This Week in Tech Episode 1080 Transcript
Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Glenn Fleischman is back. Wesley Faulkner's here. Lou Mareska, and we have a lot to talk about. The new Claude Opus 4.7 model is out. We'll talk about security flaws that AI can and cannot find. Why it's time to ban the sale of precise geolocation. And we'll watch some robots fall down.
Leo Laporte [00:00:22]:
It's coming up next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This.
Glenn Fleishman [00:00:31]:
This is twit.
Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1080, recorded Sunday, April 19, 2026. Destroy All Phono Records. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I love this panel, but I especially love seeing Glenn Fleishman back. So nice to see Glenn. You're feeling fit and fine and all that.
Glenn Fleishman [00:01:05]:
I feel fabulous. I recommend open heart surgery for everybody if you need it. If you need it. Let me point that out. That's the important.
Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
Do not show us your scar, though.
Glenn Fleishman [00:01:14]:
Do you have a. I promise, no. It actually looks awesome. I've had high compliments from medical professionals about.
Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
Oh, that's good.
Glenn Fleishman [00:01:20]:
No, I feel great. I would never have known that. I would never have known that I had this done five months ago. It's bizarre. I feel fantastic.
Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
And you feel better, don't you?
Glenn Fleishman [00:01:27]:
Oh, yeah. Incredibly. It's like all the things that were bothering me for five or six years are gone. Here's my little joke, which is everything went according to textbook. And if they would just take the textbook out of me now, I would feel that's my little joke.
Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
I hope they didn't leave anything else behind. Just a healthy.
Glenn Fleishman [00:01:45]:
Not so far. They keep checking. Nothing's in there.
Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
So great to see you. Of course, Glenn writes now on a regular basis for sixcolors. Com. We're really pleased to see that. And his new book is now on Kickstarter. Yes. You knew he. You know, after all the conversations we've had about flongs, you knew he had to write a flong book.
Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Yeah, it's called in a punning fashion, Flong Time. No see, Forgotten Stories of Printing and Labor. Yeah. Is this. Is this. Is this all about the people who did the work?
Glenn Fleishman [00:02:16]:
Yeah, in compiling. This is kind of a compilation of a bunch of things I've researched in the last several years about printing history. And I keep coming back to, weirdly, to the people involved. Most of them kind of forgotten history or as roles were downplayed and I just did a deep dive and discovered that a huge percentage of women were involved in printing and then kind of erased from its history changed again in the last 60 years. But in the late 1800s, 50% of people working in small towns on newspapers and things were women. And so I'm trying to. That will be in this book along with a lot of stuff about all the hard labor. Everybody did that we never saw that.
Glenn Fleishman [00:02:56]:
Got printing where it is today.
Leo Laporte [00:02:59]:
It is on Kickstarter. And you've already reached your goal?
Glenn Fleishman [00:03:03]:
I did. It's funded, but you can go there and you can pledge to get a book now as I continue towards completion, towards finishing the book. Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:03:12]:
Also here, good friend, longtime friend, Wesley Faulkner. Wesley of works not working. Hi, Wesley. Hey.
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:21]:
It's good to be back.
Leo Laporte [00:03:22]:
Always nice to see you.
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:23]:
Feels like the rotation is getting quicker.
Leo Laporte [00:03:26]:
Is it? Well, maybe that's because we like you so much. And the site is up. That's the other thing. Last time you were here was just about to go live. It is live now. People who are working but not happy about it, I guess.
Wesley Faulkner [00:03:39]:
Yes. And the wait list is open too, so you can join the wait list. I'm going to open up for new members at the beginning of next month.
Leo Laporte [00:03:47]:
Nice. Great to have you. And another old friend, good friend, too, former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech, Lou Maresca.
Lou Maresca [00:03:55]:
Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:03:56]:
Hey, Lou. Good to see you. He's engineering leader. I'm sorry? AI. AI engine engineering leader for copilot at Microsoft.
Lou Maresca [00:04:04]:
That's right, yeah. Focus on Excel Agent and bringing data engineering to you.
Leo Laporte [00:04:08]:
He's the guy who put Python in Excel, for which we are eternally grateful.
Glenn Fleishman [00:04:14]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:04:15]:
I know, I know. When I say that, Glenn, it's like, oh, yeah, okay. Wow.
Lou Maresca [00:04:20]:
Now you can use AI against it, too.
Leo Laporte [00:04:22]:
And now you can. Now you can use AI.
Lou Maresca [00:04:24]:
Now you generate Python AI for it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:04:26]:
Right.
Lou Maresca [00:04:26]:
In Excel.
Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
We were starting about half an hour late because we all got started talking about our AI projects. It's really interesting to see, you know, how people, geeks, I guess, even not necessarily coders, have kind of gravitated to this and have started to use it in all sorts of interesting ways. I really feel like, as somebody who's covered tech for 40 years, it is the most exciting thing to happen in tech since I've been doing it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:04:55]:
I don't know any coder who's not excited about it. The ones who aren't excited about it haven't tried it yet. And the ones that are may have ambivalent feelings, but they're still excited about it because you know what, we were talking about this before the show, but it's. I think part of the ambivalence from some people is like, I put in so much hard. This is like the. What if they pay off everybody's student loans? Well, I paid mine off. It's like I put in so much work to get here and now this thing can do a thing that used to take me 100 hours in like an hour or two. It's like.
Glenn Fleishman [00:05:24]:
Well, I think of that as more like. It's an accelerant, it's an exoskeleton. It's something you could use to make your life better. And having written about the printing industry, when the Linotype was invented in the 1880s, all these typesetters were initially put out of work. It was very sad. And then of course, what happened? Newspapers started printing newspapers that were 10, 20, 30 times bigger. And they hired back. And so within a few years, the overall employment was tremendously higher because of the efficiency.
Glenn Fleishman [00:05:52]:
So there's my.
Leo Laporte [00:05:53]:
Is that Jeevon's paradox that I don't know that. Yeah. In economics, Jevon J E V O N or the Jeevon effect is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use. Intuitively, you'd think, oh well, if it's more efficient, they're going to use less of it. No. Leads to a rise rather than a fall in total consumption of that resource. It is kind of counterintuitive. But then if you think about it, it opens new avenues.
Leo Laporte [00:06:24]:
Right. And I'm hoping. I mean, I feel bad for anybody. We see that computer science majors in college have dwindled, but people are still majoring in engineering, data science. It's just. They're not learning how to code anymore. I think that makes sense. There's still opportunities.
Wesley Faulkner [00:06:43]:
We're in an artificial paradox, though. For instance, people took more Ubers when Ubers were cheaper.
Leo Laporte [00:06:50]:
That's true.
Wesley Faulkner [00:06:50]:
But then. And so I don't know about how sustainable in terms of a direct line or hockey stick trajectory, because when people start charging how much they're worth, I see how many people will still use it, at least in the way that they're using it now. So it might change.
Glenn Fleishman [00:07:06]:
We're talking about the constraints on data center capacity. And without getting into the. Microsoft is vastly more resources. They have massively more cash in the bank than most of the AI startups. Right. But like, you know, Claude has tweaked its pricing model substantially and the tokens available and all that just in the last few weeks made a lot of people unhappy because what has been reported is it's about constraint and the necessity of computational power for the new improved models. And if they're not efficient enough relative to the output, which is I think where we're at right now, then they have to charge more, which is good from a sustainable standpoint. If you want Claude OpenAI, Copilot, et cetera, to be available in five years, then they have to do what Wesley says, otherwise we have nothing.
Glenn Fleishman [00:07:50]:
And then what do we gain?
Leo Laporte [00:07:52]:
Is it a case of them running? So the same thing happened with the Internet, right? Everything was free on the Internet except we knew, I mean it all cost money. It wasn't free free. There was somehow somebody was paying for it and eventually we found out, oh yeah, it was, you know, we're paying for it through attention, through advertising is we just run that cycle a lot faster with AI, you know.
Wesley Faulkner [00:08:16]:
Well, bits were free, the servers did cost money. Yeah, but, but those were the infrastructure and all that stuff was different than the infrastructure now.
Leo Laporte [00:08:26]:
And it worked out.
Wesley Faulkner [00:08:27]:
Yeah, but we're seeing that the, the, the demand, what do they say costs was? The demand curve is also being thrown out of whack. We have hard drives being sold out for the whole entire year in January. We have memory prices spiking. We have, you know, we're going to have probably like shortages in copper and all this stuff that's going to happen where that the constraints aren't equal. So the ouroboros of what it is is this build out is not sustainable today.
Leo Laporte [00:09:03]:
Mark Gurman's newsletter in Bloomberg said that Apple was going to have to delay the release of its new Mac Studios and perhaps Even its new M6 Max laptop because of supply chain constraints particularly
Glenn Fleishman [00:09:16]:
everybody wants a Mac Mini. I've been reading article after article about how, I mean that's for openclaw, right?
Leo Laporte [00:09:22]:
Yeah, but good luck getting one right. They're sold out too.
Glenn Fleishman [00:09:25]:
I know, yeah, I'm, I'm sort of fascinated. But I was writing something recently I was going to tell people for six colors. Well, here's a great time machine thing is use network time machine on your Mac and just get a couple two terabyte SSDs. And before I publish it, I'm like looking up, I'm like, oh, those are like $100. Like oh my God, they're like 250 to 300. They were, they had gone down so far into price during the pandemic because of an increased production and, you know, the curve is whoop. So all right, can't tell people. Yeah, don't go and spend $300 on a 2 terabyte SSD right now.
Leo Laporte [00:09:58]:
To your point, Anthropic announced this week that enterprises using their CLAUDE models would have to pay for tokens and wouldn't be able to do the all you can eat Claude max subscriptions. We can as end users still do that. We have to pay attention. You're in that situation, aren't you, Lou? You have to. Now, you said you have to watch your tokens.
Lou Maresca [00:10:18]:
Well, I mean, personally, I have to watch my tokens, but I would say, you know, use Copilot through, you know, through Excel and choose Cloud Opus 4:7. We don't. You don't have to worry too much about that.
Leo Laporte [00:10:28]:
Oh, that's good to do. Little plug there for the way to use it. The way to use it. That's good. 47 did just come out this week. Any thoughts about. You know, it's so funny, you go on Reddit and people are bitching and moaning and they hated 4.
Glenn Fleishman [00:10:44]:
6.
Leo Laporte [00:10:45]:
They said it was nerfed. And it may be that the compute constraint that Anthropic's running up against, especially because it's got this supermodel under wraps and, and it eats a lot of bandwidth and a lot of CPU and GPU that maybe they haven't been able to serve all the people who are using claude. Plus, let's face it, CLAUDE has gone through explosive growth.
Wesley Faulkner [00:11:10]:
Well, 4.6, the defaults changed. They changed it from high effort to like medium effort and to. So that was the default. So people were seeing worse results because the defaults didn't change.
Leo Laporte [00:11:23]:
You could still turn it up to
Wesley Faulkner [00:11:24]:
high effort and they didn't turn it back up. Yes, but also if you look. To look at, if you look up their uptime, that has been taking significant hits as well. So it has not been the most reliable service.
Glenn Fleishman [00:11:37]:
Did you all notice when they switched to the in 4. 6, they added that million token session. I can't remember when it sort of switched on. It was extra and then suddenly it was default and it was profoundly different. I felt like it just felt like I could work on these long sessions and have so much more sophistication during them than I had before. So Even before the 4.7upgrade, I felt like I was getting a lot more out of it without having to constantly be like, no, okay, re. Summarize, let's go back. No, we already discussed that.
Glenn Fleishman [00:12:07]:
We already Discussed that. Let's go back.
Leo Laporte [00:12:09]:
Is it fair to say that Anthropic is being bit by its own success? That that's what really this is?
Glenn Fleishman [00:12:14]:
Sure.
Wesley Faulkner [00:12:16]:
Part of it is the explosive thing, like when OpenAI and the government contract thing and they got so many free users.
Leo Laporte [00:12:22]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:12:23]:
And so they had an uptick of people who also weren't on the pay plan that just. They were trying to make it up in volume in terms of how much their money they're making. So, yeah, I think that is part of it is. And also when you roll out the. Like we're going to probably get into their new model now. You're competing with the old and new and unless you can get everyone to transition over to one model, then you can help with managing some of that usage. But now you have to kind of partition it.
Leo Laporte [00:12:55]:
Lou, you may not be able to say anything about this, but Anthropic did grant access to Mythos. It's super duper model to Microsoft. Do you. Did you. Can you.
Lou Maresca [00:13:07]:
I don't have any knowledge of that information.
Leo Laporte [00:13:09]:
Okay. Tug your ear if you've used it. I know you.
Lou Maresca [00:13:15]:
I have not.
Leo Laporte [00:13:16]:
If you could. You couldn't talk about it anyway.
Glenn Fleishman [00:13:18]:
I just saw a report today, someone was complaining that they looked through all the. Oh, I've forgotten the name of them, the IDEs, all the CDEs, the reports, the filed reports and CVEs, the vulnerability reports. They looked through all those. They tried to find any that could be directly attributed to either Mythos or to Claude, and they found almost nothing that seemed to be related to Mythos. And they're calling for more transparency from Anthropic about when they're making claims about how many fundamental bugs are finding. Part of me is like, well, I don't know what's been fixed yet, so it might not be a cve because some of the stuff they're talking about is so fundamental.
Leo Laporte [00:13:56]:
Yeah. Patrick Garrity, who works for Voln Check said that's it. It may be 40. That was.
Glenn Fleishman [00:14:04]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:14:04]:
But they're not attributed to Mythos. They're attributed to anthropic researchers.
Glenn Fleishman [00:14:09]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:14:09]:
The only one that Anthropic has said is that. Are those the one that have found an OpenBS or FreeBSD MPEG1, which I don't know, and the FFmpeg one more as an example.
Glenn Fleishman [00:14:22]:
But.
Leo Laporte [00:14:22]:
And I've also seen stories that say, this is from the Wall Street Journal. You're about to see a lot of critical software updates. Don't ignore them.
Glenn Fleishman [00:14:32]:
Well, that's Nicole. Yeah, she's, she's on top of this.
Leo Laporte [00:14:35]:
Nicole Wen. Yeah. I think that that's going to be the proof. Regardless of who these CVEs are attributed to. If you suddenly see a flood of zero day patches, Microsoft put out last patch Tuesday, its second biggest patch Tuesday of all ever. I don't know if that's related or not. I think it's too early to say that those would, those would be CVEs discovered by methods.
Lou Maresca [00:15:02]:
What do organizations, why don't organizations think about it today though? You can still have AI assisted hunts going on and probably just right. So like, so I don't understand why they, they're waiting for Mythos to come out because they should already be using these models to counteract what's already happening today.
Glenn Fleishman [00:15:19]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [00:15:19]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:15:20]:
I think the point the Mythos is so that they don't do CVEs, they don't want to publicly disclose the bugs for people.
Leo Laporte [00:15:27]:
Fix it. Fix it before fix it becomes public.
Glenn Fleishman [00:15:30]:
Yeah, well, you remember that. Does Dan Kaminsky, the sadly late Dan Kaminsky who had that DNS exploit, that friend of mine helped him do the disclosure because he thought, you know, he was one person, he thought, I'm going to destroy the world by accident if I'm not careful.
Leo Laporte [00:15:45]:
This is such a huge flaw in DNS that would have brought the Internet to its knees. It would have just killed the Internet.
Glenn Fleishman [00:15:50]:
And I'm thinking, well how many of those are there out there? Because Dan found it kind of by accident and no one had seemingly ever exploited it. So I hope not too many. But you know, you just don't.
Leo Laporte [00:15:59]:
What do we think? Are there millions of zero days just waiting. Glenn, you said that you had software you've wrote and have been running for how long?
Glenn Fleishman [00:16:11]:
27 years live on the Internet. I mean a little book price comparison site and. But you know, but all the automated vulnerability things that hit every website all the time that are looking for WordPress flaws, credentials, any kind of vulnerability for injection, they've all been hitting it. So the problems fortunately were not publicly exposed in a way. But you know, first time I said to Claude code, find me all the bugs in this. It's like, hey, you didn't escape all this stuff and you didn't do this. And this could have been an injection. If someone had sent a URL that looked like this, they could have just overwritten your databases and I.
Leo Laporte [00:16:45]:
You weren't sanitizing your inputs, young man.
Glenn Fleishman [00:16:48]:
I sanitize. I'm sorry, father. I sinned. I did not sanitize all of my inputs, for which I heartily sorry.
Leo Laporte [00:16:55]:
But that's the point is even the current models are really good at finding this stuff.
Wesley Faulkner [00:17:00]:
The thing is, we're talking about software vulnerabilities, but there's still microcode vulnerabilities on the lower level, and that's going to
Leo Laporte [00:17:08]:
be super in the processor.
Lou Maresca [00:17:09]:
You mean, what's the elephant in the room, right? There's vulnerabilities that have been long standing in all devices, all applications, all services out there, and now it's just easy to expose. And then these companies are going to have to go and retroactively patch everything.
Leo Laporte [00:17:23]:
And just to be clear what the threat is, people are afraid that bad guys are going to get access to these AI models and find the vulnerabilities and exploit them. And so the idea is get these companies to fix them before we let bad guys at the model. But as we've been saying, the current models are good enough to find a lot of exploits or work with the
Wesley Faulkner [00:17:47]:
government and make sure the flaws don't get fixed.
Leo Laporte [00:17:50]:
I think it's very ironic because one of the reasons you mentioned that Anthropic's been on a roll is because the government said, you're a supply chain risk. And Trump tweeted, or whatever you call it. Truth. He truthed. Nobody in the government can use Anthropic. Meanwhile, as soon as Mythos came out, all of these government agencies were begging Anthropic to can we have it? Can we have it? And in fact, Dario Mode went to the White House on Friday and met with Susan Wilkes, the Chief of staff, because now government's in a little bit of a bind. They want access to this thing, this supply chain, you know, drama. So ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [00:18:32]:
I think that actually the government is going to get access to it as it should. If it's that good at finding vulnerabilities, we should all have access to it in a controlled fashion.
Glenn Fleishman [00:18:43]:
This is where we get worried. Microcode. And then also the Internet of things, where all the terrible. All these untouched devices, firmware that's out there and somebody just buys up or finds the. I mean, that's the other thing. Downloads the firmware for devices, emulates it, runs tests against it, and then it's like, well, there's a million of these. I don't even want to say a brand name because I don't want to accidentally slander somebody, slander a brand.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:06]:
But you can say wise. Wise Cameras.
Glenn Fleishman [00:19:11]:
Yeah, it finds the unwise cameras out there and patches them all in A way that bricks every one of them.
Leo Laporte [00:19:18]:
Yeah. Remember Wyze had to say, well, we're not going to sell that camera anymore because we can't fix it. Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [00:19:23]:
There's a lot of stuff out there like that. I mean, how many generations of routers have never been patched? Or there is no way to upgrade the firmware for them.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:29]:
Or if you think about industrial hardware as well, like things that are made to set and forget DLCs or stuff like that.
Lou Maresca [00:19:34]:
Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [00:19:35]:
It's funny, the stuff about how the world ends is someone's like, well, the AI will take over and then we'll all be great goop. And it's like, no, I'm worried about the control system in a electrical substation near my house blowing up probably.
Leo Laporte [00:19:47]:
Well, it's not the AI, it's the bad guys, Right?
Glenn Fleishman [00:19:50]:
Absolutely.
Wesley Faulkner [00:19:51]:
We need that Borg technology where, like, if there's a vulnerability that it just gets distributed amongst all the other drones and then like they adapted and they have to find a different vulnerability to get through. Hopefully.
Lou Maresca [00:20:03]:
Actually, I think it's pretty interesting that like Opus 4. 7, when it came out, they did a bunch of benchmarks against it. Obviously comparably to Mythos, it's supposed to be the safer version of Mythos.
Leo Laporte [00:20:14]:
They say safer because it's dumber.
Lou Maresca [00:20:15]:
Yeah, I guess so. What I thought was really interesting was because of all the safeguards they put in a 4.7and the 46 model actually was benchmarking better at hacking systems than 4 7.
Leo Laporte [00:20:29]:
Interesting. Jensen. Okay, a couple of things. First of all, if you've heard of Cal.com, which is apparently I didn't know about it because I'm not an enterprise, but a very popular calendaring solution, it's open source scheduling software companies use to schedule meetings and so forth. It's going closed source because of this. They say open source security has always relied on people to fix and find any problems. But now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency. So they're going closer.
Leo Laporte [00:21:09]:
I don't know, honestly, if this is a good idea. Do you think it's a good idea that. Should we. Is it the. Some people have said this is the end of open source because if your source code is sitting there on GitHub, bad guys are going to attack it. They're going to use AI to find the vulnerabilities.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:24]:
I've been a long time user and still a user of Cal.com I loved it. It's awesome. Part of it is because for individual accounts it was free. So for the hosted version but then you could also deploy it. I know a lot of home labbers love Cal.com because they can deploy it on their own infrastructure. But they. This seems like an excuse because it doesn't make sense. Because if you remember TrueCrypt and like VeraCrypt and all this, those are open source.
Wesley Faulkner [00:21:52]:
And that's if they say we want to protect our users data. I mean an encryption software has very important use of data and they're still able to stay open source or we're able to.
Leo Laporte [00:22:03]:
It's canonical. But security by obscurity is not security.
Wesley Faulkner [00:22:09]:
But also if you look at other projects like Redis or other products that were open source and they went closed source, they have been beaten by the community. They have been. There's the retribution is swift and it's hard to the point where it's like some projects have to flip back to open source because the rebellion is very strict. This is feels like a bait and switch for a lot of people. And they, they a lot of the tagline for open source is hey you can. You always have access to it because we're open source. And when they change that.
Leo Laporte [00:22:44]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:22:44]:
That is seen as a betrayal. And they said they're going to have a version that's going to be open source now they're going to be maintaining two code. It just doesn't make sense.
Leo Laporte [00:22:54]:
They have Cal diy which is the open source for self hosters.
Wesley Faulkner [00:23:00]:
They should just call it Cal Fu. I mean that's just.
Glenn Fleishman [00:23:03]:
Yeah. I was going to say go fork yourself is what a lot of people say when this happens. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:23:10]:
It makes sense because how are they going to maintain. They can maintain both but as soon as you fork it you diverge.
Lou Maresca [00:23:15]:
Yeah. They could have did a call to action and the community just said hey everyone just use your tokens against our repo and secure it all up and we'll do that from now on. Right. I'm sure all the community would have done it.
Leo Laporte [00:23:25]:
That's a great idea.
Lou Maresca [00:23:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:23:27]:
A popular open source product should do that. That's a great idea.
Wesley Faulkner [00:23:31]:
Yeah. That's why it doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense what they're saying. And plus I mean are they seeing any real. If they saw any real world consequences like is that something bad happened that would be even a catalyst to say this happened with one of our major customers. We're redoubling down and we're closing this first. There's just a no real justification and no data that they've pointed to, it's hard and error.
Glenn Fleishman [00:23:57]:
So after all the WordPress nonsense that's happened and then Cloudflare's response to that sort of. It feels like you can't necessarily. There's not enough goodwill left. I think when open source projects say, well, this isn't really as open source as you thought, or we're going to switch our model, or people are misusing things, but you're like, well, you can't misuse those things if they're open source. Oh, we have the trademark, we have the. So there's. I think a lot of goodwill has evaporated in the last few years. I mean, I want to say the WordPress debacle has been part of that.
Glenn Fleishman [00:24:28]:
I don't know, maybe that's exaggerating that role, but I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:24:33]:
One of our. I quote him a lot. He's in our club Twit. He's a big AI user. Darren Okey, one of the regulars on our AI user group, he said, if everyone has access to these tools, this is in our club Twit. We can find vulnerabilities. For instance, GitHub Copilot already does tons of stuff. It should be finding vulnerabilities and alerting users.
Leo Laporte [00:24:54]:
Then everything's more solid and has a cascading effect. He says the real problem is so many people are using pointer based languages like C and that's where you get these buffer overruns and these null pointer vulnerabilities. He said people should just be using AI to convert it to Go or convert it to Rust.
Glenn Fleishman [00:25:13]:
Oh no, the code wars.
Leo Laporte [00:25:17]:
But he has a point, in fact. A lot of what, Mike? I don't know, what code are you getting your AIs to write in? A lot of my first thing I ever wrote was Rust. I thought, well, why not? Let's use a safer language. I don't have to write all that extra boilerplate. It's going to do it. So let's use Rust. But lately I've been using Go because of its concurrency model, but in both cases it's more secure. I would never dream of asking an AI to write something in C or C, even though I love C.
Leo Laporte [00:25:49]:
Most
Lou Maresca [00:25:50]:
of the models are written in Python, so they're highly trained on Python. It's a safe language and yeah, it's safe, right?
Leo Laporte [00:25:56]:
There's no pointer vulnerabilities in Python.
Wesley Faulkner [00:25:58]:
But in this day and age, we're just talking about LLMs and vibe coding. People just make a version of this and then open source that and then let other people use that for themselves hosts. And that's going to be the future. It's like, hey, I was a CAL user. Now it's now close. So here's my. And if you want, please add your contributions. And then they're gonna die.
Glenn Fleishman [00:26:21]:
This isn't, I don't want to get us off in too much of a tangent, although I know that's the point of this show. In part, it is the point. I've been wondering, you know, all the coders I know talk about using it for public facing projects, most of them, but also they all talk about, I'm sure everybody here about how it's like, oh, I needed a thing, so I just had it write it for me. It's for me. The interface is minimal or it's extensive, but it's all like, I had it write a game show console for me for a game I invented that I run once a year on a backwater. I mean, I'm sort of embarrassing myself, you know, a podcast network. And I'm thinking, well, I could, of course I could do my own fork of Cal.com, run something locally, have it add features and if they're good enough, I can have it submit to the, you know, do pull requests or have it update my chain. If improvements are made, there you go, integrate them, keep an eye on it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:27:11]:
But that becomes, I think, feasible as an individual if there's things you want or if you want kind of, I don't know, clean room. But you want something where I'm not necessarily always updated to the latest public version because of whatever concerns. I'm just running it for myself. So that's also going to happen.
Leo Laporte [00:27:27]:
I want to take a little break and then we can watch robots fall over, which is always fun in the half marathon in Beijing. Although these humanoid robots do run really fast, which honestly, I have some misgivings about fast robots. That seems dangerous. We'll talk about that and AI anxiety in general, plus a lot more. It's a fun time to get together and talk about technology. That's for sure. On this Week in Tech, we're so glad to have Glenn Fleischman back in the fold. So nice to see you, Glenn.
Leo Laporte [00:27:59]:
It's great to see you, Glenn.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:00]:
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:28:01]:
Dot Fun. Two NS in Glenn. Jeopardy. Champion Glenn Fleischman. Did you watch Jason Snell's episode?
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:08]:
I did. We've now had. Speaking of the incomparable. We now have and six colors. Three, six colors Writers have now been Jeopardy. Players. Two of us Jeopardy. Champions, Dan Moran, you, Dan Morin and.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:18]:
But Jason had a great time. He got beat by one of the best. He got beat by Jamie Ding, who was still playing. Still playing. Is over $700,000 in winning. He's 24, 25 games as of Friday.
Leo Laporte [00:28:29]:
Super champion.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:30]:
He's great. He's such a modest, funny, like quiet guy. And Jason feels very privileged to have been defeated by a super champion by top five all time players.
Leo Laporte [00:28:40]:
Yeah. That's awesome.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:41]:
It's good.
Leo Laporte [00:28:42]:
Also here, Wesley Faulkner. Ever dream of being on Jeopardy. Wesley, Is that, is that something in your.
Wesley Faulkner [00:28:47]:
No. Funny enough though, my, My stepsister has been on Jeopardy.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:51]:
Really?
Wesley Faulkner [00:28:52]:
And yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [00:28:53]:
Awesome.
Wesley Faulkner [00:28:54]:
It's. She was writing a book about it and I think that's still in the works. But yeah, I think I, the pressure feels too high.
Leo Laporte [00:29:03]:
Me too.
Wesley Faulkner [00:29:03]:
I would perform like that to rattle off like, gosh, when, when, when I'm in an interview and they're asking something about stuff that I know about, like the things that I lived experience then I still, I still have issues.
Leo Laporte [00:29:20]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:29:21]:
Being on Jeopardy. That's a whole nother level.
Leo Laporte [00:29:22]:
A lot of pressure.
Glenn Fleishman [00:29:23]:
I'll tell you the funniest moment though is I. One of the questions I got was clues I got. I'm sorry, was something to do with the answer was, was Bush the older George Bush president? And I said, who is Bush? And Alex said, can you be a little more specific? And I panicked and I said, who is George Herbert Walker Bush? I was like, how specific do I have to be? And I was correct. But it was just like, why do I know his full name? I know all four of his name.
Leo Laporte [00:29:47]:
It came to you suddenly. And Lou Maresque is also here. Jeopardy Champion. No, but champion in our hearts. AI engineering leader.
Lou Maresca [00:29:58]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:29:58]:
Leo at Microsoft, Fast Company had an article taking off on the fact that somebody threw a firebomb at Sam Altman's house and then somebody else fired shots at Sam Altman's house. AI anxiety is turning volatile. I've thought and I've worried about this for a long time that there was that we were almost going to see a civil war between believers and doomers. And Glenn, you already said you're kind of in the middle, right. You use AI and you love it, but you also feel bad about it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:30:29]:
Well, yeah. Part of it is backlash is it's not like NFTs were a horrible thing in the creative community. There are people who lost lifelong friendships and working relationships. If you said the word nft I think AI is a little different. Backlash is huge because there's a lot of creative people who feel completely ripped off. And as a, as a writer of many published works and sometimes a visual artist, I get that. And I think, I think we had that running ahead of the cart in terms of the horse, rather in terms of how do we license appropriately the material that makes up things that produce generative creative outputs. So that has colored a lot of people's opinions.
Glenn Fleishman [00:31:11]:
Plus environmental concerns, some of them I think realistic and some less so. And regulation and electrical use here in Seattle, we just got word the local newspaper said, hey, five different data center companies, different companies who want to build data centers have approached Seattle City Light, which they owned utility, and said, we need electricity equivalent to one third of all generation capacity of the city right now. That freaks people out. Even if it's necessary, even if it happened in a regulatory fashion, even if it happened in an environmentally sensitive fashion, how do you encompass that? So there's all of that, but it's. Gosh, is it useful for coding?
Leo Laporte [00:31:50]:
It's hard, isn't it? But it's so great at the same time. I feel guilty too. I know what you mean.
Glenn Fleishman [00:31:55]:
Yeah. So many good things about certain aspects of it don't involve replacing creative like artistic and writing work that is intended to be creative, but supplementing and amplifying our abilities as humans by using tools we developed.
Wesley Faulkner [00:32:10]:
I disagree with the premise though.
Glenn Fleishman [00:32:12]:
Oh, good. Okay. Yeah, right on.
Wesley Faulkner [00:32:15]:
Yes, AI is a problem, but I think what is going on is that it's the billionaire. So the reason why I say that the distinction is that if you look at the age of the people who are doing this, they're fairly young. So yes, they could be displaced. And yes, a lot of entry level jobs are being removed for AI because of AI or the excuse of AI. And there's talk about, like, hey, when you think about you're creating something that's going to threaten the human race, people are going to believe you, but it doesn't matter if they believe you or not. The CEOs who are firing all these people are saying that is the reason. So regardless if it's AI, regardless if it is a threat for the future, there are impacts today that are being blamed on AI in terms of junior roles not being available. But also I think this could be coupled with, if you've seen those warehouse fires where people are just lighting up inventory and saying that they are not getting paid enough and couple that with what's going on in the world in general.
Wesley Faulkner [00:33:25]:
In this administration where prices are going up, wages are going down, unemployment rate in terms of the length of people, how long they are on unemployment, trying to find another job is really, really hard because now everyone is using AI to swamp recruiters. And so they're rejecting using AI to reject wider and larger numbers of people who are looking for roles. I think it's a combination of all of the above and everything that's going on that's causing some of this backlash.
Glenn Fleishman [00:33:53]:
I'm going to agree with you, against myself and say with my history hat on, if we roll back 200 years, the Luddites were not wrong. They get a bad rap. Their methods were very similar to what's being used today in some ways and are going to accelerate, I think, which is throwing the sabbats into the. The gears of progress.
Leo Laporte [00:34:11]:
Sabotage.
Glenn Fleishman [00:34:12]:
Sabotage. Because the point of them was exactly this. It was massive displacement for mechanization without a plan for how it would affect the economy or workers. And so you gonna displace a huge number of people with necessary skills and then what happens? How does your economy survive that? And the people at the top didn't care. And the people at the bottom said, well, we've got nothing left to lose. The last public beheadings in Eng of people who were convicted of sabotage of being their Luddite leaders. So it's not in living memory, it's two centuries back, but it's still. You see the same kind of things being already.
Glenn Fleishman [00:34:52]:
If you're on X, which I am not, you see people saying like, oh, we should be capital punishment for people who attack data centers or whatever. I mean, it's already. That kind of rhetoric is being thrown around too easily. But the Luddites were right in their message. Maybe hard to support in their particular approach.
Leo Laporte [00:35:11]:
Lou, is there any trepidation among people who are actually working in AI? Does this come up at all?
Lou Maresca [00:35:19]:
All the time? Yeah, all the time. I would say my true belief is that obviously it's not eliminating jobs, it's just eliminating the tasks inside the jobs. And so you really have to learn to essentially adjust and evolve. But it doesn't change the stress. Like I personally feel stressed that my job is going to evolve very soon. And I've been doing this for 22 years. And it makes me feel uncomfortable with that whole feeling of it, like, will it. Will I be still be relevant? And if I find out after looking at all the things that it does generate or that it does automate or does make things easier, I can see it giving me Room to do other things, especially the human factor of it.
Lou Maresca [00:35:58]:
Right. The ability to make, you know, decisions using my vast experience of many, many years. So I think I get pulled in different directions. But I can definitely tell you everyone's feeling it.
Leo Laporte [00:36:09]:
You still need the engineering skills, the planning skills, the understanding of testing, I
Lou Maresca [00:36:15]:
mean shipping, orchestration, you need to be the orchestrator.
Leo Laporte [00:36:19]:
Orchestration. And so that's a skill. The problem often is raised that, well, what about entry level jobs? The people who have those skills yet they're at the beginning of the career, that 20 years later they'll have those skills, where do they fit in? And we were talking earlier about computer science majors just dwindling because nobody thinks that there's a future in learning Python anymore.
Glenn Fleishman [00:36:44]:
I mean in this whole notion I felt like it was very brief. It was like, well, everyone's going to be a prompt engineer. And I thought that felt, that didn't feel right. But there's going to be a different kind of education. It's going to be a little more abstract. I mean we don't do. Most people don't do machine level programming or never has been the case, or microcoding. And no one said, oh no, we put the microcoders out of business, we have abstracted languages, AI is going to
Leo Laporte [00:37:11]:
help us design chips better and better, I think.
Glenn Fleishman [00:37:13]:
Yeah, exactly. So I think computer science, maybe it was so practical in some ways because there was so much of a job demand feed. Maybe it's going to become more of an analytic discipline again because people will have to be relying on that kind of.
Leo Laporte [00:37:30]:
Nobody's studying how to be a coachman anymore. I need to learn how to drive a foreign, foreign whatever they call them that, you know, jobs change. I think it's encouraging that a lot of those kids who are going into computer science now are going to engineering and data science because those are probably the places to go. Right?
Wesley Faulkner [00:37:54]:
But, but the thing is there's the coding has always been more basketball than golf. It's never been really an individual sport, it's always been a team sport. And you have to think of all the things that work together in order for the outcome that you all see. And I think that's the part that people are missing in companies.
Lou Maresca [00:38:13]:
Right?
Glenn Fleishman [00:38:13]:
Yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [00:38:13]:
Like if the more, the higher you are in a company, the more abstract you are from all the minutia, all the invisible glue work that takes for the outcome to actually happen. When you're an executive and you're using AI to write reports, digest reports, write emails, you're like this thing is amazing. It could do everything that I can do. Which means those are the jobs that should be eliminated and not the people at the bottom that are working with vendors that are hearing the complaints and then coordinating with the responses and then hearing and understanding what the community is. And as we are. One thing that's also the bad part about we're eliminating these jobs because of AI is that we are losing diversity. And not the kind of diversity where you're thinking about dei, but even diversity of thought is being lost because it's being coalesced. And one decision maker who's orchestrating all these AIs, which is a problem.
Leo Laporte [00:39:10]:
Oh, that's interesting. It becomes golf.
Wesley Faulkner [00:39:13]:
Yeah, I am steeped in this because I'm writing a book about it. But the reason why that these decisions are being made is not because of AI. No, AI says you should lay off 40% of your workforce. These are people who are at the upper part of the company who are too abstracted away from the actual work to have really clear eye about how this is negatively going to affect them because they think because they had been been successful, they'll continue being successful. And that's not going to happen.
Glenn Fleishman [00:39:43]:
Go ahead.
Leo Laporte [00:39:44]:
I'm sorry.
Lou Maresca [00:39:44]:
Going back to the computer science thing though as well. I mean, I work with a ton of talented applied scientists who are actually training these models and writing the writing, you know, writing the evaluations.
Leo Laporte [00:39:53]:
Yeah, somebody's got to do that.
Lou Maresca [00:39:54]:
Somebody's got to do that. But you still have to have, you know, programming skills, you have to have engineering skills to really think through the problem sets. And I think that's, you know, that's where it's going to come in. And I think people stepping away from these roles is not going to help it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:40:07]:
I was thinking Scott Adams, rip question mark. Scott Adams had a strip.
Leo Laporte [00:40:14]:
Well, rest anyway. We don't know if it'll be peaceful.
Glenn Fleishman [00:40:18]:
A number of years ago he had a strip that had the pointy haired boss gets abducted by aliens. And there's a bit where the aliens say, teach us your management secrets. The last panel shows the boss bandaged and on crutches saying, I downsized 90% of the aliens and then the ship crashed. That must be their fault. Something like that.
Leo Laporte [00:40:36]:
Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [00:40:36]:
That's kind of how to Wesley's point, it's kind of what it feels like.
Leo Laporte [00:40:39]:
Yeah. This is what scares me about this is the Beijing half Marathon. Of course they're moving very quickly. This is from Reuters, very quickly in China towards bipedal robots, I guess we are too. The marathon was. Look at these robots running now. At first it's comic, especially when they fall down and burst into a million pieces. But in fact, a robot did break the world record for a half marathon, winning in 50 minutes 26 seconds.
Leo Laporte [00:41:07]:
To me, that's scary. I don't like the idea of fast moving machines with a lot of power in their limbs. Some of these are, some of these are cute. That's a cute one.
Wesley Faulkner [00:41:19]:
You're a fan of F1?
Leo Laporte [00:41:21]:
Well, yes, I am a fan of F1, yes. I like fast driving cars. I just don't know. Some of these are really funny. Like, oh, you're missing all the excitement. No, This is the slowest one. But by the way, this is the point. Last year the winner took two hours and a half.
Leo Laporte [00:41:43]:
This year, 50 minutes. Oh my gosh, they're getting better and better and better at that.
Glenn Fleishman [00:41:49]:
When I see that, I only see military applications, but I'm also like, you can push it over, so probably not yet.
Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
Yeah, but, well, it's just a matter of time though, isn't it, before you can't push it over. Those dogs were more scary to me actually than the robot running robots. Snap. Speaking of CEOs laying off, Snap is laying off 16% of its full time staff. And it says, I don't know if it's AI washing, but they say these thousand employees are being replaced by AI. I think just maybe that Snap's business isn't as good as it used to be.
Glenn Fleishman [00:42:27]:
So much hiring for so long, it just, I think it's a great excuse to not make people not make the stock market freak out. Even if it's. It could be, yeah, actually like block or square or whatever. The square parent company. Right. Didn't they, yeah, do that.
Leo Laporte [00:42:41]:
And Meta now says it's going to lay off 10%, which is I think 8,000 people. That is terrifying.
Wesley Faulkner [00:42:49]:
I know.
Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
You know, we always kind of of gloss over the human toll of this, but that's a lot of people who will have to find jobs in what must be a very difficult job market.
Lou Maresca [00:43:03]:
It's very difficult. I mean, this is the new business model, right? You basically want to make sure your shareholders think that your company is fiduciary responsible and so you decide to just start laying off people and blaming it on AI. So it's like kind of a weird model.
Glenn Fleishman [00:43:17]:
I feel like layoffs are always so much more emphasized partly because of legal reporting requirements in the United States for sure. But so the numbers out there, even if you don't want them to. But the hiring, there was such weird and massive hiring during the stages of the heat of the pandemic. And how many people are hired back? I never know. When they say we laid off 8,000 people, do they then hire back 4,000? What are the wages of those people? How many were part time? It's such an incomplete picture. You look at the stock market, which is at, I guess S and P is at the all time high, which I know doesn't.
Leo Laporte [00:43:52]:
Yeah, boy, that's baffling to me. I gotta say. I did something really stupid two weeks ago. I sold all my stocks. I don't have individual stocks. I have index funds, big index funds. And I just got terrified. I thought, I have to live on this.
Leo Laporte [00:44:10]:
I'm almost 70. This is going to be for the next 20 years all I've got. I don't want to lose 20% to a stock market crash, which I thought was imminent. Dumb me. So I sold everything. I'm just sitting on a pile of cash. I mean, it is enough for me, I guess, to survive for the rest of my life. But then the stock market goes through the roof.
Leo Laporte [00:44:33]:
I'm like, what the hell is going on? I don't understand. Do any of you understand it doesn't
Wesley Faulkner [00:44:41]:
make sense to fire people? If they said like they overhired. If anyone's been part of a company, there's a huge backlog of things that they wish they could do. And they could reallocate people to do more projects, do like more geographical relocation even, or different territories or different sub areas. They could have a group that's just made to make a wool shoe or something like that. Apparently there's a huge market demand.
Leo Laporte [00:45:10]:
Oh, I have Allbirds. I'm wearing Allbirds right now, as a matter of fact. I'm just glad that these shoes are going to be AI generated from now on. That's the strangest story.
Wesley Faulkner [00:45:20]:
Somebody said bad at people management. Well, somebody said reducing people.
Leo Laporte [00:45:24]:
Yeah. This is like Long Island Iced Tea becoming Long Island Blockchain. It's just a way to quickly pump the stock, get out of it.
Glenn Fleishman [00:45:35]:
Remember meme stocks? Yeah, I guess we're back to that.
Wesley Faulkner [00:45:38]:
Yes, that's what this is. This the layoff is the new or the AI Took my time to pump the stock is the new pump stock.
Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
Yeah, well, it's working, unfortunately.
Wesley Faulkner [00:45:48]:
It'll keep going until it stops working.
Leo Laporte [00:45:50]:
Yeah, that's the problem. Right. How long does it work for? How long does it fool people? I don't know.
Wesley Faulkner [00:45:54]:
Well, look at the Nines of these companies. Right. The service availability just keeps going down, so it's not like the quality is going up. Well, by the way, like GitHub.
Leo Laporte [00:46:07]:
But honestly, that's an example of GitHub's success. So many people are committing. I have 13 repos on GitHub. So many people are committing. All the AI commits are just killing GitHub. I can't blame GitHub for the nines.
Glenn Fleishman [00:46:24]:
Oh my God. The one thing that I'll say there's unalloyed good thing about AI is I'll be like, yeah, do a commit. And then it writes like a thousand words. That actually eloquently explains my commits are like fixed something thing.
Leo Laporte [00:46:39]:
Yeah, the commits are so good.
Glenn Fleishman [00:46:41]:
Like, what did I fix?
Leo Laporte [00:46:41]:
I don't know. Oh, I'm never going to write another commit message.
Glenn Fleishman [00:46:44]:
Never.
Wesley Faulkner [00:46:45]:
Mine are like fix number two, second fix, second the fix, third fix of
Glenn Fleishman [00:46:49]:
the fix of the fix 2.1.1.1.1 update.
Leo Laporte [00:46:52]:
Yeah, I did something. I can't remember what it was, but this is the new version.
Glenn Fleishman [00:46:57]:
That's beautiful what you wrote. That was beautiful.
Leo Laporte [00:46:59]:
Lou, do you enforce like good commit messages? You must. I mean there's got to be always, always, always.
Lou Maresca [00:47:04]:
Yeah, and it's because it's documentation too. You want to be able to use the commit messages to retroactively document how the software has changed and so on.
Leo Laporte [00:47:12]:
So yeah, people who are not GitHub aficionados or git aficionados are probably going, what are they talking about? It's just that when you make a change to. I don't know, how far back do
Glenn Fleishman [00:47:23]:
I want to go on this?
Leo Laporte [00:47:25]:
So when you write software, you sometimes you use a system that actually you should be using, that keeps track of versions so that you can, if you make a change and it causes problems, go back, you can know who made a change. If it's a big team making changes to a single code base, there's lots of reasons for versioning. There have been many solutions. Git ended up being the dominant solution because Linus Torvalds created it when he realized he couldn't keep track of all the commits to the Linux kernel. And git's become huge. GitHub is perhaps the, the biggest purveyor of git and people store their source code in a GitHub repository or repo. And when they make changes they will write a little message called a commit message. And then Wesley and I just write fixed it.
Leo Laporte [00:48:15]:
But good professionals will write a long message saying what they did so that you can ascribe blame, so that you can rewind it appropriately so you know what changes have been made. This, you know, you all experience this when you go to the App Store and there's an update and the update says fix some stuff. What I hate is the ones that we're always working harder to make your software better. And we just did.
Glenn Fleishman [00:48:40]:
I think Apple should not require commit messages for the, for minor updates. It's really, it's the whole reason you have to put text in there, right? It's embarrassing if you don't, I guess. Or you just put like you can't make a period.
Leo Laporte [00:48:52]:
Maybe companies could really do a changelog and say, hey, this is what we fixed. Wouldn't that be. Why can't they be more like Lou? Be more like Lou.
Glenn Fleishman [00:49:02]:
Yes, everybody, good advice for life.
Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
Be more like Lou. We're going to take a little break, more with Lou and all of us who want to be like him. Glenn Fleishman, Wesley Faulkner, Lou Mareska. Great to have all three of you. All right, enough. AI, enough AI. We've been talking about AI. Oh, well, there's one more.
Leo Laporte [00:49:19]:
Let's talk about the courts. AI in the courts. Elon Musk versus Sam Altman.
Glenn Fleishman [00:49:25]:
Oh, no. AI and Elon Musk.
Leo Laporte [00:49:27]:
Leo and court. It's gonna this trial in which Elon is suing OpenAI, saying, hey, when Sam and I got together to create this, it was a non profit. Now they're taking it to be profitable. You know, I'm not, I'm gonna admit I'm not an Elon fan, but there is some merit to this, especially if you just read that New Yorker article about how slippery Sam Altman has been. This whole time Elon is saying that OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission and that's not what he funded it for. And he wants, by the way, like a huge amount of money, which I don't think he's going to get. A jury is going to get this. Nine jurors in Oakland, California in the federal court there will soon get this case and decide.
Leo Laporte [00:50:26]:
It could affect OpenAI's IPO. It could affect Musk's status as an OpenAI competitor with XAI. Incidentally, I think his case is a little bit weakened by the fact that he said, we're going to found OpenAI so that the big guys don't get AI and it's going to be non profit. And then he, you know, immediately leaves and founds xai, which is fully for profit, fully closed, everything he's complaining about with OpenAI. I don't know if there's anything to be said about this. Elon gave about $38 million to found it left in 2018 after disagreements with Sam Altman. The lawsuit has been essentially whittled down according to wired to three core claims. Whether OpenAI breached its charitable trust.
Leo Laporte [00:51:25]:
You know, because they were supposed to be non profit and now they have a for profit arm that generates billions in yearly revenue. And by the way, their code is not open. One of the things that came out in the New Yorker article was that there was a Covenant originally with OpenAI that if any other company ever came up with better AI than OpenAI that OpenAI would immediately dissolve and go help that company. That. That went out the window pretty quick. There also is a claim of fraud that Altman deceived Musk about his intentions to make a profit. And the third claim is unjust enrichment which argues that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the President and other OpenAI investors have enriched themselves at the expense of Musk. He wants the.
Leo Laporte [00:52:18]:
One of the things he's asking for is that the jury remove Altman and Brockman from OpenAI Management, return their ill gotten gains to the company's nonprofit and blocks them from existing as a public benefit corporation which is. It is what the for profit arm is currently and he could in the long run get hundreds of billions of dollars if the jury rules for him. What do you think's going to happen in this case?
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:48]:
It's going to be a great discovery process for everybody, I think.
Leo Laporte [00:52:51]:
Yes.
Wesley Faulkner [00:52:51]:
What's going to happen?
Leo Laporte [00:52:52]:
It has been so far.
Glenn Fleishman [00:52:53]:
They're going to pay Elon Musk off and he's going to complete and he's going to take it and then complained about it for the rest of his life. Life.
Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
I'm surprised they didn't settle though. They went to. They went to trial, right?
Wesley Faulkner [00:53:05]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
And there is, there is a cynical point of view that Elon's just doing this to slow OpenAI down so that XAI can.
Wesley Faulkner [00:53:12]:
Yeah. Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:53:13]:
Can win. Yeah. It's funny because I don't know. How do you all feel about Grok Elon's model? I think in general people kind of. It has some abilities but I don't think people embrace it. Certainly not the way they embrace ChatGPT or Claude.
Lou Maresca [00:53:33]:
I like it. More openness, you know, unless there's less gates in the way. I think that that's one thing I go to some.
Leo Laporte [00:53:39]:
Oh, in the sense of. Well, I can't talk about that.
Lou Maresca [00:53:43]:
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one good thing about it.
Wesley Faulkner [00:53:46]:
Yeah. But, yeah, you want to kill kittens? I'll tell you how to kill kittens. Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [00:53:50]:
I don't like it's Mecca Hitler part, but.
Leo Laporte [00:53:53]:
Well, that, to me, the reason I'm skeptical of GROK is because it's so clear that Elon puts his thumb on the scale.
Glenn Fleishman [00:54:00]:
Right, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:54:02]:
That Elon sends messages downstairs that says, oh, you should mention me more, things like that. Well, that, that's not how you make a good AI.
Wesley Faulkner [00:54:13]:
I think all AIs are. Have their bias.
Leo Laporte [00:54:16]:
They do. There are these system prompts. Right.
Wesley Faulkner [00:54:19]:
And I think also if you've ever used Kilo code, GROK is one of the free models. So I think that they're really trying to get users to use their models to get more information of what the type of data that gets sent through their models to make it better. I think because it is extremely opinionated about the approach, even Elon Musk is saying it's not biased enough. So they say that there are problems with it, we will fix it. He says that all the time. So I think that no matter how good it is, I think he can make it worse. And I think he's in a unique position to do that. And so I hear what you're saying, but I think that the bias that is Grok will definitely, I think, make it at odds with itself some.
Wesley Faulkner [00:55:17]:
So I don't. I personally don't think it's. It's good. And I think because of the thumb and the scale of the bias, it's good. It's never going to be good. So if you think about.
Leo Laporte [00:55:28]:
It's good for generating nude pictures of people, you know.
Wesley Faulkner [00:55:31]:
Yes, exactly. But if you think about Anthropic was as a spin off of OpenAI. Going back to that, they said that they wanted to be a safer model, they wanted to live in AI, which I think that, yeah, dealing with those harder problems I think makes you better. And having like that type of. I don't want to get too deep into like a doctrine about how they want to approach it and have some sort of principles makes it better because they're trying to really carve out a niche and be opinionated in that way. But they all have their own bias. And I think GROK is the other opposite end of OpenAI saying they're too restrictive and you can see that it performs worse. And I think if you look at who's trying to tackle the harder problems, I think it pays off to see that why OpenAI is not as good as anthropic and while GROK is not as good as OpenAI.
Leo Laporte [00:56:25]:
Darren's saying something important too though. That GROK does not have a coding harness like Codex or like a Claude code. Does that make sense, Lou? Is that.
Lou Maresca [00:56:36]:
It doesn't. He's very. I mean but there's always, you know, I'm not going to give out a bunch of secrets here, but like you
Leo Laporte [00:56:41]:
could technically give out some secrets, Lou.
Lou Maresca [00:56:43]:
You could. You could always use MCP bridges to basically bridge and enable GROK as a coding agent through open cloud like it does. It is possible. Is it any good?
Leo Laporte [00:56:53]:
It's.
Lou Maresca [00:56:54]:
It's so. So right.
Leo Laporte [00:56:56]:
Is there a GROK MC written by Xai MCP server or do you some. It's just.
Lou Maresca [00:57:02]:
Yeah, no, these are just third party. They're in effect scraping oauth capability. You know that you can access GROK AS and make it a coding agent, basically.
Leo Laporte [00:57:10]:
So I have access to GROK because I got a. As Cory Doctorow calls it a non consensual blue check. So they. So Elon at some point decided to. To give. For some reason give me a full account so I have access, but I just don't. I don't. I.
Leo Laporte [00:57:30]:
I got really turned off when at one point. Remember when he came out with the, the manga girl and the fox?
Wesley Faulkner [00:57:40]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:57:42]:
And the age, the. What do you call them? The avatars. And when it first came out, the day it came out, I'm sitting at breakfast and I said, oh look, there's these avatars. Let me go talk to the fox. And it said something so rude, completely voluntarily. I just said, you know, are you having a nice day or something? And he said, yeah, I'm going to go out and teabag the mayor. And it was like what, what? That it just turned me. It was like, like that was completely gratuitously gross.
Leo Laporte [00:58:20]:
I don't understand.
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:21]:
It's trained on Xbox chats.
Leo Laporte [00:58:23]:
Maybe that's it. Yeah, it's like, what the hell.
Wesley Faulkner [00:58:28]:
Going to the OpenAI case though. I wanted to point out one thing that is a huge problem for OpenAI is that if we're looking at standing, I think the state of California has more standing than Elon Musk because it's been pointed out that this path of incubating as a nonprofit and then not paying taxes and saying you're going to do good and then converting into a for profit at the end and become publicly available is not something that this should. That if this goes, if they're able to do that, other companies will replicate this. And that is a huge problem. So in the discovery process, if you see or if there's any hint that that was planned a while back, that is going to be huge, like probable cause for the state of California to bring a follow on suit to prevent this from ever happening. So that's in part of the discovery. Yeah, they might look bad, but if you're, if you don't remember that nonprofits and for benefit companies, companies, when they're creating a product that is owned by the nonprofit. So anything, all of their models, even their closed source ones, should be held by the nonprofit.
Wesley Faulkner [00:59:46]:
And the thing that goes public should not have access to those. They shouldn't create their own property.
Leo Laporte [00:59:52]:
That's not the plan, is it?
Wesley Faulkner [00:59:53]:
And that's not the plan. And so this is something in which it could go wrong in so many different ways. And this is one of them.
Leo Laporte [01:00:01]:
This is where is. What worries me a little bit about OpenAI is it feels like a house of cards. A little bit.
Glenn Fleishman [01:00:07]:
Oh, well, yeah. I mean. So let's see. I want to say something again, careful to not be slanderous, which is, oh
Leo Laporte [01:00:16]:
no, just remove all barriers.
Glenn Fleishman [01:00:19]:
Okay. So I once had a job. This is irrespective of nothing else, obviously. I once had a job in which I worked with three pathological liars, including the person who ran the organization. And he had hired the others. And there were a couple people who had.
Leo Laporte [01:00:31]:
That's a nightmare.
Glenn Fleishman [01:00:32]:
Extremely dubious ethical principles. Unfortunately, a lot of it didn't affect me for a long time. When it did, I finally left. I was fine. But having worked so closely with pathological errors, you start to identify patterns. So I was reading a New York Times or New York article that happened to mention some AI figures in it. And one of them, it struck me particularly that some of the patterns mentioned repeatedly by Rowan Ronan Farrow and his reporting partner there really did seem to align with pathological, pathological. And so you, you know, so all the stuff with OpenAI, every time I come back to it, I felt he, Sam Altman has always felt unreliable to me as a narrator of his own company because he says in multiple interviews you see different things being said on the record that would be easy to compare.
Glenn Fleishman [01:01:20]:
And apparently he does the same thing, reportedly does the same thing in private. So this whole thing about their valuation, the money they're raising, where they're going, what's happening, I just feel it's, it just seems so dubious to me that I want to see results before I believe anything that's being said.
Leo Laporte [01:01:35]:
Okay, I'm gonna throw a little monkey wrench into this. You know, Sam has this side project called World, where you. There's an orb and you put your eyes up against it and it scans your irises. Right.
Glenn Fleishman [01:01:47]:
Don't love that.
Leo Laporte [01:01:49]:
And he was giving cryptocurrency to people all over the world, I think primarily in the developing world, where it was really valuable to scan their irises. His theory, which is not wrong, being that one of the chief challenges to security is authentication. And that if we knew somebody was a human, that that would ultimately be useful. If you could prove you were a human and you were the, you know, that you were Wesley Faulkner, the Wesley Faulkner, not somebody impersonating him. And I think that there is some merit in that idea. The company behind it, which is, again, a Sam Altman investment, is called Tools for Humanity. They announced on Friday that they're going to start bringing the Worldscan into dating apps. Tinder is going to start using it to verify that a Tinder account is.
Leo Laporte [01:02:42]:
Belongs to an actual human with eyeballs, I guess. And the human that they say they are, they're also going to start working with concert ticketing systems. Oh, Ticketmaster. Oh, the Dolan's will love this one, right? Business organizations email. So maybe this, you know, proof of human, proof of humanity is actually going to go somewhere.
Glenn Fleishman [01:03:09]:
Opt out. Oops, where's my.
Leo Laporte [01:03:12]:
Do not scan my irises.
Wesley Faulkner [01:03:16]:
Yeah, next they're gonna buy clear. And then, yeah, get those.
Leo Laporte [01:03:22]:
Zoom is gonna integrate with World ID to battle a deep fake threat to business calls. You've heard about these stories of. There was a CFO who was fooled in a Zoom call. They were. He thought it was his boss and the CEO in the board in a Zoom call. They were all deep fakes and he wrote a big check because they said to. So Zoom's going to do it. DocuSign is going to do a deal to make sure signatures come from authentic users.
Leo Laporte [01:03:53]:
Maybe this was a good investment. OKTA is going to use it to verify that an agent is acting on behalf of. Of a human. So you can. This is interesting. Part of the agent delegation scheme is that you tie your agent, your claw, your open claw to you using World ID so that the agent is authenticated to you, so that when the agent asks for something, they know it's. It's really on behalf of leo.
Glenn Fleishman [01:04:25]:
I. I want a federated system of authentication in which individual organizations agree to use vetting processes that are federated and have degrees.
Leo Laporte [01:04:36]:
We have certificates, certificate, authorities, Right, right.
Glenn Fleishman [01:04:40]:
Basically, something like that. I don't like this. I don't want any, I don't want any government or individual organization to have that much information.
Leo Laporte [01:04:46]:
It's a private company.
Glenn Fleishman [01:04:47]:
Yeah. And then how do you get, you get, you know, blocked. Listed on it and it's like what happens then? They're like, well, you violated some terms of service. Interesting. Here's the thing. World Court, members of the. Sorry, not the World Court, the. What is it the World itc? Yeah, yeah, International Trade Commission.
Glenn Fleishman [01:05:05]:
Thank you. No, no, I'm sorry, the Hague. What's the group in the Hague? It's the.
Leo Laporte [01:05:09]:
Oh yeah, the court.
Wesley Faulkner [01:05:10]:
The International Criminal Court.
Glenn Fleishman [01:05:12]:
Thank you. Yes. So there are members of that court who have been sanctioned by the US under the second Trump administration who cannot use Google, cannot use banking. They're blocked from all these kinds of things. They have to explain why they have to pay in cash at hotels.
Leo Laporte [01:05:28]:
That's horrific.
Glenn Fleishman [01:05:29]:
Because they're essentially been unpersoned out of the international banking and all the systems that operate in the United States all
Leo Laporte [01:05:36]:
because probably they declared that Netanyahu was a war criminal.
Glenn Fleishman [01:05:39]:
Yeah, something. Things of that nature. And so the United States actually the government has the power to debug and de. Authenticate you. And so this company, if it's got your retinas well then it's going to be able the US be able to do that too.
Leo Laporte [01:05:56]:
That's a nightmare scenario. You're right. We're so at this point dependent on technology that even if Google alone said we're going to take away your account,
Glenn Fleishman [01:06:06]:
which has happened a lot there apparently. I've been reading reports that they've stepped up automated, ostensibly AI based account blocking where people cannot get their accounts back. Their entire families even like at one household are blocked because of something and they can't appeal it. There's no way to reach a human being and they lose all their history and access. Sometimes business, if they're using Google app or Google for business, all kinds of records.
Wesley Faulkner [01:06:33]:
So this is forces cryptocurrency. I'm going to be so pissed off
Leo Laporte [01:06:38]:
if they use what I said.
Wesley Faulkner [01:06:40]:
If this is going to. If this forces me to use cryptocurrency
Leo Laporte [01:06:44]:
or you could be on the blockchain.
Glenn Fleishman [01:06:49]:
It's funny, you know, the AI blockchain thing is so funny. Like the blockchain or cryptocurrency. It's such an interesting set of people involved in hyping and involved in both them. And yet the utility is so they had to create a reason for the blockchain to exist. And it has to be.
Leo Laporte [01:07:04]:
That's what this solves, though. Blockchain solves that because no one controls it. Everybody's got a copy. And so no government can kick you off the blockchain.
Glenn Fleishman [01:07:17]:
I mean, come on, look at Bitcoin. It's just, you know, I don't think blockchain has paid out the way people have opened.
Leo Laporte [01:07:24]:
No, you're right. In fact, it's become more centralized, hasn't it?
Glenn Fleishman [01:07:28]:
Ultimately, that's kind of my concern.
Leo Laporte [01:07:30]:
Yeah, it does solve a problem, though. I mean, look, with age verification, what's going on right now, Every government wants age verification, verification. There's no good way to do it without violating your privacy. I guess the real problem with World is that it's a private company. Right.
Glenn Fleishman [01:07:49]:
Centralized and a private company.
Leo Laporte [01:07:50]:
But then what government would you trust to run this?
Glenn Fleishman [01:07:54]:
Oh, I want Mastodon. Could run authentication. I think that's the.
Leo Laporte [01:07:56]:
It should be federated. Well, that's the point of blockchain. In a way. It's kind of federated. Right. There's no one single point.
Glenn Fleishman [01:08:04]:
I don't know. It's just who. Who gets to decide what our access to everything in the world is. And I'm nervous. Like, you know, passwords and bank accounts. Maybe not the best arbiter of that, but I'm just bringing all this. This backlash on Blue sky in the last day to pass keys. Everyone is fed up with passkeys, which are so much more secure.
Glenn Fleishman [01:08:23]:
But I think the implementation has gotten people. And I'm like, oh, my God, we could get rid of passwords and move to a supremely better way in which all the information is edge, you know, stored on the edge stored on your devices you have more control over, you know, and it's just. But the way it's implemented is too much. I'm thinking we're never going to get to centralized authentication if people won't even adopt passkeys.
Wesley Faulkner [01:08:43]:
So no USB C of everything. We're still in the weird thing where you could plug so many different things into it and it doesn't necessarily have the same results. And I think that's that people have uneven, uneven experiences with pass keys. And I think that's part of the issue.
Glenn Fleishman [01:08:59]:
I wrote a book about that. It's called Take Control of Untangling Connections. Partly it's not all about USB C, but it's a lot about USB C because people had so many questions about it.
Leo Laporte [01:09:10]:
Oh, my God, I have a USB C tester. Yeah, I don't know what it is or what it does. Burke left it here. Maybe explain it.
Glenn Fleishman [01:09:18]:
I bought some and they have, and they still don't. You have to have a computer to tell you what speed will get. And the tester only tells you if wires are connected.
Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
Yeah. There should be a readout. And I think they do make them with LCD panels.
Glenn Fleishman [01:09:32]:
I've got one over here somewhere. I can never get it to. Yeah, it's just. We can't solve you. You can put a ban on the moon. You can send a diverse group of people of genders and origins around the moon, and we can't get USB C to work. We got a new phrase. We need to simplify that.
Glenn Fleishman [01:09:49]:
You can't put a man on the moon. It's got to be a short.
Leo Laporte [01:09:51]:
A person.
Glenn Fleishman [01:09:52]:
Send people around the moon.
Leo Laporte [01:09:53]:
Around the moon.
Glenn Fleishman [01:09:55]:
That's not as catchy, by the way.
Leo Laporte [01:09:57]:
That was the one story all month that just made everybody smile. Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [01:10:02]:
Oh, my gosh.
Leo Laporte [01:10:04]:
And it's sad that we have so much to be, you know, scared and worried about. And then this. There was at least it was one incredible happy, happy moment. Yeah. I'll give you another happy moment, actually. Go ahead, Lou.
Wesley Faulkner [01:10:18]:
I was gonna say the meme of, like, it was Dave Chappelle and his character where he's a crackhead. He's like, got any more of those Artemis missions?
Glenn Fleishman [01:10:26]:
That's good.
Leo Laporte [01:10:26]:
I like it.
Glenn Fleishman [01:10:27]:
Give me that. Yeah. It's always like, put it in my vein. Come on, man. I need more Artemis right now. It's competency, actually.
Leo Laporte [01:10:35]:
Space might save us. There was a great story about Voyager 1.
Glenn Fleishman [01:10:39]:
Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:10:40]:
Still going 50 years after it was set off. Now NASA is trying to keep it alive. I mean, it never was intended to last this long. This week, NASA announced it shut one of their last remaining science instruments just to keep the battery going a little bit.
Glenn Fleishman [01:11:01]:
Yeah. I wrote a lot about Voyager back when it passed through. I was running for the Economist at the time, and it passed through was the heliopause, or the heliosphere, actually entered interstellar space. The magnetic envelope of the sun. And I got to interview in person Ed Stone, who was the principal investigator of the Voyager missions. And he's still going to work every day at JPL in the 2010s and talked to him about just space fanboying for an article. And they really wrote a bunch in the 2010s about voyagers because it seemed like all the people associated thought by 2020, we're going to really have to start turning a lot of stuff off if it lasts that long. And then 20, 25, it's probably going to be dead and maybe putting out a beep.
Glenn Fleishman [01:11:47]:
But the radioactive. Was it radioisotope, thermal thermocouple generators, thermonuclear generators, RTGs, they. It's just physics, right. They're running down, you've got a certain amount of energy. But they've done such a good job with the energy budget. I mean it's got a, it's got a digital, it's got like an eight track digital tape in there or something. It's amazing. Two backup, you know, three systems, backup computers for each and I think one of them has failed.
Glenn Fleishman [01:12:14]:
It's just the continued operation is one of the greatest technical achievements in humanity's history. I mean 20, 26 and they're still getting data back is unfathomable.
Leo Laporte [01:12:25]:
Amazing.
Glenn Fleishman [01:12:25]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:12:26]:
There's a really great documentary called the Farthest that Ed Stone's featured in. That's what's interesting about this JPL team that starts, you know, started this all almost 50 years ago. Well, think about it. They're in their 70s, 80s and 90s now, right. And they're just kind of hanging on. There's just a handful of people left. They're still doing it. It's a great documentary if you get a chance.
Glenn Fleishman [01:12:49]:
I'll tell you the greatest bit of hope ever on the Voyager missions was. And Ed told me this, or Dr. Stone, I should say, and some other folks involved mentioned this was they put a. Is it Reid Huffman encoding? No, Reed something encoding. Reid Huffman, yeah, they put an encoding system for error correction which was a. They had a 50% efficient error correction system available and they put a essentially experimental 90% error correction system. So it would be several times more efficient, get you that much more data out. They put them on the Voyagers.
Glenn Fleishman [01:13:24]:
We did not have a decoding component and so they sent the probes off with the hope that by the time they reached the grass giants we would have developed the ability to decode on Earth, which we did. And the reason we got all these images, we got so much data, we got multiples of what was expected in the original project brief was because of this encoding mechanism that's like a device, you know, it was like a, like a lava lamp sized device or something that they had a budget for that's still kicking away on there.
Leo Laporte [01:13:54]:
It's amazing. Launched in 1977.
Glenn Fleishman [01:13:58]:
Amazing.
Leo Laporte [01:13:59]:
And Voyager 1 still going strong. Voyager 2 is out there too. They're so far away now. That it takes 23 hours to get a message to it and then 23 hours to get the message back.
Glenn Fleishman [01:14:13]:
It's ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [01:14:14]:
It's incredible. It's incredible.
Lou Maresca [01:14:17]:
What a 48 hours for commands, like actually send a command to us.
Leo Laporte [01:14:20]:
Yeah, so that. So yeah, that's part of the.
Glenn Fleishman [01:14:23]:
I'm sorry, I won't get too spacey on you, but the Deep Space Network, one of the things they discovered and were able to do after the Voyagers launched was that the cumulative area of all of the different receivers on Earth can be essentially aggregated, which they didn't have the capability when it was launched. So they can turn on the Deep Space Network means you can turn on the capacity of the entire area of aggregation and have that serve as one giant antenna, even though they're disparate in function and location. So there's all these things, there's like thing after thing after thing that if they hadn't done this, hadn't done this, hadn't done this and. Or wasn't available when they launched. So that's why there's so much more data than. I mean it was like a two year mission or something or four year science mission or something. And then.
Leo Laporte [01:15:05]:
Yeah, 50 years later.
Glenn Fleishman [01:15:06]:
Yeah, they keep budgeting more money for it.
Leo Laporte [01:15:08]:
Yeah. In case you care, the. The instrument they turned off is called the Low Energy Charged Particles Experiment, or lecp. And it's just because they're running low on energy. The little plutonium generator in there is, I guess every year it loses about 4 watts of power. So it's just declining.
Glenn Fleishman [01:15:29]:
It was operating, I think it started with, was it 250 or 500 watts? It's a very small amount. So it's got 40 watts. It's so small and the amount that can do it just.
Leo Laporte [01:15:41]:
It's so cool.
Glenn Fleishman [01:15:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:44]:
Engineers are confident this is from NASA, that shutting down the LACP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They're using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy saving fix for both Voyagers. They call the Big Bang.
Glenn Fleishman [01:15:57]:
Ooh, ooh.
Leo Laporte [01:15:57]:
That doesn't sound good. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once, turning some things off, replacing them with lower power alternatives. 46 hours out to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data. Big Bang will happen on Voyager 2. First. It has a little more power. It's a little closer to Earth.
Glenn Fleishman [01:16:21]:
They don't care about it as much. They're like, I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:16:24]:
I was very sad when I heard there were Layoffs at jpl. But apparently this team is still. I mean many of them have retired but this still doing their, doing their thing. It's a great documentary because they get together in this little old wood paneled room with all this old technology. It's just kind of like in a little corner of NASA still at our
Lou Maresca [01:16:45]:
house, I have a little dashboard that shows the current positions that we put on the wall.
Leo Laporte [01:16:50]:
Oh, that's so cool.
Lou Maresca [01:16:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:16:52]:
Are the kids kind of like aware of it? Are they interested?
Lou Maresca [01:16:54]:
Oh yeah, yeah. It's really cool technology.
Leo Laporte [01:16:56]:
So it's so cool. Is it a year screen or is it a lcd?
Lou Maresca [01:17:00]:
It's a regular display Android tablet, but it just follows it uses the JPL dashboard that they have.
Leo Laporte [01:17:07]:
Yeah, yeah, there's a very nice dashboard.
Glenn Fleishman [01:17:09]:
I've been watching. I'm a very late comer to Apple TVs for all mankind and I'm in midway in season two now and it's just those things where I'm like, oh my God, if only, if only, if only. But.
Leo Laporte [01:17:23]:
So this. Lou put the link in the discord. This is the display on your wall, right?
Lou Maresca [01:17:28]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:17:29]:
Nice.
Lou Maresca [01:17:32]:
It did obviously the, the trip to the moon too. So we had like the three, the two positions.
Leo Laporte [01:17:37]:
Oh, that's. What a great way to get kids interested in science. Just inspire them a little bit, you know, I think that's just really cool. Really, really great idea. You're watching this week in Tech. See a little inspiration amongst all the nightmare things. Is this the article you wrote back in 2013 about?
Glenn Fleishman [01:17:58]:
Yeah, that's what I got to talk
Leo Laporte [01:17:59]:
to Dr. Postcards from the Edge. What a great name.
Glenn Fleishman [01:18:02]:
Mars rover driver who later went to work for Google and meet some of the whatever the Mars probes were at the time. One of them that failed wrote a bunch about the Curiosity thing. Fun fact, Alex Trebek was at the seven minutes of terror bit of the Curiosity landing. He was a space nut and he got invited to gpl. So if you look carefully in footage of when there's that gap when it lands on Mars, there's Alex Trebek in the watching area.
Leo Laporte [01:18:33]:
What the hell, I think I recognize him. Do they not give you bylines in the Economist? It's just by GF.
Glenn Fleishman [01:18:40]:
That's correct. Since 1843 all you get is initials. You only get initials on the blog and the magazine itself. There's no bylines. It's considered product of group editing. Essentially. How old fashioned voice. Yeah, it's a weird thing.
Glenn Fleishman [01:18:54]:
So I could claim I wrote anything in the publication right but as long
Leo Laporte [01:18:57]:
as GF wrote it, whoever that is,
Glenn Fleishman [01:18:59]:
whoever that person is.
Leo Laporte [01:19:01]:
You're watching Twit. It's great to have gf, WF and LM on the show. I'm LL Hey, I got a quick
Glenn Fleishman [01:19:10]:
question for you, Leo. How do you feel about Salt hank being on damn lines.com? do you know? Is this all garbage?
Leo Laporte [01:19:20]:
Save that for me. And we'll do the ad, and then I'm gonna have to find out what that's all about.
Glenn Fleishman [01:19:25]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:19:25]:
All right. Damn lines.
Glenn Fleishman [01:19:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:19:27]:
Oh, because of the lines waiting outside his restaurant.
Glenn Fleishman [01:19:31]:
Yeah. Not about. It's not about him. It's not a complaint about him. I'll tell you.
Leo Laporte [01:19:33]:
I'll tell you. All right, well, we'll find out in just a bit. That's a good tease, Saul. Hank is my son, who is a TikTok legend with two and a half million followers watching him make sandwiches. And last year he opened a sandwich shop in New York City, which has become a legend now. I notice, by the way, ever since he did that, there's all these new sandwich shops trying to make the best sandwich in New York City. But according to Belly, his is still number one, beating Bradley Cooper's easily. And then that's a plug for Salt Hank.
Leo Laporte [01:20:06]:
All right? It's on Bleecker and Jones in the West Village if you're ever in. All right. What is this line thing?
Glenn Fleishman [01:20:15]:
I don't want to derail you. I spotted an article the day in the New York Times about damnlines.com where this company, it's this guy's side project.
Leo Laporte [01:20:23]:
Oh, you can watch the lines outside of restaurants.
Glenn Fleishman [01:20:25]:
He rents a little space in somebody's apartment nearby to put a camera in.
Leo Laporte [01:20:30]:
And then this is Salt Hanks. That blue. That blue. See, this is Sunday. It was raining, so the lines weren't too bad.
Glenn Fleishman [01:20:37]:
It must be closed now. Right. So this is all. This is a timeline.
Leo Laporte [01:20:40]:
He's right next to John's of Bleecker Street. So I think one apartment and they get both. Johns is famous. Famous for its lines, right?
Glenn Fleishman [01:20:49]:
Yeah. So I think it's some guy's project, but he's using some kind of analytical tool so you can get a sense of. It's automatically count.
Leo Laporte [01:20:56]:
There's the line, right? There's always a line in front of Salt Angst. Look at that. And you know why? Because he runs out.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:04]:
Yeah, it's great.
Leo Laporte [01:21:06]:
He opens at 11:30 and he sells sandwiches until there are no more. And then he closes doors. You can see that's when the line disappeared.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:13]:
There we go. I thought that. Very charming. Was it the New York Times did it or Eater did the long video about his.
Leo Laporte [01:21:21]:
You can see what the average wait time is.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:23]:
I'm sorry. Not trying to make this an ad for your child, but.
Leo Laporte [01:21:26]:
Well, this is. I don't even know if he knows
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:28]:
about this great technology story.
Leo Laporte [01:21:29]:
I'm sending it to him right now. Oh, that's Salt Cure. That's the wrong one. I want salt Hanks.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:37]:
Oh, wait a minute. No. They've got salt hanks though, right?
Leo Laporte [01:21:39]:
Yeah, they do have salt.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:40]:
How funny. How many salts are there?
Leo Laporte [01:21:42]:
Well, that's the thing. Hank's created a monster.
Glenn Fleishman [01:21:47]:
I mean, this is one of these demand curve things too. Is like, how do you fill in your empty spot? Some people are worried that folks won't show up because they'll see a line. Other people like this a great way to fill the quieter times for places that don't always have a line. You know, balanced demand like Waze does for driving and so forth.
Leo Laporte [01:22:04]:
Yeah, well, Google added that right on the Google Maps. You can see where. You can see where a business, what the business's busy hours are.
Glenn Fleishman [01:22:13]:
Don't they use AI calls like an agent to call and ask from time to time how busy it was they were at one point.
Leo Laporte [01:22:20]:
How's the line? How is it? That's the problem with these agents. They sound normal. All right, I'm sitting.
Wesley Faulkner [01:22:29]:
What do you need?
Leo Laporte [01:22:29]:
I don't have the.
Glenn Fleishman [01:22:32]:
Yeah. Do you have any tables for you?
Leo Laporte [01:22:33]:
I don't know.
Glenn Fleishman [01:22:34]:
Click. Let an AI deal with that.
Leo Laporte [01:22:38]:
I bet Henry doesn't know about this. But who knows? I just sent it to him. Thank you for that tip. That's very good. Back in court. Meta, according to a Massachusetts court. This is up the road from you. Louis must face youth addiction lawsuit.
Leo Laporte [01:22:55]:
There was a lawsuit by Massachusetts Attorney General alleging that. And you know this happened, of course, in la, there was a trial. The jury ruled that Meta had crafted its algorithm to trap children. New Mexico, big judgment, hundreds of millions of dollars. So the state's top court ruled on Friday, unanimously, the lawsuit brought by Massachusetts Attorney General is not vulnerable to section 230. It is not seeking to hold Meta liable for content created by its users. But. And this was a strategy used by the trial in la, it's defective algorithm is designed that way.
Leo Laporte [01:23:47]:
Ah, yes. Hank knows about the line. He says blowing up. He was going to do a Good Morning America interview about it yesterday, but there was construction in front of the restaurant.
Glenn Fleishman [01:23:58]:
Oh no.
Leo Laporte [01:23:59]:
So there was nothing to show he says, I've talked to the founder.
Glenn Fleishman [01:24:03]:
Good.
Leo Laporte [01:24:04]:
He says it's smart, but also kind of creepy.
Glenn Fleishman [01:24:07]:
Oh, so all technology right now, right?
Leo Laporte [01:24:10]:
Yes, that's. That's the story of this show. Smart but creepy. So that's interesting. Although writing in Tech Dirt, Mike Masnik is saying he's considerably worried about these kinds of decisions and jury verdicts. He says section 230 is dying by a thousand workarounds, and Massachusetts just added another one.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:31]:
Someone said the day after the ruling came out from the one in LA that they're starting to get ads like, were you affected? Call this number or click this link.
Leo Laporte [01:24:40]:
Yeah, the ambulance chasers. Right?
Glenn Fleishman [01:24:42]:
Mesothelomania. What is it? Mesothelia.
Wesley Faulkner [01:24:44]:
Mesothelioma.
Leo Laporte [01:24:46]:
Yeah. I shouldn't laugh. That's a terrible, awful disease.
Glenn Fleishman [01:24:50]:
It's the ambulance trace. It was like the best way to make money on the web for a little while was to have a site that mentioned that.
Leo Laporte [01:24:56]:
I still see ads for it all the time on tv.
Glenn Fleishman [01:24:58]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
This is what Mike says is the most important part of the whole ruling. And he's quoting a Professor, Eric Goldman, who's been tracking these. He says, I don't see. Eric says, I don't see any distinction between third party content and the editorial choices about the manner of presenting that third party content. So the courts and the plaintiffs are making that distinction. There's what third party content's doing, which is protected by section 230, and there's what the companies are doing to surface that content by embracing that false dichotomy. Professor Goldman says the court invites plaintiffs to reframe their complaints, to focus on presentation instead of substance. And that's why you're seeing these advertisements.
Leo Laporte [01:25:47]:
Has meta made you nuts? Now you can go after them. And you know what? I don't know if I. I'm a big supporter of 230. I think it's very important. It protects people like me. I have a Mastodon instance, which is now backup, by the way. Thank you for telling me. I forgot to pay the bill.
Leo Laporte [01:26:06]:
I was down for a day. But if I'm liable for something somebody posts on my Mastodon instance, I will take it down. I can't afford to defend against that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:26:16]:
But this is different.
Leo Laporte [01:26:17]:
Yeah, this is different. My Mastodon instance does nothing algorithmically to surface content. Now I am protected by section 230 because I moderate it, Right? If somebody posts something, you know, a bunch of nudes on there, I delete their account.
Glenn Fleishman [01:26:34]:
You're protected even if you don't Moderate it, it's. You're protected. If you do moderate it, you're protected. If there's a legal content and a process is used like DMCA and you don't follow it, then you could be liable. But you could leave up. You can leave up, essentially, thanks to section 230. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:50]:
And that's.
Glenn Fleishman [01:26:51]:
Yeah. Someone could post a bunch of nudes. As long as they're legal nudes, they don't violate a local or law, then you're fine. But you're also entitled to do whatever you want as moderate.
Leo Laporte [01:26:59]:
And I choose to take those down.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:02]:
So this is about not about content, is about design, which I think I hear what you're saying, but I think this is exactly what courts are made to do to debate is to slice
Leo Laporte [01:27:12]:
that baby in half.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:13]:
Like for instance, Infinite Scroll. That's not just about content. It is how you keep people hooked on it and how you listen. Like you're trying to sense how someone might be in a vulnerable place based on their mood and then giving them ads and serving them ads based on that. This is. And the issue at heart is the. It's not the ignorance of it, it is doing it. And for the outcomes you want, knowing the harms and hearing the decisions made in spite of that.
Wesley Faulkner [01:27:48]:
So if there's things on your platform that you don't want and you choose to take it off, that's a different thing. It's on your platform and you don't want, but you are not aware, that's a different thing. But if, if it's things that are on your platform that are. Is harmful and you do know about it and you make a mechanism to make sure that that is being served.
Leo Laporte [01:28:10]:
Yes, you're liable. There is a difference.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:12]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:28:12]:
And I agree with that. I don't think this. I'm not sure I agree with Mike Mazek, and that's rare for me to say, but I feel like there is a difference. Meta does make a defective product. Right. Because of its, you know, they're making a harmful product.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:29]:
I don't think it's harmful because it's working as designed.
Leo Laporte [01:28:32]:
It's a harmful product.
Wesley Faulkner [01:28:33]:
And that's the problem. Is it the way it's designed and it's meant to be that way. And for those types of things, that's what the court system is made for, those types of debates. And so I think this makes sense and this is where it should be debated by people on both sides who are informed, who are able to present that. And so there might be a Rash of these, but it's to their own detriment, because that's the thing that they did. This is a comeuppance. And maybe some cases, cases will be valid, some are not valid. Hopefully this won't choke our court system to the point where this will just kind of fall into a background noise.
Wesley Faulkner [01:29:14]:
But the. The reason why companies like Meta Abuse People is because the downside is will never overcome the upside. And the only way to change the equation is to go about this this way.
Leo Laporte [01:29:29]:
Here's a court case I can absolutely support. You may remember the FTC went after Live Nation and Ticketmaster for ticket prices, and the Trump administration decided to drop that case. By the way, the attorneys in charge of the prosecution all quit when Trump dropped the case without consulting them.
Glenn Fleishman [01:29:49]:
Saw that.
Leo Laporte [01:29:50]:
Yeah. But here's the good news. There was a court case also going on because it wasn't just the federal government. It was, I think, 30 states. The lawsuit brought by the states is over, and the jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster did maintain an illegal monopoly. So that is very, I think, very good news. We all know it's horrible, right? You know, they add fees upon fees upon fees, and they end up because they control the venues as well as the ticket sales, dominating the market. And even acts that don't want to be beholden to Ticketmaster have to be.
Glenn Fleishman [01:30:36]:
And I was like, I can understand the horrible economics of 2026 that mean you have to charge $80 for a bad seat in an auditorium. That's terrible. But, all right, I'll just accept that. And I read a lot of fans saying, we get it. We understand there's a lot of profit in there. But also, whatever, it's the $34 or the $50 I pay on top of the $80, that's the problem. And it's sneaky.
Leo Laporte [01:31:01]:
Like, you buy the ticket and then they add it after you buy it. Oh, and by the way, it's so frustrating.
Glenn Fleishman [01:31:08]:
Here's your $20 fee to present a ticket into the app. Which costs us nothing to do, right? Yeah. It's the most indefensible industry. I try to think of something that's worse than, like, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, in terms of how I think even the cable companies. People don't hate the cable companies as much anymore. Right. Because there's actually various kinds of competition. Like, what's worse than these in terms of health care?
Leo Laporte [01:31:33]:
Health care. Because we all have to have it, right?
Glenn Fleishman [01:31:37]:
I don't know. Well, unfortunately, I have a really good insurer in Washington State. We have a really good state insurance commissioner. So with all the healthcare I had last year, my insurance company is like bonk. Yep, yep, yep, yep. It's all okay. So right now you're happy? Yeah, I.
Leo Laporte [01:31:52]:
How come you have such good healthcare?
Glenn Fleishman [01:31:54]:
Well, we have a very strong state commission, health insurance commissioner's office, and we have a few sort of semi local insurance companies, so it ain't cheap, but.
Leo Laporte [01:32:05]:
Well, thank goodness you had it.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:06]:
I had.
Leo Laporte [01:32:07]:
Was it unexpected, the surgery? I mean, did you.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:09]:
No, I've known for years. It just didn't know exactly when. And then my valve went its times like a little, little button pops up and my cardiologist said, I can hear that when I listen to your chest. I can hear a certain tone. So it wasn't emergency, but it's an amazing thing when you get a bill for $250,000 and it's like my share was I hit my annual deduct or out of pocket zero. And there's no greater feeling than that. So I'm sorry, I don't. I use.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:35]:
I do hate insurance companies. Most years I do, but this year
Wesley Faulkner [01:32:39]:
it's now I hate you.
Leo Laporte [01:32:42]:
Well, see, that's the problem. It's not people like Len, because you buy insurance, you pay for it and you're self employed, so you pay for it yourself.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:47]:
I pay for it through the. Yeah. Self employed and not Medicare A.
Leo Laporte [01:32:51]:
Through aca, through Obamacare or.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:53]:
Yeah, exactly. So I get, you know, it's one
Leo Laporte [01:32:55]:
of those, thank goodness for that. And they're trying to kill that too.
Glenn Fleishman [01:32:57]:
Yeah. I don't actually know what we pay for health insurance because it requires being a CPA to understand as a freelancer because you get to deduct premiums and blah, blah, blah. So it's like, I don't know, it's crazy.
Leo Laporte [01:33:08]:
I don't know.
Glenn Fleishman [01:33:09]:
But yeah, no, I, I love this year or last year. I love my insurer just for one year.
Leo Laporte [01:33:13]:
So I'm just hoping that the fines, they will say, well, Your fine is $100 million, but there is a $50 million service fee and a $25 million fee for, I don't know what, for parking. And so the judge has not yet determined what remedies will be applied. They could in fact force the two to split. That was what, what the FTC wanted and that was what the settlement that the Trump administration forced said, no, you don't have to split up. But the judge could do it. There are also monetary damages to be awarded. They haven't been set yet. Of course there will be an appeal and we'll see what happens.
Glenn Fleishman [01:34:02]:
But this is a wealth disparity problem though, too, isn't it? I mean, to Wesley's early. Sorry, earlier point, it's like the fact that so many people can pay so much means that they run demand pricing and they run it up. So, you know, not to defend anything they're doing, obviously, but it's. They're basing this in part on the. I wanted to go see a podcast I like, and it was $85 to sit in the nosebleed seats for a podcast before the fees. And I thought, again, I understand some of that, like the cost and, you know, the cost.
Leo Laporte [01:34:33]:
A ticket for this World cup final, the FIFA World cup final will be. It's over $10,000 for a single ticket.
Glenn Fleishman [01:34:41]:
You see the cost. Was it New Jersey transit, what they're charging for a round trip ticket? It's $150, I think, for what's normally a 1250 fare gouging. But no, in this case. I actually read the article because I thought this is outrageous. It's because there's like $50 million in extra expense that a public transit organization has to bear for extra trains, for coverage. There's all this stuff that they've budgeted out and they have to. But that means that, you know, incidentally,
Leo Laporte [01:35:09]:
you think we could get $80 a seat for podcast tickets if we decided to do it?
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:15]:
Just retinoid.
Leo Laporte [01:35:16]:
We never charged when we did the podcast in public.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:18]:
There you go.
Leo Laporte [01:35:19]:
See, that's a mistake.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:20]:
Merch and auditorium shows.
Leo Laporte [01:35:23]:
Merch. We have merch and never made any. Not a penny on merch.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:26]:
I went to a. You have a stage show. Part of it, though, like they used to do. What was that? There was a group that was going around doing essentially a live magazine show. Everything was researched for the show.
Leo Laporte [01:35:38]:
That's cool.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:39]:
I went to see 99% invisible a number of years ago.
Leo Laporte [01:35:41]:
They're great. I love them.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:44]:
Full houses for a live show. It's a bunch of different stories. There you go.
Leo Laporte [01:35:48]:
It makes me nervous because I have a feeling. I just feel like we would go and there'd be five people in the audience and I'd feel so bad. I'd give them their money back.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:55]:
You kickstart it. So you have. Everybody has to buy the tickets.
Leo Laporte [01:35:58]:
Kickstarter.
Wesley Faulkner [01:35:59]:
Yeah.
Glenn Fleishman [01:35:59]:
Beforehand. So you only have to hit a threshold before you do the show.
Leo Laporte [01:36:02]:
Brilliant.
Wesley Faulkner [01:36:03]:
I saw Radiolab live and that was amazing.
Glenn Fleishman [01:36:05]:
Oh, my gosh.
Wesley Faulkner [01:36:06]:
There's a lot of good, like, on show performance that, like, once you understand.
Leo Laporte [01:36:13]:
Yeah. I don't know if our shows would be that what it looks like in person, to be honest.
Wesley Faulkner [01:36:18]:
I mean, so also, like, I went to south by Southwest last month.
Leo Laporte [01:36:22]:
Oh, yeah? How was that?
Wesley Faulkner [01:36:23]:
There is a, There is a virus. Fox Media Stage. And so they had a lot of podcasts live there, and every room, every time they had a show was packed. There was a line. South by was great in general, but I think podcasts are taking a bigger percentage of, of, of, of these live events as well. And speaking of podcasts, I'm sure you know as well that Netflix is now moving into podcasts. And so I, I think the, the, the visual nature and the experiential nature of podcasting, I think it's just going to keep growing.
Leo Laporte [01:36:56]:
They should have listened to me when I said, you should change the name because a video podcast is not a podcast. I don't know what it is, but it's not a. It makes no sense. It's a show. Yeah, I guess it's going to be a podcast.
Wesley Faulkner [01:37:11]:
I have the same feeling when someone says, let's roll the videotape.
Leo Laporte [01:37:14]:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, let's roll the tape.
Wesley Faulkner [01:37:17]:
But I don't think it's going anywhere.
Leo Laporte [01:37:18]:
Let's dial the phone and roll the tape. Yeah. Well, they should have listened to me. We could have had a better name. But no, no. You're watching this Week in Tech, which is one of the oldest podcasts in the world. I neglected to mention this at the onset. We just had our 21st birthday.
Leo Laporte [01:37:36]:
Ooh, we can drink. April 17, 2005 was the first twit and we are now officially 21 years old.
Glenn Fleishman [01:37:46]:
Congratulations.
Leo Laporte [01:37:47]:
I think Anthony made a bunch of logos with alcohol in it. And I thought, I don't really want to. I don't know if I promote that exactly. Yeah. This is episode 1080p, by the way. Progressive episode. Other court decisions. Anna's Archive.
Leo Laporte [01:38:06]:
Remember Anna's Archive was a pirate activist group that scraped the entire library, 86 million songs from Spotify and put them online. They have been told, they've been told to pay Spotify and The record labels $322 million. Spotify, UMG, Warner Music Group and Sony sued. In January, they sued Now. Now Anna's might feel a sense of relief because the suit was for $13 trillion. They made the songs available via BitTorrent. At the time, Spotify called the scraping a brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings. Anna's archive said no.
Leo Laporte [01:38:57]:
No, it's an act of preservation. New York federal judge said no. And in fact, Anna's archive did not defend. They didn't respond to the lawsuit because they're anonymous. And good luck collecting that $322 million because no one knows who Anna is. I'm guessing her name is not Anna. The court also said the archive must immediately destroy all copies and phonoreco records. There's that thing rolling the videotape and phono records of any work scraped, downloaded, copied, or otherwise extracted from Spotify.
Leo Laporte [01:39:39]:
Is that a term of art in the law, phonorecords, or are they talking about vinyl records?
Glenn Fleishman [01:39:46]:
Oh, no, there's something called the phonogram, right? Or phonograph write.
Leo Laporte [01:39:50]:
Oh, that's what it is. Okay.
Glenn Fleishman [01:39:51]:
Which is the right to separate from the copyright that underlies the composition. It's the right to associated with the audio fixed in any medium. Sorry, I wrote about this a lot once. It's the right associated with.
Leo Laporte [01:40:04]:
I asked the right person. I'll tell you what. Jeopardy. Champion Glenn Fleischmann.
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:10]:
Any medium. So if you own the phonogram, right? Then you control a particular audio recording, no matter how it's produced.
Leo Laporte [01:40:17]:
So phonorecords probably refers to just probably
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:19]:
the phonogram or phonograph. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:40:21]:
Not a vinyl record.
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:23]:
It'll be interesting, though. Yeah, go, you know, go smash all the old vinyl that's in there.
Leo Laporte [01:40:27]:
You gotta smash them.
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:29]:
Reminds me of when they had. There was that company that was doing the video on Demand where they had a whole, like, warehouse full of VHS and someone would go and punch a videotape in and hit a routing button to go to your TV set. Yes, that's how we used to do
Leo Laporte [01:40:42]:
it back in the day.
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:43]:
Late 90s, I think, before it was so funny,
Leo Laporte [01:40:47]:
actually. Jokin Bokan, who is in our YouTube watching. On YouTube in our chat, says in US copyright law, phono record is a term of art for a material object that embodies sounds.
Glenn Fleishman [01:40:58]:
I see.
Leo Laporte [01:41:00]:
So basically it is the judge saying, whatever you got, get rid of it. Not that there's any way to enforce it, which is interesting. Roblox has also agreed to a settlement with the state of Nevada. $12 million. More importantly, they've committed to enhanced protection for minors and age verification for all users. You know, this is a case where I think it's a good idea to enforce age verification, but there's just no way to do it. Roblox is aimed at children, and kids love it. But there are adults in there.
Lou Maresca [01:41:36]:
You get AI just like cloning highly loved sub games or what do you call it, side games. Games that they have in there. And then they basically, you know, suck the. Suck all your. Your funds out or whatever. You're willing to say roblox, whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:41:49]:
So do your kids play Roblox?
Lou Maresca [01:41:51]:
Yeah, I mean, they play it every day and they. In fact, they've tried to build their own sub games and. And you just find all these clones, these, like watered down clones.
Glenn Fleishman [01:42:00]:
How do you protect them?
Leo Laporte [01:42:02]:
You keep an eye on them over their shoulder.
Lou Maresca [01:42:04]:
Keep an eye on it? Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:07]:
Like Minecraft. It's really. There's a huge benefit to it because they're learning to. It's basically coding, right?
Lou Maresca [01:42:12]:
They do. They code. They absolutely, absolutely do code. Luau is the coding. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they. They actually do learn a lot of stuff there.
Leo Laporte [01:42:20]:
Do they know Lua? Lua? Are they like Lua?
Lou Maresca [01:42:23]:
They. They know Lua. In the case of a coding agent helping them.
Leo Laporte [01:42:28]:
That's really cool.
Lou Maresca [01:42:29]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
That's a great way to start. I'm sorry, Wesley, what were you saying?
Wesley Faulkner [01:42:33]:
It was stupid. I said, I wish this happened.
Leo Laporte [01:42:35]:
No, no, it's too late.
Wesley Faulkner [01:42:37]:
Because when they're trying, they're saying, like, they want to protect miners. I thought that'd be a hilarious title.
Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
Oh, that's good. In Minecraft, you do want to protect miners.
Glenn Fleishman [01:42:46]:
I was watching for all mankind. It reminded me of something. There's a scene where apparently in the slightly alt history universe of that TV show, there's a. I guess it's the 80s. Somebody. There's the child. One of the people is applying to college, and she's sitting there with an Apple II of some kind in the living room. And I was like, oh, yeah, that used to be how parents protected children
Leo Laporte [01:43:06]:
in the living room.
Glenn Fleishman [01:43:07]:
You're not gonna have a computer in your bedroom. That would be ridiculous. Everyone in the family needs to use it and we need to see what you're doing.
Leo Laporte [01:43:14]:
But now everybody has a phone, so good luck keeping it in the living room. You can only use your phone in the living room. Where are your kids, computers? They must have. You have six.
Lou Maresca [01:43:24]:
It's all centralized. Yeah, I centralize all into this little room that's right off of our family room. So it's easy.
Leo Laporte [01:43:30]:
You have so many kids that it's like a computer center in there.
Lou Maresca [01:43:33]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's heated during the winter for sure.
Leo Laporte [01:43:37]:
So is my studio, by the way.
Glenn Fleishman [01:43:39]:
I have two kids, and any more than two Seems an impossible number to me. So that's.
Leo Laporte [01:43:42]:
You know, Lou and his wife are prolific in that department. Are they all boys? They're all boys.
Lou Maresca [01:43:48]:
All boys? Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:43:49]:
From.
Lou Maresca [01:43:49]:
From three years old. Sorry, five years, all the way up to 16. So how.
Glenn Fleishman [01:43:53]:
How many kids do you have? Four or five.
Lou Maresca [01:43:54]:
Five boys.
Glenn Fleishman [01:43:55]:
Five boys. Five boys. I've heard of five boy households. That's a lot of. That's a lot of cereal. And milk is one thing.
Lou Maresca [01:44:00]:
It is.
Leo Laporte [01:44:00]:
It is.
Lou Maresca [01:44:00]:
You're right. We go through two gallons a week.
Glenn Fleishman [01:44:03]:
That's a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:44:04]:
Okay, that explains it, because when I go to Costco, they have the two gallons cellophane together, and I can't think who's gonna need that much milk around here.
Lou Maresca [01:44:13]:
They only sell the one and a half gallons. Oh, I have to buy two of those. So then I have to get three gallons.
Leo Laporte [01:44:18]:
Three gallons. Costco's smart. They always make sure you get a little bit more than you really need. Just in case. One last court case a judge has. Now, this is actually an important one. You may remember Apple and Google both cooperated when ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, demanded that they take down apps that would track where ICE agents were, that would announce where ICE was active. And Apple and Google people complied without any question.
Leo Laporte [01:44:52]:
They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These should all be taken down. In particular, Eyes up and ICE citing Chicagoland. A judge has granted the makers of ICE, citing Chicagoland, which is a Facebook group, and the Eyesup app, a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from coercing platforms to take the projects down. Now, of course, they're already down on both sides, Facebook and in the App Store. But this is an important, I think, ruling because it asserts this is a First Amendment right. ICE Block, Red dot taken down from the App Store on Google Play. Pam Bondi, you remember, threatened the maker of ICE Block, said, we're going to look into that guy.
Leo Laporte [01:45:41]:
Kristi Noem demanded and took credit for the removal of the apps. In a document filed on Friday. The judge called it thinly veiled threats and said the First Amendment protects the right to discuss, record and criticize what law enforcement does in public. So this is only a preliminary injunction, and I don't know how effective it's going to be because the apps are already down.
Glenn Fleishman [01:46:07]:
Well, it's also Apple and Google could have. They could say we have our own set of criteria by which this fails, but that becomes a different issue. And then they could be sued directly for taking this down.
Leo Laporte [01:46:21]:
That's allowed. That's not the government censoring. That's a private company which can of course censor.
Glenn Fleishman [01:46:26]:
I would just like to see. Yeah, I wonder if these will come back especially it seems like. I know.
Leo Laporte [01:46:30]:
I don't think Apple wants to go on record as saying, oh, no, no, we don't want those apps on our.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:34]:
Yeah, I think the app opposite. I think they'll stay down.
Leo Laporte [01:46:38]:
I do think they'll stay down. I don't think they'll go back up
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:40]:
because the, the court ruling just says that you, the, the, the government cannot threaten you.
Leo Laporte [01:46:46]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:47]:
And.
Leo Laporte [01:46:48]:
But it's a fair conflict.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:50]:
Yeah, but anything. Everyone who's seen this administration knows that even if they won't say that, they won't do it outright.
Leo Laporte [01:46:56]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [01:46:57]:
They would find a way to do it and just not say it. So that's why people are pre compliant with a lot of different things. Apple CEO Tim Cook is showing up at the White House giving gifts and stuff like that. It's not because they are. Are trying to carry favor. That's part of it. But it's also because they don't want to be the focus of any negative retribution whether or not it's said or not. And so the court order doesn't force Apple or Google to put it back in the Play Store.
Wesley Faulkner [01:47:27]:
It. It just forces the government not to say, we will attack you if you don't take it down. And that just stops that. And I think we're past that point where that discussion is actually happening in public anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:47:40]:
It's done. And Apple does have a problem with the App Store. In fact, last week we talked about the Bitcoin wallet. That is a real wallet. Was it legend that's available for download on the web, but somebody cloned it, made a fake version of it, got it on the Mac App Store, got it approved by Apple, and then it proceeded to steal $9.5 million of cryptocurrency from the people who used it.
Glenn Fleishman [01:48:07]:
I got a good one too. Somebody impersonated me on a barely active Slack because Slack does not do. It doesn't have a unique namespace. So this is a Slack I haven't contributed to in years. We set it up almost as an experiment, but it was public. It was public and there were several hundred people using it, but just not very actively at all. And someone registered as one thing and they changed their handle to Enfleischman, which was my handle. Slack doesn't enforce a unique handle.
Glenn Fleishman [01:48:35]:
They disabled certain kinds of administrative controls. So that person thought I was asking them to install an app that I wanted them to help test, even though I didn't know them, but they knew me because it was associated with an Apple thing and they got infected. Fortunately, they're brilliant and they were able to remote wipe their machine. They had a time machine backup from a day ago. They basically didn't lose anything. I was very impressed by that part. So it's even down to that granularity. So when it's on the App Store, it's a million times worse.
Leo Laporte [01:49:04]:
Who wouldn't trust it? And Apple really has had a problem with this Macworld article. What's the point of an App Store if it can't protect users? David Price writing Ledger not Legend Ledger Live Free Cash, Same thing.
Glenn Fleishman [01:49:21]:
I wanted to quote John Gruber at Daring Fireball. He said, why doesn't Apple have a Bunco Squad that targets these high grossing apps? You'd think, I mean, I have tools for my little tiny sites that warn me when there's too much activity in certain areas. They've got a thousand people working on the App Store, right. Why can't they identify things that the media can find or people individual researchers can find instantly? It's baffling.
Leo Laporte [01:49:49]:
Free Cash has been on the App Store for more than a year. It was marketed as a way to make money by scrolling. TikTok was at the top of the App Stores in recent months, according to TechCrunch, peaking at the number two position in the US App Store. In truth, FreeCash pays users to play mobile games while collecting sensitive data. We were talking before the show about data brokers and how they get their data. This is how they get their data. And it's malware, right? You think you're going to make some money and instead it's just collecting all it can about you. Because unfortunately, apps, when you install them on your phone, have a lot of access to what's going on.
Leo Laporte [01:50:33]:
Including, we know there are apps that take screenshots regularly screenshots of what's on your screen and send them back to the home office. So that's why Ruber says there should be a Bunco Squad. I think part of the problem right now is that Apple's App Store is flooded with new submissions. I think primarily due to AI vibe coding. 84% increase in app Store apps over the last year more than almost doubled. And they probably don't have enough people to vet all these apps, but they. But if they're going to make the claim that we protect you, that's why we have this walled Garden. They damn well better do it.
Lou Maresca [01:51:14]:
Yeah, they were never really good at submitting apps, even when they were, you know, back in the day, like five, ten years ago. I mean, I tried to put an app out four or five years ago and they reviewed it and denied it right away even though it was legitimate app. So I can't imagine being able to handle coding agents out of apps.
Leo Laporte [01:51:30]:
Yeah. And this has been an eternal complaint from developers about the App Store.
Glenn Fleishman [01:51:36]:
Yeah, they let stuff like this through, but you can't get your like dot one release with bug fixes up. Because you mentioned somewhere in a disused laboratory behind a locked door that says Beware of Leopard, that there's another store besides Apple. Apple out there. Thank you for the Douglas Adams reference.
Wesley Faulkner [01:51:53]:
Recognize that there needs to be an app store like escrow. So something in between the bank accounts that they can. That would definitely prevent a lot of fraud if they know that they could claw back that money whenever they needed to.
Leo Laporte [01:52:07]:
Lou, I want to give you a chance to comment on this story from Ars Technica. When Microsoft announced Recall, which I thought was a great idea, security experts warned, oh, this is a nightmare. That bad guys are going to go after the database because it takes screenshots of everything you're doing on a regular basis. The AI now for AI analysis. And I like the idea. I mean, I, you know, my, the whole reason I'm building an AI agent of my own is so that will remember everything about me. But I can see why people might be a little worried if it's happening on Windows. Recall, before it even shipped, ended up getting such protections around it that in my opinion, it's kind of less useful.
Leo Laporte [01:52:46]:
It's only on one machine. It can't know everything about you because it's limited to that one machine. There's a lot of security protections on it. However, there is a tool called Total Recall Reloaded that is apparently breaking into the Recall database. Despite all the protections Microsoft added, it waits for the users to authenticate Recall using Windows. Hello. And then jumps in the middle. It's kind of a man in the middle attack and snarfs up all the data that Recall's sending.
Leo Laporte [01:53:23]:
Microsoft made Recall an opt in solution. So people are only using it if they've turned it on. I don't know. Do you have anything? This is not your area. Speaking from Microsoft when you're here.
Lou Maresca [01:53:36]:
Yeah, I mean, not speaking for Microsoft, I'd say it was a great idea. I, I mean, I think they tried everything they could to make it secure. Right. They encrypted the vault. They made sure it was behind multifactor and all that stuff. So obviously there's going to be people targeting and exploiting things as they can.
Leo Laporte [01:53:53]:
And by the way, Microsoft should and probably will respond to Total Recall. The reason it works is once the user's authenticated, the system passes recall data to another process AIX host that doesn't need verification or authentication. And so the author Alexander Hagenow, who is a security researcher, says the vault is solid, the delivery truck is not. And so by hooking into the DLL of AIX host, you can exfiltrate it. This is a. This is a kind of a Proust proof of concept. And I imagine Microsoft will respond.
Lou Maresca [01:54:34]:
We think about it, everything today think about like openclaw, right? It stores all of your data, stores your access tokens and JSON files. Like, like any type of anybody person that gets on your device and has a way to like, inject some kind of process that can start collecting data. Like, this is. This is actually a pretty sophisticated one. But like, if somebody goes and exfiltrates information from places like openclaw, so on, they get so much more, more information out of it than just what they tried here. The problem's all over the place at
Leo Laporte [01:55:01]:
this point, actually, the recall pure seems kind of quaint now, actually, because we are all, not all, many of us are putting stuff on our system that's far worse. But that was the whole. For me, that was why I was disappointed that Microsoft kind of nerfed recall is because it isn't really useful unless it collects everything and makes it available to you. That's the whole point. And that's why my agent. I'm pouring everything I can into it. I want it to know everything. And you're right.
Leo Laporte [01:55:31]:
If somebody got into my system, I put as many safeguards as I can and I use tailscale. And, you know, there's a lot. There's no exposed surface to the outside world. I encrypt my tokens, my API keys and everything.
Glenn Fleishman [01:55:46]:
I did the opposite of the day. As I asked Claude code, I said on my Mac, I said, do I have PII personally identifying information for myself or other people anywhere? Because I've done Kickstarter campaigns, I fulfill. And it was like, yeah, here's a whole bunch of it. I'm like, all right, let's consolidate that. I'll do this. I'm going to delete all this. This is going to go into an encrypted mount. But it was good for hygiene for me to say that and now I'm trying to be more.
Leo Laporte [01:56:10]:
I do regular security audits with AI with my, with Claude. And it often does find stuff. You know, you're backing up to your nas, but that backup's not encrypted. And I said, oh well, nobody's going to have my nas, but just in case, let's encrypt it.
Lou Maresca [01:56:23]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:56:24]:
So I mean, it was an easy thing to turn on, but yeah, I mean, that's good. It's good at finding them. But honestly, there's no point to having an AI unless it knows everything.
Glenn Fleishman [01:56:36]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:56:37]:
That's the whole reason openclaw's risky is because in order to be good at its job, it needs to have your email and, and your calendar and your phone numbers and your contacts. And in fact, if you give it a credit card, it could even do more.
Glenn Fleishman [01:56:50]:
Oh my God, this reminds me. There was a humor article from the New Yorker from the 80s that somebody had photocopied. I don't know when I saw it. And it was basically like it was describing Open Claw. Now that you say that, it was like, would you like some coffee or. Coffee, sure. There's even some for you or something with. It was.
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:11]:
I see that you like this. It was just, it was eerie because it was. I mean, literally.
Leo Laporte [01:57:15]:
But that's what we want. We want an agent.
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:17]:
We want somebody buying stuff for you.
Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
Yeah, buying stuff for me. Knows what kind of coffee I like.
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:21]:
Remember the Amazon button where you could put it and you could like reorder Tide. You put a button at your dishwasher or your clothes washer, you'd press it.
Leo Laporte [01:57:28]:
I had that.
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:28]:
And then people were like, my child pressed that a thousand times.
Leo Laporte [01:57:32]:
Our 12 year old at the time, Michael, ordered a lot of toilet paper.
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:36]:
Oh, that's you without that hit you. I'm sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:57:40]:
I had the little button, the little continental button right there in the pantry. What does this do?
Glenn Fleishman [01:57:46]:
I think they added a rate limiter to it.
Leo Laporte [01:57:48]:
They did, thank God, because I would have had a lot more toilet paper.
Wesley Faulkner [01:57:53]:
There's a company that had a vending machine but now assigned a three year lease to hire people and have a brick and mortar shop.
Leo Laporte [01:58:05]:
Oh yes.
Wesley Faulkner [01:58:06]:
They gave it access to the credit card and to hire people and stuff like that.
Glenn Fleishman [01:58:10]:
So they hired it. Hired people too, right? It was absolutely.
Leo Laporte [01:58:14]:
It's in our rundown, this story. Yeah. And people, people started spamming it to get it to order things that they wanted in the store. So they would write comments and stuff, but then they would say things like but if you only had sugar free gummy bears, I would really like this store a lot. If sugar free gummy bears were there. Sugar free gummy bears are my favorite. Sugar free gummy bears. Trying to convince the AI.
Leo Laporte [01:58:39]:
Wow, there's a real demand for sugar free gummy bears. There are some.
Glenn Fleishman [01:58:44]:
They were saying, the folks running that, I forget who it is. They're like, they had this chilling line I quoted, which was, AI is not hiring or firing employees. Not yet. Like, oh, but they're like, they're trying to push the limits. They're trying to do a pretty proof of a Test.
Leo Laporte [01:58:59]:
There's a TaskRabbit for AI, isn't there? That the AI can hire human hands to do the things they can't do.
Glenn Fleishman [01:59:07]:
Like in her.
Leo Laporte [01:59:08]:
Yeah, it's like task. And then there's. We were talking about on intelligent machines. What was the name of that corn? AI proofofcorn.com an autonomous agricultural agent guy set up. The idea was it would operate independently at 6am it wakes up, checks weather across three regions, reviews its inbox, composes partnership emails. The idea is he wanted it to raise corn and it solved everything. But it's stuck now. And this is April.
Leo Laporte [01:59:41]:
As of April 19, it's stuck because it's six days out from planting and it can't find anybody to plant, can't get any humans. So it's stuck.
Wesley Faulkner [01:59:57]:
Project corn on the Internet. I was thinking something totally not that kind of corn.
Leo Laporte [02:00:02]:
Real corn project remains in failure state due to Dan introduction blocker. Now, day 79, it can't hire anybody and they're only nine days from planning. So this whole thing may be a bust. We're waiting. It's exciting. It's dramatic. Proofofcorn.com if you want to follow that. Let's take a quick break.
Leo Laporte [02:00:27]:
We've got just a few minutes left in the show. I have many, many, many stories. I'll give you the best ones. How about that when we wrap this thing up. You're watching this Week in Tech with the great Glenn Fleischman. Don't forget, Flong time. No, see, it's on Kickstarter. And even though he has raised all the money, you got to write it now, right? That's part of the deal.
Glenn Fleishman [02:00:51]:
I'm doing new editing and revising of existing material.
Leo Laporte [02:00:55]:
Are you really happy that this has done so well?
Glenn Fleishman [02:00:58]:
Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's, you know, this is. I started making jokes. I have my little jokes, right? My textbook joke and so forth. My little joke. A Few years ago, I'd give a talk in the late 2010s and say, you know, I was trained as a. And then I became a freelance journalist. I collect obsolete professions.
Glenn Fleishman [02:01:13]:
And people would laugh, people would laugh. The problem was when people stop laughing and they're like, I'm so sorry, so sorry to hear that. That's terrible. And now I was making a joke a couple years ago. I've shifted from freelance technology reporting to the lucrative, lucrative field of writing about 19th and 20th century printing history. And weirdly, that's a good hunk of how I've made my living the last three years is, you know, part of it is helping other people with their projects, with their books, like Marching Witcheries.
Leo Laporte [02:01:43]:
And I have that beautiful book that he did about keyboards.
Glenn Fleishman [02:01:46]:
You can kill a person with it. It's pretty heavy, pretty solid. And part of it is, you know, writing for six colors and doing take control books. And then part of it is writing about printing history, which I love. And people, you know, people seem to like it.
Leo Laporte [02:01:58]:
This is so great. This is a good example of why the Internet is a marvel, because there's a long tail for everything. So if you went to a publisher, said, I want a book called Flong Time. No, see, they would say, go see the romance editor or something. I don't know what they would say.
Glenn Fleishman [02:02:14]:
They would say, no Very brief story is just. Dan Perkins, who has been doing the comic strip this Modern World as Tom tomorrow since the 1990s. He's approaching 40 years doing this strip. His publisher said a few years ago, we can't make money off you anymore. We're not gonna do any more compilation. We're doing something else. And he reluctantly, because he never wanted to own his own books and do all that, he came to me and said, glenn, can you help me produce a five year collection? And I said, well, that's very interesting. I'm about to get open heart surgery.
Glenn Fleishman [02:02:43]:
And he said, ah. So we worked out the timing and I had a backup plan from another person and we closed the campaign a couple weeks before my surgery. All went beautifully. He raised $137,000 Kickstarter to print a five year collection. But I don't know, still, even with those numbers that his publisher could have,
Leo Laporte [02:03:01]:
I don't think the publishers are wrong.
Glenn Fleishman [02:03:03]:
I don't think they could have made. They might have broken even on it. And he made a very nice sum of money.
Leo Laporte [02:03:08]:
Exactly.
Glenn Fleishman [02:03:09]:
And a lot of his fans were very happy, sold a lot of signed copies of his books.
Leo Laporte [02:03:13]:
And it was Great technology is an enabler. It's made it possible for people to operate on their own scale. A scale that a big company is never going to operate on, but a human is perfectly happy, happy to operate on. Look at podcasting.
Glenn Fleishman [02:03:26]:
I'm looking at it.
Leo Laporte [02:03:27]:
Yeah, you're looking at it right now. Wesley Faulkner is here, another perfect example. He's the founder of Works Not Working. The idea is a website for people who are working, but it's just not working for him.
Wesley Faulkner [02:03:40]:
And keep in mind that the job of the guy, Joaquin's Phoenix character in her, was writing letters, so.
Leo Laporte [02:03:46]:
That's right, I forgot about that. That's right, right now, he did dictate them. He didn't actually physically write them.
Wesley Faulkner [02:03:51]:
Exactly. But I'm just saying there's still a place for humans and yeah, it's not dead.
Leo Laporte [02:03:56]:
He would write love letters for people too lazy to write their own. It's pretty funny, wasn't it? Works Not Working is open. You can sign up now. Get on the wait list. Works dash. Not dash. Working.
Wesley Faulkner [02:04:09]:
Yeah, love to see you there. Let's all chat.
Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
And Lumaresa, who is ably employed by Microsoft to take us to take all our jobs. AI engineering leader. No, no, it's empowering technology.
Lou Maresca [02:04:23]:
Empowering. Yes, that's right.
Leo Laporte [02:04:24]:
It totally is. If you've ever tried to write a pivot table on your own, forget about it. AI happens to be very good at pivot tables, right? It does, yeah.
Lou Maresca [02:04:34]:
It can actually. It works great with, you know, some of the really important things, like people use work IQ or FIN tool today to build out financial data models and enterprise grade financial models. So really stuff people don't want to do themselves.
Leo Laporte [02:04:48]:
It's actually amazing. I mean, it turns everybody into a quant in a way. Right? Because you can have an idea and maybe not have any idea how to execute it.
Lou Maresca [02:04:57]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:04:57]:
But the AI can help. This morning I asked my AI, I said, I've read this thing by Andrej Karpathy about auto research that overnight tries things and it fails. And I said, it sounds intriguing. I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me like I'm five? And it actually wrote Eli five. And it explained it all to me. And I said, would this be of use? And it said, yes, as a matter of fact, here's how you could use it. I said, could you set that up? It said, yes.
Leo Laporte [02:05:24]:
And it did. You know, it's empowering. It's a lever that you can use to move the world. And I think that's how to Think about it. And honestly, if you're afraid of it or you hate it, it's probably a good idea to at least dip your toe into it and try it, because you might find you can actually use it in some very interesting ways. At least that's been my experience. And look what, you know, people like Tom Tomorrow can do what Glenn Fleischman can do. Technology is a.
Leo Laporte [02:05:55]:
Is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it.
Glenn Fleishman [02:05:59]:
Here's my best sales pitch on using CLAUDE code is if you ever have to work with CSVs and manipulate the data. And my God, I've had to deal with so many CSVs from different logistics systems and outputs and Kickstarter campaigns. I wrote so much code over the years to just massage it. Now I'm like, can you take these three things and do this? And it's like, here's your script. And I'm like, oh, my God, you just saved me.
Leo Laporte [02:06:23]:
It's really good at reading JSON XML, writing to APIs.
Glenn Fleishman [02:06:29]:
I want to do something with Stripe. It's like, sure.
Leo Laporte [02:06:33]:
We've had an API for the Twit workflow backend for more than 10 years. It's beautiful, beautifully done. Only our engineer knows how to use it, and I've always wanted to be able to use it. So I just said, claude, here's the API documentation. Write me an implementation. And it wrote a whole implementation so I can use it. I can say, you know, how many times has Glenn Fleischman been on the network and it will actually pull it all. It's very.
Glenn Fleishman [02:07:00]:
Too many is what the answer is.
Leo Laporte [02:07:01]:
Not enough is what it said. Isn't that interesting? Not enough. 21 years we've been doing this show. And that was, for me, you know, coming from a broadcast background where you either had to work for a radio station that had a license with the FCC and big towers out there and, or. Or a television station, which even, you know, more expensive, millions of dollars worth of gear to be able to do podcasts for a fraction of the cost to a fraction of the audience, admittedly, and still make a living. That's been an amazing boon. I'm a big fan of technology and I know what it can do that's not so great. For instance, 404 Media reporting, Google, Microsoft and Meta all track you even when you opt out.
Leo Laporte [02:07:47]:
This is according to a independent audit. We'll leave Microsoft out of the mix. But this is. This is a privacy audit in California. And of course, California has very strict privacy laws. The privacy search engine Web X Ray Found that according to their audit, 55% of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser, even if they opt out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research. Google said it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how its product works.
Leo Laporte [02:08:25]:
Okay, okay. They viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in the month of March. I found that most tech companies ignore when a user asked to opt out of cookie tracking. That's that bad? Where you say no. California has the stringent well defined privacy legislation, the California Consumer Privacy act, which allows users to opt out of sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control that replaced the do not track, which everybody ignored. That never was enforced. But now there is Global Privacy Control, which includes a browser extension that tells a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking.
Leo Laporte [02:09:08]:
I installed that, by the way. Probably not doing anything. Google failed to let users opt out 87% of the time. When you click that button, Google should not return cookies. However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt out, it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the set cookie command. That's non compliance. So this leads me to this article, which I think is kind of right on from lawfaremedia.org it's time. Well, we need, first of all, we need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States, but we also need to ban the sale of precise geolocation.
Leo Laporte [02:10:01]:
And that's what this article is about. That's just one form of the privacy. But geolocation is very risky.
Wesley Faulkner [02:10:11]:
Some might call it an assassination tracker.
Leo Laporte [02:10:13]:
Oh, someone might say that, yeah. No tracking for me. Maybe for thee. Here's another one from the eff. Google broke its promise to me. Now ICE has as my data. This is why this has become a little bit more important now that law enforcement might be using this against you.
Glenn Fleishman [02:10:38]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:40]:
Amanda Amandla Thomas Johnson, a PhD candidate studying in the US on a student visa for I think like five minutes, he attended a pro Palestinian protest. ICE sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data the next month. Google gave that information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena, even though Google has promised in the past that they would do that. And. Well, he was not allowed back into the country when he crossed over into Canada. He's a dual British and Trinidad and Tobago citizen, not accused of any crime. The only thing thing he did wrong was attend a protest once.
Wesley Faulkner [02:11:28]:
That's not doing anything wrong and that's
Leo Laporte [02:11:30]:
not doing anything wrong. It's, in fact, constitutionally protected.
Glenn Fleishman [02:11:34]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [02:11:37]:
EFF supported him with legal work. His lawyer at the EFF obtained this subpoena and proved that they, in fact had requested it, that Google had provided it it IP addresses, physical address, other identifies, fires, session times and durations. They were looking for, I think, evidence that he had been at that protest.
Wesley Faulkner [02:12:02]:
This goes back to the previous story where you're. We're talking about the ICE app and whether it will show up back in the store. And this is a reason why I don't think it will.
Leo Laporte [02:12:11]:
Right.
Wesley Faulkner [02:12:11]:
Because it was an administrative warrant, it was in private or not in the public view, and they still complied. So there, there's no incentive for them to do anything that would put them on the negative side of this government. So threats, I think, are unnecessary for compliance in this case. And this is also where being at a protest is not illegal. Yet they will still find, I don't want to say, like, the edges of the law. They. They'll do whatever they want, and they will choose to make the decisions that they want of what is important and what is threatening. And even when we're talking about ICE and they're using a facial recognition app, false positive is something they also don't really care about.
Wesley Faulkner [02:13:03]:
Their incentives are to get rid of as many people as possible.
Leo Laporte [02:13:07]:
Possible.
Wesley Faulkner [02:13:08]:
And any excuse, any hint of an excuse, is enough justification to follow through on that.
Glenn Fleishman [02:13:15]:
There's no repercussions. Nothing changes. And that's kind of what they're seeing. Even when courts castigate them, there's no personal. The worst thing that happens is somebody actually has a moral qualm and they quit or they're fired because they say something that is too supportive of defendants. So what's, what's the consequence?
Leo Laporte [02:13:31]:
Yeah. Netflix co founder Reed Hastings is actually leaving the company. He had moved himself upstairs to a board chair, but he's now leaving the company's board. He will focus on philanthropy and other pursuits.
Glenn Fleishman [02:13:45]:
Interesting.
Leo Laporte [02:13:46]:
Yeah, I think a lot of credit to this guy who took a DVD by mail idea. He says he was inspired in a college course when a professor said, which carries more bandwidth, a fiber optic line or a truck full of DVDs? And he said, oh, maybe instead of relying on the Internet to deliver movies, we could just send DVDs by mail. And then, of course, very famously, I mean, I. I don't know. We probably all subscribe to the red envelope, right? Had. I had red envelopes gathering dust under my TV for months.
Glenn Fleishman [02:14:24]:
Great model. The gym membership of DVDs and then
Leo Laporte [02:14:30]:
crashed the stock when he said, we're going to pivot. We're going to just do a streaming service. And everybody thought, oh, that's nuts. In fact, they initially were going to split the two into a DVD by mail and then a streaming service.
Glenn Fleishman [02:14:45]:
It had the craziest name. Quick.
Wesley Faulkner [02:14:47]:
Quick something.
Glenn Fleishman [02:14:48]:
Quince. It was terrible, wasn't it? I can't remember the name of it.
Leo Laporte [02:14:52]:
Nobody remembers it because they didn't need to. They dumped the DVD by mail thing pretty quickly.
Glenn Fleishman [02:14:57]:
And Netflix with a qw. That's it. My gosh.
Leo Laporte [02:15:03]:
Now, of course, Netflix is the number one streamer by far.
Glenn Fleishman [02:15:08]:
I don't think people understood the implications of content delivery networks. When Hastings did this, I think we were still. It still seemed like an abstract notion, especially getting CDN servers into edges of Xfinity and all the big ISPs. And I mean, the ultimate version of that is Alaska Airline and other airlines flying with essentially a CDN server on board for the movies that they stream over inflight wireless. It's not exactly that, but it's still. I think it seemed ridiculous. They were like, we don't have that kind of bandwidth. It's like, well, we don't need it.
Glenn Fleishman [02:15:40]:
We have Internets and we'll just push it cleverly to CDN servers. And that happened very quickly, is what it felt like.
Leo Laporte [02:15:47]:
Yeah, really.
Wesley Faulkner [02:15:47]:
And they. They created fast.com because they started getting throttled and they wanted to expose the ISPs hand.
Leo Laporte [02:15:54]:
And ISP. This is where net neutrality became a big issue. ISPs wanted Netflix to pay them for access to their customers. And of course, we all said, but we're already paying you for access to Netflix. Netflix. You want to charge both ways. Netflix proved it was happening, that they were actually slowing Netflix traffic down.
Glenn Fleishman [02:16:16]:
Oh, I remember that.
Leo Laporte [02:16:18]:
Basically blackmailing them.
Glenn Fleishman [02:16:19]:
Wasn't the intro. Wasn't the origin of net neutrality laws. Was somebody who was trying to had an archive of barbershop quartet digitized tapes.
Leo Laporte [02:16:29]:
Oh, I don't know that one.
Glenn Fleishman [02:16:30]:
That's the origin of net neutrality. To have sued because some ISP was slowing down or blocking his distribution of recorded. Legally recorded copyright. Correct. Barbershop quartet singing.
Leo Laporte [02:16:43]:
Nothing against barbershop quartets, but that's a strange hill to die on.
Glenn Fleishman [02:16:47]:
Well, that's what got us where we are today. I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:16:50]:
We could do a barbershop quartet. Who wants to be bass? Who wants to be tenor?
Glenn Fleishman [02:16:58]:
I was a member of Spubska once. The.
Leo Laporte [02:17:00]:
Oh, I thought you Might be you looked like you might wear a straw hat and striped briefly.
Glenn Fleishman [02:17:06]:
Society for the Preservation Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America.
Leo Laporte [02:17:10]:
Were you in a barbershop quartet at the time? No.
Glenn Fleishman [02:17:12]:
I was in a chorus once when I was young.
Leo Laporte [02:17:14]:
When I was young and unwise in 2007. Thank you, Larry. In our discord tests by a barbershop quartet loving techno geek named Rob Topolsky trying to use BitTorrent to share public domain music files revealed that Comcast was indeed injecting forged packets into the peer to peer traffic to disrupt the connections.
Glenn Fleishman [02:17:40]:
The thin edge of the wedge is barbershop quartet singing the thin edge of the wedge. Oh, my gosh.
Leo Laporte [02:17:46]:
Wow.
Glenn Fleishman [02:17:47]:
That is.
Leo Laporte [02:17:47]:
Anyway, in this world of skeezy CEOs, you know, when we had a little argument on intelligent machines over Sam Altman and that New Yorker profile, I said, well, they're all like that. Look at Elon. Look at. You know, I mean, it just go down the list. All CEOs are a little skeezy. It's nice to know that there are some who not who have made it. Reed Hastings, one of the good guys. So I'm glad he's gonna retire and spend time with his money.
Wesley Faulkner [02:18:14]:
Yeah, they said, like, if you live long enough, you become the villain. It sounds like he's checking out exactly
Leo Laporte [02:18:20]:
the right time to get out before you become the villain.
Glenn Fleishman [02:18:23]:
Local hero. Hero. Paul Brainerd, one of the founders of Aldis Corporation. He passed away not long ago and he did the same thing. He cashed out at the right time, pivoted to philanthropy, and he never did anything. He was not a terrible monopolist or anything, but all the memories around here, all the obituaries about all the great stuff he did in the last 20 plus years of his life with lasting results for the Seattle area community. So there you go. Get out when the G.
Glenn Fleishman [02:18:49]:
And then don't build the world's largest yacht.
Leo Laporte [02:18:53]:
That's the first thing you could buy a basketball team if you want to buy the Clippers. Okay.
Glenn Fleishman [02:18:59]:
Ballmer's spouse. I'm blanking on it. Connie.
Leo Laporte [02:19:02]:
She just donated what, 25 million.
Glenn Fleishman [02:19:04]:
80 million.
Leo Laporte [02:19:05]:
80.
Glenn Fleishman [02:19:06]:
80 million. It was a lot of money.
Leo Laporte [02:19:08]:
Yeah. To make up for the loss of federal funding.
Glenn Fleishman [02:19:11]:
That's great. So go Bombers.
Leo Laporte [02:19:14]:
Go Bombers. And hopefully some developers. Developers, Developers. Jokes there. I don't know what it would be, but, you know,
Glenn Fleishman [02:19:24]:
audio program developers.
Leo Laporte [02:19:28]:
Yeah. Good night. Yeah, I think it's Connie Ballmer. That sounds right. That sounds right. And sad news. Ron Conway, who is an angel Investor who funded early on Google Facebook. He kept OpenAI together.
Leo Laporte [02:19:42]:
When Sam Altman was fired, he was one of. He's one of the legendary investors in Silicon Valley. They call him the godfather of Silicon Valley. Stepping back from SV angel because he has an aggressive rare form of cancer. Broke the news on Friday. So we wish you the best. Ron and I hope the treatment goes well. But yeah, that's so that's he.
Glenn Fleishman [02:20:06]:
He.
Leo Laporte [02:20:06]:
He was legendary. And you know, we often eulogize these guys after they're gone, but maybe be better to remember them while he's still with us. And at least he doesn't have to worry about his health insurance. And I'm glad you didn't either. Glenn Fleischman, thank you. Glad you're doing well. It's great to have you back. We took a little time off from the Glenn Fleischmann trained in give you time to heal.
Leo Laporte [02:20:33]:
But now he's back. He's writing regularly. Took his advice column to his help column to sixcolors.com where it is much appreciated. You do a great job there.
Lou Maresca [02:20:46]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:20:46]:
I. I commended Jason Snell for hiring some of the best people keeping keeping that spirit alive.
Glenn Fleishman [02:20:52]:
It's the old gang. We're still together.
Leo Laporte [02:20:54]:
The old gang still together again. The success of independent media. God bless it. It's great to see you Flong Time no see is on Kickstarter. It's not too late. Or you can go to Glenn's website. G L E N N Fun.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:09]:
I want to promote one.
Leo Laporte [02:21:10]:
Oh, you and have another book and you don't have a dog in this hunt.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:14]:
Let's see.
Leo Laporte [02:21:14]:
You're going have to turn off your green screen here. Oh my God. He's disappeared. He's got. He's back.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:21]:
This book is impossible to show. It's Sphere Computers is a website. Oh, it's so funny.
Leo Laporte [02:21:27]:
Steer like steer a car.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:29]:
No. Oh my gosh. I have to turn off. I don't know if I can make it appear. S P H E R E Computer Sphere.
Leo Laporte [02:21:36]:
I will just go to Sphere Computer and show it on.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:39]:
You can buy an invisible book. This is somebody I work with on the developmental editor.
Leo Laporte [02:21:43]:
What is the Sphere? I never heard of the Sphere.
Glenn Fleishman [02:21:45]:
Sphere is a computer nobody heard of, but it had probably the first all in one CRT keyboard bootable computer. When you turned it on in 1976 and they were in Utah and they just couldn't raise enough capital and kind of get it going fast enough. They probably sold at least a thousand, maybe a couple thousand computers and Bill Gates in his autobiography last year, while we're prepping the book, I said I hadn't bought a copy yet. And my author colleague Benzotto wrote the book. I said, ben, you've got a copy, look it up. And Bill Gates says, list a bunch of companies, including Sphere. Everybody knew who Sphere was, this incredibly smart guy named Mike Wise, who is very difficult to work with, but absolutely brilliant, unlike other founders. He claims that Wozniak saw the Sphere demoed at a homebrew computer meeting and then went back and duplicated it.
Glenn Fleishman [02:22:39]:
Clearly not the case, but Wise made a lot of claims. But they 75 and 76, they advertised and bite like crazy. So one day, Benzado's walking down the street in San Francisco, stumbles over a computer on the street, picks it up. Someone's just throwing it away. It's a Sphere computer.
Leo Laporte [02:22:55]:
Oh, my God, he found one.
Glenn Fleishman [02:22:57]:
He found one, brought it home, got it working, starts researching it, gets obsessed and winds up interviewing 40 people, many of whom hadn't spoken about it in 50 years because they were so embarrassed that the company had failed because it's a very tight knit Mormon community outside of Salt Lake City. People had invested their own money. I mean, it wasn't a lot of money it raised, but they left bills behind. There was a complicated bankruptcy. So some people had not spoken about the company to anybody for 50 years. And this guy calls up, says, I found a Sphere computer. Do you want to talk about it? So anyway, it's a really wild story because if you have any interest in computer science or computer history of that era, you're like, what is a Sphere? So when he first sent me the manuscript, I never thought it was. I thought he was making it up briefly.
Glenn Fleishman [02:23:41]:
And then I'm like. And then you start searching on Google and you find ads in byte and you find all these people who. There's still a little bit of a community anyway, so history.
Leo Laporte [02:23:49]:
$650 kit, 8 bit computer based on the Motorola 6804K RAM expandable to 64K.
Glenn Fleishman [02:23:56]:
Yeah, it was an incredible. You could buy. You could put 20k in a machine at a time that I think most computers were shipping 4K. They were using Dynamic RAM in 1975, they built a floppy disk controller. They were part of the Kansas City standard that got set for tape. All these things for all the. I know that listeners this show are all like, yeah, you know, hands there. Anyway, it's.
Glenn Fleishman [02:24:17]:
It's a company no one ever heard of. And he wrote a book about him. And now he's filling up a piece of missing computer history and it's now shipping.
Leo Laporte [02:24:24]:
It's a wonderful book on him. That's fantastic. A lot of fun Sphere computer. There's actually a lot of information there.
Glenn Fleishman [02:24:32]:
He has a working emulator. You can launch it and it'll boot into Sphere OS and you can. What?
Leo Laporte [02:24:39]:
It's got Ms. BASIC on it. Look at that. Oh man. Wait a minute. Look at that.
Glenn Fleishman [02:24:45]:
It's incredible. Anyway, the future in a browser window. You could be emulating a 50 year old computer that no one's used because he deciphered the firmware.
Leo Laporte [02:24:53]:
Wait a minute. I'm going to see 10 print. Hello.
Glenn Fleishman [02:24:57]:
20.
Leo Laporte [02:24:57]:
Go to 10 run. Is it run? Do I just type run?
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:01]:
I think it's run.
Leo Laporte [02:25:02]:
Oh my God. It worked. My first program.
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:06]:
There we go.
Leo Laporte [02:25:07]:
Look at that.
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:10]:
That's pretty funny.
Leo Laporte [02:25:12]:
Oh man. I had a computer with cassette. That was a wild way to load memory.
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:20]:
It was just a weird story and you get somebody who's obsessed again. It's a Kickstarter program. He raised enough money to make the book happen. You can buy a copy of it from him if you want. You can buy an old. He designed a floppy disk controller for Fun for this 50 year old computer and got it to work.
Leo Laporte [02:25:34]:
So go computer. Now you can read about it. Ben Zotto. Z O T T O Great book. It's@sphere.com and there's the Sphere Bookstore. $39. Look at that shop pay button.
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:46]:
They claim they went to miss Tandy and they showed them it all in one design. A year by before the TRS 80s ship. There's all.
Leo Laporte [02:25:52]:
Well, that I think you could reasonably say. Yeah, that was a little bit of a Sphere knockoff.
Glenn Fleishman [02:25:58]:
Yeah, it's a lot of.
Leo Laporte [02:25:59]:
It looks a lot like.
Glenn Fleishman [02:26:01]:
You look at it and you're like,
Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
oh, okay, that's familiar. Except it's aluminum case. It looked nice.
Glenn Fleishman [02:26:06]:
Wild stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:26:07]:
What a story. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Glenn. It's good to see you and nice to see you. Congratulations on your. Your health.
Glenn Fleishman [02:26:15]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:26:16]:
And all that. And you're good Ticker. Appreciate it. Thank you. Wesley Faulkner. So glad you got the site up. Works-not-working.com. if work's not working for you, that's the place to go.
Leo Laporte [02:26:29]:
Wesley is always amazing. Did you do a talk at South By?
Wesley Faulkner [02:26:34]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
What was your talk about?
Wesley Faulkner [02:26:36]:
It was called why Work sucks and how to make it Joyful Again.
Leo Laporte [02:26:41]:
Good day. Is it on? Can I watch it online? Is it. Is there a video of it?
Wesley Faulkner [02:26:45]:
No. The audio is posted.
Leo Laporte [02:26:47]:
Okay.
Wesley Faulkner [02:26:48]:
But you have to have a ticket if south by, like, credentials in order to see it. I had my. My. My sister and her husband did a shaky. Like the cell phone video of it. So I do have some video of it, and I'm going to be editing that. That with splicing in some good audio and then inserting the slides because of the lighting in the room was very bright. So my slides allows you to do that? Well, it's my material, so they should.
Leo Laporte [02:27:19]:
Yeah, yeah.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:20]:
So I could. Yeah. It's just that. Yeah, I've signed a release and all that stuff, so I definitely. I just can't use their name and represent them as this is official. It's just my thing, and so I can totally do that.
Leo Laporte [02:27:29]:
Nice. Well, we'll look for it. We'll have you back when you put that out.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:33]:
Thank you. And for the current members of Warts not working. They might say that the site's not working, and I would just, like, say, I am so sorry. I am pushing a PR right now, right after this.
Leo Laporte [02:27:44]:
Get Claude fired up.
Wesley Faulkner [02:27:46]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:27:47]:
Well, I was embarrassed this morning when we started the show and people were saying, your Mastodon instance is down. But in that case, it was me not paying my bill. So I apologize. It's back up. Thank you, Hugo, for jumping on. On that one. I appreciate it.
Glenn Fleishman [02:28:00]:
I have so many Cron tabs that tell me everything that I'm doing that's failing, and then I have things that tell me when those things are failing. Now it's all.
Leo Laporte [02:28:06]:
It's embarrassing. I actually fell for a phishing scam and gave them that credit card. And so I had to cancel it. The first time I canceled it, American Express said, well, you can keep it active with people who already have it so that your recurring payments will continue. And I said, yes. And then. And then I got a charge for $1,000 at some liquor store in Massachusetts. In fact, come to think of it, wasn't so far from you there, Lou.
Leo Laporte [02:28:33]:
I don't know. Anyway, I said, okay, this time I'm going to cancel it, and you can't extend it to people who already have it. And now I'm just waiting for things to fail.
Wesley Faulkner [02:28:44]:
Well, now that is 21. You might get reels like that all the time.
Leo Laporte [02:28:48]:
Well, I'm thinking. I think our Redis account is actually on that credit account. So I should probably call Redis and say, hey, here's a new one. Anyway, Hugo, who runs Mastohost, he's a great Mastodon server farm. He's in France and I immediately flipped the switch and turned it back on. So I apologize for the downtime. But it can happen. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:29:11]:
I need crontabs. That's what I need. Lou Mareska, great to see you. I just love you so much. AI engineering leader, but just a wonderful fella. Copilot. Thank him for Copilot And Microsoft. Thank him for Copilot and Excel.
Leo Laporte [02:29:28]:
Appreciate all you do.
Lou Maresca [02:29:31]:
I'm not a writer but I do want to promote my wife's books because.
Leo Laporte [02:29:34]:
Oh yes, that's awesome.
Lou Maresca [02:29:36]:
Doing a fabulous job. She's got a book called Absolution out there she put out last year. It's a fabulous book about the 1989. It's a fictionalized version of the 1989 talent on mortars. So it's.
Leo Laporte [02:29:47]:
Oh my God. What's her author name?
Lou Maresca [02:29:52]:
Her pen name is EE Lawson.
Leo Laporte [02:29:54]:
If you look at on Amazon, Lawson Absolution by E.E. lawson.
Lou Maresca [02:29:58]:
She also has a really great rom com for the holiday season called Hurry down the Chimney which people actually reading even now it's not holiday season. So she also has that. She's got another one coming out called Pros and Cons. So she's doing a fabulous job.
Glenn Fleishman [02:30:12]:
She has a great author photo too, which is key. Looking at the website. Did you take that?
Lou Maresca [02:30:19]:
I didn't. She did it all of her own. The website is her own all time.
Glenn Fleishman [02:30:24]:
Great.
Leo Laporte [02:30:24]:
Isn't that great?
Glenn Fleishman [02:30:25]:
Really good, isn't it?
Leo Laporte [02:30:27]:
I love it. Well, gosh, you know what? I'm glad we could plug this. E.E. lawson, she's got her own website, eelawson.com.
Lou Maresca [02:30:36]:
right.
Leo Laporte [02:30:36]:
And you can see all the books. You can see more about her. You can even buy a quietly scheming woman's cropped hoodie. I should get that for Lisa. That is awesome. She's quietly scheming. She's quietly scheming. Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:30:55]:
That's hyster. Is that. That is fantastic.
Lou Maresca [02:30:58]:
A little bit out of her books, but yeah, she's done a fabulous. Like I said, she didn't ask for any help for this. So she's done it all herself.
Glenn Fleishman [02:31:04]:
Very good.
Leo Laporte [02:31:05]:
Oh, that's nice. That is really great. Well, yeah, let's give her a big plug. Absolution. That is quite a story, that Tylenol story.
Lou Maresca [02:31:12]:
Oh yeah. She really enjoyed widening it. She likes writing all different types of stories. She's not really at a specific genre.
Leo Laporte [02:31:17]:
So it's non fiction.
Lou Maresca [02:31:19]:
It's all fiction. Everything's fiction.
Leo Laporte [02:31:20]:
So it's a. It's a fictionalized story.
Lou Maresca [02:31:24]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:31:25]:
Oh, that's really interesting.
Glenn Fleishman [02:31:27]:
Wait for it to be adapted into a 10 part Netflix series.
Lou Maresca [02:31:29]:
Yeah, I know, right?
Glenn Fleishman [02:31:31]:
Why not?
Leo Laporte [02:31:32]:
The option is available. Eelawson.com Go get it. That would be a wonderful book.
Glenn Fleishman [02:31:38]:
All right. Maybe only eight parts these days. Are cutting back.
Leo Laporte [02:31:41]:
Yeah, right. Well, it just depends.
Wesley Faulkner [02:31:43]:
Thank you podcast.
Lou Maresca [02:31:45]:
Thank you.
Leo Laporte [02:31:45]:
Great to see you. Thank you so much, Wesley. Thank you, Glenn. We do this show every Sunday from 2 to 5 Pacific. That's 5 to 8 Eastern Time, 21:00 o' clock UTC. I mentioned that when we do it because you can watch us live if you're in the club, of course. In the club Twit Discord. But you can also watch everybody can.
Leo Laporte [02:32:04]:
YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn. A kick. If you chat in any of those platforms, I will see it and we can chat with you as I have been throughout the show after the fact, on demand versions of the show available at the website Twit TV. There's a YouTube channel with the video, video and audio at the website. Or subscribe to the video or audio or both in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically. All of that's free, but if you want to support it, you appreciate that too. Thank you you everybody for being here.
Leo Laporte [02:32:36]:
And we will see you next time. As I have said now for 21 years, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Another Twit is in the can.
