megawatts. AI data centres are running between 800 and 1,000 megawatts. And there are at least 4 in-construction data centres that are running at 1,000 megawatts. that are at 4 gigawatts or higher. So yeah, they've got an increasing demand for power. Now, the way that we would want to handle that load is with either a massive solar array, which we don't do in the United States anymore because I guess that's DEI, or a large gas turbine. That's probably the most possible solution because there's not a lot of extra nuclear power plants. Now, a large combined gas turbine power plant can deliver between 400 400 to almost 900 megawatts of power per turbine.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:05:00]:
But it's not just the power that's attractive, it's everything else that comes with a large gas turbine. First of all, it can ramp up and down. It's very easy to bring it from 10% power all the way up to 100% power, and it stays efficient the entire range. That's what they're designed to do. Also, because they use turbofan instead of turbojet technology, they inhale their air more slowly. They expel it more slowly. They just inhale through a larger intake. That makes them quieter.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:05:29]:
Now, also, the size of LGTs makes it possible to use noise suppression technologies, which you can't on smaller plants. And large combined gas cycle turbines can reach up to 63% efficiency, which is pretty damn good. Now, obviously, LGTs would be the choice for any new data center They're very difficult to manufacture. They're very difficult to ship. And so it's 5 to 8 years just to get it delivered, and then you still have to build around it. That's not really going to be an option for most of these data centres. With the massive backlash that we're currently seeing against data centres slurping up, they've been getting more and more creative about how they power their data centres, specifically with solar panels. Specifically, they're using old jet engines.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:06:17]:
They're basically reconditioning engines off of old Boeing airliners and turning them into micro turbines. Now, the most popular of these is the small gas turbine, the SGT, the PE6000, from a company called— what is it? Something General Electric? No, they use General Electric engines. Now, each one of these things is rated at 50 megawatts. You need to combine a bunch of them in order to get enough power for your data centre. xAI installed 8 of them at its Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee, getting 400 megawatts. But there's a problem. And Ian, I want to throw this problem to you, and that is the fact that you have these small gas turbines. They are so less efficient than large gas turbines that they're exceptionally noisy, exceptionally polluting, and exceptionally inefficient.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:07:07]:
efficient. And yet Elon's been using them on a temporary basis because he says temporary doesn't require a permit.

Iain Thomson [02:07:15]:
Yeah, no, this has been a big issue with Elon's data center. Because basically, it's like living next door to an airport. Now they've done in, I think it's Mississippi, they've done one thing where they ended up buying all of the houses within the acoustic range and demolishing them, which is a short-term solution. But the fact of the matter is they're really, really noisy. I'll never forget a friend of mine used to work at Windsor Castle in the UK, which is right under the flight path for Heathrow Airport. And an American tourist apparently asked, you know, it's like, why did they build the castle here with the airport, with all the airport noise? And the guide said, I think you'll find the castle is pre-America, ma'am. But, you know, this is going to— this is only going to exemplify the problems, only going to irritate people more about the problems of data centers. I mean, to my mind, nuclear is the way to go with this.

Iain Thomson [02:08:17]:
It's largely silent. If you do it right, it's non-polluting. I interviewed one company, they've patented a design, and it appears to work, where you drill down a mile down and you put a PWR down there and fill it up with water. And the water pressure keeps the reactor cool enough to operate and you can just stack them. And that's a really good solution. And yes, gas is a very good— is very good from all the— for all the reasons you mentioned. But A, you've got to have the gas there, which means pipelines, which are prone to leakage and the occasional mild explosion or explosive disassembly, whichever you want to call it, but it's the noise factor. You know, if you're really looking to piss people off about data centers, the noise of gas turbines is gonna— is just gonna drive people up the wall.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:04]:
Yeah, yeah, that is actually a big one. I've brought that point up several times and people have asked, is it really that noisy? Here it is. So if you wanted to get the same amount of power out of those small gas turbines, the PE6000s, that you get out of a large gas turbine, you need about a dozen A dozen would, would get you close to the range of one of the lower-end large gas turbines. It's not even the largest that they've got. At full speed, because you'd have to run them at full speed 24 hours a day, you'd be looking at generating about 85 decibels 1 mile away. Mm-hmm. So if you were far enough away from the data center, it wouldn't technically be bad for your hearing. It wouldn't cause hearing damage, but it definitely would be loud enough.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:52]:
About 80 decibels is the same as having a blender running at arm's length 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Iain Thomson [02:10:01]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:01]:
So that's, that's like— and you get half a mile, it's now up at 95 decibels. That is actually— that causes hearing loss. So this is the kind of noise pollution that we're dealing with. By the way, when you compare that to a large gas turbine at a mile away, a large gas turbine operating at full tilt would be quieter than an office with no talking. It would be quieter than a city street at night when there's no traffic. That's—

Iain Thomson [02:10:24]:
But as you say, it's a 6 to 7 year lead time to do this.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:10:27]:
Correct.

Iain Thomson [02:10:28]:
You know, it's kind of like I wrote a story about the effects of an EMP attack on, on the US back when North Korea was making noises about it. And yeah, you can protect the transformers that run our grid. But if one of them goes out, again, it's a 3 to 4 year lead time, which you've got to do under EMP conditions, which isn't going to work. So yeah, these large gas turbines, great. The smaller ones, it's like having a teenager who's really into Megadeth in the next room.

David Hewlett [02:10:58]:
And the environmental impact. Remember, we were going to be carbon neutral by 3030? What happened? That, that went out the window pretty quick. I mean, those small engines do to the birds, to the, to the air, to the— I mean, oh

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:11]:
yeah. They operate at half the efficiency of the large gas turbines, which means that for less, less fuel and with less pollutants, you make more power with a large gas turbine. But like you said, if you can't get it, you can't get it. But the question becomes, do we allow these data centers to use a lot of these temporary turbines in order to generate the power that they need? Elon's been running it for 2 years, and he's been running it under a temporary, a temporary arrangement, which means he says he doesn't need permits. Of course, the state is saying—

David Hewlett [02:11:41]:
There's a different justice system for people worth over a few million dollars. That's true. And that became so apparent recently that there's a whole other system of justice for these people. I mean, it's absolutely shocking to me. And I think that's a big— we talk about going back to our data center issues with the vote. Of course, that's why people are voting against this stuff. Because if they're symbolized by a clueless trillionaire who doesn't give a crap about the people he's affecting and the planet that he's destroying, of course, people do not want them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:12:17]:
Oh, and by the way, the numbers I gave you, that was for 12 of these turbines, which is what they're going to be using in Mississippi. At his campus in, where is it, the one at Memphis, Tennessee, the colossus 2. There's 69 of these. Imagine 69 of these running full tilt all day.

Allyn Malventano [02:12:37]:
So this is a little different because it's an actual jet engine, but similar. I mean, these turbines are basically repurposed jet engines. I mean—

David Hewlett [02:12:44]:
You have one in your garage?

Allyn Malventano [02:12:45]:
No. Wouldn't, wouldn't put it past you though.

David Hewlett [02:12:48]:
Yeah, it's running my data center.

Allyn Malventano [02:12:51]:
Yeah, funny story. No, um, can't hear anything. You can't— listen how quiet it is. Uh, no, there's a— I mean, I'm about 20-minute drive from the airport. They do that thing where they're testing the engines. And so like a part of the airport, they have a little baffle and then they back the jet up to it and then they run the engine at full tilt. Right? Like you can, you can tell something's happening. Like you can't really, you can't tell for sure exactly what it is.

Allyn Malventano [02:13:13]:
Like the first few times this happened, I was like, what the hell is that sound? And I heard it inside the house. Had to like go out my back door and like open up the door and like go out there and like, what, what is that? And finally I just like someone, someone local told me that's what it took. Like, I, I couldn't figure it out on my own. I was like, what the hell is that rumble? You know? And so I can only imagine if you had 69 of those things running and you were 20, 30-minute drive away, you could probably tell something's going on, you know?

David Hewlett [02:13:37]:
And that's why it's happening in Mississippi, right? I mean, that's like, it's not, it's not happening in New York State. It's not happening in, yeah. You know, in, in a, in the, in the Texas suburbs, you know what I mean?

Allyn Malventano [02:13:48]:
Yeah. But, but even, but even if it's kind of, out, you know, out in the boonies, so to speak. Like, it's still— there's still gonna be people living around it that are, you know, and those are the people that are going to the town halls and like voting, you know, voting about the data centers, right? Because they hear those stories. Yeah,

Iain Thomson [02:14:05]:
yeah,

Allyn Malventano [02:14:06]:
that's where it comes from.

Iain Thomson [02:14:07]:
And this is all— I mean, I've been doing some research for an article on this at the moment, and Elon's big idea, oh, we'll put data centers in space. Well, Google launched Project Suncatcher a couple of months ago. And if you actually look at the specs they've released, a single TPU needs 0.8 of a square meter to cool it. So these massive data centers are not going to space. It's never going to happen. You'd have to build something about 20 times as large as the ISS. So we've got to get this sorted out on land. And frankly, nuclear looks like the best option.

Iain Thomson [02:14:41]:
And I'm sure nobody is particularly happy about the idea of having a nuclear reactor, you know, in their back garden. But at the same time, the technology is kind of proven. You know, it's like, I mean, Alan, you know this. I mean, you've worked on a nuclear submarine. The technology is— it's not— okay, I nearly said it's not rocket science, but you know what I mean. It's an understood science.

Allyn Malventano [02:15:03]:
It's understood enough. Now granted, I will give this schooling system an amazing amount of credit for what it's to do. But yeah, the Navy can take people out of high school and within a 2-year window, they know enough to go to a submarine or a ship and be a reactor operator.

Iain Thomson [02:15:20]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:15:21]:
Right? So if you can, if that's the turnaround, now granted, extremely good educational program, right? Like I had the pleasure of being an instructor for that later on after I did my first tour. So really cool thing. But my point is, is that like, yes, it is not rocket science, so to speak. Right. Like the principles are all well understood. It's once you, you know, get down to the brass tacks of it, it's all very basic in how it works. You just have to have a bit of an aptitude for kind of visualizing, you know, moderately complicated physics in your head on the fly while you—

David Hewlett [02:15:53]:
Is that all?

Allyn Malventano [02:15:54]:
You know? Yes. Just slightly, you know, it's a Rodney thing. Right. Right. Like Rodney could do it. Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:15:59]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:59]:
But Alan, my question to you is how does an RBMK reactor explode.

Allyn Malventano [02:16:04]:
Oh boy, here we go.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:05]:
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Allyn Malventano [02:16:07]:
I can't do the accent correctly to reproduce the show. But on day 1 of the school, we had to learn— we were taught the actual inside of like what happened for, you know, Three Mile Island, what happened for Chernobyl, like what happened for that Air Force experimental nuclear jet engine.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:28]:
Oh my god, that thing was awesome and horrible.

Allyn Malventano [02:16:30]:
That was actually a thing. That was actually a thing that somebody made. And the reason it failed was because the neutron detectors had a saturation point that they didn't account for, and it was a closed-loop system, and they said, go to 80%, and it couldn't read higher than 60%. And so it turned into a pile of molten uranium. So yeah, so there could have been nuclear jets in an alternate timeline where someone didn't make that mistake.

David Hewlett [02:16:57]:
Right.

Allyn Malventano [02:16:58]:
And we all— and the 4th one we learned about was SL-1.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:01]:
Oh,

Iain Thomson [02:17:02]:
was that the Pluto, the Pluto thing? Or—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:04]:
That's the one that pinned one of the operators to the roof on a fuel rod.

Allyn Malventano [02:17:08]:
Yes, experimental, experimental Army compact reactor that you could like deploy somewhere, and they had an experiment in a building, and the guy just— you manually used— you manually actuated the control rods.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:22]:
Not a great way to do it.

Allyn Malventano [02:17:22]:
You literally grabbed the control rod and pulled on it.

Iain Thomson [02:17:26]:
And you were the control rod.

Allyn Malventano [02:17:31]:
You are the control rod. You are the control rod. Well, in the case of what happened at SL-1, yes, he actually was impaled by the control rod into the ceiling of the, of the building.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:42]:
He was buried in a lead-lined casket, if I remember correctly. All 3 of them. Yeah, because they're so radioactive. Crazy radioactive.

Allyn Malventano [02:17:48]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:17:49]:
But I mean, the thing that pebble reactor technology, which is a possibility. Deep sunk reactors.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:17:57]:
Gen 4, Gen 5 reactors are amazing.

Allyn Malventano [02:17:59]:
Oh yeah, yeah. The technologies now are amazing. You can encapsulate the fuel in ceramic pellets that are rated to higher than the whatever possible melting point of the thing. The thing can't physically melt down just by straight physics. They've designed it in such a way that it just can't happen. You have like molten salt, you have like— Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:18:21]:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:18:22]:
All sorts of, you know, you have ones where the, the actual, it's a molten form of fuel that has the uranium in the slurry that literally, uh, you know, circulates. That's like another thing that, yeah, there's all sorts of cool reactor technologies. The problem is, is that the regulations, the approvals, you know, all those trying to get that stuff off the ground. ground is a huge pain. I mean, I think there's been a lot of work done on that, but most of the work has to be done politically than like the physics of it and the design of it, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:52]:
Every reactor accident we've had has been with either a Gen 1 or a Gen 2 reactor, if I, if I remember correctly.

Iain Thomson [02:18:58]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:18:59]:
Yeah. I mean, they were all— yeah. Chernobyl was just ridiculous because you had, you know, things that made the reaction— reaction goes up and you put that stuff at the tip of the control rod. So when you try to like push the rod in to shut it down, it actually makes it go up first before it goes down. Yeah. And just really bad mistakes in design and stuff. Like the, the Navy ones, you have to like intentionally do multiple things bad that are— you have to break a bunch of rules in order to even put it in any kind of jeopardy because everything is designed so that everything fails in a safe way. Every time.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:19:35]:
Do you know what I think of every time I see you, Alan? Do you, do you remember it was a James Bond film with Pierce Brosnan, and they were in a nuclear sub that they had stolen because that's easy. And they had formed pure plutonium into a rod that they were shoving into the reactor to make it explode. And every time I watch that scene, I think I want to get Alan to comment on this. He must be pulling his eyes out.

Allyn Malventano [02:19:58]:
Is this the one with the girl that was the nuclear scientist with him? Yes. And she says the line, the coolant is going to burst.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:08]:
Yes.

Allyn Malventano [02:20:09]:
And this— see, now I was able to quote that for you because yes, I experienced extreme pain in watching this. Listen, I have over here behind that Optane box is the James Bond DVD collection, which I still possess, and it sits on my shelf. I love Bond movies. I hated that scene. Oh my goodness.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:31]:
It was so bad.

Allyn Malventano [02:20:32]:
It was really bad. You have to realize Like people that work and live on submarines are a strange, you know, there's a strange kind of humor involved there, right? Like we treat, uh, Hunt for Red October, pretty good submarine movie, right? Uh, Crimson Tide is a comedy for us.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:51]:
Yes.

David Hewlett [02:20:51]:
Right.

Allyn Malventano [02:20:51]:
Right. Like that, he's got his dog peeing where somebody's working. That thing would end up mysteriously disappeared into a torpedo tube and shot out of the submarine. Like there's just no way. Right. Down Periscope is probably a documentary for us, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:07]:
I love that movie!

Allyn Malventano [02:21:09]:
But, but like, you know, the guy in Sonar that hears how much change— like, we literally had like sonar techs that would know if somebody dropped like a wrench in the bilge of the engine room. They would call back, hey, stop freaking— we're trying to be quiet right now. What the hell are you doing back there? Like, that literally happens, right? They're not gonna tell you 2 dimes and a nickel fell in the bilge, but they know. Those guys, they hear stuff. They're good.

Iain Thomson [02:21:35]:
Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite XKCDs was he gets asked questions, if only, or what. And he said, is it possible to, if you went swimming in a nuclear power plant pool, would you be okay? And it's just like, well, as long as you're more than 2 meters away from the fuel rods, you know, that water will attenuate it. But then he added the addendum. It's like, however, a friend of mine works at a nuclear power plant and he probably wouldn't be okay because he'd be punctured by several bullets from the guards when you actually get out.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:07]:
That's true.

David Hewlett [02:22:10]:
We visited CERN this year and they were lamenting Dan Brown's death because the anti-nuclear antimatter, the antimatter that was going to blow up the world.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:23]:
That thing is supposed to be under my feet. I'm supposed to be above that thing right now.

David Hewlett [02:22:28]:
That was their pet peeve. They were like, oh, you're an actor? Well, I got something to tell you. That damn Brown guy, forget it. My fault?

Iain Thomson [02:22:39]:
Oh God.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:40]:
If we had an accelerator underneath my feet, I would love it. That'd be fantastic. But yeah, No, all we have are racks of AI hardware.

Iain Thomson [02:22:49]:
Yeah, well, I mean, I covered the— I mean, I used to write about CERN a lot. And my favorite story about they had to shut the entire thing down because a seagull dropped a baguette on an electricity supply and shorted it out.

David Hewlett [02:23:03]:
Oh my God.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:23:04]:
Did you write that story?

Iain Thomson [02:23:06]:
Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:23:07]:
Because I remember reading that. Yes. Oh, fantastic.

Iain Thomson [02:23:10]:
I mean, it was just— it was made for journalism. It was just fantastic. fantastic. But, you know, I just love the idea that a random seabird can just drop something in, short out the largest and most expensive scientific instrument on the planet. And they hadn't thought about seagulls and baguettes.

David Hewlett [02:23:27]:
I will say this though, I was incredibly impressed by the fact that they put that together, like, you know, a year before they were all trying to kill each other, and then they somehow managed to bring all these countries together to, to work towards a, a greater good for humanity. I was— I— that I mean, along with this, of course, mind-blowingly impressive technology and discoveries. But to me, the biggest, the one that really shocked me the most was that we were able to get all those people together in the same room. Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:23:55]:
I mean, getting the French and Germans to work together is just like almost impossible.

David Hewlett [02:24:00]:
Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:24:02]:
And they're doing the same with fusion power as well. And, you know, that's, it's another very expensive scientific instrument, but it's one that will pay huge dividends. And just while we're talking about CERN, I've put a YouTube clip on the Discord channel because when they first fired it up, an awful lot of people had a lot of fun with that. But enjoy that maybe after the show.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:26]:
The black hole?

Allyn Malventano [02:24:27]:
The black hole one? Yeah. I can almost see the video, honestly.

David Hewlett [02:24:30]:
Yeah, they're doing an open day at CERN, I think next year, which I'm really hoping to try to weasel my way into 'cause apparently we can then go in the tunnels as well. So,

Iain Thomson [02:24:39]:
oh yes, they're upgrading it. So it shut down for a couple of years now.

David Hewlett [02:24:42]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:24:42]:
Yep.

Iain Thomson [02:24:43]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:24:44]:
And what could go wrong? There's an, you know, if they let some sci-fi actor in there.

Allyn Malventano [02:24:47]:
That's the video.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:24:48]:
Well, I was at an accelerator when we had a quench, and that was possibly the scariest thing I have ever witnessed. It was, I, I thought the world was ending. It was a crazy loud sound, a horrible, horrible smell. And then they just said, oh yeah, everything's broken. Yeah. Fun with supercomputers.

Iain Thomson [02:25:08]:
Yeah. Actually, I'm just going to stick another video because this is a CERN worker who I love dearly called Alpine Cat. She's now a PR, but she did the Large Hadron rap, which is as nerdy as it comes. Wow.

Allyn Malventano [02:25:23]:
I think I remember that too.

Iain Thomson [02:25:25]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:25:26]:
Why can't we play that one though?

Iain Thomson [02:25:27]:
8 million views, you know, and the voice of Stephen Hawking. Hawking. But—

David Hewlett [02:25:32]:
Oh, rapping?

Allyn Malventano [02:25:34]:
Yes.

Iain Thomson [02:25:34]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:25:35]:
Okay.

Iain Thomson [02:25:35]:
Time to get some particle physics in the house.

Allyn Malventano [02:25:38]:
I remember the video.

David Hewlett [02:25:41]:
Poor Padre. We've lost the thread.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:44]:
I'm sorry?

David Hewlett [02:25:46]:
Poor Padre, we've lost the thread.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:25:48]:
No, no, no. We lost the thread a long time ago. I just wanted to say that we're getting close to the end and we do have to throw to one more ad. However, when we come When we come back, I'm going to give you a choice. Do you want to talk about something political? Do you want to talk about something geeky? Do you want to talk about finances?

Iain Thomson [02:26:07]:
Ooh, that's a tough one.

David Hewlett [02:26:09]:
That's a really tough decision.

Allyn Malventano [02:26:10]:
Are you going to do the FAA one? Is that what you're talking about?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:12]:
I think that could be a parting shot, but we got to pick— we can only pick one of the major, the big 3 ones. I kind of like the refrigerator story just because it's—

David Hewlett [02:26:21]:
Oh God, that's bizarre. Yeah, yeah,

Iain Thomson [02:26:25]:
yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:26:25]:
No,

Iain Thomson [02:26:26]:
I can go with that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:26:27]:
All right, when we come back, we're going to be talking about keeping your cool in times of hackers. But before we do that, let's, uh, go back to Leo one more time. Thanks again, Leo. You know, guys, I think I might have the record for the longest gap between hosting TWiT because I think it's like 10 years. I don't think anyone's ever done that where they go away for 10 years and they come back and they're hosting again. So I, I love this, but let's not talk about that. Let's talk about something that's a bit more chilling, pun intended. Hackers are remotely destroying food stocks by turning up the heat on internet-connected refrigerators.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:05]:
Now, on October 12th, about 700 supermarkets were attacked by an exploit that allowed the attackers to raise the internal temperature of refrigeration systems to 50 degrees Celsius. That's 122 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way. Now, in late October, there were similar attacks in Belgium and the Netherlands. On November 2nd, refrigeration systems were compromised in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland, and Estonia. Now, there have been whispers of refrigeration mishaps at French blood storage facilities and on U.S. military commissaries. Now, these attacks have caused millions in euros in food spoilage and economic damage. The attacks seem to have exploited refrigeration systems that use a centralized controller.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:27:50]:
That's one main controller that controls multiple refrigerators. Now, some systems were using default passwords, others had firmware that had known exploitations, known vulnerabilities. And once the attackers had administrative access, they could change temperatures, they could disable alarms so nobody knew what they were doing, and they could actually cause physical damage by causing the, the compressor to cycle over and over and over again, until it overheated and basically melted itself. Now, an important note: they have not yet been able to confirm that the same technique or the same hackers were in all attacks. It appears as if this is mostly the result of lazy, lazy administration and not a master hack. That doesn't decrease the severity of this problem. Right now you've got, uh, Forest Scout, which is a security research company. They did a quick scan of the internet and they found more than 13,000 exposed refrigerators through this same management system in 99 countries and territories on 6,017 IP addresses.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:28:53]:
And 80% of them are still using firmware that has never been updated. Oh, okay. I gotta ask you this 'cause I threw this out on Blue Sky when this first happened. It, I feel like there are some things that just really don't need to be connected to the public internet at all. This seems like one of them. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:29:13]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:29:13]:
No, no, I mean, I'm with you because I've just been researching buying a new dishwasher because ours is dying on its backside. And my first choice of dishwasher, I asked Reddit for wisdom of crowds, you know, can you say, should I go this or should I, you know, go for this brand? And I won't say it, but it's a German brand that begins with B. And I have to have it connected to the Wi-Fi. and an app to access all the functions. And there's no need for it. I have fingers. I can program a dishwasher myself. And this is okay.

Iain Thomson [02:29:49]:
That's on the consumer side. But on an industrial side, IoT devices like fridges are the last things that get patch updates. IT admins are drowning with stuff that they should be patching. And I'm sure they thought, this is not going to happen to us. So we'll stick it on the back burner. We'll deal with the main corporate vulnerabilities first. But this has just shown, yeah, you know, it's— I'm sure you can make a case for it's nice to have internet-connected fridges because we can, you know, work out power fluctuations and how best to get things slightly more economical, but opens up a huge vulnerability window.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:30:26]:
Right. Well, I mean, for me, if— yes, there are some cases where regulation and laws require you to have some sort of reportable interface where you can say, look, everything's been operating at temperature, everything's within safe levels. and we can give this to the health inspector and so on and so forth. However, if it's critical infrastructure, and I would consider freezers and refrigerators to be critical infrastructure because you mess with a population's food and you are messing with that population's life, if you have to do that and if you have to do it remotely, it does not go on the internet at all. Yeah. I don't mean a VPN, I don't mean a firewall. I mean, it's air-gapped except to like a call-in terminal. It's air-gapped except to a specific dedicated device that allows an administrator at a secure location to access it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:31:14]:
Otherwise, you are asking everyone with a set of Cain-enabled attack tools to just ping away at your device until they find the vulnerability. And again, like they said, 80% of these fridges are running outdated firmware because, like Ian said, IT guys have so much to do, and they've given— they're given so few resources, and they are told that these systems can never go down. So it's not like they can just change it on their time off. Alan, would you— I'm just thinking, would you have something internet connected in a submarine?

Allyn Malventano [02:31:49]:
Well, number one, kind of hard.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:31:51]:
Yeah. So, but let's say a dock.

Allyn Malventano [02:31:55]:
No, no. Even So I used to work at a place called NCDOC, which was Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command. So that's more the defense side of my network part of my military career, right? And so there's a whole command there, and it's just to try to act as a human-backed firewall for that entire branch of the service, basically. And so any connectivity that any of the ships get, so can't really count because they aren't directly internet connected. But, um, even ships, like, they're getting their connection but through like a safety, you know, level, like a safety, uh, firewall, right? Yeah. Um, you know, we had that thing network— like, I learned so much about network sensors and, you know, IDS, IPS, all that stuff, ways to sniff all the traffic, make sure that nothing bad's coming in, right? Fortunately, we were so good at blocking the bad stuff that we would spend most of our time just like making sure that some kid wasn't playing World of Warcraft on a ship when he wasn't supposed to be, because we would see that too. We wouldn't block everything because there was only so much space for blocking, you know, signatures on the IDSs. So like, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:33:13]:
Wasn't there just a case that there was a sailor on the Abraham Lincoln who had smuggled in a Starlink and was using it for internet access.

Allyn Malventano [02:33:21]:
Yeah,

David Hewlett [02:33:22]:
it was renting it out to other people, right?

Allyn Malventano [02:33:24]:
It wasn't just a sailor. I thought it was like some of like the, the leadership or something. Like someone—

Iain Thomson [02:33:29]:
I was gonna say, yeah, it was a couple of the officers were using it to stream porn.

Allyn Malventano [02:33:34]:
Wow.

Iain Thomson [02:33:34]:
Oh

David Hewlett [02:33:35]:
really?

Allyn Malventano [02:33:37]:
Yeah, I mean, shocker, but still.

Iain Thomson [02:33:40]:
Um, who'd have thought it?

David Hewlett [02:33:44]:
Oh, we're talk— I mean, we're talking though about, you know, we've, we're talking about AI, this flood of AI content and stuff. This has to be applied to the security side of stuff as well. There is a flood of AI attacks that are happening now.

Allyn Malventano [02:33:57]:
Yeah. And, and they're way easier.

David Hewlett [02:33:59]:
And they're way easier. And they're also, they're, they're, they, they don't tire. They don't have to go to the bathroom. They don't, you know, they will just continue knocking away until they, they figure it out. And we haven't even started on the fact that what happens when these things start actually, you know, blackmailing humans or actually starting to do some social Social engineering as well. I mean, beyond just phishing and things. I mean, these—I feel like this is like a perfect storm of problems coming together right now. And the reason why I'm so fascinated by the fridge one is because it just seems so benign.

David Hewlett [02:34:30]:
Like it just feels like such a—what a silly little thing! It went in and they ruined a little bit of meat here or whatever. I think it's indicative of a problem. I mean, between the PHP thing, the recent PHP thing, where like every single smart device that uses PHP. Yeah. It's basically vulnerable now. There's that. There was a new, there was a certificate issue where this, one of the large certificate organizations has been taken out. And then there's a built into a lot of these IoT devices are instant access for that, that now basically hacked certificate.

David Hewlett [02:35:04]:
Between that and the AI, there's so many different ways into these things. I just, I feel like, I mean, the response to the PHP thing was literally what you were saying, Padre. They just pulled them off the internet. Like, there's some people just pulled up their website off the internet because they're like, we can't fix this. Oh yeah, it's terrifying.

Allyn Malventano [02:35:21]:
It, it can be used for, for, you know, obviously it can be used for bad intent. There's some good intent in the form of like Wendell from Level 1 Techs and Steve from Gamers Nexus recently have been digging into LG TVs and such that have been maybe sniffing on people that shouldn't have been sniffing to the extent that they were, right? Like things that those 2 guys— I mean, I know Wendell, he's got some reverse engineering background too. like, you know, maybe not with certificates like mine was, but, you know, he's still super capable with that kind of stuff. He would— it's not practical for him to have done that exercise without AI, right? Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, um, and it's just, you know, again, he's a human being. He's got to go to bed at night, right? These— there's not enough hours in the day. So, so, you know, again, can be used for good, can be used to like expose things that, uh, the greater public might not have been aware of otherwise. Yeah, right.

Allyn Malventano [02:36:16]:
Which is handy, you know.

Iain Thomson [02:36:18]:
I think we're in the second age of script kiddies, basically, because it used to be if you wanted to hack something, then, you know, you had to do it yourself. Then you got hacking toolkits and a whole bunch of script kiddies found out that, you know, they could spend $50 in Bitcoin and get a hacking kit. And I think that's going to go mega with AI. And you can do a lot of things with these. And the authorities and IT admins have got to get a lot smarter about it. And I think honestly, in the refrigerator case, they will, because if you screw with the French and their food, they take it really

David Hewlett [02:36:49]:
seriously. Oh my God, yeah, so true. You know, you have ruined my baguette, I'm coming for you.

Allyn Malventano [02:36:54]:
Also, it is, it is possible that you remember—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:36:57]:
oh God, I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Allyn Malventano [02:36:58]:
Yeah, I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:36:59]:
was gonna say, if you remember Samsung, these were commercial— not commercial, these were residential refrigerators. They had a problem where their IoT refrigerators just shut down. They couldn't contact the server, they couldn't get updates, so they just turned off. So again, there is a name for this that I can't say on a safe stream, but it's the end-somethingification of— Yes, you can say it.

Iain Thomson [02:37:24]:
You can say that word on stream. End-shittification.

David Hewlett [02:37:25]:
End-shittification.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:37:26]:
We can say

Iain Thomson [02:37:27]:
it? No, no, it's in Webster's Dictionary now.

David Hewlett [02:37:31]:
Yeah, it's in the dictionary.

Iain Thomson [02:37:32]:
I've seen it on the front page of the Financial Times. I mean, it's— I mean, I've interviewed Corey about this.

David Hewlett [02:37:38]:
In Canada for that.

Iain Thomson [02:37:39]:
Yeah. No, no, honestly, Corey, I'm down with. I interviewed him about it after a talk he gave, and it was just like, he's so proud of that.

David Hewlett [02:37:48]:
Oh my God. That is like, that is like the pinnacle. You got a word in Webster's, for God's sake.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:37:54]:
Yeah. We use it all the time.

Allyn Malventano [02:37:55]:
I will say there is a hope that like, not that I want it to be everywhere, but I certainly want it to be doing a pass across any given piece of software for security's sake.

Iain Thomson [02:38:05]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:38:06]:
Right? That would make things way better across the board. Like, you wouldn't have— now granted, I still don't think your fridge really needs to be on the internet in the first place, but had it been passed through some AI stuff, not that it existed when those refrigerators were produced necessarily, right? But that at least knocks out a low-hanging fruit, and if you're not gonna build able to talk the manufacturer into like not doing it in the first place, which I don't think we're going to win that one.

David Hewlett [02:38:31]:
So I do the firmware update for you.

Allyn Malventano [02:38:33]:
At least have the AI like do a pass, like make sure you didn't necessarily hire the people that were best at network security that didn't know all the tricks. Okay, spend the money, you know, yeah, get a pass of it, make sure it's secure. Okay, at least, uh, you know, you had— you have knocked out the low-hanging fruit of vulnerabilities and didn't have a key that the number 4, uh, that went out the door, right?

David Hewlett [02:38:56]:
That was the, that was the certificate.

Allyn Malventano [02:38:58]:
That was the PHP thing.

Iain Thomson [02:38:59]:
Number 4. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:39:00]:
There was a certificate that was literally the number 4, a bunch of zeros and then the number 4. But okay. Sure.

Iain Thomson [02:39:06]:
If you've ever felt bad about 123456 and that was just like, yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:39:10]:
Literally worse. Literally worse than the 12345 luggage combination.

David Hewlett [02:39:15]:
I mean, significantly less secure.

Iain Thomson [02:39:18]:
I mean, to come back to Padre's point, there is no reason why these should be open online. At all. You can build— I mean, I understand why people did it because it was cheaper to do it that way and less hassle to do it that way. But all you got to do is build a closed system with a single point of contact. You can get all this data securely. And unless they hack that single point of contact, you're safe. And, you know, this— we need a fundamental rethink in IoT security. And it's not just fridges and the rest of it.

Iain Thomson [02:39:48]:
I interviewed Rob Joyce. Yeah. I mean, I interviewed Rob Joyce, former chief hacker at the NSA, and I asked him, you know, what is the thing that keeps you up at night? And he's like, not so critical infrastructure hacking. You know, they're not going after the power grid or the water system or that sort of thing, but it's the minor stuff. You know, if a country is looking to disrupt things. Hey, shut down the ATMs for a couple of days. People will stop bothering about anything else other than they can't get their money. Or, you know, shut down cable TV or, you know, the rest of it.

Iain Thomson [02:40:25]:
There are so many things that we are vulnerable to and we could fix easily if there was an incentive or an instruction to do it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:40:34]:
No, if it breaks, we just throw it away and replace it. That's kind of—

Iain Thomson [02:40:39]:
Yeah. Okay. That's the American way. But if you know, Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:40:43]:
Yeah. That is, well, which unfortunately I think is being promoted by this sort of right to repair thing or this sort of anti-right to repair stuff. I mean, it's not meant to be, we took stuff apart.

Allyn Malventano [02:40:51]:
I've been, I've been just like trying to think of things that were cool things, cool pieces of hardware that have just been phased out because no longer supported. Just, I'm trying to think those up because I'm like, ooh, that would be a cool thing to just make work again.

Iain Thomson [02:41:06]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:41:07]:
Like you can literally just make it work again. I had this little— I had this little button— not that I have a phone line to use this on, but I had a little like Obii box thing from back in the day. Oh yeah. Right? I came across it the other day and I was like, oh man. And all it was was like an internet— or it was like a phone on one side and like internet on the other. And you could like use it to connect to like your Google Voice thing and like actually have a phone number. And I forget exactly how all the integration worked, but it was cool. But they stopped supporting it because they'd had to use their backend to do a piece of the chain, you could just totally figure that out now and just do it, right? Like, yeah, anything that needs— anything that's a simple device that had some little bit of firmware that you would not normally on your own be able to figure out, you can just reverse engineer it now.

Allyn Malventano [02:41:55]:
It's— well,

David Hewlett [02:41:55]:
if you look at Blender—

Allyn Malventano [02:41:57]:
Oh,

David Hewlett [02:41:57]:
sorry, I used it with Blender. I had Claude figure out— it was someone had created this beautiful Stargate Stargate 3D model and I wanted to animate it. I started looking through it and I was like, I can't keep track of what all these things are. So I just had AI look at it and then went, I wonder if it could animate it for me? It literally ran a bunch of animations on it and created it. It's just extraordinary. It's an epiphany to me. I was like, wow, it's amazing. Why have I taken all those damn Blender courses?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:42:28]:
I actually use Claude. I So I have a 3D printer at my parents' home in Nevada, but I hadn't used it for a while and they needed a replacement part. I'm like, well, I designed one of that a long time ago. I can just use the 3D printer. And so I log into it and the company has shut down. So they would no longer print it because it required it to go to the server and then from the server back to the printer.

Allyn Malventano [02:42:53]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:42:54]:
So I used Claude. I gave it a bunch of tokens, gave it a bunch of inputs. And I said, I need you to replace the firmware on this with standard firmware that controls XYZ axis.

Allyn Malventano [02:43:03]:
Merlin firmware.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:43:05]:
It took about maybe 3 hours.

Allyn Malventano [02:43:08]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:43:09]:
And it replaced it and I was able to access it. So that was the first time I ever used AI to create firmware for device. And it was, it was incredible. And then Anthropic removed the ability. So yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:43:22]:
Right.

David Hewlett [02:43:23]:
Well, I mean, essentially Go to the Chinese models then.

Allyn Malventano [02:43:26]:
Which is why I sell most. Yeah, exactly.

Iain Thomson [02:43:30]:
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of— we had a weird situation a couple of years ago where a bunch of farmers in the US were becoming hackers because John Deere software was absolutely knackering them. So they were downloading a Ukrainian operating system to put on their own kit, stuff they'd bought. You know, this is what, this is what really gets my goat in that, you know, if you buy something, you should own it. You know, you're not leasing it. This is why, you know, I've got a wall of CDs in the other room because I actually like to own my music rather than rent it. If you buy a combine harvester, you should own it and you should be able to repair it yourself, not wait 3 or 4 days while the harvest rots in the ground because, you know, an engineer can't get get to you. That kind of, you know, this kind of, you know, renter economy is really hurting us and it's not getting any better soon.

Allyn Malventano [02:44:24]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:44:25]:
Yeah. It's, it's, it's, and I think that's, again, that's why people are, are drawn back to sort of the retro, the idea of owning vinyl, owning, you know, the, the whole vintage clothing and such. There's just, I think there's a huge, there's a sort of a—

Iain Thomson [02:44:39]:
CD sales were up 100% on last year. You know, people are actually still buying this stuff. up again. Yeah. Um, and vi— I mean, I've got a friend who works in the music industry. Vinyl sales are going through the roof, you know, which is just crazy.

David Hewlett [02:44:53]:
Physical ownership. It's still so inconvenient.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:44:54]:
Physical ownership. It's something you can hold.

Iain Thomson [02:44:57]:
I gotta say, it is. I was trying to, trying to explain it to my goddaughter, and it's like, yeah, no, you take a diamond and you put it on a vinyl disc and you rotate the disc at just the right speed and it plays music. And she looked You on crack?

Allyn Malventano [02:45:10]:
Are you rubbing rocks together too? Like, what are you doing over there?

David Hewlett [02:45:13]:
Sometimes you have to put pennies on it to hold it down.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:45:15]:
That's right. Oh my God. Oh, you are bringing back some, some not great memories.

Iain Thomson [02:45:21]:
Oh, FlexiDiscs as well. Oh my word.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:45:24]:
My first car had an 8-track.

Allyn Malventano [02:45:29]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:45:29]:
Oh, the 8-track. Bad out of hell.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:45:31]:
I wish we still had those. I loved that thing.

Iain Thomson [02:45:34]:
My dad had that. My dad was And I know it sounds weird as a technology journalist to say this, but my dad was the antithesis of bad technology investments. He bought 8-track immediately. He bought Betamax the second it came out.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:45:47]:
Of course.

Iain Thomson [02:45:47]:
For the good reason, because it was actually a better technology solution. Much better. Than VHS at the time. But, you know, it's like every time, I mean, he asked me, should he buy a Zune? And I was like, Dad, break the cycle. Just if you really want a media player, go for the iPod. God rest his soul, but he really knew bugger all about technology.

David Hewlett [02:46:10]:
My granddad used to lease technology. He leased televisions, leased stereos, because he said they change every couple of months.

Iain Thomson [02:46:18]:
Yeah, my granddad did fine.

Allyn Malventano [02:46:22]:
Yeah, that was the thing.

Iain Thomson [02:46:24]:
Yeah, we worked out she'd actually spent enough to buy 3 TVs just in 2 years of renting a TV.

David Hewlett [02:46:32]:
He always had the best Stereo though.

Allyn Malventano [02:46:34]:
That's

Iain Thomson [02:46:34]:
true. Fat boy.

Allyn Malventano [02:46:35]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:46:36]:
There, there was that, uh, It's Always Sunny episode where the, the boys were telling, uh, telling Frank how they had been renting a couch for like 20 years and he does the math in his head. He's like, so you paid $22,000 for your couch? And they're like, no, no, it's just like, it's just like $20 a week. Yeah. $22, $20 a week for how many years? Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:46:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

David Hewlett [02:46:56]:
It's like phones. That's what we do with phones now. Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:46:59]:
well, I, I haven't bought a subsidized phone probably in about 15 years.

David Hewlett [02:47:05]:
Oh really? What do you do? You buy them outright?

Allyn Malventano [02:47:06]:
I just buy them

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:47:07]:
outright. Yeah, I buy them out.

Allyn Malventano [02:47:08]:
I

Iain Thomson [02:47:09]:
do the same here. Really?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:47:11]:
Yeah, we don't do subsidized phones in Europe. None of the phones here are subsidized. You have to— you buy them and then you get service. But my service is crazy. You know, I get 50 gigabytes a month, I get unlimited talk and text and international and so on and so forth. It's $5 Yeah, it's ridiculous.

Allyn Malventano [02:47:29]:
Really good.

Iain Thomson [02:47:29]:
Oh God, no. When I first moved over here, I had, uh, the company phone was Verizon and I wanted to add, uh, SMS messages, um, and they wanted to charge me $10 a month for 1,000 SMS messages. Now SMS was an engineering function which was put in there, you know, and only became useful when people discovered it. So for Verizon to claim, well, it's our invention and therefore was complete bollocks anyway. But yeah, I'm amazed at how badly people get hosed over here and even in Silicon Valley. Sorry.

David Hewlett [02:48:02]:
We go, we go traveling and get, and get, and get roaming fees of $15 a day for internet. Yeah. Because we have no choice in Canada. There's

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:48:11]:
no, I have visitors who they're like, oh, well, we just paid extra to T-Mobile, Verizon so that we can get international service on I'm like, look, you can go online right now and buy an eSIM. An eSIM. Yes. Put it on your phone. It will be ready when you land and it will cost you like €7 for your entire time here.

David Hewlett [02:48:30]:
I wish I could do that here while just all the time.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:48:33]:
That's true.

Iain Thomson [02:48:33]:
Well, the Brits are discovering this the hard way since Brexit because we had a deal with the— when we were in the EU, there was a co-roaming deal so you couldn't get screwed. And immediately when that ended, My goodness, the screams that came out. I was not expecting this. It's like, well, you leave the EU, that's what you get.

David Hewlett [02:48:52]:
Yeah. Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Iain Thomson [02:48:55]:
Oh

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:48:55]:
yeah. I feel bad for people who live on the border of the US and Canada or Mexico. I used to— Sometimes they will pick up the signal from the other side of the border and then they suddenly, they get the roaming fees.

Allyn Malventano [02:49:05]:
Oh

David Hewlett [02:49:05]:
yeah. I used to have to call them all the time. We lived in Point Roberts for a couple of years and yeah, we used to, every time we used to call 'em and go like, and they'd go like, well, no, it says you visited America. And I'd be like, oh God, here we go.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:49:17]:
Sorry, no, no, no. Yeah. Okay, I do want to do one more story before we have to cut it short, and this one's kind of fun. I want to end on a good note because the United States government has finally got its act together. They are really gonna modernize our network that we use for air traffic control because they have decided to no longer use floppy disks. No, seriously, this is an actual story. This is really happening right now. Now, the FAA has announced announced that it is eliminating floppy disks from all air traffic control systems by the end of 2028.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:49:51]:
Now, they will be replacing the current setup, which consists of 4 barely interlinked networks from the 1980s. Think old compact computers, basically. That's what we've got. They're going to replace it with EIDS. That's the Enterprise Information Display System. Now, the changeover needs to take place at more than 435 facilities. And this is the trick: it has to take place while the system is still being used. You're changing the engine in the car while you're still driving down the highway.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:50:23]:
The new system will consolidate weather, equipment alerts, restricted airspace notifications, pilot reports, and any other critical data into that enterprise mythical single pane of glass, which is you know going to be more efficient. It's it's much better. It's much safer. There have already been upgrades at Atlantic City International. National Airport, in Nashville, in Rochester, in Atlanta, and Salt Lake City. Now, this was part of that big, beautiful bill, $12.5 billion for ATC modernization. And Congress is mulling over another request for about another $30 billion. Now, Alan, I want to throw this to you because the first thing I thought about was when they finally replaced the large 10-inch floppy disks in nuclear missile silos.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:51:08]:
Is this kind of like that? I mean, is it just been a case of— It's a case of it's worked, so why would we ever change it?

Allyn Malventano [02:51:14]:
Well, I was just gonna ask, I was just gonna ask like, where, where are they getting the Zip disks that they're gonna transition to? Oh, is that, is that what they're doing? They're not doing that? They're not migrating over to Zip disks?

David Hewlett [02:51:26]:
I used to love those Zip disks.

Iain Thomson [02:51:28]:
Uh, I had a Zip disk stolen off my desk at work. I'm still bitter about that.

Allyn Malventano [02:51:34]:
But so, yeah, listen, I mean, I get it with the missile silo thing. that's absolutely the case of if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:51:41]:
Yep.

Allyn Malventano [02:51:41]:
Right. Uh, and this obviously fell into that, that same thing because if it's a system and it works, and to their credit, floppy disks are pretty reliable as long as you don't get them next to a magnet. Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:51:54]:
Like, they've been more reliable than most of our media.

Allyn Malventano [02:51:56]:
Yeah. Right. Um, and so you can't, you know, if you keep them in the right environment, like then they're, and I would imagine that they were buying the best possible quality for that particular system because they needed to last. So probably wasn't even broken, honestly. Right? Yeah.

Iain Thomson [02:52:12]:
I mean,

Allyn Malventano [02:52:13]:
you know,

Iain Thomson [02:52:14]:
what are they running off floppy? Well, the US nuclear SAC stuff was running off 8-inch IBM floppies up until 2019. And they finally upgraded. As you say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But this kind of stuff pops up everywhere. BART in the Bay Area, for example, has just moved off floppy disks after a couple of horrendously bad outages. I've got to say, with the airline thing, I'm a bit nervy about it because they're also shifting to complete digital viewing of 365 AI-powered viewing of the— or 360 AI-powered viewing. of aircraft. And you'd kind of like, I hate to be the beta tester on that one, you know, because—

Allyn Malventano [02:53:05]:
I will say there is kind of a middle, like everybody likes to say AI, they want to slap an AI label on everything, right?

Iain Thomson [02:53:13]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:53:14]:
If it says it's AI powered, does that necessarily, you know, it's probably more like fuzzy, what would be considered fuzzy logic.

Iain Thomson [02:53:21]:
Yeah. I mean, they're saying humans are still in the loop, right? Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:53:24]:
Well, well, no, but I mean, for like, in other words, it's not running like a language model. It's not spitting out random words and things, you know, it's just, you know, it's AI adjacent, right? It's machine intelligence. Yeah. That's a good way to describe it. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that stuff has existed for a very long time, so they're just throwing the label on it, you know, and like, could, could some of that is honestly, some of that is probably overdue, uh, to be in a aviation industry, right? Because, you know, you could potentially recognize that, you know, extra safety mechanisms, extra backup mechanisms in terms of like, hey, these 2 planes might be getting too close to it. Like, this looks like it might be bad sort of thing, right? You know, anything that can improve that, probably for the better.

Allyn Malventano [02:54:09]:
I would hope that they're not to the point of, you know, just throwing Claude at the air traffic at the TRACON.

Iain Thomson [02:54:14]:
Oh, please God, no. We'd have an instant like the Washington crash every time, and it would just be like, oh, my bad, sorry.

Allyn Malventano [02:54:21]:
Yeah,

David Hewlett [02:54:22]:
I'm sorry, you were on the same trajectory.

Allyn Malventano [02:54:24]:
Yeah, yeah, it turns out you were on the same trajectory. That's right, that's on me. Yeah, sorry.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:54:30]:
I could see Claude just saying, oh, uh, by the way, I've just deleted all the planes. I'm very, very sorry. I don't seem

Allyn Malventano [02:54:38]:
to be able to recover. Would you like to know how to implement this more safely for the next time?

Iain Thomson [02:54:43]:
No, I mean, this is what really irritates me about sort of open access LLMs. You know, when you call them out on something, it's just like, oh, you're right, I'm very sorry, I'll correct that. And you're just like, you little bugger, why the hell didn't you get it right in the first place?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:54:59]:
I need your consent so I can beat you to death. That's the kind of the anger that comes out of that. Now, okay.

David Hewlett [02:55:06]:
The image of the day on the Security Now was about the, was it, was the camper trying to figure out whether the mushroom was poison or not? So he asked. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The next shot of course, him dead and them saying, you're right, it was poison.

Iain Thomson [02:55:19]:
Well, it's the old—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:55:20]:
that's good training.

Iain Thomson [02:55:21]:
Yeah, it's the old Slovakian saying goes, every other— every mushroom is edible, just some only once.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:55:28]:
Yeah, or, or actually, I prefer to use the words of Socrates who said, I drank what? Too soon, too soon. How many of you still have a 3.5-inch floppy drive somewhere?

Allyn Malventano [02:55:46]:
Well, that's what you caught me spinning around in my chair, Padre, when you asked me that question earlier, because I was doing—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:55:51]:
I've got mine. I've got mine.

Allyn Malventano [02:55:53]:
Like, it's on my shelf. I don't know. I'm tethered to the computer though, so I can't like find it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:55:59]:
It's just in case, right? It's, it's always just in case.

Allyn Malventano [02:56:03]:
I mean, it's underneath, it's underneath the water block from, oh my God, from Uggum number 2, I think.

David Hewlett [02:56:10]:
Oh wow.

Iain Thomson [02:56:10]:
That's actually really cool.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:56:11]:
That's cool. That's cool.

Iain Thomson [02:56:12]:
I mean, that is very—

Allyn Malventano [02:56:13]:
I mean, this is, this is TWiT heritage right here. This is the ultimate gaming machine. Uh, water block.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:56:18]:
GTX 280. Holy cow.

Allyn Malventano [02:56:21]:
Colleen, Colleen built that system. Colleen built that system.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:56:24]:
The person who built the Skypasaurus.

Allyn Malventano [02:56:26]:
Yes, it was a triple water block. And so I have one, Patrick Norton has the other one, and Colleen has the third one. Oh, wow. Nice. I'm like in,

Iain Thomson [02:56:35]:
you know, geeking out on that. That's fantastic.

David Hewlett [02:56:38]:
Pretty great.

Allyn Malventano [02:56:40]:
I mean,

Iain Thomson [02:56:40]:
I've got some 5¼ disks, but I have nothing to read them on.

Allyn Malventano [02:56:44]:
Where's my floppy? I see, I don't know where my floppy is. I have like a, I have a tape. I have a Zip disk.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:56:52]:
Floppy is really easy to convert to USB because the interface was decent. The 5¼-inch drives, I tried. They're— wow.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:02]:
I mean, I mean, you got, you want to use one of these?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:04]:
Oh my God.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:06]:
You just use—

Iain Thomson [02:57:06]:
but the 5.25s were actually floppy, whereas the 3.5 should be called stiffies, but I don't think that was really going to take off.

David Hewlett [02:57:14]:
Yeah. Weirdly didn't catch on in— Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:17]:
I'm just going through all of it. You want some 25-nanometer NAND?

Iain Thomson [02:57:21]:
Oh,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:22]:
I used to have wafers. Oh, those are great.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:24]:
I got a wafer, but here, the reason I pulled that out is to clean

David Hewlett [02:57:27]:
this all up after.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:28]:
I know I am. I'm trying to get to this What is this puppy?

Iain Thomson [02:57:32]:
LaserDisc?

Allyn Malventano [02:57:34]:
Hard drive.

Iain Thomson [02:57:34]:
Oh wow.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:35]:
IBM hard drive disk.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:37]:
That's from the spin—

Allyn Malventano [02:57:38]:
back when you literally would pull these out of the machine.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:57:42]:
There would have been an array of those, and that would have been about, what, 5 megabytes?

Allyn Malventano [02:57:47]:
This was probably like 1 megabyte or something on this.

David Hewlett [02:57:50]:
Kilobytes.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:51]:
Yeah,

Iain Thomson [02:57:52]:
it's the vinyl record of its day. Yeah, basically.

David Hewlett [02:57:55]:
I'm sure that the kids will want I want to go back to that, to their hometown.

Allyn Malventano [02:57:58]:
Oh yeah, yeah. Back in my day, I had to rewind this with a pencil.

Iain Thomson [02:58:03]:
We wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:06]:
When we come back, I do want to send us off the right way because this has been an absolutely fun episode. But first, let's take a moment, a little break to talk to a sponsor. And we are back. Before we close it off, I asked if our guests had anything they wanted to show and Alan Malventano, I don't know if this was a brag, a boast, or if he was just trying to make us feel bad because he sent us a bunch of photos of this god-incredible rig. Alan, can you please talk us through this? What are we seeing?

Allyn Malventano [02:58:40]:
So this— I have a habit when I lean into something to get like a little serious about it. And it had been a while. Listen, I used to watch water-cooled, and I kind of swore off of it for like basically a decade because I didn't like my computer upgrades to involve plumbing.

David Hewlett [02:58:57]:
Yeah,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:58:58]:
I could see that. Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [02:58:59]:
However, I kind of did this out of necessity. Oh, by the way, 4 of those are Wendell's, not mine, on the table there.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:05]:
What are those? What are those?

Allyn Malventano [02:59:07]:
Those are Pro 6000s because I'm a crazy guy.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:09]:
Oh my goodness.

Allyn Malventano [02:59:11]:
Now I will say I bought them before everything went crazy. Oh,

David Hewlett [02:59:14]:
that makes us feel way

Allyn Malventano [02:59:17]:
Well, I, I also, I also bought that half a terabyte of RAM in that system before everything went crazy too.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:59:22]:
Oh

David Hewlett [02:59:23]:
my God. Um, okay,

Iain Thomson [02:59:24]:
that's a retirement fund now.

David Hewlett [02:59:26]:
Uh, seriously?

Allyn Malventano [02:59:27]:
Yeah, basically.

David Hewlett [02:59:28]:
What is your address?

Allyn Malventano [02:59:31]:
Listen, David, I've told you it's your turn to visit.

David Hewlett [02:59:34]:
Yeah, it's true.

Allyn Malventano [02:59:36]:
Uh, so yeah, there's locks

Iain Thomson [02:59:37]:
because

Allyn Malventano [02:59:38]:
there's, there's the, there's the nice shot right there of the thing. So I just took decided it was time to do a proper build. This is probably half for like professional development because I needed to learn how all this AI stuff works because part of my day job and part of what I do in the industry is benchmarking storage. And so this AI workload is also a storage-related workload. I need to be able to produce it and figure out how it works and do all the things.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:00:02]:
You know, Alan, telling, telling me that that's for learning is like me telling you that Monaco was for work.

David Hewlett [03:00:06]:
gonna say, this is something everybody can just

Allyn Malventano [03:00:08]:
eye roll. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I don't play games on it, although it would be a killer gaming rig. Um, you know, but it is, is, it is purpose-built for self-hosting models. And in the winter, it will be helping heat the house. What is the whole—

David Hewlett [03:00:22]:
give us the whole—

Allyn Malventano [03:00:23]:
It's, it's, it's 5 Pro 6000 GPUs. Uh, usually you need 4 to self-host decent-sized models like the newest DeepSeek Um, yeah, Podberries, just—

David Hewlett [03:00:34]:
This is supposed to be cheering me up, cheering me up, not depressing me.

Allyn Malventano [03:00:39]:
But instead, so, so instead of having 4, this one goes to 5. So there's your goes to 11 joke. Um, okay.

David Hewlett [03:00:44]:
All right.

Allyn Malventano [03:00:45]:
The 5th, the 5th one sits off to the side so it can do extra room for activities for like a, a voice model and like other things. So I can have rooted Echo Dots around the house that I can talk to and get the Anthony Daniels voice of C-3PO talk back to me, cuz that's name of the— that's the—

David Hewlett [03:01:00]:
I don't know why you would ask for that.

Allyn Malventano [03:01:02]:
Yes, exactly. Um, so fun, fun things like that. Uh, but I've, uh, in my, in my AI harness since the beginning, the first thing I did was set like the Anthropic sort of middle of the road model API rates into my harness so that I would know how much equivalent money I was using. Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:01:22]:
Okay. Nice.

Allyn Malventano [03:01:24]:
Uh, I've, I've almost Paid

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:01:31]:
it off. Once you sell it for 10x.

Allyn Malventano [03:01:33]:
Well, I could, yeah, but I've almost— I've almost— no, what I mean is I've almost paid off what I paid to assemble it, right? Is it worth more than that now? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. And, and it's also pretty painful for there to just be a half a terabyte just sitting in that system instead of being sold. But I need it because I'm actually using using it, it's like that, that's what part of the model sits in when it's running. That's where the n-grams live. So,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:01:58]:
you know, I'm, I'm gonna send Ram Altman after you.

David Hewlett [03:02:01]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:02]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [03:02:02]:
See, I feel so sorry for you, Alan, having that half terabyte just sitting there.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:06]:
Oh yeah. Yeah. So, so sorry. So sorry.

David Hewlett [03:02:09]:
Yeah.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:10]:
Yeah. Come visit.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:02:12]:
Okay. All right. Well, thank you for making me feel horrible. So what I'm gonna do—

David Hewlett [03:02:16]:
That was the worst story to end on. Alan.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:20]:
No, listen, like it start— well, it started, here's the thing. It started with the intention of just doing like one of them.

Iain Thomson [03:02:27]:
Yeah. That's how a lot of the GPUs—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:02:30]:
It's not getting better. It's not getting better.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:33]:
Well, you know, yeah, it turned into Pokémon. It was like, oh, this is, this is, I could fit 5 in there. Okay.

David Hewlett [03:02:42]:
Gotta get 'em all.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:02:42]:
Yep.

Allyn Malventano [03:02:43]:
Gotta get 'em all, I guess.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:02:44]:
Let me, let me do my thing so I can feel a little bit better about myself. 'Cause I don't have half a petabyte, half a terabyte. But I do have something that I have been enjoying the last couple of weeks, uh, because it, it helps me to stay awake. And that is this wonderful little thing called the Fanttik Caffeine 11. Now, this is a portable coffee maker. It's a battery-powered black stainless steel cylinder that makes shots of espresso. Now, it includes a carry bag, some accessories. Oh, look at that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:03:12]:
But the important parts, there are 2 different coffee adapters. The first is for Nespresso machines, Making it possible to use the caffeine eleven with any standard size Nespresso pod. You just remove the cap, you unscrew the threaded adapter, you remove the pressure cap, and then you pop in your pod. Now the second adapter this is this one here is the Nespresso pod, but the second adapter is a micro filter adapter which allows me to grind my own coffee beans and then make my own custom shot of espresso. It even includes a measure which doubles as a tamp, so I can do that little espresso barista. a thing going on when I, when I'm making myself my morning coffee. Now, using this thing is crazy easy. You just choose your coffee source, pod or loose grounds, you fill it, you cap it, then you thread it into the Caffeine 11.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:03:55]:
You turn it over, you open the top of the pressure cap, then you fill it with your amount of water. Now, it can make shots up to 70 milliliters, but some would say that that's over-extracting. My Italian colleague, the man I work with all the time, Stefano He's the one who really taught me how to appreciate Italian coffee, and he would never put more than about 40 millilitres into a shot. Yeah. Because the idea is not to have a lot of coffee, but to have a small amount of very good coffee. So you cap it, you long press the, the power button, and it kicks off. It heats the water to 92 degrees Celsius in about 130, 135 seconds. Then it forces it through the adapter at 20 bar of pressure.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:04:34]:
That's important because that temperature and that pressure means that you're not going to be dissolving any of the bitters, the bitters that you get in like drip coffee. Now what I love about this is that we overuse cream and sugar in American coffee because we make it so bitter by over-extracting, by using water that's too hot, by doing it at room pressure. And if you don't, you get that, that golden brown foam. That's the crema. That's not milk. That's tiny bubbles of CO2. Now, when hot water at pressure goes through those grounds, it dissolves that CO2 and you get that crema, the bubbles coming out once it hits atmospheric pressure, and it emulsifies the oils. It's a wonderful experience.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:05:14]:
I got to say, I did not find Italian coffee to be at all interesting when I first got here because, you know, everyone told me how great it was and I was just thinking coffee is coffee. But seriously, this stuff is amazing. This thing has been a lifesaver. I carry it with me when I travel. It sits next to my desk so that I can have my coffee in the morning. And I mean, for $140, it's probably the best thing I've purchased. I get a lot of tech. There's very few tech that I will get and then I will keep.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:05:45]:
And this is the one that I'm keeping. So that's the Caffeine 11 from Fanttik.

David Hewlett [03:05:50]:
And you get that through airport security?

Iain Thomson [03:05:52]:
I'm sorry?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:05:52]:
Oh yeah, they don't care. Thermos.

Allyn Malventano [03:05:55]:
As long as it's empty.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:05:57]:
Exactly. There's no water in it.

Iain Thomson [03:05:58]:
But I mean, Padre, you live in Italy or surrounded by Italy. How have you not been burnt at the stake for using this sort of thing? I mean, they take their coffee very seriously.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:06:08]:
The coffee guy, the Italian I told you about, he keeps trying to steal this.

Iain Thomson [03:06:14]:
Huh?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:06:14]:
'Cause it tastes so good. It's really like they got it down. 92 degrees is like that magical temperature. Most American coffee is like 99. It's almost boiling. The problem is when it gets too hot, you, you like, you take all those bitters, all those volatile compounds, and you put it into the coffee. And that's why we have to add so much cream and sugar to balance that out. This I drink straight, and I never thought I would drink coffee straight, but it tastes so good.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:06:41]:
Now granted, it's not half a terabyte of memory or, uh—

Allyn Malventano [03:06:45]:
Oh my goodness, you're just never gonna have a house with video

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:06:48]:
cards, but

Iain Thomson [03:06:49]:
No, but I mean, it's kind of like— I'm trying to think of a British analogy. It's kind of like making tea in a microwave, it seems. You know, it's something that you should be beaten through the streets with for using. But I got it.

David Hewlett [03:07:01]:
My wife almost left me when I nuked a cup of tea. Yeah, I was not—

Iain Thomson [03:07:05]:
I can quite understand that. I'm in great sympathy with your wife.

David Hewlett [03:07:08]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:07:10]:
Well, I mean, the first time I ever heard that, do you remember in Ocean's— I think it was Ocean's Ocean's 11, or what was the one where they, they broke into Al Pacino's vault? Was that 13 or—

Allyn Malventano [03:07:22]:
12 or 13.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:07:23]:
12 or 13.

Iain Thomson [03:07:24]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:07:25]:
Eddie Izzard's character was asking for tea, but he was instructing him, but don't bring it to boiling. And that's the first time I thought, is that— does that actually make a difference? Yeah, it does. Both for coffee and tea.

Iain Thomson [03:07:35]:
Well, it depends, green or black. I mean, green should be served at 80 degrees. Black, you can go up to 95. I'm still not convinced that Lipton isn't a continuation of the American Civil War, American Revolutionary War, because it tastes like death. And they also—

David Hewlett [03:07:52]:
Yorkshire Gold's the only one I can do. Yorkshire Gold's the only one

Iain Thomson [03:07:55]:
I can do. Yorkshire Gold and Barry's, you know, it's—

David Hewlett [03:07:58]:
And which one was the other one?

Iain Thomson [03:08:00]:
Barry's. It's an Irish brand.

David Hewlett [03:08:01]:
Oh, I don't know Barry's.

Iain Thomson [03:08:03]:
Yeah, because Lipton bought PG Tips and changed the recipe just as I bought 1,000 bag box and we had to send it back because it just tasted like death.

David Hewlett [03:08:14]:
I came back from England with giant bags of like Sainsbury's. Oh yeah. I

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:08:19]:
live with a very nice British Jesuit from London. And when he first came to the house, we have a lot of Indian Jesuits who live here. And he saw them drinking tea and he's like, oh, I love your taste in tea. I didn't realize that you drank tea. And they just looked at And he said, where do you think your tea came from?

Iain Thomson [03:08:38]:
Yes, exactly. Although technically we stole it from the Chinese and then sent it to India to be cooked. Yeah, uh, to be, to be, to be grown. But yeah, uh, no, I've just, I've just had a friend come over from the UK and he brought me over Marmite, um, 2 packets, 2 fun packs of beef hula hoops, um, and chocolate. Proper chocolate, not American chocolate.

David Hewlett [03:09:01]:
Oh God, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:09:03]:
Yeah, we make some good chocolate here. Ghirardelli chocolate is great. It's fantastic. High cocoa content.

Iain Thomson [03:09:09]:
Ghirardelli is not bad, but Hershey's and Mars both smell like vomit.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:09:14]:
They're

David Hewlett [03:09:15]:
weird, waxy chocolate. I can't— I can't—

Iain Thomson [03:09:18]:
Yeah, I mean, they have 60% of the US confectionery market. And fun point, we just had Halloween and I was seeing a report. Apparently in the last 5 years, they've jacked up the price of candy just before Halloween by 71%. Yeah. That's right. And it's like, this is what happens when you don't have functioning free markets.

Allyn Malventano [03:09:36]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:09:37]:
But then right after Halloween, all that coffee is at, at sale. I mean, all that, all that candy is at sale.

David Hewlett [03:09:41]:
Oh, that's true. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:09:42]:
It balances out.

Iain Thomson [03:09:44]:
If only it was that simple.

David Hewlett [03:09:44]:
My wife bought 2 boxes, 1 box of good chocolate and 1 box of just cheap chocolate. And, and, and weirdly that one was emptied out, the cheap one. And we've been eating the, the wunderbare chocolate.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:09:56]:
I used to hate dark chocolate, chocolate fondant, but living here, I— it's all I eat now. I can't eat the milk chocolate stuff anymore. It doesn't taste right.

David Hewlett [03:10:04]:
Really?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:10:05]:
So no.

Iain Thomson [03:10:05]:
No, I'm with you on that.

David Hewlett [03:10:08]:
I got some visiting to do.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:10:10]:
Gentlemen, thank you. This has been so much fun. It's nice to be back in the seat, but it's— I mean, I had a panel that was a dream panel. I want to give you your props. I want to thank you for staying up this entire time. This has been actually a pretty long episode. Ian, tell us what you're up to, what you're doing, where people can find you.

Iain Thomson [03:10:29]:
Well, you can get me on Bluesky or Twitter. It's Ian Thompson. Mind the spelling. My parents were bastards and we've had words. I'm also writing for The Stack. I do a couple of monthly columns in TechFinitive, View from the Valley and Celebrity Interview. So just had Gadi Evron from the— who's been running the AI Unprompted AI Security Conference. Um, other than that, I am available for freelance journalism as, as and when needed, uh, and I'm a complete corporate whore.

Iain Thomson [03:10:59]:
So if you need some PR white papers done, then yeah, I'm your man.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:11:04]:
He's ready to work, gentlemen. He's ready to work. Thank you so much, Ian. It's, it's always a pleasure to work with you.

Iain Thomson [03:11:10]:
Great to see you again. It's been a long time.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:11:14]:
And please, if you come back across the pond, Come visit, please. Damn right.

Iain Thomson [03:11:20]:
Listen, as soon as I get my American passport, I'm coming to Europe and Italy is on the list. In the meantime, all hail Pres Maximum Leader Trump.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:11:29]:
And careful, careful. Alan, what about you? Where— what have you been working on? What projects are new and wonderful? And where can people find you?

Allyn Malventano [03:11:40]:
You know me, I'm just making the— trying to make the SSDs better. brother. Like, that's, uh, you know, I used to do all the review stuff back in the day and everything else, and then I just eventually had to turn over to the dark side because I got tired of getting the companies to make their SSDs better after, like, when I got them in for review and poked a bunch of holes in them and said, this is bad. And so I just decided to start working for them. So that's what led me to Intel and now Solidigm. So, uh, you know, I'm not as public as I used to be. Well, you know, which hurts a little sometimes, but usually I'm just too busy working. So

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:12:14]:
yeah, that's a good problem to have. So yeah, again, thank you.

Iain Thomson [03:12:18]:
You really need to send us your address. And if you use a Bluetooth lock, which is easily sort outable because, you know, there are mouths to feed and my God, that machine looked good.

David Hewlett [03:12:27]:
You keep it in the basement?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:12:30]:
I'm giving you guff. I'm giving you guff, Alan, but that thing is incredible. Thank you very much for sharing it. That looks so cool.

Allyn Malventano [03:12:36]:
It was, listen, so much, like, it legitimately was like, I haven't done a build in like, like a decade. So, you know, there was a lot of pent up.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:12:48]:
It's a good build to come back to.

Allyn Malventano [03:12:49]:
Yeah.

David Hewlett [03:12:50]:
Way to start slow.

Allyn Malventano [03:12:53]:
You listen, I never do anything halfway, David. You know that.

David Hewlett [03:12:55]:
That's true.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:12:55]:
You should see his next build. It's going to have a terabyte of memory.

Allyn Malventano [03:12:59]:
Yeah. Right. Not in this one.

David Hewlett [03:13:02]:
center is what it is.

Allyn Malventano [03:13:04]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:13:06]:
And of course, it's nice to finally be able to work with you again after so many years. We've had, we've had Zoom calls throughout the pandemic and, and other— and actually, I'm gonna be on your show in just a few weeks here, so I'm looking forward to that. David Hewitt, if you could please tell people where they find you, what you've been working on, what cause it is that you want to push.

David Hewlett [03:13:28]:
Well, connardian.com is where you can find me now. And I've decided that having played a genius, I'm now going to talk Octogenesys. So what I do is just interview fascinating people doing amazing tech and engineering related stuff, and it's absolutely wonderful. And I'm living my, just living my best life doing it. Love it. Absolutely love it. Um, so yeah, so head on over to connardian.com. That's, uh, that's where you'll find me.

David Hewlett [03:13:49]:
And, uh, and, uh, you'll find ZPM mugs that aren't ZPM mugs as well too. So.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:13:54]:
Yeah, that's right. It's a, it's a vacuum.

David Hewlett [03:13:57]:
It's a vacuum energy.

Allyn Malventano [03:13:59]:
It's a vacuum that holds coffee energy.

David Hewlett [03:14:01]:
Exactly.

Allyn Malventano [03:14:02]:
Coffee energy. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:14:03]:
You know what, at DEF CON last year, we actually, we, we may have been a little drunk, but there was a panel with some very, very smart people. And we were actually trying to put real physics explanations and equations behind a ZPM. And we got pretty damn close. I mean, vacuum energy is actually, it's a real thing. So we're like, well, yeah, how would it work in a crystal and an artificially created pocket of of a subspace universe. And yeah, so yes, you've inspired an entire generation of nerds. You should know that.

David Hewlett [03:14:33]:
To get drunk and talk about these things at DEF CON. That's somewhere I've got to go. I'm dying to do— talk about talking to geniuses. That, that is somewhere that I really want to, I want to, I want to get to.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:14:42]:
Don't go next year because next year is an art badge. Go the year after. It's going to be back to the electronic badge, and the electronic badge badges the last few years have been—

David Hewlett [03:14:51]:
Oh yeah, I have.

Iain Thomson [03:14:52]:
It's gonna be an art badge.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:14:54]:
only?

Iain Thomson [03:14:54]:
Yeah, I was so disappointed the first one of those I got.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:14:57]:
It's, it's every other year. So if it was an electric badge this year, it's an art badge next year.

David Hewlett [03:15:01]:
I love it's just about the badge. I love that. That's

Allyn Malventano [03:15:03]:
basically—

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:15:04]:
yeah, there's a, there's a thing we call it badge life. It's people who, who they just, they really want their badges. So yeah.

Iain Thomson [03:15:10]:
Yeah. Are you going? It's a really, um, probably this year and next. Yeah. I mean, I just need to justify it with the accountant, but the badges, particularly the electronic badges, were a really good way to meet people. I mean, yeah, remember Marcus Hutchins? Because, oh yeah, they had a thing. Yeah, they had a thing where you had to connect with like 8 different groups, and if you had a journalist badge, everyone just swarmed you. And Marcus was like, you're British, let's link up your badge. It's like, well, I'm linking up with Marcus Hutchins, who pretty sure he's probably done some hacking.

Iain Thomson [03:15:42]:
So, you know, but I mean, as a journalist—

David Hewlett [03:15:45]:
You were in the control room too, weren't you? Weren't you in there? You were in there. Not the control room, the network room, or the network room. Knock.

Iain Thomson [03:15:51]:
Oh, The Knock. Yeah, no, I always do an article from The Knock because they have the best stories ever and a really great— it's just, it's the perfect working environment, you know. They've got tech movies playing on one wall, ambient music playing, everyone's just going backwards and forwards with, have you seen this, have you seen that? And they— it works, you know. They've actually had to take some Black Hat delegates aside and say, look, you do realize that you're broadcasting everything. You know, you've got to lock your system down. And they said the biggest weakness, pet cams, because nobody locks down.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:16:25]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no one ever thinks about those.

David Hewlett [03:16:27]:
Yeah.

Iain Thomson [03:16:29]:
So yeah. Well,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:16:30]:
again, gentlemen, it has been a pleasure, a pleasure to share the stage with you. Uh, I, I don't get to, to get out very often. In fact, I'm still not out. I'm still sitting inside the Vatican. So the fact that I can live vicariously through your experiences is, is fantastic. Now, to you, to the listener, to the watcher, the person who drops in, thanks to you. We couldn't have this show without you. Thank you to everyone who joined us live or is watching via time and recorded downloads in streaming.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:16:57]:
We record TWiT in front of a live streaming audience every Sunday at 2:00 PM Pacific, 5:00 PM Eastern, 11:00 PM Rome time. That's 21:00 UTC. Now you can watch the show live at twit.tv/twit. If you subscribe, you'll get the feed automatically. So why, why wouldn't you? Come on, just do it easily. We'd love to have you. You can also watch the show as we do it live anywhere you get quality content. And don't again forget to subscribe.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [03:17:24]:
Until next time, I'm Father Robert Balasare, the Digital Jesuit in for Leo Laporte. And until next time, another twit is in the can.