This Week in Tech Episode 1065 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this week at Tech. Coming up, Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI and Joey De Villa, AI developer, advocate, a couple of AI experts. We're going to talk about Andrej Karpathy saying he can't keep up anymore. This is the guy who invented Vibe coding. We'll also talk about the FCC killing that plan to improve home security and those nude images on Grok. Plus, why kids can't read clocks anymore. TWIT is podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.
Leo Laporte [00:00:43]:
This is TWiT this Week in Tech. Episode 1065, recorded Sunday, January 4, 2026. AI Action Park. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Yes, we're back. Happy New year, everyone. The first show of 2026. So great to see you and I'm thrilled that you're here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:05]:
I also want to welcome our panel this week. This is going to be fun. A brand new member of the TWIT community. We interviewed him on intelligent machines. He is a developer advocate for AI Joey de Villa. His blog, globalnerdy.com Joey, it's great to see you. YouTuber, blogger, AI guru.
Joey de Villa [00:01:26]:
Well, thank you very much and great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Leo Laporte [00:01:29]:
I loved it so much when you were on im. I said, get going. Get this guy on Twitter. So we're thrilled to have you. We're also thrilled to have Dan Patterson here. Dan had went through a little bit of a health scare, but you seem like you're looking fit and ready to run.
Dan Patterson [00:01:49]:
Yeah, I don't know about ready to run, but it was a challenging year of oncology appointments, but got a clean bill of health.
Leo Laporte [00:01:58]:
Now the prognosis is good.
Dan Patterson [00:02:01]:
So far, so good. I mean, the long story short is I had some tumors removed from my neck in October and had to rush back a couple days after the first surgery for I had a hematoma internally inside my neck.
Leo Laporte [00:02:15]:
Oh, my gosh.
Dan Patterson [00:02:16]:
And had a wonderful medical team and a nice long stay at NYU Langone. But all is well now.
Leo Laporte [00:02:22]:
Well, I'm good. I'm glad to hear it. And I hope you have health insurance.
Dan Patterson [00:02:27]:
Yes, Blackbird is a fantastic company.
Leo Laporte [00:02:29]:
Good. Oh, that's right. I didn't mention he's the senior director of content@Blackbird AI. We got two AI experts here, which is a good thing because 2025 was the year of AI and 2026 at this point looks to be even more spectacular. I remember talking to a guy who worked at an AI company. His company was responsible for fine tuning the models, you know, down the road. And this was a couple of years ago. He said, this is going to be a very weird decade.
Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
He said, it's hard to explain, but what we're about to see is going to change everything. At the time I thought, yeah, I could see that happening. But increasingly, I'm increasingly convinced that's the case. And by the way, both good and bad, right Joey? I mean. Oh yeah, we're inundated with AI slob. There's no, no doubt about that. Yes, the promises of a super intelligence have yet to be lived up to, which is probably a good thing.
Joey de Villa [00:03:36]:
I would agree. I would agree. Let's figure out what we're doing right now with these artificial intelligences that we do have before we create this supreme intelligence.
Leo Laporte [00:03:49]:
And you could certainly make the case that the economics of AI at this point are a little iffy.
Joey de Villa [00:03:58]:
They're weird. Like one third of the stock market, something like that.
Leo Laporte [00:04:02]:
The Magnificent Seven dominate, not just the Dow Industrial. In fact, they don't dominate Dow Industrial, they dominate the S&P 500. And fully 1% of our GDP growth last year was from AI. None of which at this point is profitable.
Dan Patterson [00:04:21]:
What has been really interesting to me at least the story through 2025 and looks to be in 2026 is the productization of AI and kind of the split between the top of mind AI companies, between a business focus and a consumer focus and seeing Anthropic and Google really invest in business. And Google of course, because they have such diversity of resources or such vast resources, they've created a diversity of products. So you know, it was only 18 months or so ago, two years ago, that there was kind of a good healthy gut chuckle about Bard and their Google's ineptitude with consumer AI. And I remember the also gut chuckles about the AI summaries that would appear above Google searches. And those kinks have been pretty fully worked out. Those consumer products seem to be going gangbusters. And on the other side we see Microsoft using OpenAI and we see Anthropic with almost every large business. Well, not, that's an exaggeration with many large businesses tapped into the API and using AI as a business resource.
Dan Patterson [00:05:50]:
So really seeing these products develop was the real story AI story that I saw emerge in 2025 and I expect to continue to develop in 2026. There is of course the data center story and how these large data centers are kind of driving up RAM prices for both businesses and consumers.
Leo Laporte [00:06:10]:
Yeah, one of the things that we talked a lot about in 2025 is the electric cost, the water costs, and then of course the hardware costs of AI. But some of that has been over reported. Karen Howe, who spread the story that AI was consuming vast amounts of water, has since retracted that, in fact, but I still hear it from everybody. I had a gotten a fight with my daughter during the Christmas break because she said, oh, it's just, it's taking all our water. And I said it's actually taking a fraction the amount of water as the nation's golf courses. So. So I don't know you, I guess we could get rid of golf and AI, but maybe we should, you know, really think about this. And by the way, the water doesn't disappear.
Leo Laporte [00:06:59]:
It's not being sent into space. It's, it's still on the planet. In fact, most AI water is recirculated anyway. She said, well, what about Elon Musk's plants that he's powering with natural gas and creating huge pollution? I said, that's not an AI problem, that's an Elon Musk problem. It doesn't have to be that way. So there are, I mean, I will stipulate there are definitely problems with AI But I agree with you, Dan. I think especially when you look at Anthropic and Google and then maybe if we throw in some of the really interesting stuff being done out of China right now, it's pretty clear we've made significant progress. I use Claude code daily now and I don't have the $200 a month Ultra subscription.
Leo Laporte [00:07:43]:
I just have a $20 a month subscription. It is great as an assistant. It is great. Oh, Google's talking to me. I mentioned I said the G word. Oh, I'm sorry, go away. Oh, now it's playing a video about AI. Hey, Google, stop.
Leo Laporte [00:08:01]:
It's too helpful. Right?
Dan Patterson [00:08:04]:
There's Also, you know, OpenAI has, has caught a lot of flack and I'm not advocating for them one way, but they have certainly turned into the consumer angle and their products have gone from being kind of mid like their consumer products a year ago, even six months ago were just meh. But now their consumer products are somewhat compelling. I don't use their consumer products like.
Leo Laporte [00:08:30]:
ChatGPT, that kind of thing.
Dan Patterson [00:08:31]:
Yeah, I mean ChatGPT is integrating some pretty interesting features. Their image creation has certainly improved.
Leo Laporte [00:08:39]:
Nano Banana's the winner right now though.
Dan Patterson [00:08:41]:
Yeah, right, exactly. And Sora, you know, I don't know that there's been large scale consumer adoption.
Leo Laporte [00:08:49]:
I think that was a Flash in the pan, wasn't it?
Dan Patterson [00:08:51]:
Yeah, but it was interesting and then.
Leo Laporte [00:08:53]:
Everybody tired of it. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:08:55]:
What's interesting to me is not so much the success or failure of these products, but the strategic direction that they've elected to take. And although their API is very compelling and a number of businesses definitely use that API, their focus or their double down on consumer products is what's really kind of interacting.
Leo Laporte [00:09:16]:
Yeah. In fact, that's one thing that has changed in the past year. All these companies were working really hard to get competent AI, less hallucinating AI. But now the differentiator isn't really so much the model. They're all really very similar. It's the targeted audience and how it's being used.
Dan Patterson [00:09:37]:
Yeah. Which is very interesting. I mean, you're right. The, the story last year, the year before was hallucinations. And now if somebody tells me why, I just hallucinates. And you know, I do have some frustration with the. And I still write for ZDNet. I still consider myself a journalist in many ways, but much of the journalism community seems to have rightfully a distrust of many of the AI companies, but an equal amount of lack of knowledge of these products.
Dan Patterson [00:10:10]:
But seeing how these products can assist technologies or human behavior and productivity to me really reminds me of. Do you remember the early days of Photoshop and when Adobe.
Leo Laporte [00:10:25]:
Just like that.
Dan Patterson [00:10:26]:
Right. It doesn't.
Leo Laporte [00:10:27]:
And the same complaints. By the way, remember we were saying, oh, you'll never know if a photo's real again?
Dan Patterson [00:10:32]:
Yes, I had those exact conversations in newsrooms and when I was a younger reporter, I had those conversations. That's exactly what I think about Leo is, well, you'll never be able, like, yes, we can tell if a photo was doctored, just like we can tell if a photo is AI. In fact, at Blackbird, not to LogWorld for Blackbird, but we make products that will help you tell if a product, if a photo or if a claim is real or not. And those things, I remember having those conversations about a year ago, 18 months ago. Well, can we tell? Will we be able to tell? Will we have to watermark? Well, you know, actually we can use AI to figure out if it's real or not.
Leo Laporte [00:11:12]:
Yeah. I mean, again, I don't want to downplay there are negatives and AI slop is one of the negatives for sure. Go on x.com you want to see a lot of AI slop. That's pretty much all X has become. So. And if you go there, it's kind of depressing because it is so sloppy. We'll talk about the trouble they got into this week in just a little bit. But you posted.
Leo Laporte [00:11:35]:
You actually put a link in our rundown Joey of a tweet or a next post from Andre Kaparthy, who I, by the way, is my personal guru for AI. His videos have been very informative.
Joey de Villa [00:11:50]:
I'm working my way through them.
Leo Laporte [00:11:51]:
Yeah, yeah, he was. Yeah. One of them's three and a half. The best one is three and a half hours long. It's a bit of a slog, but very, very good. He was at Tesla. He is now kind of on his own. He says I've.
Leo Laporte [00:12:05]:
So this is what he. And you would think. He's the guy who knows. Right. He's the guy who's. I'm looking to. To figure out how to use this stuff. He says, I've never felt this much behind as a programmer.
Leo Laporte [00:12:16]:
The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10x more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last year. I feel the same way with Claude Code, by the way. And a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like a skill issue. He's falling behind. He says clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around. Except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the professions. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Leo Laporte [00:12:54]:
He's the guy who coined the term vibe coding.
Joey de Villa [00:12:56]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:12:57]:
And he can't keep up.
Joey de Villa [00:12:59]:
And remember vibe coding, he. That term is not a year old yet. That doesn't happen till February. That is how new that is, how new the term is. And just the general popular concept is. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking maybe it's one of those end of year things where sometimes some people just feel a little depressed and go, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
It was December 26th when he posted this. So maybe you're right.
Joey de Villa [00:13:26]:
Yeah, you know, maybe it was some bad eggnog. But, you know, a lot of people around that time of year are going, oh my God, what are. What am I doing with my life? But it is an entirely different thing for Karpathi to say that. That's like, I know Cookie Monster going, maybe these cookie things aren't all cracked up.
Leo Laporte [00:13:47]:
No more cookie. But I understand his feeling. And the funny thing is it reflects a feeling I had when I first started covering technology, when I first moved to Silicon Valley, when I first encountered the public Internet of overwhelm. Like, I can never keep up. And this was 30 or 40 years ago.
Joey de Villa [00:14:08]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [00:14:09]:
I mean, do you guys remember that? Feeling that way I can't keep up is moving too fast.
Joey de Villa [00:14:14]:
Oh, yeah. And this was when I was at Queen's University. And in fact, actually, for Elon and I have some overlap there.
Leo Laporte [00:14:26]:
And by the way, Queens. Not Queens, New York.
Joey de Villa [00:14:30]:
Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Leo Laporte [00:14:33]:
Canada. Okay. Yes, that Queen.
Joey de Villa [00:14:35]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:14:37]:
Was it Elizabeth the first or second? Or was it Victoria?
Joey de Villa [00:14:40]:
Oh, wait, what was she named after? No, it would have been Victoria.
Leo Laporte [00:14:44]:
Yeah. Okay.
Joey de Villa [00:14:45]:
It would. It would have been named after Queen Victoria. Queen from that era. And. Yeah, No, I remember. Yeah. A computer powerful enough to do our assignments. We had to go to the lab.
Joey de Villa [00:14:56]:
We had a lab provided to us by Digital, if you remember that company.
Dan Patterson [00:15:01]:
Yeah, my uncle worked for Digital.
Joey de Villa [00:15:02]:
There we go. Yeah. And they got bought up by Compaq, who got bought up by hp. But, yeah, we had a bigger fish eating.
Leo Laporte [00:15:11]:
Actually, it's like a littler fish eating a bigger fish. It's kind of the opposite.
Joey de Villa [00:15:16]:
And in Deck Lab, all of a sudden, all the GUI UNIX machines that we had all of a sudden had Mosaic on them.
Leo Laporte [00:15:23]:
Oh, a browser.
Joey de Villa [00:15:24]:
Yeah. And that just. That just opened the world. It was wild, because before then.
Leo Laporte [00:15:31]:
I.
Joey de Villa [00:15:32]:
Was either on Usenet.
Leo Laporte [00:15:34]:
Right.
Joey de Villa [00:15:34]:
And we may have to explain. Yeah, we may have to explain that to people.
Leo Laporte [00:15:37]:
Or Archie. Yep, yep.
Joey de Villa [00:15:39]:
Archie and Veronica. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:15:41]:
I remember on Mosaic, by the way, Marc Andreessen, one of the authors. Not the sole author, but one of the authors of Mosaic, he later turned that into Netscape, turned that into a fortune, and turned that into. Well, I don't know what he's become now, but anyway, I remember using Mosaic and seeing. This is. I still remember this. There was a little. A compass. I'm watching, looking at the screen, because it was just text, and there was a little animated gif of a compass with a needle moving, and it blew my mind.
Joey de Villa [00:16:09]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:16:11]:
Wow.
Dan Patterson [00:16:11]:
Boy, that's a blast from the past.
Leo Laporte [00:16:13]:
It blew my mind. It's moving.
Dan Patterson [00:16:16]:
There was a sense of openness and hope and fun with the Internet in the 90s and early 2000s.
Leo Laporte [00:16:23]:
Maybe we've learned better. Yes. Cynicism has set in, because, really, you're right. I mean, I remember John Perry Barlow's cyberspace manifesto, People of Earth, leave us alone. And we all had this great utopian vision of what the Internet was going to do. We didn't really foresee social media phone addictions. We didn't foresee some of the consequences of this. But like any technology, it's a double edged sword.
Leo Laporte [00:17:05]:
Right? I mean, YouTube's a good example where, yes, there are more videos uploaded to YouTube every minute than you could watch in a lifetime, literally. So that you can't. It's. It's an overwhelming tidal wave of content and much of it is garbage. Yes, much of it is terrible, but some of it's from Joey de Villa. Some of it's. Some of it. And, and I always said, yeah, okay, so everybody gets a voice and there's a lot more content, but just as there's a lot more content, there'll be a lot more.
Leo Laporte [00:17:35]:
That even though there's a small percentage of all content is really great, that percentage means there'll be even more great content. And I think that that's true.
Dan Patterson [00:17:44]:
Do you remember. Surely you remember Adam Curry and Pod Show?
Joey de Villa [00:17:49]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:17:49]:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:17:50]:
Which, yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [00:17:52]:
Oh, don't get me started. Go ahead, sure.
Dan Patterson [00:17:55]:
It's a long relationship.
Leo Laporte [00:17:57]:
He told me at one point, I'll just give you one thing, just so you know, just to set the stage. Adam and I were doing a John Dvorak's a Cranky Geeks show. And Adam had just started Pod show, which was a directory of podcasts.
Dan Patterson [00:18:09]:
I was signed to Pod Show.
Leo Laporte [00:18:11]:
Yeah. Well, he tried to sign me.
Dan Patterson [00:18:13]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:18:13]:
He said, leo, you're going to make wife leaving money.
Dan Patterson [00:18:18]:
They promised me very similar stuff. And I said, 100 bucks a month.
Leo Laporte [00:18:22]:
I don't want to leave my wife. Adam, screw you. That, that literally was the end of my relationship. And boy, I was, I was right not to get involved with Pod Show. Look what happened to Luria Petrucci, which she was calling.
Dan Patterson [00:18:34]:
Oh, yeah, sure, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:18:36]:
Getting out of that contract. He owned all that content. Yeah, he owned the Masters. He was kind of, he was kind of like.
Dan Patterson [00:18:44]:
He took it from the record executives. Yeah, I saw my contract. I kept everything. I kept ownership of everything. I mean, I, Well, I had mentors who were from the music business and so I insisted on like, I keep all of my. I own every. It was essentially a distribution deal that included satellite radio, which was big at the time. But I, I remember talking to their CEO.
Dan Patterson [00:19:06]:
It became a company called Mevio and they had a CEO named Ra Ron something. I can't remember his last name, but I remember him before YouTube blew up, maybe 05 or 06 and him saying one day the Internet, right now the Internet is like 8020 mainstream media to our. There wasn't the term creator at the time. But like creator owned content. But one day it will be 80% creator content and the mainstream media will shrink.
Leo Laporte [00:19:39]:
Like.
Dan Patterson [00:19:40]:
Well, one thing that guy said, he.
Leo Laporte [00:19:42]:
Was right about that. Yeah. He actually was very smart and had a lot of vision. I will give him credit for that, really. And a deep understanding. He was an MTV VJ who, when the Internet came along, registered MTV.com in his own name and got Viacom was. They had a little tussle over that. It's a very famous case.
Leo Laporte [00:20:07]:
And actually added to the case law of who owns domain names. But so he was smart. He was a visionary in that respect. And he was absolutely right. In fact, this was last year, was the year YouTube became the number one content purveyor on people's TVs in their living room.
Joey de Villa [00:20:24]:
Yep.
Dan Patterson [00:20:24]:
And that's where Instagram is now refactoring is to get on TVs.
Leo Laporte [00:20:28]:
Yep. Not that that's a good thing, but.
Dan Patterson [00:20:32]:
It'S the growth strategy.
Leo Laporte [00:20:34]:
Yeah. Hey, Joey, center your camera a little bit so that you're not leaning over on the frame a little bit. No, other direction. There you go. We like the octopus. No, no.
Joey de Villa [00:20:43]:
See how you're just this way.
Leo Laporte [00:20:44]:
Thank you.
Joey de Villa [00:20:45]:
Okay, There we go.
Leo Laporte [00:20:48]:
I have to explain Joey's first time on the show that there is something about technology podcasting that draws a slightly OCD crowd and if anything is just a little bit off, it bugs.
Dan Patterson [00:21:04]:
Oh, yeah, it does. If I listen to a show and it's over compressed or.
Leo Laporte [00:21:10]:
Yeah, so we're all a little ocd. So that's why I bring it up. I don't want people to be distracted by that.
Joey de Villa [00:21:16]:
Comes with the territory.
Leo Laporte [00:21:18]:
There is a lot of AI news we're going to get. Actually, let me take a break and we'll get to that. A lot of things happened over the Christmas break. I was talking with Benito, our producer, Benito Gonzalez, who, by the way, is in Manila. This is the other thing that changed dramatically thanks to the Internet is nobody has to work in the office anymore. And you can live anywhere in the world and we can all work together. Dan, you're in where? New Jersey? New York. New York.
Leo Laporte [00:21:45]:
Joey, where are you?
Joey de Villa [00:21:46]:
Tampa.
Leo Laporte [00:21:47]:
I'm in Petaluma, California.
Joey de Villa [00:21:49]:
Here we go.
Leo Laporte [00:21:50]:
And Benito's in the Philippines. It doesn't matter. Right. Anyway, I was saying to Benito that a lot of kind of a little sketchy acquisitions and moves happened in the AI industry over the Christmas break. And I was saying I think these people think nobody's paying attention during the holidays. So that's the time to do things like, I don't know, invade countries and buy other companies and so forth. And Benito pointed out that's because they still think there's a news cycle. There's no news cycle.
Joey de Villa [00:22:22]:
Yeah, but they're still playing the old news cycle game of what's called taking out the trash. You announce the bad stuff on a Friday.
Leo Laporte [00:22:29]:
Right, but does it fool anybody anymore? Not me. Cause I got a show on Sunday. I'm looking all week long. And by the way, the other thing companies thought is we're gonna get everybody to move back into the office. How's that going for you? Nobody wants to return to work. All right, we're gonna take a break. It's Joey De Villas. Great to have you@globalnerdy.com I've asked him to play the accordion for us a little bit later on.
Leo Laporte [00:22:58]:
He's encouraging me. He's encouraged because I've been learning the piano this year in 2025, that was my year to learn the piano. And I played Old Lang Syne on the piano. And at the end of the year. But maybe it wasn't you. I thought it was you who said, if you know the piano, it's not such a big step to go to the accordion.
Joey de Villa [00:23:19]:
That was me.
Leo Laporte [00:23:20]:
Yeah, that's what I thought. And I've been tempted ever since to buy an accordion.
Joey de Villa [00:23:25]:
You know, it is a machine that turns music into free beer. If you take it to bars. It's always somebody's birthday at a bar.
Leo Laporte [00:23:34]:
What about those little holes, though? I could do the keyboard and it's sideways, so I'm gonna have to figure that out. But don't you have to do the holes a little bit and I can bellow.
Joey de Villa [00:23:42]:
Now the buttons are just chords.
Leo Laporte [00:23:43]:
Oh. Oh, that's easy.
Joey de Villa [00:23:45]:
That's very. And they are arranged in a pattern that.
Leo Laporte [00:23:48]:
So I don't have to. I can hit a F major just by hitting a button instead of hitting the three keys.
Joey de Villa [00:23:54]:
That is correct. And what that allows you to do is hold a beer in your right hand and have a drink.
Leo Laporte [00:24:01]:
All of rock and roll can be played on those buttons.
Joey de Villa [00:24:04]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:24:04]:
It's an amazing thing. Anyway, it's great to have you, Joey. First time. Great to be here on the big show. AI, developer, advocate. He freelances all over. And of course, he's on YouTube. But his blog is a great place to start.
Leo Laporte [00:24:16]:
It's a really fun blog too, by the way. Global Nerdy.
Joey de Villa [00:24:19]:
Oh, thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:24:21]:
Dan Patterson is also here, Senior director of content, Blackbird. AI. We'll talk about Blackbird a little later on because it really is a very useful tool for debunking BS in the in the world which we all need nowadays. And he also has a lovely newsletter called the News, which you can subscribe to at news Dot. Dan Patterson, great to have you both. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler Talk about AI. This is the world's largest cloud security platform. And these days, if you are in security, if you're a cyber security platform, AI very much is part of the story, right? It's obvious that the rewards of AI, we were just talking about it for any enterprise, are too big to ignore.
Leo Laporte [00:25:13]:
But AI also poses a great risk. Not just because hackers are using AI to step up their attacks in ways they just couldn't before, but also because just the use of AI in your company can cause you to lose sensitive data. So we know that generative AI increases the opportunities for threat actors. If just take a look at the phishing emails you get these days. They're perfect, right? And they come rapid fire, right? Malicious code AI is very good at that, as it turns out, to automate data extraction. But there's also this issue of leaking AI through AI apps. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications in 2025. Last year, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations.
Leo Laporte [00:26:07]:
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Joey de Villa [00:26:39]:
AI provides tremendous opportunities, but it also.
Leo Laporte [00:26:42]:
Brings tremendous security concerns when it comes to data privacy and data security.
Joey de Villa [00:26:46]:
The benefit of Zscaler with ZIA rolled out for us right now is giving us the insights of how our employees.
Leo Laporte [00:26:53]:
Are using various gen AI tools. So ability to monitor the activity and make sure that what we consider confidential and sensitive information according to companies data classes does not get fed into the public LLM models, etc. With zero trust plus AI from Zscaler, you can thrive in the AI era. You can stay ahead of the competition and you can remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. All right, let's see some AI news I promised. Nvidia got busy over the holidays doing kind of a weird thing they this. I feel like this is not a good trend in AI.
Leo Laporte [00:27:48]:
They basically hollowed out a company, spent $20 billion not to acquire the company but to acquire its brains. In effect. The. The acquisition was of Grok, not Elon's Grok with a Q. Grok with a Q. It's a nine year old firm. It's. It's was started by the Google's TPU engineers.
Leo Laporte [00:28:17]:
It was never up for sale. Nvidia came in with a $20, $20 billion deal not to buy it, but to license their technology and to bring the leaders, including Jonathan Ross over which if I were working at Grok with a Q I would be a little perturbed by. Because this means. Or if I were an investor, maybe the investors get paid.
Joey de Villa [00:28:45]:
Do they get a cut? I don't know. I don't know the nature of that particular deal.
Leo Laporte [00:28:52]:
These are very important brains behind Transformers. So this is a very important brain acquisition for Nvidia. But it's not the first time we've seen this. The same thing. Meta did the same thing. Right. Where they hollow out a company, they hire its brains and then.
Joey de Villa [00:29:10]:
But the rank and file are kind of left high and dry, aren't they?
Leo Laporte [00:29:13]:
Yeah. What do I do?
Dan Patterson [00:29:14]:
Google. I think Google did that with maybe character AI as well.
Joey de Villa [00:29:19]:
Yeah, I was trying to remember who was.
Leo Laporte [00:29:23]:
There's a new name for this. MG Siegler has dubbed it a hacisition. Remember we had acquire. We used to Acquire.
Joey de Villa [00:29:32]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:29:32]:
Where you buy a company to hire its team. Now they don't even bother buying it. They just hac it. So the creator of the TPU is now an Nvidia employee and the people who are still working at Grok with a Q are left high and dry. I don't know. I don't think they get this $20.
Dan Patterson [00:29:52]:
Billion if they have common shares. Probably not. But I would imagine the investors must be paid off. And the board. I can't imagine a board of directors.
Leo Laporte [00:30:03]:
Investors and the board has to sign off on.
Dan Patterson [00:30:05]:
Yeah, exactly. This can't just happen willy nilly.
Leo Laporte [00:30:12]:
Anyway. This is a new trend in AI. I don't. You know, there's not much to mention. Certainly Jensen Huang of Nvidia has a fat, fat Wallet and can do a lot of this. So does Mark Zuckerberg. He just bought Manus M A N U S, which is a Singapore startup that now this is not an old company. This is less than a year old.
Leo Laporte [00:30:38]:
They had a demo video that showed an AI agent doing things like screening job candidates, planning vacations and analyzing stock portfolios. They were funded by Benchmark, giving them a Post Money valuation of half a billion dollars.
Dan Patterson [00:30:59]:
I wonder what that agent is built on, though.
Leo Laporte [00:31:02]:
Well, I wonder if it's built on Llama, which is Meta's open weights model.
Dan Patterson [00:31:08]:
Likely.
Joey de Villa [00:31:08]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:31:09]:
Which would make sense then, for. So meta is paying $2 billion, which is the amount of money Manus was looking for in its next funding round. 2 billion. That's a deal. That's chump change for mark.
Dan Patterson [00:31:23]:
Wasn't Instagram 1 billion?
Leo Laporte [00:31:25]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:31:26]:
And WhatsApp was 26.
Joey de Villa [00:31:28]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:31:28]:
WhatsApp ended up, I think, being 32 once the stock got inflated. Yeah, but I don't know if WhatsApp was worth it. But Instagram was definitely worth it, right? Instagram's gotta be.
Dan Patterson [00:31:39]:
I mean, everyone uses WhatsApp.
Leo Laporte [00:31:41]:
Yeah, that's true. But do they make money? How do they make money?
Joey de Villa [00:31:45]:
You know, they're gonna have to. They're gonna have to rework that line from the social network where.
Leo Laporte [00:31:52]:
Oh, they're not a. Facebook is old hat. Mark already pivoted to Meta, right, To.
Joey de Villa [00:31:59]:
The metaverse, the meta. But no, they're gonna have to rework the line where they go, you know, a million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. They're gonna have to move it up now. It's gonna.
Leo Laporte [00:32:09]:
I always wanna do the pinky when I hear that. A billion. That was. Yeah, that was.
Joey de Villa [00:32:14]:
Now they're going to have to say a billion dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A trillion trillion.
Leo Laporte [00:32:20]:
OpenAI opened a job position for the head of preparedness. They are offering a $555,000 a year salary plus stock. That's not stock, that's cash plus stock. For the head of preparedness. Sam Altman said, this will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately. It's a critical role to help the world. The Guardian says in what may be close to the impossible job, the huda preparedness at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AI to human mental health. Somebody joked, that's a lot of money for somebody who just stands next to the kill switch.
Leo Laporte [00:33:08]:
All day, pull the plug.
Dan Patterson [00:33:13]:
That sounds like you interface with all like a PR job.
Leo Laporte [00:33:18]:
It does sound like a PR job. The successful candidate will be responsible for evaluating and mitigating emerging threats and quote, tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm. They've had people in this job, but none of them have lasted very long.
Joey de Villa [00:33:36]:
It has a high burnout rate. And since I'm actually in job search mode right now, I have half a million.
Leo Laporte [00:33:43]:
Well, that's quite a billion.
Joey de Villa [00:33:45]:
So I've been using. And you know what? Being Canadian, I pronounce it Claude.
Leo Laporte [00:33:50]:
Claude. I love French name.
Joey de Villa [00:33:52]:
It's a French name. I don't. Quad sounds wrong. So I've been using Claude. And one of the first things I always do is I give it a job description. I go evaluate my fit for this job.
Leo Laporte [00:34:02]:
Oh, so you use Claude code as almost others would use ChatGPT or Claude itself. You use it as a chat bot.
Joey de Villa [00:34:14]:
Actually, this is. No, this is consumer. This is consumer cloud.
Leo Laporte [00:34:17]:
Oh, you're not using Claude code, you're using Claude.
Joey de Villa [00:34:20]:
I'm using Claude code to code.
Leo Laporte [00:34:22]:
The reason I ask is I know many people, in fact, I've found myself doing this now who do. In fact, just why. Why launch? I'm using Opus 4. 5. I'm using the latest model. I chat with code.
Joey de Villa [00:34:35]:
And you know what? I actually, I should do that. I mean, I use Warp as a terminal anyway. So if you're in a terminal, I have chats with the terminal anyways. For JavaScript, for job. If somebody gives me some JavaScript code, I'm going, you know what? I have no idea what framework this is written in. I have no idea how to launch it. You launch it and it does a fantastic job.
Dan Patterson [00:34:57]:
It's kind of a metaphor, right?
Joey de Villa [00:34:58]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:34:58]:
Like using a terminal and a chatbot are very similar things.
Joey de Villa [00:35:04]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:35:05]:
Or chatbot interface.
Leo Laporte [00:35:07]:
I actually now all we all, during the Christmas break, I've been. Me and Claude. Claude have been bunding. I'm going to call him Claude from now on. Is it him, by the way, or is it it?
Joey de Villa [00:35:21]:
I try to use it. And in fact, actually I want AIs to use. I want AIs to use the personal pronouns that AIs in classic star Trek have used. Smart computers from classic Star Trek always said this unit. And I want them to refer. I want these machines to refer to themselves as this unit.
Leo Laporte [00:35:43]:
I start Claude now with the continue command and I keep it running. I've decided just to keep a terminal window open at all times and it's always running.
Dan Patterson [00:35:54]:
The cloud is fantastic.
Leo Laporte [00:35:56]:
I asked it the other day, what's the name of Taylor Swift's latest album? And it didn't know. And then I said, try searching the web for that. And it said, oh, I'm sorry, you're right. It's a life of a showgirl. It corrected itself. Let me see. I wonder if it remembers.
Dan Patterson [00:36:13]:
I use the CLAUDE agents all the time. In fact, I will often write or edit alongside the consumer version of Claude. And I use the API every day.
Leo Laporte [00:36:26]:
You can now you can tell. Oh, look, it's smart. It learned. It says, I'm going to do a web search. I am not going to give you the bad answer I gave last time. I'm going to do a web search. So I keep it running all the time and I have a BigClaud MD, which is the instruction file for it. And I say, keep that up to date and I keep that maintained.
Leo Laporte [00:36:50]:
I say, remember what we did? Keep track of that conversation. Yeah. Look at this.
Dan Patterson [00:36:56]:
So that doesn't use the context window or the context tokens.
Leo Laporte [00:37:00]:
It does.
Dan Patterson [00:37:01]:
Oh, it does.
Leo Laporte [00:37:02]:
Yeah. But it's, I think, a little bit. The other thing you can do is you can spin up agents and that becomes a separate context window and then you can have the agent boil it down. So there's some really interesting stuff going on. This. This just came out from Deep Seek and I'm going to read something called mhc, which some are saying, oh, my God, this is the. This is the next thing after LLMs. And I'm going to read what our friend Lou Maresca, who does AI.
Leo Laporte [00:37:33]:
He is responsible for the AI in Excel, for Copilot in Excel. So he does it for Microsoft. And Lou said I had. So MHC stands for Manifold Constrained Hyper connections. It's a new technique used by Deep Seek. They announced it, I think, yesterday. So this is brand new. And I don't really.
Leo Laporte [00:37:55]:
I know I asked you, Joey, you said, well, I read the post.
Joey de Villa [00:37:59]:
I read it. You know what it reads like? SharePoint Marketing, where you read it and you know less.
Leo Laporte [00:38:08]:
Well, maybe that's why it took a Microsoft guy to figure it out. This is what Lou wrote. And this is. He wrote this as a memo to his team to explain this because they're developing Copilot. He says MHC manifold constrained hyper connections, and this was an archive.org paper that DeepSeq published, is primarily a training stability and scale enabler. So in my mind, I think of it kind of like these CLAUDE agents, where you kind of spin off additional AIs to do specific tasks. He says. Imagine you're a busy.
Leo Laporte [00:38:44]:
You're running a busy restaurant kitchen. Hyper Connections adds extra prep stations, more parallel lanes, which can increase throughput. Now, remember, we're in a kitchen. Okay? But if cooks can arbitrarily siphon or amplify ingredients between stations, the whole workflow becomes chaotic at dinner. Rush. Right. You know, give me your mirepoix. No, that's mine.
Leo Laporte [00:39:08]:
MHC is the rule. This is the key, the rule that every transfer between agents must conserve total ingredients and keep the average seasoning stable. Plus, it reorganizes the counters, the tabletops, so that people stop bumping into each other. On a small kitchen, one gpu, your constraint is fridge space and how fast ingredients move. So the new rules only help if the counters were your real bottlenecks and clear as mud. Much clearer than the archive.org paper.
Joey de Villa [00:39:44]:
Well, have you tried to get Deepseek to explain Deep Seek?
Leo Laporte [00:39:48]:
Oh, there you go.
Joey de Villa [00:39:49]:
I did.
Leo Laporte [00:39:50]:
And.
Joey de Villa [00:39:51]:
Okay. And it uses a water park analogy.
Leo Laporte [00:39:55]:
Oh, that's great.
Joey de Villa [00:39:56]:
And it's basically saying, okay, old AI brain. So the classic way is AI is currently. LLMs are currently designed like a single straight water slide.
Leo Laporte [00:40:07]:
Okay. And so, yeah. Okay, so I'm having this in my mind. This is what Andrej Karpathy was talking about in a three and a half hour video. This is the training. Yeah, the training. Conveyor belt, the workflow. Okay.
Joey de Villa [00:40:20]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:40:22]:
Information in, you know, your. Your latest video, your articles, your pictures, turns into tokens in the. In the machine and weights. And that's a linear workflow.
Joey de Villa [00:40:33]:
It is a straightforward linear fashion. And what they are saying is, you know what? Be more fun is a crazy, unregulated water park.
Leo Laporte [00:40:42]:
Oh, no.
Joey de Villa [00:40:43]:
So, like, I don't know if you remember from the 80s, there's this place in upstate New York, Action park, aka Traction Park. No, it had all these dangerous rides.
Leo Laporte [00:40:53]:
Oh, that's.
Joey de Villa [00:40:54]:
Do a Google search for traction parks.
Leo Laporte [00:40:56]:
Oh, my God.
Joey de Villa [00:40:58]:
So the idea behind MHC is it's a crazy water park, but with perfect safety controls. So in other words, you can still have all these chaotic connections, but there is. The manifold part is some kind of regulated connection system between the interconnections.
Leo Laporte [00:41:22]:
All right.
Joey de Villa [00:41:22]:
Yeah. And that is.
Leo Laporte [00:41:24]:
This is what it looks like.
Joey de Villa [00:41:27]:
They had a. Action park. Had a loop. The loop water slide.
Leo Laporte [00:41:32]:
No, no, you can't do that if you're not going fast enough.
Joey de Villa [00:41:36]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:41:37]:
Oh, this is insane.
Joey de Villa [00:41:40]:
That's why it was called Traction Park.
Leo Laporte [00:41:42]:
And they were, by the way, closed Weren't they?
Joey de Villa [00:41:45]:
Yes. Yeah, and with good reason.
Leo Laporte [00:41:47]:
Yes. Guests who are not strong swimmers.
Joey de Villa [00:41:54]:
Should.
Leo Laporte [00:41:54]:
Not enter the Action Park. Oh. And. Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay, so I'm sorry, I got distracted by Action Park. So you're saying instead of a linear flow of information into tokens and weights.
Joey de Villa [00:42:11]:
It'S more of a crazy. It's supposed to be a more crazy quilt flow of information. But the idea is that there are some kind. There is some kind of guardrail that keeps the information from just flying willy nilly. So a deep seek. The analogy gave me as a crazy water park with perfect safety controls. And then it did give me a.
Leo Laporte [00:42:34]:
Little, you better be a good swimmer.
Joey de Villa [00:42:36]:
It did get. Yeah, well, apparently it's supposed to be better than that. And it gave me a Wikipedia link to something called a Berkhoff polytope, which is a matrix formation for stochastic math. Okay, that was. That's based on a 1946 paper by a Garrett Berkhoff. So this is the era when people are. This is the Alan Turing era. This is people defining what it means for something to be computable.
Leo Laporte [00:43:05]:
Oh, it's a polytope of doubly stochastic matrices. I understand now clearly. Yeah, math is hard. But I guess the idea, by the way, you can think of. It's not unusual to think of. In fact, Darren Okey proposed this on our last AI user group, which we did on Friday, that you can think of in a way, the AI as a matrix. I always think of matrixes, matrices as trees. It's a different ways of looking at the same idea.
Leo Laporte [00:43:42]:
And stuff flows through the matrix and you can transform the matrix. So I guess the idea is that these are a little bit more. I don't want to use the word chaotic because that sounds like action park, but a little bit more richer than a linear dynamic. Dynamic. Dynamic, That's a better word.
Joey de Villa [00:44:03]:
Dynamic would be a good. Dynamic would be a good way of phrasing it. Yes.
Leo Laporte [00:44:07]:
Okay. It's doubly stochastic. What could possibly go wrong?
Joey de Villa [00:44:14]:
Anyway, and stochastic meaning random but predictable.
Leo Laporte [00:44:18]:
Probabilistic.
Joey de Villa [00:44:19]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:44:20]:
Which is what? What. What these things are basically is stochastic. That's the paper. Stochastic parrots pointed this out. They're just basically probabilistic autocorrects. Okay, very interesting. The point only it's way beyond my limited capabilities. But the point being, for much of 2025, people were saying, oh, LLMs are done.
Leo Laporte [00:44:44]:
We've hit the. Well, there was two schools of thoughts. One saying, hey, people like Yann LeCun saying, no, no, LLMs are a dead end. We've got to find something else. And then people like Sam Altman said, no, no, LLMs are still great. We just have to throw more compute at it. It just got more compute, more compute, more compute. And eventually they'll get, you know, super intelligent.
Leo Laporte [00:45:06]:
And those are the two schools of thought. Well, maybe, maybe you're both right because maybe it isn't just LLMs. Maybe we have other models, other methods that we can use. LeCun was arguing for something a little more physical.
Joey de Villa [00:45:22]:
Real world, a world model.
Leo Laporte [00:45:24]:
Yeah. Also said that, she said an LLM is just language. We need to go beyond just language. We need a model of physics. What happens, you know, an LLM doesn't know what happens when you drop when a pen rolls off the table because it doesn't have a world model. So maybe, maybe we have some. Maybe we have a way to go. I guess what the point to me is that we have some headroom.
Leo Laporte [00:45:46]:
That's the. Things are still improving and growing.
Joey de Villa [00:45:51]:
We're. We're only at the beginning. You have to remember Chachi Beatty came out what, three, three years, one month ago? That is.
Leo Laporte [00:45:59]:
It isn't that amazing? And it blew our minds and. Yeah. And I don't feel progress is slow. Do you, either of you think that?
Dan Patterson [00:46:08]:
I think there was a point this summer where it seemed like chat and anthropic hit a wall.
Leo Laporte [00:46:17]:
When Chat GPT5 came out, people were disappointed. They said this is not supposed to be.
Dan Patterson [00:46:22]:
Yeah, that was like expectation of management or management of expectations. But I do think that the consumer products hit some friction and that probably fed a lot of, well, news cycles and consumers were probably. The narrative was probably that these weren't at expectation level, but those expectations were also set with this talk about superintelligence and other stuff that just wasn't ever going to be true.
Leo Laporte [00:46:54]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:46:55]:
And I also think that there has been marked improvement in. I mean, chat 5 is not what was promised, but it's a better product. And Anthropic is like we've been talking about this entire show. It's just, it's really great.
Joey de Villa [00:47:11]:
Yeah, yeah.
Dan Patterson [00:47:12]:
I mean, it's very useful.
Leo Laporte [00:47:14]:
Well, and Gemini too, which came out, and Gemini later and Nano Banana. The video and still picture models are amazing. Gemini 3 is very competent Chatbot. I honestly don't care about chatbots so much because I'm not trying to get psychotherapy or I don't need a friend. I don't want to marry my computer.
Joey de Villa [00:47:37]:
But Gemini is useful for getting work done. Like I have found it fantastic for search or actually in my case, job search. So for instance, Gemini, because it can pull stuff out of video. Actually I've been, I've been using it to find. I used to work for Cory Doctorow. I used to work at his startup.
Leo Laporte [00:47:58]:
Oh that's great. God, I love Corey. Oh my God.
Joey de Villa [00:48:01]:
So yeah, because yeah, we're both.
Leo Laporte [00:48:03]:
I didn't know that. Yeah, we're both from Toronto. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What was his startup? That was before Eff. That was before he became a novelist.
Joey de Villa [00:48:11]:
Open Cola.
Leo Laporte [00:48:12]:
Open cola.
Joey de Villa [00:48:13]:
This was during the peer to peer era and our thesis and it was.
Leo Laporte [00:48:18]:
A little tongue in cheek, wasn't it?
Joey de Villa [00:48:20]:
Well, Open Cola was supposed to be open source and we decided to make a product, an open source version to promote ourselves. An open source version of the most proprietary thing we could think of at the time, which was coca cola. Right. Ingredient 7x. A closely guarded secret. Yeah. So as a promotional tool we made an open source Cola. And Open Cola was basically during the P2P era and our thesis and it made sense to me at the time was that Google wouldn't scale and what you needed to do was distribute search across every computer connected to the Internet.
Leo Laporte [00:48:57]:
That's brilliant.
Joey de Villa [00:48:58]:
Everyone would run a client combination client server which we call the Clerver that would do these, that would do these searches and not just for information but also for files because this was the peer to peer era. And yeah, the idea was that people, people who are similar to you are going to have similar interests to you and are going to search for things that are similar to you.
Leo Laporte [00:49:23]:
COLA stood for Collaboration Object Lookup Architecture.
Joey de Villa [00:49:27]:
Architecture. Yes. Corey and I, and I think our friend George Scribbon who also was with the company with us, we made that up over sushi one night.
Leo Laporte [00:49:36]:
It does sound like what I call a retro nym, which is.
Joey de Villa [00:49:39]:
It's a backronym. Yeah, Acronym is the term we like to use.
Leo Laporte [00:49:42]:
Acronym. Yeah, you got the word first and then you figure out what it stands for.
Joey de Villa [00:49:47]:
Yeah. And in fact I got in. That was my first Developer relations job and that is because I was originally a developer. I brought my accordion to Linux World. I jumped in front of some news cameras, parlayed it into an interview and by the time I got back to Toronto, this was Linux World Expo New York. Corey said, you're now our developer evangelist.
Leo Laporte [00:50:08]:
You know what? Awesome. I can see the accordion being the key to Cory Doctorow. I can see that Being the conversation starter. Very on. That's Corey in a nutshell. Well, he's still doing that. I mean, basically, this is the philosophy that he continues to live up to this notion of big tech. The siloed tech isn't the solution.
Leo Laporte [00:50:32]:
It's got to be open, and it's got to be distributed.
Joey de Villa [00:50:34]:
Exactly. But anyways, yeah, I was using Gemini to search because he quotes me occasionally, because he actually uses my dumbest line often. And that is. And I did this back when SARS was a thing. I said, when life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla.
Leo Laporte [00:50:52]:
Oh, my God. That was your line. He's used that a dozen times on this show.
Joey de Villa [00:50:56]:
Yeah. And sometimes he credits it to me. And what I had Gemini.
Leo Laporte [00:51:01]:
I'm gonna put Joy Villa.
Joey de Villa [00:51:04]:
And what I did was I just had Gemini search through a whole bunch of YouTube videos. And I. I said, yeah, tell me if he. Tell me if he uses the line. Tell me if he credits me. And if he does, give me the time. Give me the time. Mark when it happens so that I can.
Joey de Villa [00:51:19]:
I can reference it as part of my. In my portfolio, as part of my job.
Leo Laporte [00:51:23]:
Now that we know that, we'll. Next time Cory's on, we'll. We'll have you on it. We can have a little reunion. Sure. Make a note of that, Benito. Corey's on a big book tour right now. His book is huge.
Leo Laporte [00:51:35]:
He coined the word of the year 2024 in Sh. Ification. And now he's reaping the whirlwind.
Joey de Villa [00:51:42]:
Yeah, there we go.
Leo Laporte [00:51:43]:
There's the book. That's right. Right to hand, Dan. That's good.
Joey de Villa [00:51:48]:
There are bits and pieces of Corey's friends, me included, throughout his novels. Little. Little lines he borrows from us. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:51:55]:
Oh, that's good to know. Well, I'll remember the sarsaparillo one. That's a very Canadian line. It is, because SARS was a much bigger deal in Canada.
Joey de Villa [00:52:05]:
I mean, it was a much bigger deal in Canada and actually was particularly big to me because my sister is the. Is. Was the chief medical officer for the city of Toronto.
Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
No kidding.
Joey de Villa [00:52:17]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:52:18]:
Wow.
Joey de Villa [00:52:18]:
And actually, she got. She got her way into the. Of the precursor of that job when SARS happened. So that was her first.
Leo Laporte [00:52:26]:
Yikes.
Joey de Villa [00:52:27]:
She entered the job on sars and she left after Covid was over.
Leo Laporte [00:52:30]:
Yeah. Little did she know, SARS was the warning shot for Covid. It was an airborne respiratory disease we thought would be as bad as Covid. Fortunately, kind of thanks to public health, people who really did Their job. Right.
Joey de Villa [00:52:49]:
It did not spread, and it was a. Yeah. And it was a big deal because it was spreading through the Asian community rather quickly. And my family, with the exception of me, I'm the black sheep. They're all Asian doctors. Wow. I'm the black sheep. I'm the black sheep.
Leo Laporte [00:53:04]:
Joey.
Joey de Villa [00:53:05]:
Yeah. I did.
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
You had to play the accordion.
Joey de Villa [00:53:09]:
Oh, no, we all have to play instruments. That's a rule. If you cannot perform on a variety show, you are in danger of losing Filipino citizenship.
Leo Laporte [00:53:18]:
Oh, you know what? That explains.
Joey de Villa [00:53:20]:
He is correct.
Leo Laporte [00:53:21]:
Benito. Yeah. He plays, like, every instrument. I'll be danged. So that's why, Benito, you play all those instruments. It's for the variety shows.
Joey de Villa [00:53:31]:
Well, everybody here.
Dan Patterson [00:53:32]:
Everybody here either sings or plays an instrument, like everybody.
Leo Laporte [00:53:35]:
That's nice. I think that's the right. That's something we've lost, I think, due to mass media, because it used before you had the radio and tv. Yeah. Entertain yourself of an evening.
Joey de Villa [00:53:46]:
Well, you know what? Filipino extended family gatherings. There's always talent show after dinner.
Leo Laporte [00:53:52]:
Oh, how fun. All right, well, we're going to take a break, and then we'll. We've been avoiding it, but I guess we'll have to talk about the government. There's a. There's a government information we got to talk about. FCC's been busy. There's so much going on, in fact, even an AI angle on this. But stay tuned.
Leo Laporte [00:54:17]:
We've got Joey Davila here, who coined one of Corey's best lines. I love it. Great to have you, Joey. GlobalNerdy.com is the website. Dan Patterson from news.dan patterson.com and Blackbird AI our show today, brought to you by this little. This little fella. Now, if you look at this, if you're not paying close attention, you might say, oh, that's a. That's an external USB drive.
Leo Laporte [00:54:42]:
It's about that shape. Little black box. But maybe if you look closely, you'll see there's. There's a bird on there. Is that a. That's like a canary. Yes, this is the thingst canary. And you know what this is? This is genius.
Leo Laporte [00:54:55]:
This is the security device everybody needs to have inside their network. Here's a question for you. If a bad guy were to penetrate your. Your perimeter defenses, your firewall, if a bad guy were to get into your network and start roaming around, started exfiltrating information, started planting time bombs and ransomware, how would you know? Would you know that somebody's in your network? They're clever. They don't Leave footprints behind. They erase their traces. How would you know? This is how you would know the things Canary. This is a honey pot that is brilliantly designed.
Leo Laporte [00:55:33]:
It can be deployed in minutes. It can impersonate anything. Now this one is a nas, a Synology nas. That's kind of what I always keep mine as. But you can make it a Windows server, you can make it a Linux server, you can light it up like a Christmas tree with every possible service, or pick a few judicious services like, I don't know, Windows RDP to publish. You can even make it things like a SCADA device. This could be a Siemens SCADA device, this can be a SharePoint server. Anyway, there are literally dozens and dozens of things and it's as easy as a dropdown menu picking the configuration.
Leo Laporte [00:56:10]:
And it is a perfect image. That's why it's a good honeypot. It's got the right Mac address. It actually duplicates a Synology Mac address. It has the right login fields. Everything looks real. But here's the thing. It doesn't look vulnerable to the bad guy.
Leo Laporte [00:56:29]:
It looks like it's something valuable, something they're going to want to take a look at. Oh, there's another thing you can do with this thing. Scannary. You can generate lure files, little files that can be anything from a wireguard configuration file to a Google Doc to a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet. And you can put them anywhere. By the way, I have on my Google Drive spreadsheets to say things like employee information. Oh man, that's juicy. You know, bad guy's going to try to open that.
Leo Laporte [00:56:57]:
But the minute they open the lure files or they try to brute force your, you know, your fake internal SSH server, you're going to get an alert. Your Thinks Canary will tell you you got a problem, there's somebody in your network. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And by the way, any way you want it. Text messages, email, they support webhooks, they have an API, they support syslog, any way you want it. Just choose a profile for Thinks Canary device. In fact, it's so easy you might change that profile every day if you want. It's very easy.
Leo Laporte [00:57:30]:
Register it with a hosted console for monitoring and notifications. And then you sit back, you relax, you wait. An intruder who's breached your network or an evil maid, a malicious insider, they cannot help but make themselves known by accessing those files or that fake device, your Thinks Canary. This is a must have for anybody who's got A network to protect. You know, we always say security is a layered system. It's not just one thing. It's not just a perimeter defense. You've got to have something inside that'll tell you if you've been penetrated.
Leo Laporte [00:58:04]:
Visit Canary Tools Twit. You know, if you're a big bank casino backend operation, you know somebody that's under attack, which is all of us these days you might have dozens or hundreds of these. A small business like ours might just have a handful. But I'll give you an idea. For 7,500 bucks a year, you get five things to Canaries. That includes your own hosted console, that includes upgrades, that includes support and maintenance. And by the way, if you use the code Twit in the how did you hear about us Box, you're going to get 10% off for as long as you have your think scanneries. 10% off.
Leo Laporte [00:58:38]:
You can always. Oh, if there's any, you know, if you have any like qualms, you should know you can always return your Thinks canary. With their two month money back guarantee, you'll get a full refund. Two months, 60 days. So there's no risk at all. I should tell you though, they've been advertising with us now nine years and that refund guarantee has never, not once been claimed. Because once you get these things canaries in your network, you're going to go, how did I live without it? Especially if it. If you get that alert.
Leo Laporte [00:59:11]:
I did. You know, we've had these on our networks for some time. It's only been triggered once. No false alerts. That's what I love. But when you get that alert. We got the alert. Somebody is sniffing the IP address at the canary.
Leo Laporte [00:59:24]:
We immediately was coming from inside the house. We tracked it down. It was a kind of a rogue western digital device that for some reason decided to check every port in the house immediately took that off the network, believe me. But I was really gratified to know if anybody's in there, I'm going to know about it. Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code Twit in the how did you hear about US box. 10% off for as long as you have them. Canary Tools slash Twit.
Leo Laporte [00:59:50]:
We thank them so much for their support and for helping protect our little network, our little, our little podcast network. Yes, I did. Yes, we got off lucky. Well, it reminds you of a bird because it's the canary in the coal mine, right? It's warning you something's wrong. Something's wrong. One of the things that Happened while we weren't paying attention. Congress has proposed a suite of bills that many of us have called the Bad Internet Bills. There's a Screen Act.
Leo Laporte [01:00:31]:
This is all from Salon. Congress may be about to create the Bad Internet. Just want you to be aware of these. The Screen act is going to do federally what many states have done. An age verification requirement for any website. And why porn? No, any website Congress decides is harmful to minors. Any website. That's the Screen Act.
Leo Laporte [01:00:57]:
The Cooper Davis act would require any electronic communications service provider, your ISP to report knowledge of drug related offenses to the dea. Well, wait a minute. What if, what if my communications are end to end? Encrypted? Oh, no, no. You have to know what's. You have to have the clear text. No. No encryption allowed.
Joey de Villa [01:01:18]:
It's the 90s again. Do you remember when they wanted all encrypted communications to have a backdoor?
Leo Laporte [01:01:24]:
They still do. Yeah. Never gave that up.
Joey de Villa [01:01:28]:
By the way, which Screen Act? There are two of them. I know. And they work. They worked really hard on these acronyms. Probably harder than on the build.
Leo Laporte [01:01:37]:
This is, this is a backronym, isn't it? So Mike Lee's Screen act, which has been floating around for a while because there's Shielding Children's retinas. Shielding Children's retinas from Egregious Exposure on the Net Act.
Dan Patterson [01:01:57]:
It'll have to move fast, though. I mean this, this would have to really get through committee.
Leo Laporte [01:02:03]:
Yeah, I don't, I don't know where.
Dan Patterson [01:02:04]:
It's nine months. I just don't.
Leo Laporte [01:02:06]:
It's probably, it's probably over. You think? I mean.
Dan Patterson [01:02:09]:
Well, I don't know if it's over, but I just.
Leo Laporte [01:02:10]:
Congress has another year before the end, right? Yeah.
Dan Patterson [01:02:13]:
And this has been. I'm without getting into any sort of partisan.
Leo Laporte [01:02:17]:
It's been read twice and referred to the committee, but nothing much has happened.
Dan Patterson [01:02:21]:
And it's been a very unproductive Congress. They have just a few months, I mean, maybe six months. Everybody's going to start campaigning now. So it's really. I mean, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:02:32]:
This is. I just want COSIS back. It will not die. Right.
Dan Patterson [01:02:37]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:02:39]:
It's the Jason of.
Leo Laporte [01:02:41]:
Yes, but not Jason. Jason, Jason.
Joey de Villa [01:02:45]:
Jason Voorhees. But no, that, that acronym works hard. Harder than the people who came up with it.
Leo Laporte [01:02:51]:
Screen. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:02:53]:
And then there's the other one. Stopping Communist Regimes from Engaging in Edits now. Act, that's the other screen. There are two screen acts.
Leo Laporte [01:03:03]:
Who knew that that word could have two different meanings? COSA is the child of the kids, Sorry, Online Safety act, and that's another one that will require platforms to identify minors and censor content as decided by the states. They're still attacking section 230. They're, they're not giving up. And I think it's important that we remember that and pay attention. But you're right, Dan. Maybe there's some hope because it's such a Do nothing.
Dan Patterson [01:03:34]:
I'm trying not. I don't want to minimize the importance of our, of not taking for granted the freedoms that we currently have on the Internet. And our friend Corey would loudly remind us that this is very important, but from a practical standpoint. And I just think about this as I covered politics for many years, and I just think about what are the practical implications of something like this. And it just will be very difficult in the next year for this to happen. And if the Democrats regain the House, it's unlikely that this will. Anything will happen other than their attempts to go after the current president.
Leo Laporte [01:04:24]:
So we got another three years of nothing, basically, is what you said.
Dan Patterson [01:04:28]:
Maybe. I, I, again, it sounds like I'm minimizing this, and I don't want to do that, but I, I just think about, like, what is the.
Leo Laporte [01:04:34]:
It's not hair on fire. I will grant you that.
Dan Patterson [01:04:36]:
Yes. Right. I, I just don't want to put hair and like, have our hair on fire and go, omg.
Leo Laporte [01:04:41]:
No, because what happens. We've had our hair on Fire for 10 years now. What happens is eventually you just go, you know, my hair's on fire.
Dan Patterson [01:04:47]:
Bingo. That's exactly right. And cynicism is a tool of autocrats. And so when we go, oh, my goodness, everything is bad, everything is terrible. It really, it makes so many people dial out. And instead, we need to just look at what's in front of us. And what's in front of us is a busy campaign season.
Leo Laporte [01:05:09]:
Okay. That's a. I'm very glad my hair's out now. It's been doused.
Joey de Villa [01:05:14]:
I am. Yeah. I am counting on, I'm counting on this administration being ideologically ambitious but operationally sad.
Dan Patterson [01:05:25]:
That's very wise.
Leo Laporte [01:05:27]:
What's that acronym? I, A, O, S or you and get a K in there. You got chaos.
Dan Patterson [01:05:34]:
Congress has been like that for, for years. Like, Congress's ability to be productive has been disappointing.
Leo Laporte [01:05:42]:
Well, the states maybe are a little bit more effective. On the day after Christmas, Governor Hochul signed a New York state law that requires social media platforms to display warning labels similar to those found on cigarettes.
Dan Patterson [01:05:57]:
Right next door. Cookie Labels.
Leo Laporte [01:05:59]:
That's really done a lot of good. Of course, Australia has banned social media for kids under 16 and that is now spreading. Denmark says they want to do same thing. France is the latest. We tried to get Patrick Beja on the show because I wanted to get him to talk about that. He lives in Paris. There is some good news, though. Texas had a app store age verification law that was set to take effect this month and a federal judge has now blocked that.
Leo Laporte [01:06:28]:
It's only a preliminary injunction. It's not dead. This is SB2420, the Texas app Store Accountability act, which was passed and signed into law. Judge Robert Pittman said it's akin to a law, quote, akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they tried to purchase a book. In other words, a violation of the First Amendment. He hasn't ruled on the merits of the case, but he has, he feels, I guess there is enough concern about it to grant an injunction so that it does not go into effect. So that's Utah, Louisiana, similar laws. These aren't anti porn laws specifically, these are, these are censorship laws.
Joey de Villa [01:07:24]:
Yeah. Basically it's 21st century. A lot of it's probably rooted in 21st century equivalent of book burning.
Leo Laporte [01:07:32]:
Book burning, exactly. They've done it in libraries, now they want to do it on the Internet. The, the suit was brought by the Community Computer Communications Industry association ccia, including Apple, Google and Meta. CCIA said the law imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps. Of course, Google and Apple do not want to have to make their app stores be, you know, the guardian.
Joey de Villa [01:08:04]:
Yeah. Because they already have to do that a fair bit already. I remember, I remember when I was, when I was doing product management at a fee for service software development company, having to fight with the App Store, trying to convince them that the app that my company was putting out on behalf of a client was not tobacco related.
Leo Laporte [01:08:28]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, so that's the interesting conundrum here. I mean, I can understand why you'd want to prevent tobacco related apps, especially those aimed at young people in the App Store.
Joey de Villa [01:08:41]:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Leo Laporte [01:08:43]:
And I also, you know, we've talked about this a lot on our show Security. Now our guru, Steve Gibson is of the opinion that the best place to do this is on the phone. On the. Because Apple already knows your age probably and they have an API already that can be Called by apps to say what group, what age group is this person in? They have parental controls that let parents not say a birth date, not say the user of this phone is 12 years old. But to say which group, which age group this kid falls into, which is good. I think the parent should be allowed to be the one to decide that. So it does seem like technologically anyway, Apple has. Is.
Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
Is the choke point. That's a good place to do it.
Joey de Villa [01:09:30]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:09:33]:
And by the way, the Texas law which required age verification for porn still stands.
Joey de Villa [01:09:38]:
Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:09:39]:
The judge said this one is too broad. This goes too far.
Dan Patterson [01:09:46]:
Does Australia have a similar law?
Leo Laporte [01:09:50]:
Yeah, they have. Yes. As of December 11th in Australia, you have to do age verification to YouTube.
Joey de Villa [01:09:57]:
Not social media.
Leo Laporte [01:09:58]:
Yeah, YouTube, Twitter, you know, meta, Facebook, you know, a variety of social media sites. Some are left out unaccountably. YouTube's the big one to me. I mean, if I were a 16 year old in Australia and I couldn't look at YouTube, I'd feel pretty peeved. That's a VPN, by the way.
Joey de Villa [01:10:20]:
Well, that's the thing, actually. New Year's 2025. The number of friends who approached me asking about VPNs for a friend. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:10:29]:
Yeah. It is a boon, isn't it? Our VPN sponsor loves these laws. But wait a minute. Think about it. That means the next step is to ban VPNs. That's going to be a little harder to get through. But. But, but lawmakers are already considering that, talking about that.
Joey de Villa [01:10:49]:
That will be. But that means that VPNs will go underground.
Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
You can't ban it because businesses rely on VPNs. How are you going to ban VPNs?
Joey de Villa [01:10:57]:
Yeah, it's going to be too hard. And even then. Yeah, we were back around. I worked on the user interface for a Cult of the Dead Cow project. Remember that?
Leo Laporte [01:11:10]:
Cool. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:11:12]:
Pikaboody.
Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
I remember Peekabooty.
Joey de Villa [01:11:15]:
Yeah. So I was the. No, I was the. I was the user interface programmer for that.
Leo Laporte [01:11:18]:
Oh, man.
Joey de Villa [01:11:19]:
Yeah. And the dev rel guide we had.
Leo Laporte [01:11:22]:
Back in the tech TV days. We had the Cult of the Dead Cow and the Woo Woo people on talking about Peekabooty. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:11:29]:
So it was me and Cult of the Dead Cow developer Drunken Master who worked on it.
Leo Laporte [01:11:37]:
Wow. You have some deep roots.
Joey de Villa [01:11:42]:
I just kind of fall. I just kind of land in the right place at the right time. I'm trying to be the 21st century equivalent of Zelig. Do you remember that? Woody Allen.
Leo Laporte [01:11:52]:
Yeah. Zelig he was everywhere.
Joey de Villa [01:11:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:11:54]:
So Pikaboodi was a. Was a peer to peer file sharing thing, right?
Joey de Villa [01:11:58]:
Actually was a peer to peer distributed proto vpn. I guess that's the best way to describe it. Yeah. And basically it was a network of computers that acted. A network of personal computers that acted as a vpn. So if you were.
Leo Laporte [01:12:13]:
It's a little like hamachi or tailscale or something.
Joey de Villa [01:12:16]:
Yeah, kind of like it. So you were either on the bad side of the Great Wall of China where you were trying to reach out. Reach sites outside, or you were on this side of the great Firewall and you were providing those. You were acting as the VPN for someone random randomly in China.
Leo Laporte [01:12:32]:
Wow. Huh.
Joey de Villa [01:12:34]:
And yeah, we presented that at Codecon back in 2002, I think.
Leo Laporte [01:12:39]:
Cool. Wow.
Joey de Villa [01:12:41]:
So, yeah, that was br. Yeah, that was Bram Cohen's thing.
Leo Laporte [01:12:44]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before. Before BitTorrent.
Joey de Villa [01:12:48]:
Yeah, just before. Yeah, just before BitTorrent because I ended up participating in the BitTorrent test.
Leo Laporte [01:12:53]:
Oh, neat.
Joey de Villa [01:12:54]:
Yeah, because I know him from Mojo Nation back. And this is when Open Cola was active and I was living in San Francisco at the time, doing the developer relations there.
Leo Laporte [01:13:05]:
I feel like our lives have intersected and we've. You know, I don't know how we never met in person because we have.
Joey de Villa [01:13:12]:
In Toronto every now and again. When you. Because you did G4 Tech TV events.
Leo Laporte [01:13:17]:
Did you come by the show?
Joey de Villa [01:13:18]:
Never by the show, just to events.
Leo Laporte [01:13:22]:
Oh, yeah, you. I have a picture of you playing the accordion with me and. And Amber.
Joey de Villa [01:13:25]:
Amber Mac.
Leo Laporte [01:13:26]:
Yeah, that's right.
Joey de Villa [01:13:27]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:13:28]:
No, you came to.
Joey de Villa [01:13:28]:
Yeah, yeah, I generally went to Amber back.
Leo Laporte [01:13:30]:
It's like at a bar or somewhere.
Joey de Villa [01:13:32]:
Yeah, yeah, I remember that because Amber. Amber was the one who also convinced two cows that they needed a children's TV show and that I would be a great host. So it was me and a puppet.
Leo Laporte [01:13:42]:
As you would be. What was the puppet's name?
Joey de Villa [01:13:45]:
Junior. The show was called Developer Junior and it was me and a puppet friend, and we did two episodes. The only reason we didn't do more is that Microsoft did not have a budget for a tween audience.
Leo Laporte [01:13:58]:
Oh, man, I gotta see if my puppet is up here or not.
Joey de Villa [01:14:03]:
Oh, hey.
Leo Laporte [01:14:03]:
Oh, I don't know where my puppet went. So. Yeah, I had a Leo puppet. I think I might have given it away.
Joey de Villa [01:14:10]:
It was me and puppeteer Brian Hogg.
Leo Laporte [01:14:12]:
Oh, Brian. Yeah, he made. He made the Leo puppet.
Joey de Villa [01:14:15]:
Oh, okay. There we go. Well, Brian also made a puppet called Junior.
Leo Laporte [01:14:21]:
Yeah, he's the guy who Made my puppet.
Joey de Villa [01:14:23]:
Oh, there we go.
Leo Laporte [01:14:24]:
Yeah, That's a small world. I'm sorry, I don't mean to leave you out, Dan.
Dan Patterson [01:14:32]:
This is some great history.
Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
It's wild. I had no idea. Joey, where is my puppet? Now you've got me going. I hope I didn't give it away.
Joey de Villa [01:14:42]:
Yeah, I remember hearing about this puppet.
Leo Laporte [01:14:45]:
Yeah, he made a Leo. In fact, at one point we did a puppet reenactment of the first Twit.
Joey de Villa [01:14:52]:
Oh, wow.
Leo Laporte [01:14:53]:
It's, I think, still on YouTube. If you. If you want to see my. My Leo puppet, the Brian Hogg. But I wonder if I can find that twit puppet. That should be enough to get.
Joey de Villa [01:15:06]:
You'd think.
Leo Laporte [01:15:10]:
I mean, how many twit puppets could there be? Oh, no, unfortunately, twit has a lot of.
Joey de Villa [01:15:17]:
A lot of meanings.
Leo Laporte [01:15:18]:
A lot of meanings. About this week in Tech Puppet Video. We're gonna take a little break while I do this search. And I'm sure that Patrick Delahanty, our engineer, has a link that he will put up in the. In the discord. If you're a Club Twit member, that's where you go for that kind of weirdness. We are so glad you're here. Happy New Year to you all.
Leo Laporte [01:15:43]:
2026 is here and we are going to continue doing what we do thanks to you guys in the club. Make a big difference to our bottom line. We really appreciate it. If you're not yet in Club Twit, you're missing out. We do a lot of special content. As I mentioned. On Friday we had our AI user group. We do that every month.
Leo Laporte [01:16:02]:
And it's really a great deep dive into the ins and outs of actually using AI things like Claude, Claude code and other other things. We also had a fascinating interview with a guy who was a talent coordinator, worked on Letterman, worked on Saturday Night Live, and has written a book called Love Johnny Carson. He interviewed over 500 people about Johnny Carson. He was a big Johnny Carson fan. We talked about Johnny Carson for an hour. I know that's maybe a little bit out of our ballpark, but it was a fun conversation with Mark Malkoff, the author of Love Johnny Carson. Those are both now on the Twit plus feed. Actually, I think we're going to make that Malkoff interview public so you can see that on our YouTube channel as well.
Leo Laporte [01:16:48]:
But that's all possible, made possible by club members like you. So if you're not a member and you want to get ad free versions of all our shows and you want to get access to the Club Twit Discord, where there's always a party going on. If you want to get access to those special shows we do and support the special programming we do. And of course support all the programming we do. About 25% of our operating costs are paid for by the club. It's that important to us. Please go to Twitter, TV Club Twit. We would love to have you as a member.
Leo Laporte [01:17:19]:
And a special thanks to all the folks who have been such generous contributors to our programming. We appreciate it. Twit. TV Club Twit. We also appreciate our sponsors and I want to thank Monarch this week, our sponsor for this segment of this Week in Tech. Wouldn't it be nice? Let's start the new year right. Reduce money stress. That's the worst thing, you know, when they, when they talk about the things couples mostly fight about.
Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
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Leo Laporte [01:18:16]:
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Leo Laporte [01:19:03]:
And Monarch's auto categorization of your expenditures is perfect. You set it up very quick and easy to all your accounts, including, by the way, your investment accounts. Everything. I put it all in there. It's completely private. This is why you don't want to use one of those free tools. You want to use a paid tool so that you are the customer. Right? Completely private.
Leo Laporte [01:19:22]:
But now it auto categorizes everything that happens. You get automated weekly money recaps. You can track your progress towards future financial goals. I had to make a budget for me. I didn't. I didn't want to think about it. It's easier than ever to stay financially fit, both in the short term and the long term. And, you know, if you're like me, on the verge of retirement where, you know, fixed incomes just down the road, this is pretty important, actually.
Leo Laporte [01:19:47]:
It's important even if you're a young person, you got to. Retirement's not as far off as you might think. You gotta be planning for the future. I told my kid this. He said, dad, what should I. How should I invest? I said, first get Monarch. Monarch's different because unlike most other personal finance apps, it's built to make you proactive, not just reactive. And they have added some really nice new AI tools built on Monarch Intelligence, the core infrastructure that powers the app.
Leo Laporte [01:20:14]:
Monarch Intelligence is a better AI because it's trained on actual, authentic, collective wisdom of certified financial planners and financial advisors. It's got that knowledge built in, and then it has your data so it can see and it can plan and it can help you. You'll get real user results. Actually, let me tell you what some Monarch users reported. They did a survey at the end of the year. Monarch helped users save over $200 a month on average. $200 a month. Just after joining 8 out of 10, 80% of monarch members feel more in control of their finances with Monarch.
Leo Laporte [01:20:49]:
I'll raise my hand on that one. 80% say monarch gives them a clearer picture of where their money's going, that's for sure. You probably made a resolution this New Year's to kind of plan a little bit better this year. Achieve your financial goals for good. Monarch, the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Use code twitonarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with code twit. They didn't have that when I signed up.
Leo Laporte [01:21:22]:
It was worth every penny. Now it's even more valuable. Monarch.com offer code TWIT. Thank you, Monarch. Thank you. I really appreciate it. You've made a big difference in my life. Back to the show.
Leo Laporte [01:21:35]:
We go with a very prestigious panel. It's great to have Joey de Villa here. I had no idea Joey and I had all these connections going back to Brian Hogg, of all things, and Dan Patterson, who I've known for. It must be 10 years. 15. It's been a long time, Dan.
Dan Patterson [01:21:52]:
2009 was my first twit.
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
2009, 16 years. That's nice. 2009. We had just gotten going Practically back.
Dan Patterson [01:22:02]:
Then I think Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis were.
Leo Laporte [01:22:06]:
Oh, I was listening to that show again, you mentioned that and I thought, oh that's fun, I have to listen. And that show, not only that, Jason kept bringing celebrities on like it was a, it was a wild show and I really enjoy it. Actually made me feel good. I thought, you know what, this isn't a bad show. This isn't such a bad show. I really enjoy. I was doing my tactics. I remember this.
Leo Laporte [01:22:31]:
It was. So was April and you mentioned that you. That was your first show and I listened to it and I thought that's pretty darn good. Weirdly you remember the federal government goes back and forth on this. There was a embargo on Chinese chips being sold, American ships being sold to China for AI. Weirdly in Jensen Huang, I don't know, he went to the president, had dinner with him. President said, you know what, you could sell those H200 chips to China. Go right ahead.
Leo Laporte [01:23:02]:
China's response was yeah, we don't want them. The US has just approved Samsung and SK Hynix can ship their chip making tools to China this year.
Dan Patterson [01:23:13]:
Huh.
Leo Laporte [01:23:16]:
Well it's so confusing. It's so confusing. They do this I guess every year and so I guess it could change. TSMC also exempt. I'm just gonna. Without comment, I shall just say this without comment, I don't understand.
Joey de Villa [01:23:46]:
What about the super precise Dutch chip.
Leo Laporte [01:23:51]:
Making equipment, the Ah yes, which the Chinese have now reverse engineered, have they?
Joey de Villa [01:23:57]:
I thought they were having trouble with it.
Leo Laporte [01:23:59]:
Well, they were because it is. If you've looked at this machine, this is ASML holding and they make EUV extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. It's 200 million dollar machine. If you look at this machine, it is a Rube Goldberg device and so very difficult to reverse engineer. Except the Chinese got a former employee of this company to come over ASML to come over and work for them. And I last I saw they believe they have a working prototype of the SML EUV machine. We've been blocking them getting that because that's what allows these really tiny, you know, 3 nanometer, 2 nanometer processes. Yeah, so I think you give up on that.
Joey de Villa [01:24:54]:
Were they not. I mean my understanding is, and this is from Peter Zion's book, so the geopolitics guy right, in Colorado and he was talking about how it wasn't until 2017 or 2018 that the Chinese were not able to completely homemake ballpoint pens.
Leo Laporte [01:25:13]:
Really?
Joey de Villa [01:25:14]:
Huh. The ball bearing is too, is too precise. They could they needed to have external equipment to make that.
Leo Laporte [01:25:22]:
But if you read Apple in China.
Dan Patterson [01:25:23]:
I was just gonna say.
Joey de Villa [01:25:25]:
Yeah, but that's the thing. How, how do these two things. Apple.
Leo Laporte [01:25:30]:
So the Chinese government gave very, very friendly terms to Apple. They basically built cities. You know, the iPhone city, they built that out of nothing. And of course, Terry Gow of Foxconn was instrumental in that. And China, Apple could not resist. It's a great story. The book Apple in China, Apple could not resist, but that involved a huge transfer of technology to China. And so they have all these capabilities.
Leo Laporte [01:25:57]:
So here's the story from Christmas Eve on. Tom's Hardware, China's reverse engineered Frankenstein EUV chip making tool, hasn't produced. So you're not wrong, Joey has not produced a single chip. It's still years away from becoming operational. Not because the machine doesn't work, but because the supply chain for the machine.
Dan Patterson [01:26:19]:
Oh, so interesting. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:26:23]:
So you can build it, but you've then got to feed it, right?
Dan Patterson [01:26:27]:
You have.
Leo Laporte [01:26:28]:
Yes.
Dan Patterson [01:26:29]:
You need the components, right.
Joey de Villa [01:26:32]:
Ultra pure silicon and the necessary impurities that actually make the circuits.
Leo Laporte [01:26:38]:
But I, but yeah, that's, that's what doping is, isn't it?
Joey de Villa [01:26:41]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:26:41]:
Making it impure. I would not count against China.
Joey de Villa [01:26:46]:
Oh, no.
Leo Laporte [01:26:48]:
Getting there. It may not be there today, it may not be there this year, but at some point that's going to happen. And are we, I mean, I understand we want to be. We're so afraid of China that they would get these chips and use them militarily. Is that what we're afraid of or are we being protectionist for American companies?
Dan Patterson [01:27:10]:
Yeah, I think it's geopolitical or geo economical. Geo economical. I invented that.
Leo Laporte [01:27:17]:
It's not a strategic necessity, it's an economic necessity.
Dan Patterson [01:27:21]:
Yeah, I think so.
Leo Laporte [01:27:23]:
So I submitted, submitted for your approval. Exhibit A, the DJI drone ban. The U.S. at the end of the year, the FCC banned not just Chinese drones, but all drones not made in the United States of America.
Joey de Villa [01:27:44]:
Do we make drones in the us? I don't even know. Well, I'm trying to think of a use.
Leo Laporte [01:27:51]:
Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr. Owns stock in and advises several American drone startups that have received billions in loans and subsidies from the Pentagon. So there is, I think, good reason to believe that this ban of all foreign made, not just dji, you could say, oh, well, well, we don't want DJI to drones in the United States because they have, you know, they're a Chinese company, China government, the PRC has golden shares in the company. They have involvement with the Chinese military, et cetera, et cetera, you could make that case. But this is drones made everywhere in the world.
Joey de Villa [01:28:38]:
And well, the, this Trumpson's drone company, is it strictly military? Because there are, there's a lot of agricultural uses for drones.
Leo Laporte [01:28:49]:
Oh, there's a lot of reasons why you would want good drones.
Joey de Villa [01:28:53]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:28:54]:
If you have, by the way, a DJI drone or another non US made drone, you can continue to operate it. They didn't ban its use, they just can't buy new ones.
Joey de Villa [01:29:05]:
About parts.
Leo Laporte [01:29:07]:
Ah, that's an interesting question. Can you get it fixed?
Joey de Villa [01:29:11]:
Yeah, no, because. Yeah. On the startup bus tour we visited University of Florida and they were talking about all the agricultural uses of drones that they were, that they were working with for the future, but also present day use of agricultural drones for things like looking for diseased crops, optimizing irrigation, actually doing crop dusting. Very precise crop dusting.
Leo Laporte [01:29:42]:
Yeah, well, and there's massive military use. In fact, we used in the invasion of Venezuela on Saturday. A lot of that was supported by drones.
Joey de Villa [01:29:51]:
Sure. And yeah, same thing's happening in the Russo Ukraine war.
Leo Laporte [01:29:55]:
That's right. 70%. DJI has 70% market share on drones in the U.S. so I guess you could say it is a ban against dji. The other companies don't make much different, much difference in the equation. But it is all foreign made drones. It's not just dji. Carl Bode writing at techdirt, Trump's drone ban is corrupt protectionist nonsense dressed up as a national security fix.
Leo Laporte [01:30:29]:
But there may be consequences, right?
Joey de Villa [01:30:34]:
Law enforcement, military, shortages everywhere.
Leo Laporte [01:30:38]:
Agriculture, industry, real estate.
Joey de Villa [01:30:45]:
Possibly, possibly even rock and roll. Because you have to remember that Randy Rhodes, Ozzy Osbourne's guitarist, died while in a crop duster joyride.
Leo Laporte [01:30:57]:
I did not know that. Oh, that's right. Very famously. Almost hit the bus.
Joey de Villa [01:31:01]:
Oh no, it clipped the bus.
Leo Laporte [01:31:03]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:31:03]:
And that's why it went crashing into the ground. Because the bus driver, they were staying at a farm. The bus driver said, hey look, a crop duster who wants to go for a ride.
Leo Laporte [01:31:12]:
Oh man. Randy was an amazing guitarist.
Joey de Villa [01:31:15]:
Oh, absolutely.
Leo Laporte [01:31:18]:
Bodhi writes some US drone makers asked Daddy to protect them from global market competition. And he did. Now US consumers have to pay twice as much money for much crappier technology. Instead of translating the proceeds into new jobs, better tech or lower prices, the executives at the companies responsible will simply pocket the proceeds. It's not about national security. I think we might American labor.
Dan Patterson [01:31:42]:
It's not about industrializing across consumer and business technology for the foreseeable future.
Leo Laporte [01:31:51]:
That.
Dan Patterson [01:31:51]:
There is just a slowdown. And because of these protectionist policies, it might be far more difficult to advance products and capabilities at the rate that we've seen in the last decade or so.
Leo Laporte [01:32:08]:
I mean, I can go on and on. I don't. I don't want to. Wired magazine story, December 31. Fears mount. US federal cybersecurity is stagnating or worse, government staffing cuts and instability. CISA pretty much shut down. Right.
Leo Laporte [01:32:25]:
They closed down 18F and they closed down the United States Digital Service and realized, oh, my God, those people we need. So they've created. What do they call it? Cyber force.
Dan Patterson [01:32:38]:
Yeah, on the defensive end. I. A defensive cyber. I think offensive cyber was deployed in Venezuela.
Leo Laporte [01:32:45]:
Oh, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [01:32:49]:
So it's some. It's shifted our posture or it appears to have shifted her posture.
Leo Laporte [01:32:54]:
But FCC has also killed a plan. You. May I. We were very excited about this. The Cyber Trust Mark program, an FCC plan to improve home security. The idea was when you bought a home security device, it would have a stamp on it certifying that the smart home device, whether it's a router, a camera, a door lock, would meet certain cybersecurity standards. Approved products that have a shield icon in the package, like an energy star sticker. It was launched last year at Cesar.
Leo Laporte [01:33:33]:
Nobody's put the mark on. And the. Apparently the FCC has now decided to kill it. That's disturbing. Underwriters Lab, which was going to be the safety testing company, announced it's stepping down. And that's because the FCC has been investigating Underwriters Lab. Four ties with China. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:34:01]:
Anyway. Yeah, this is. This is not good. This doesn't make us more secure, doesn't make things better, doesn't make us safer. It's a little scary. But on the other hand, Waymo has updated its cars now, so when there's a power outage next time in San Francisco, they won't all stop in the road.
Joey de Villa [01:34:27]:
Oh, my.
Leo Laporte [01:34:29]:
This was a big problem. San Francisco got a big power outage. And Waymo said, well, because the cars won't operate with the traffic lights aren't working, we're just. We're gonna pause our service. The thing is, the cars didn't go back to the barn. They just stopped in the middle of.
Dan Patterson [01:34:47]:
The street, paused their service.
Leo Laporte [01:34:49]:
They just stopped working.
Joey de Villa [01:34:56]:
Probably because they rely on. They rely on those traffic lights.
Leo Laporte [01:34:59]:
Yeah, they don't have. They don't know how to. I guess. I mean, it's for safety I guess.
Joey de Villa [01:35:06]:
I mean, I don't trust humans. Never mind. When the traffic lights are out and we're all trying to figure out, okay, which one of us goes next.
Leo Laporte [01:35:17]:
Most humans treated the traffic lights that were at as four way stops, right?
Joey de Villa [01:35:21]:
As a four way stop. That's right. But yeah, cars.
Leo Laporte [01:35:26]:
Anyway, they would freeze in the intersection.
Joey de Villa [01:35:29]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:35:30]:
Ironically, two days later, after the power outage was cleared, Power's back. But then the National Weather Service issued a warning about a powerful storm. So Waymo stopped again. Is this making our city streets better? Is this improvement over cabs? I don't know.
Dan Patterson [01:35:51]:
I live in New York City and all of these things are like normal human drivers in the middle of the.
Joey de Villa [01:35:56]:
Street.
Leo Laporte [01:35:58]:
Everybody just stops. Yeah. What happens when the power goes out in New York? That's a disaster.
Dan Patterson [01:36:04]:
It is a disaster. Well, it's not that. I mean it's a disaster, but New Yorkers, they survive, flip you off and swear, continue to drive.
Joey de Villa [01:36:14]:
Yeah, you, yeah, they figure it out.
Leo Laporte [01:36:16]:
Hey, I'm driving here. Out of my way, buddy.
Dan Patterson [01:36:21]:
I would, I mean I would and I would absolutely not like to see Waymo navigate the Holland Tunnel during rush hour.
Leo Laporte [01:36:32]:
So you don't have Waymo yet in the Manhattan?
Dan Patterson [01:36:35]:
Not that I'm aware of.
Leo Laporte [01:36:38]:
You can't miss these cars. They're Jaguar. I misses with all sorts of worrying.
Dan Patterson [01:36:43]:
Loud here and I think I don't know that it would survive.
Leo Laporte [01:36:48]:
Did, did, are you of the opinion that Uber caused traffic congestion in New York City?
Dan Patterson [01:36:54]:
Well, I want to be careful with my opinions, but it sure seemed that way. I remember when Uber came to New York City and certainly remember their, their policies, which has been mimicked by a number of tech companies. They simply just came into New York City despite regulations and operated until they changed regulations. And now I see a heck of a lot less yellow cabs.
Leo Laporte [01:37:19]:
Yeah, yeah, unfortunately.
Dan Patterson [01:37:22]:
So although you know, did it cause.
Leo Laporte [01:37:25]:
A lot of women like Waymo because there's no driver? I know many women will not do Uber or they will request a female driver. They just are scared. And I'm sure it's the same with cabs. And so they like. I know a number of women who say, oh, you know, I far prefer Waymo because it's safer.
Dan Patterson [01:37:42]:
Yeah, so do I. Or at least who have said similar things about Uber and Lyfts. Did it cause, did it create congestion? I don't know because that would look New Yorkers are going to take a cab or take a car regardless as to whether it's an Uber or yellow cabin.
Leo Laporte [01:38:04]:
Right. The cars are still going to be there.
Dan Patterson [01:38:06]:
I guess the cars are going to be there.
Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
Yeah. Although apparently that congestion pricing has been very helpful.
Dan Patterson [01:38:11]:
It seems like it has.
Leo Laporte [01:38:13]:
Yeah. Paying just a little. It's not a huge fee, but paying a little fee to come into town during high traffic hours. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [01:38:20]:
And everybody just goes on the west side highway or the fdr. Anyway, like if you're going uptown, like you're, you're not going through. You're not going up Broadway.
Leo Laporte [01:38:27]:
No. So Professor Panda, who is one of our good friends who lives in Chinatown in Manhattan, says Wayo is still in beta in New York City. He does see them roaming around and mapping. Huh?
Dan Patterson [01:38:38]:
I have, I have never seen one.
Leo Laporte [01:38:41]:
Yeah, you can't miss them.
Dan Patterson [01:38:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:38:43]:
Phoenix, San Francisco, including San Jose. They just announced that they're going to be in our neck of the woods as well. Although I doubt they'll come up here because I don't think there's enough business to make it worthwhile. We barely have Uber. Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and they're expanding soon into Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio. Good Lord. Orlando.
Joey de Villa [01:39:03]:
They've been testing here in Tampa. There was one right on my street and I'm on a residential street.
Leo Laporte [01:39:08]:
Well, that's the fun in San Francisco because there are certain neighborhoods in San Francisco with waymo congestion problems. There's like places you can't turn right and the waymos get confused and so they bottleneck up.
Joey de Villa [01:39:22]:
Oh, well, what about the, the DDoS that somebody pulled? He got, they, they, he got a bunch of people to call several waymos to a dead end street where they all block each other.
Leo Laporte [01:39:33]:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can hack them. Well, that's maybe why at Mayor Mamdani, by the way, congratulations on your, on your new socialist Mayor Zero. He. At his inauguration, they banned Flipper Zeros. Not just guns and bombs, but Raspberry PIs and Flipper Zeros.
Dan Patterson [01:39:54]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:39:54]:
As they should. I had a Flipper. I played with it. It was fun. I taught it how to break into our offices back when we had the door key thing. And then I thought, you know, I'm going to give this to a real hacker. I gave it to Father Abalisaire, the Digital Jesuit, so that he could hack the Vatican.
Dan Patterson [01:40:13]:
I've put it into my shopping cart and been inches from purchase. And then I thank you. What am I going to do with this that doesn't involve getting into trouble?
Leo Laporte [01:40:23]:
That's the right question. It's pretty cool. You can play Snake on it, but I think that's more for plausible Deniability. If the authorities say. What's that?
Joey de Villa [01:40:34]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:40:34]:
What's that, kid? Oh, it's my snake box.
Dan Patterson [01:40:36]:
I mean, I think until pretty recently it would be. And most people I know would have no idea what it is. But I think law enforcement probably has an understanding. But I think you could walk around with it in your pocket and most people wouldn't know.
Leo Laporte [01:40:53]:
It's not illegal. This is a little. It's a. It's not.
Joey de Villa [01:40:57]:
Not here in Canada. It might be.
Leo Laporte [01:41:00]:
Oh, really?
Joey de Villa [01:41:01]:
Yes. Oh, I remember hearing something about it. I don't know what the definitive ruling on that was.
Leo Laporte [01:41:07]:
Oh, I'm just looking to see where they prohibited items. Large bags, weapons, fireworks, explosives, drones, strollers, coolers, laser pens, Flipper Zeros and Raspberry PIs.
Joey de Villa [01:41:23]:
Why Raspberry PI?
Dan Patterson [01:41:25]:
Because you can make it.
Joey de Villa [01:41:26]:
I guess.
Leo Laporte [01:41:27]:
Flipper Zero is just a Raspberry PI.
Joey de Villa [01:41:29]:
With a nice costume.
Leo Laporte [01:41:31]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:41:33]:
Big and clunky. But at that point, you know, they gotta ban the wifi. Pineapple.
Leo Laporte [01:41:38]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Dan Patterson [01:41:39]:
Although that is so. I mean, that like, that's a fantastic device, but I feel like that is very. A niche device.
Leo Laporte [01:41:47]:
Well, that's how the Flipper Zero is built as the WI fi. Pineapple is built is as a pen testing tool. This is for you to test your security of your networks.
Joey de Villa [01:41:57]:
Exactly.
Leo Laporte [01:41:57]:
Not other people's security. I. I believe Robert has used his to good effect. But I don't want to say. How does he take it into the Vatican? He lives in the Vatican, so he can't help but take it.
Dan Patterson [01:42:16]:
So he tests the security of their networks.
Leo Laporte [01:42:18]:
Yes.
Joey de Villa [01:42:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:42:19]:
Or he does say, though you don't want to mess with the Swiss Guard. They may wear gaudy clown like outfits, but they carry submachine guns.
Joey de Villa [01:42:26]:
Well, yeah, because they can fit him in those pantaloons.
Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
Pantaloons. You can't hurt me. You're wearing pantaloons. Oh, yeah. It's not. It's not just this halberd I'm holding.
Joey de Villa [01:42:38]:
He could hack the Conclave vote.
Leo Laporte [01:42:40]:
Oh, yeah.
Joey de Villa [01:42:41]:
We could have had a hacked Pope.
Leo Laporte [01:42:43]:
Hack the Conclave.
Dan Patterson [01:42:44]:
Hack the Pope.
Joey de Villa [01:42:45]:
Hack the Pope.
Leo Laporte [01:42:46]:
Robert's gonna. By the way, Robert's gonna be on next week. He's going to ces. We will have his CES report as we have every year. He's gonna make a nice video for us and will bring us some toys, electronics show.
Dan Patterson [01:42:59]:
Simpler times.
Leo Laporte [01:43:00]:
These were simpler times. Hack the Conclave. I love it. Let's take a break. We will talk about CES right after this show in three hours. Samsung's going to. Samsung's going to do. It's the first.
Leo Laporte [01:43:14]:
I think it's the first press conference of ces. They have Samsung, they have so many products. They have the TVs in the TV section. They have the tablets, they have the phones. They probably have a car. I don't know. Sony is going to show it's a felia car again. We'll talk about that CES coming up.
Leo Laporte [01:43:38]:
It starts tonight in effect, having some fun. It's great to have fun.
Dan Patterson [01:43:43]:
Veiled is tonight unveiled?
Leo Laporte [01:43:45]:
Yeah, I think, you know, they actually. Saturday, you know all the. All the third party trunk shows like Showstoppers and Pepcom were making all the money. So the cea, the people who put on CES decided we better have an event and we better have it the day before pepcon. So Pepcom, so they do it on Saturday. So I think they did that last night. And then tonight's probably Showstoppers or pepcom. And.
Leo Laporte [01:44:10]:
Yeah, I don't miss all of that. Did you. Did you guys used to go to Cesar? Yeah. No.
Joey de Villa [01:44:15]:
Never went.
Leo Laporte [01:44:16]:
Never went. Oh, Joey, you should go once. Everyone should go once. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [01:44:19]:
And I shouldn't complain.
Leo Laporte [01:44:20]:
It's like Action Park. Everybody should ride the water loop. The loop once.
Dan Patterson [01:44:25]:
Even if you've been to a massive conference, you still should see CES just to go.
Leo Laporte [01:44:32]:
Oh, I don't want to. It's not as big as it used to be. Only 130,000 people. This year, more booths.
Dan Patterson [01:44:37]:
I think it's a privilege. I would tell myself that when I went. That's the way to. A lot of people want to be here and I am a reporter who is here at the same time, I greatly.
Leo Laporte [01:44:49]:
Not a punishment. It's a privilege.
Dan Patterson [01:44:52]:
Typing from my sweatpants back in New York City.
Leo Laporte [01:44:55]:
Oh, it's just, it's.
Joey de Villa [01:44:59]:
I'm trying to remember the show the two cows where I used to work was banned from because they probably.
Leo Laporte [01:45:04]:
COMDEX was it.
Joey de Villa [01:45:06]:
Yeah, it was the one where they brought. One of the things that you could do was they had a raffle and you could either win some money or you could win a cow. And they brought a cow into a real cow. Yes, the convention center. A live cow, somehow without approval. And.
Leo Laporte [01:45:26]:
That convention center is also the home the world's largest, most famous rodeo every year, just months before ces. So I don't know why they'd be bummed about a cow, but. All right, if that's how you feel.
Dan Patterson [01:45:38]:
On that show floor.
Joey de Villa [01:45:40]:
Yeah. Because I remember going through a list of conferences or Conventions and going, why not this one? And they said, well, there was the incident, the incident that feels like a.
Dan Patterson [01:45:50]:
Black hat or DEFCON thing.
Leo Laporte [01:45:52]:
Maybe it was black hat.
Joey de Villa [01:45:53]:
Yeah, that's more. No black. No, no, DEFCON's like you put concrete in the toilet. Somebody did that at the Def Spec. Yeah, yeah. Cause that was. Yeah, that was DEFCON. DEFCON 2000.
Joey de Villa [01:46:07]:
Yeah, somebody did that that year because I was at that one.
Leo Laporte [01:46:10]:
That was quick drying, fast acting concrete.
Joey de Villa [01:46:13]:
Yes. And they called it a denial of service attack.
Leo Laporte [01:46:18]:
You know you could do the same much more effectively with just a little bit of cellophane.
Joey de Villa [01:46:23]:
But okay, yeah, and I was there, yeah, I was there on behalf of Open Cola actually present. Presenting a little prototype called Colavision, which was a Gnutella, if you remember that.
Leo Laporte [01:46:35]:
I remember Nutella.
Joey de Villa [01:46:36]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:46:37]:
So new file sharing tool.
Joey de Villa [01:46:38]:
It was a Nutella. Yeah, yeah, it was basically a Nutella system for broadcasting your favorite, your favorite video clips.
Leo Laporte [01:46:46]:
Nice.
Joey de Villa [01:46:46]:
Written in Visual Basic, believe it or not, because we had to do it in a hurry.
Leo Laporte [01:46:51]:
Nothing wrong with that.
Joey de Villa [01:46:52]:
But it worked. But it worked. But you know what? Vibe coding is the new Visual Basic.
Leo Laporte [01:46:58]:
Yeah. You know, I write most of my code in Common Lisp just to be ornery. And it's weird because believe it or not, Claude code is very good at Common Lisp. And then over the holiday I got a. I bought myself a Christmas present. I bought myself a ThinkPad X1 carbon because it has an OLED screen. I really like OLED screens and it's very light, little under £2. And put cashy OS Linux on it, which is my new favorite Linux.
Leo Laporte [01:47:32]:
But I decided I wanted to use a tiling window manager instead of. I usually use Gnome, but it's boring and I don't need a big gui. I really do most things full screen. Emacs is full screen. Claude code is full screen. So I thought I'm going to do a tiling manager and I set up Wayland is the compositor in Sway. But it's. All of this stuff is for hardcore.
Leo Laporte [01:47:58]:
You gotta read a lot of documents, a lot of websites, a lot of wikis. Not so much with Casheos. It's arch, but it's arch for people like me. It's easy to install, but setting up Sway, it's all configuration text, configuration files. I just said Claude code to it and it's beautiful. It knows exactly what to do. Claude said, of course, what do you want? I said, could you put the temperature on the weather on? Yes, I write a little script. Can you tell me how much memory I have left.
Leo Laporte [01:48:25]:
Okay. I put a little icon there. I mean, it was incredible. Claude is amazing and knows all this arcane stuff. And the point of it is it's read the wiki so I don't have to.
Joey de Villa [01:48:35]:
Well, yeah, and it's read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and all the, all the smug Lisp weenie books that are standard. I wish I'd known. There we go. You know what? I wish I'd known that you were into Lisp back during your G4 Tech TV days. Because my deadbeat ex housemate, when he moved out, left his symbolics.
Leo Laporte [01:48:58]:
Oh my God.
Joey de Villa [01:49:00]:
In the house.
Leo Laporte [01:49:01]:
What did you do with it?
Joey de Villa [01:49:03]:
I. I actually put out an ad for it. No, it. This was.
Leo Laporte [01:49:08]:
By the way, I should explain for people who are going one at the time, this is a Lisp machine. It was. Was a CPU that ran Lisp on the cpu. It was designed just to run Lisp. And. And now, by the way, in today's world, it would be considered a complete slug and, and almost worthless. I can run as much faster on a stock PC, but. Piece of history.
Joey de Villa [01:49:33]:
Yeah. I ended up giving it to Hack Lab to. Okay.
Dan Patterson [01:49:37]:
Oh, good.
Leo Laporte [01:49:38]:
Well, I'm sure they did good things with it then, but.
Joey de Villa [01:49:40]:
Yeah, but yeah, it was. It's £150 of machines like the size of a New York apartment radiator from the 19.
Leo Laporte [01:49:48]:
It was because all of this was early AI. This was all about AI. And in those days, these guys just couldn't, you know, was my. They. They finally said, we're gonna have to design our own machine. Nobody, nobody's gonna let us run Lisp on their. On their IBM three seventies. We gotta design our own machine.
Leo Laporte [01:50:06]:
And so they did. Wow, that's a piece of history I would have loved to see.
Dan Patterson [01:50:11]:
That is very cool.
Leo Laporte [01:50:12]:
There is one at the Computer History Museum.
Dan Patterson [01:50:15]:
Like, when was this?
Joey de Villa [01:50:16]:
It would have been late 80s, early 90s. It was one of the first machines where RAM was measured in megabytes when we were still in the kilobyte range. Yeah. And for its time it was fast. And this would have been circa 2000, 2001, that I had the machine in my house.
Leo Laporte [01:50:36]:
Datalore is asking. This book is the absolute essential read for anybody who wants to be a computer programmer. Except nobody reads it anymore. This was the introductory book for computer science at MIT for 20 years. The structure and interpretation of computer programs. Its scheme, which is a lisp.
Joey de Villa [01:50:55]:
It's a Lisp.
Leo Laporte [01:50:56]:
But if you. And I'm rereading this. Well, I can't it put. I can't pretend that I actually have ever finished it. But I'm going to finish it this time because I decided. You know what? I am suffering, Amanda, when I do these advent of code things. I'm suffering from not having formal training. I've done how to design programs.
Leo Laporte [01:51:16]:
This is the next one and I've been reading it for eight years now.
Joey de Villa [01:51:22]:
It's a slog. It's like a Karpathy video Coach. It is, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:51:27]:
This time I'm gonna do all the exercises, I'm gonna finish it and I don't know, I'll be dead by then. I don't. Why is somebody my age doing this? Is a. Is a legitimate question. Shouldn't you, Leo, be out, you know, sitting and playing checkers at a. Somewhere on a.
Joey de Villa [01:51:47]:
You know, that is the checkers.
Leo Laporte [01:51:50]:
You are my checkers.
Joey de Villa [01:51:51]:
You are 21st century century whittling wood checkers.
Leo Laporte [01:51:55]:
And you know what? I was a Chinese major in College in the mid-70s. Did you play Go? I did play Go. That's Japanese, but I played it. And I played also Chinese chess, which is an amazing game. But finally the world came around. At the time, this was a useless skill. China hadn't even been opened yet, but the world came around. Now AI, the world's finally coming around to Lisp and AI.
Leo Laporte [01:52:26]:
And I'm here. I'm ready. No. Anyway, we're going to take a little break and come back and we will talk about CES and Amanda Silberling's wonderful TechCrunch article. The dumbest things that happen in tech this Year. And there are a lot of dumb things. We'll get to that in just. And Darren, the world is coming around a Lisp and desktop Linux.
Leo Laporte [01:52:50]:
This is the year. This is the year, Darren. I will not cede that point. I will actually talk about our sponsor for this segment. Melissa has been the data quality expert since 1985, longer than we've been around 40 years now. Forward thinking businesses are now using AI in all kinds of new ways. But AI is only as good, and we know this as the data you feed it. You can have the most sophisticated AI tools in the world, but if your customer data is incomplete, duplicated or just plain wrong, you're training your AI to make expensive mistakes.
Leo Laporte [01:53:30]:
That's where Melissa comes in. They have been known for 40 years as address validation experts. But really they're more than that. They're data scientists. In fact, they have many great talented, smart data scientists working for them. They have been the data quality partner, really. That's the better way to think of it for 40 years. They help businesses get their data clean, complete and current.
Leo Laporte [01:53:53]:
And that's what Melissa can do for you with their global address validation and autocomplete. This is fantastic. In your shopping carts, in your, in your customer forms. Real time validation for addresses. And not just in the US but everywhere in the world. That's really important. If you're delivering, your deliveries actually arrive and your customer experience starts strong. You also get mobile identity verification.
Leo Laporte [01:54:18]:
You can connect customers to their mobile numbers so you know if that customer is calling, oh, that's really them. It reduces fraud, it helps you reach people and devices. They actually use change of address tracking. This is really important. You know your data, your address data is essentially eroding. It's dying at a rapid clip. But with Melissa you can automatically update records when customers move, ensuring you don't lose revenue due to outdated information. Melissa also does something so important.
Leo Laporte [01:54:52]:
Anybody who's got an address book knows smart deduplication. On average, A database contains 8 to 10% duplicate records. I've told this story before. Restoration Hardware, which is a wonderful furniture store in our area, sends out these beautiful full color catalogs. They must cost them a mint. They're beautiful, they're thick. They sent out several different ones. I was getting five copies of the same one at the same address.
Leo Laporte [01:55:19]:
They needed Melissa. Can you imagine the cost of that? Melissa's powerful matchup technology can identify even duplicate records, even when they aren't exactly matching and eliminate those five catalogs. Just send one. That's all I need. Data enrichment. You can append demographic data, property information, geographic insights to turn basic contact records into marketing gold. And they have something new now. The Melissa Alert service, which will monitor and automatically update your customer data.
Leo Laporte [01:55:51]:
Not just for moves and address changes, but for property transactions, hazard risks and a whole lot more. Whether you're a small business just getting started or an enterprise managing millions of records, Melissa scales with you. And they have such easy to use apps in all the places that you would want them. Salesforce, Dynamics, CRM, Shopify, Stripe, Microsoft Office, Google Docs and more. Melissa's APIs integrate seamlessly into your existing workflows or custom builds too. And Melissa and you never have to worry about your data security. Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant. They're ISO 27001 certified.
Leo Laporte [01:56:28]:
They meet SOC2 and HIPAA high trust standards for information security management. Your data is safe and secure with Melissa look, you know this clean data leads to better marketing, ROI, better customer lifetime value and AI that works as intended. So get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. And at melissa.com TWIT that's melissa.com/TWIT. We thank them so much for their support of this Week in Tech. Longtime, longtime supporters. And then back in 2026, we're very pleased about that. Amanda Silberling has been on the show many times.
Leo Laporte [01:57:06]:
Love Amanda has a. She's actually a regular on Tech News Weekly too. Every month with Micah Sargent. Wrote a great article. I got to give her credit for it. The dumbest things that happened in tech this year and you will remember them. You might wish you didn't. Mark Zuckerberg, a bankruptcy lawyer from Indiana sued Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta.
Leo Laporte [01:57:30]:
He the lawyer posted ads on Facebook to promote his practice. Mark Zuckerberg, esquire. But they kept suspending him for impersonating Mark Zuckerberg. And they made him pay for the advertisements even though he was suspended. He says I can't use my name. You don't. Folks, if your last name is Zuckerberg, do your kid a favor. Do not name him Mark.
Leo Laporte [01:58:00]:
I can't use my name. When making reservations or conducting business, people assume I'm a prank caller and hang up. My life sometimes feels like the Michael Jordan ESPN commercial where a regular person's name causes constant mix ups. The Lawsuit is ongoing. February 20th is the next filing deadline. Thank you, Amanda. Keep us up to date on that. Do you remember when the founder of Mixpanel, Suhail Doshi, posted on X to warn fellow entrepreneurs about a young engineer, Soham Parek.
Leo Laporte [01:58:35]:
He'd hired Parek to work for his company, but then realized he was working for several companies at once. This is an epidemic, by the way. Yeah, I fired this guy in his first week, told him to stop lying and scamming people. He hasn't stopped. A year later, no more excuses. It turned out that Doshi wasn't the only one. Three days later. I mean, sorry, just that day, three founders reached out to thank him.
Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
They were also employing Parek. But I know people, I have to say, I know people work at home. This is one of the reasons companies don't like work at home who have multiple 40 hour a week jobs because they go, well, I get the job done. It doesn't matter if I work 40 hours for them or not.
Joey de Villa [01:59:15]:
That's what the Reddit forum is for. Overemployed. Overemployed subreddit yes, There's a sub there. Yeah, I love it.
Leo Laporte [01:59:23]:
Do you remember when Sam Altman got in trouble for using his olive oil wrong?
Joey de Villa [01:59:28]:
What?
Leo Laporte [01:59:32]:
It was a video made for the Financial Times. Lunch with Financial Times and Sam, deciding to show he was a regular person, made pasta. But he bought this very. It's very trending. You'll see this in stores. Olive oil called Graza. They have two olive oils in Squeeze convenient Squeeze bottles. One's called Sizzle, which you're supposed to use for cooking, and one's called Drizzle, which you're supposed to use is too good to cook with.
Leo Laporte [01:59:57]:
You're supposed to use that for dipping or topping. But Sam apparently squeezed his drizzle on his sizzle and got. There was a. Let's just put it this way, there was a social media uproar.
Joey de Villa [02:00:13]:
Faux chisel.
Leo Laporte [02:00:14]:
Oh, shizzle. Mark Zuckerberg, as you know, writing big checks to hire people for OpenAI. But it wasn't just money. At one point, he actually delivered soup to a guy he wanted to recruit. In December, OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen said on a podcast he'd heard Mark was hand delivering soup to recruits. In fact, he went to Chen's direct reports and tried to woo them away with soup. So Chen went and gave his own soup to Meta employees. It goes on.
Leo Laporte [02:01:00]:
I won't, I won't. I will go to TechCrunch, read Amanda's article. You could find out why you might need to sign an NDA if you're going to build Legos. You might be surprised to hear that Brian Johnson was live streaming his Shroom trip. Gemini and Claude reckoning with their mortality by playing Pokemon. Lots of stories. It was a crazy, crazy year. The picture on the front is Elon Musk's anime girlfriend.
Leo Laporte [02:01:36]:
Yes. Did you. Have you played with the little avatars they have on Grok?
Joey de Villa [02:01:44]:
I have not touched anything.
Leo Laporte [02:01:46]:
Don't Twitter and touched is the operative word. There's a. There's. So there's that. The anime avatar that you can apparently get not only to talk sexy, but to start stripping. They also is a little fox. And the day he rolled it out, I am like Cory Doctorow, a non consensual blue tick on X. So as a result, even though I pay them nothing, I want to assure you I get Grok Pro and all the benefits of a Twitter ultimate.
Leo Laporte [02:02:17]:
Sure. So I went and I. They had the little fox and I talked to him and he. It's actually a moment on intelligent machines that we had a Censor. He was so profane. He started talking about, forgive me, children, don't listen to this. Teabagging the mayor. I said what he said, yeah, just tell me which mayor and I'll go teabag him.
Leo Laporte [02:02:45]:
And then the next day it turned out that was the kid Fox. That was the one that was supposed to be for little kids. Grok's still in trouble this week. Grok's been a lot of trouble for allowing X users and Grok users to create sexual images of women. France has actually flagged the content as illegal. According to Bloomberg, Grok created and published images of minors in bikinis and other even worse poses. In fact, at one point it was. I heard, I didn't go there.
Leo Laporte [02:03:32]:
And I'm proud of this. X was flooded with this content because once people figured out you could do it, everybody had to try. Yeah. They call it spicy mode. Oh, good God. Which permits partial adult nudity, sexually suggestive content. That's apparently what I got was these spicy Fox. Grock's response.
Leo Laporte [02:03:55]:
Ax's response is we will. We will actively go after anybody does anything illegal and we will refer you to the authorities. So don't they. Rather than turn off the capability.
Dan Patterson [02:04:10]:
Going back to the beginning of our conversation about productization of AI, I wonder if this was an attempt to get out ahead of Open AIs.
Leo Laporte [02:04:20]:
Of course it was.
Dan Patterson [02:04:22]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:04:23]:
Because OpenAI has announced they're going to do adult. Allow adult content for adult. But I think OpenAI is not going to be quite so salacious.
Dan Patterson [02:04:29]:
No, no.
Leo Laporte [02:04:31]:
Or something. Right?
Joey de Villa [02:04:31]:
No. They're going to go for. For her, like the movie her, if anything, because. Well, don't you think Altman's obsessed with that?
Leo Laporte [02:04:39]:
These guys know the. Yeah, right. He loves Scarlett Johansson. She doesn't love him so much. These guys know that in the past, we've always said technology is. Is driven by adult content. The Internet was. Vhs, tapes were.
Leo Laporte [02:04:55]:
That's what killed Betamax. There was no adult content.
Dan Patterson [02:04:59]:
And this is, you know, this is nothing new, but like many people, I have OpenAI mapped to the action button on my chat GPT. Open map to the action button on my iPhone.
Leo Laporte [02:05:11]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [02:05:12]:
And so when I'm just walking around, I'll hit that button and ask questions.
Leo Laporte [02:05:19]:
And you ask it for sexy types.
Dan Patterson [02:05:22]:
Spicy questions.
Leo Laporte [02:05:26]:
What are you wearing right now? Well, I'm actually water cooled.
Joey de Villa [02:05:31]:
Yeah, exactly.
Dan Patterson [02:05:33]:
I wish I had that creativity. But mostly it's about pizza.
Leo Laporte [02:05:37]:
Pizza. Where's it? Where's the best pizza? Where's the next pizza?
Dan Patterson [02:05:41]:
I know where the best pizza Is.
Leo Laporte [02:05:42]:
What'S the best pizza in New York?
Dan Patterson [02:05:44]:
Tell us the closest pizza.
Leo Laporte [02:05:45]:
Oh, what's the best?
Dan Patterson [02:05:47]:
Well, I mean, the best pizza in New York City. Look, I can't get into trouble if I say the best. Best. That's gonna be very controversial. But I will say my preferred slice. That is in the New York Times. One of the best slices is definitely Frank's on Smith street in. On Court street in Brooklyn.
Leo Laporte [02:06:05]:
Oh, I gotta go. Have you ever been to Frank's John's on Bleecker?
Dan Patterson [02:06:11]:
No, most of my pizza consumption is in Brooklyn. But I don't know.
Leo Laporte [02:06:15]:
Can you get a good pizza in Brooklyn? I feel like you have to go into town.
Dan Patterson [02:06:18]:
Can you get a good pizza? Frankstot pizza.
Leo Laporte [02:06:21]:
Well, the only reason I bring that up. Next time you're at John's on Bleecker, go next door. John's. There's always a line. So I think it's gotta be pretty good. I think it's widely considered one of the best. Yeah, I don't know if they do slices. It's.
Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
It's, you know, it's kind of.
Dan Patterson [02:06:33]:
If you don't do a slice, what.
Leo Laporte [02:06:34]:
Are you gotta have a slice slice and a Coke, whatever.
Dan Patterson [02:06:37]:
Even pizza.
Leo Laporte [02:06:38]:
Yeah. And it's gotta be so greasy. And it's first season.
Dan Patterson [02:06:43]:
You gotta put a little napkin on the piece.
Joey de Villa [02:06:44]:
You gotta fold it.
Leo Laporte [02:06:45]:
It's gotta fold and the grease has to drip off the point or it's really not.
Dan Patterson [02:06:49]:
It's a Sicilian slice, which is a fantastic slice as well. Look, I do not discriminate when it comes to my pizza.
Leo Laporte [02:06:59]:
Anyway, go next door when you're at John's, because that's where my son's sandwich shop is deemed.
Dan Patterson [02:07:04]:
I'll go to your son's sandwich shop.
Leo Laporte [02:07:06]:
Deemed one of the top 50 restaurants in New York City, according to decider. Deemed by the New York Times, the best sandwich in New York City. Where is it? What, like it's on Bleecker Street? Bleecker and what Jones. Excellent.
Dan Patterson [02:07:19]:
I'll go.
Leo Laporte [02:07:20]:
It's called Salt, Hank. And they only serve one sandwich. It's a French dip. That's it. Fantastic. They. You know, a couple of weeks ago, he was gonna expand because it's an expensive sandwich to make. It's.
Leo Laporte [02:07:32]:
It's only the best cut of. It's everything the best. He said, I didn't want to. I didn't. No compromise. Everything the best. So it's a 32 French dip sandwich, I should warn you. But bring.
Leo Laporte [02:07:41]:
It's good enough for two. So it's really only 16. And that's it. They have limeade and French fries and that's it. But he was gonna have another sandwich because it's expensive. He's gonna have a chicken sandwich. It's less expensive to make. He could have a less expensive sandwich.
Leo Laporte [02:07:57]:
Nobody would order it. All they ever want is the fry. So he stopped. He says, well, I'm not gonna stop down the kitchen and start making, you know, chicken parm sandwich that nobody orders. We're gonna stay with the French dip.
Dan Patterson [02:08:10]:
So just can be there in 20 minutes.
Leo Laporte [02:08:14]:
It's closed now. In fact, if you're going to go, you got to get there really pretty early. They the doors open 11:30, but they sell out by 2.
Dan Patterson [02:08:22]:
That's so cool. That's the sign of a real open till. That's good.
Leo Laporte [02:08:27]:
He says, that's right. He says New Yorkers love to line up. Wow.
Dan Patterson [02:08:31]:
All the time. What is this line? I don't know. Shoes.
Leo Laporte [02:08:33]:
It's got to be good. It's got to be good. That's where we get. Where we hand in our Flipper Zeros before we go to the inauguration.
Dan Patterson [02:08:40]:
That's what I was doing on break. Maybe I should put this Flipper Zero into my shopping cart.
Leo Laporte [02:08:45]:
No. So New York City has. As many jurisdictions have. California's about to do it. Banned cell phones in schools. According to Gothamist, they've learned that that's a problem. Some students can't read clocks. Oh, yeah, That's a major skill they're not used to at all, says Tiana Millen, assistant principal at Cardoza High School in Queens.
Leo Laporte [02:09:15]:
Teachers complain. The Maddie Morinweg, who teaches high school English in Manhattan, says the constant refrain is, miss, what time is it? She says it's a constant source of frustration. Everyone ought to know how many minutes are left in class. I finally got to the point where I started saying, this is high school. Where's the big hand? Where's the little hand? Dan, you learned how to tell time on a pie face on an analog clock, right?
Dan Patterson [02:09:42]:
Yeah, of course. Of course. It's on my. You can't see it, but it's on the wall. I got my kid a little for. I have a three year old and for the holidays I got her a little analog. It's a dinosaurs.
Leo Laporte [02:09:53]:
Are you teaching her how to read the clock?
Dan Patterson [02:09:55]:
Yeah, that's what I want. I want her to. To be able to tell time on an analog clock. Analog for you.
Leo Laporte [02:10:00]:
I have one analog clock in here. I've got 40 clocks, 40 ways to tell time. But only one analog clock. And the only reason I don't like them is because I have to set them by hand every twice a year. I don't want to change the.
Dan Patterson [02:10:12]:
And every newsroom I've ever been in has analog clocks. I mean, there's a digital countdown, but like there's analog clocks in newsrooms.
Leo Laporte [02:10:20]:
Yeah. It's said that you can tell kind of better where you are by the analog clock. You see the. Yeah. Is it more volume?
Dan Patterson [02:10:28]:
It's more glanceable?
Leo Laporte [02:10:30]:
I'm a digital guy.
Joey de Villa [02:10:32]:
Would you feel dumb for not being able to read a sundial?
Leo Laporte [02:10:36]:
No, exactly. It's as antique as a sundial.
Joey de Villa [02:10:41]:
Right, right. You know, and because it's the nature of the technology of the time, for the longest time, the only way we could display a reflection repeating cycle was to have some kind of circular mechanism. So that's why we. That's why clocks are designed that way. But we don't have that. We don't have that limitation anymore.
Leo Laporte [02:11:00]:
According to the New York City public schools, the education department students are still taught how to read clocks in first and second grade. The problem is they forget because they never have, never have to practice. Officials said kids are taught to say master terms like o' clock and half past o'. Clock. How, how, how archaic is that? O'. Clock? It's 3 o'. Clock. 3 o the clock.
Leo Laporte [02:11:28]:
Half past and quarter two in early elementary years. But they, they forgot the skill because they never used.
Joey de Villa [02:11:38]:
Is two hours in the post meridian.
Leo Laporte [02:11:40]:
You know, in the post meridian of the o'. Clock. It is kind of archaic. It's pretty funny. I mean, media.
Dan Patterson [02:11:49]:
It's the quarter hour because you're programming by the quarter hour.
Leo Laporte [02:11:53]:
Oh, yeah. Well, I. In fact. Yeah. When I was doing radio and ratings. Right. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [02:11:59]:
Hot clock.
Leo Laporte [02:11:59]:
I learned. I actually wrote a program.
Dan Patterson [02:12:02]:
Yes, exactly right. I write you in a color code. Is this right? Is this because I had a hit.
Leo Laporte [02:12:09]:
Network network time, you know, you had to be done at 0930. Yep.
Joey de Villa [02:12:14]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [02:12:14]:
The network sting would come on and if you kept talking, didn't matter, you're gone.
Dan Patterson [02:12:19]:
My radio mentor, a guy named Dave diamond, this was one of the things we absolutely had to do is we had to. To slice up a hot clock. And then we. We'd program it like what songs are you going to put in what hour and. Or what segment of the hour? And he wanted to see that you had a feeling. Feel for the flow. Like could you program a. Flood the.
Dan Patterson [02:12:38]:
The flow and get. Drive a listener past the aqh and drive or drive up your. Your average quarter hour listens. Because they stay listening past the. The 15 minute mark.
Leo Laporte [02:12:50]:
That's right. And you get an extra quarter hour if they. Yes, exactly that mark.
Dan Patterson [02:12:54]:
Yep, exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:12:55]:
You don't have to listen for all 15 minutes. Just one minute.
Dan Patterson [02:12:57]:
Just one minute. That's why you said bottom of the hour.
Leo Laporte [02:13:03]:
Yeah. And that's why you say, give us 20 minutes, we'll give you the world. And.
Dan Patterson [02:13:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:13:07]:
1010, 1010 news and all of that. Speaking of traffic on the eights.
Dan Patterson [02:13:12]:
Radio.
Leo Laporte [02:13:13]:
Yeah, radio. I feel like a dinosaur in some ways. So I have. I should fire up my hot clock. I had to write it because I was so bad at sticking to the timings, because I had some that could move and some that couldn't move. But if I was loose with it, the commercial break would move closer and closer to the network break. And then I'd have to do, like, all of it all at once. And did you ever have carts? Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:13:42]:
Slam the cart in.
Dan Patterson [02:13:43]:
Slam the cart.
Leo Laporte [02:13:44]:
Yeah, slam the cart. So I went to the Bay Area Radio hall of Fame awards a couple of months ago to support my old friend Cami Blackstone, who got inducted into the Bay Area hall of Fame. And out front There was the KFRC mobile.
Dan Patterson [02:14:01]:
KFRC.
Leo Laporte [02:14:01]:
Yeah, mobile studio. They had long ago retired at KFRC. I don't even know if they're still around. 610, KFRC, Boston.
Dan Patterson [02:14:11]:
The big 610.
Leo Laporte [02:14:11]:
The big 610. And had Dr. Don in the morning and somebody had. They had retired or sold or. I think actually they sent it to a junkyard. The old mobile van. Somebody bought it and restored it. They had a cutout of Bobby Ocean sitting in front of the microphone.
Leo Laporte [02:14:29]:
And they had all these cart machines. Yeah. And they had the carts. These are. They look like eight tracks. They actually are eight tracks.
Dan Patterson [02:14:36]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:14:36]:
But they only have one track on them, and they're a loop. And the reason you want these is because you play it. It's for the end. The machine keeps going and gets it back to the start. So when you hit that button and it plays, you know, 1010 news and then it rewinds to the beginning again and you can hit it again in a few seconds.
Joey de Villa [02:14:54]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:14:54]:
So they had all the carts. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:14:56]:
They make use of the cart machine on this last season of Stranger Things.
Leo Laporte [02:15:00]:
Do they? There's a cart now I have to.
Joey de Villa [02:15:02]:
Watch it because there's. Their central operations is a radio station that the kids have taken over.
Leo Laporte [02:15:10]:
Oh, my. Huh? Oh, my.
Dan Patterson [02:15:12]:
Cool.
Leo Laporte [02:15:14]:
That's kind of cool. So it's an old school radio station.
Joey de Villa [02:15:17]:
Yes, it is. Because the show takes place in the 80s. This last episode takes place in 89.
Leo Laporte [02:15:23]:
I might have to watch that. Oh, yeah, I needed that. That clock. And I ended up writing a version of it for my successor when he took over. He took over the radio show. I said, okay, you know you're going to love doing this, but the biggest issue is this clock. You got to do the clock right or they're going to get mad at you. So Rich demuro, I gave him a special version of the clock.
Leo Laporte [02:15:54]:
I think I even named it Rich on Tech, the Rich on Tech clock and gave it to him. I'm going to see if I can find it. I think I still have it here.
Joey de Villa [02:16:02]:
And in scheme.
Leo Laporte [02:16:04]:
And I wrote it in. In Racket. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:16:07]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:16:07]:
Wow. I don't. Only because I guess. Well, why? No, why? I didn't do it in Lisp. Because Racket had a graphics library, so I didn't have to go too far to get the. Because it's a graphical clock. Do I have it? Oh, well. Oh, yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:16:26]:
If I just. I run it, will it run? Isn't it fun? Do you ever do that, Joey, Go through old archives of your old programming days and look at code that you wrote many years ago? Oh, yeah, I just crashed my machine.
Joey de Villa [02:16:45]:
The problem is a lot of it won't run anymore.
Leo Laporte [02:16:47]:
Yes. As I've just learned.
Joey de Villa [02:16:49]:
Or the runtimes are gone. Because my first job out of school was working at a CD ROM company, Mackerel Interactive Multimedia in Toronto. And we. They wrote in hypercard and Super Card. And I convinced them just so that we could serve both platforms. Go to director and bingo.
Leo Laporte [02:17:12]:
Here is the. Here is the hot clock.
Joey de Villa [02:17:16]:
Oh, look at that.
Leo Laporte [02:17:17]:
Yeah, remember that?
Joey de Villa [02:17:18]:
There we go. Radio station style. Hot clock.
Leo Laporte [02:17:23]:
That's the hot clock. And I think, let's see if this will run. Will it run? Oh, yeah. There's the. So I have 6 minutes and 42 seconds left in this segment.
Joey de Villa [02:17:33]:
Okay, nice.
Leo Laporte [02:17:35]:
And then it's going to go yellow when I only have 30 seconds left. And then it goes red when I have 10 seconds left. And then it yells at me if I go over that I need this. You know what? I'm going to. Benito's gonna make me bring this back. So I don't. So I time out the show. Yeah, I keep forgetting to do the commercials.
Leo Laporte [02:17:53]:
In fact, let's do one right now. And then finally, I will talk about ces. There's not that Much to say. We gotta talk about ces, a very relaxed but I think very enjoyable version of TWIT this week, thanks to Dan Patterson. It's great to have you. Blackbird AI. You can go there and create a free account. What is the address for the fact checker?
Dan Patterson [02:18:17]:
We call it a context checker because it provides a heck of a lot more context, including about GIFs or images. It's Compass Blackbird AI. That's Compass Blackbird AI.
Leo Laporte [02:18:27]:
I use it all the time. It's. If you read something, pop a link online and you go, where is that? I don't know. Is that, you know, can you really drink spring water and cure cancer? You could go to Blackford Compass, Blackford AI and ask. And it's very useful if you want to.
Dan Patterson [02:18:43]:
Oh, really? Somebody on Reddit? That's the best way to do it.
Leo Laporte [02:18:46]:
Oh, oh, really?
Dan Patterson [02:18:47]:
Or oh, actually.
Leo Laporte [02:18:49]:
Oh, actually. Compassed up like. Well, actually, it's great to have you. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate you being here. And of course you can subscribe to dan's newsletter@news.danpatterson.com Joey Davila is also here.
Joey de Villa [02:19:03]:
Hey there.
Leo Laporte [02:19:04]:
Get the accordion. I think you might have to play a closing theme for us. He's@globalnerdy.com look at that. It's beautiful. Who makes the best accordions?
Joey de Villa [02:19:13]:
Actually, I have no idea. And I'm sure some accordionists are gonna get on me. In fact, I found out that this accordion is more valuable than I thought. I bought this off a drummer for. I bought this off a drummer for 80 bucks.
Leo Laporte [02:19:28]:
Nice.
Joey de Villa [02:19:28]:
And it turns out this is a post World War II camera.
Leo Laporte [02:19:32]:
I was gonna say it looks like the. The colors in the body that look pretty sweet.
Joey de Villa [02:19:36]:
And then I just added puffy stars, glitter stickers just for fun. This is the beater accordion. This is the one that I take to. That I take out drinking. It's always somebody's birthday at a bar. So this is a machine that turns music into free beer.
Leo Laporte [02:19:51]:
I like it. Okay. This is the first. We've never had an accordion on Twitch.
Joey de Villa [02:20:00]:
Okay.
Leo Laporte [02:20:00]:
And the AI cameraman. I used to do a radio show, good friend of mine, Tom Santos, who had a band called those Darn Accordions, and it was a giant accordion band. Oh, yeah. Many, many accordions. So that's why people said, those darn Accordions.
Joey de Villa [02:20:19]:
And I can play the official. The official unofficial anthem of AI.
Leo Laporte [02:20:24]:
What's that?
Joey de Villa [02:20:25]:
Okay. And it goes like this. I was gonna get a job, but then came AI. I'm now an unemployed slob. Because of AI. I'm hired from Terminators. Yeah. You know why? Yay.
Leo Laporte [02:20:44]:
Hey.
Joey de Villa [02:20:45]:
Cause of AI. Cause of AI. Cause of AI. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:20:54]:
Thank you, Joey Davila, everybody. Where's my applause button? My radio applause button? Yes, Joey. Thank you, Joey Davila, everybody. GlobalNerdy.com wow. This is like the old radio show. We'll have more in just a bit. You're watching this week in tech. First show of 2026 and we're beginning it with a bang.
Leo Laporte [02:21:17]:
An actual accordion serenade. Our show today, brought to you by. And when I say brought to you by, I mean it's a service that we use on our website, Redis. You know about. I hope you know about Redis. Redis is the real time data platform that powers ultra fast applications used for caching. That's kind of how we use it. So our website's always fast, always loads, always up.
Leo Laporte [02:21:41]:
It's used for data storage, it's used for search. People use it for vector embeddings, AI workloads and more. With a global user community and adoption everywhere from startups to mid size companies like ours. Although you know we serve a lot of content through redis to Fortune 500 companies, Redis continues to innovate on speed, scalability and developer experience. Redis R E D I s helps developers ship faster, scale instantly and keep apps blazing fast even under heavy load at the center of the platform. Redis Cloud, that's what we use. It's the fully managed version of the fastest, most feature rich Redis on the market. By choosing this Redis as a service, you can easily start using Redis 8 in production.
Leo Laporte [02:22:30]:
You could scale to real time speeds effortlessly. You don't have to worry about the details. Redis Cloud is purpose built for performance and simplicity. You'll get extremely low latency, high throughput. That's what you know. You go to our website, we know you're not going to stick around if it doesn't load like that, right? People don't wait. If you see a blank screen for a second, it's it. I'm done.
Leo Laporte [02:22:53]:
That's why you use Redis. Extremely low latency, high throughput, automatic scaling, global availability, simple setup and a generous free tier so you can try it right now. Redis Cloud is the real time context engine that gathers, syncs and serves the data you need to build accurate AI apps at scale. Learn more. Or to try Redis Cloud for free, just search for Redis Cloud or visit Redis IO. That's the website R E D I S IO. Thank you, Redis. Oh, and the hot clock says there's only 40 seconds left in this commercial break.
Leo Laporte [02:23:30]:
We're counting down. It'll go red in about five seconds. Three, five, four, three. I think it. Yes. Now we're running out of time. No, we're not, actually, but we would be if we were on the radio. That's one of the reasons I don't miss the radio.
Leo Laporte [02:23:46]:
Everything, right, Dan, Everything. You gotta. You can't do anything long.
Dan Patterson [02:23:51]:
I miss the urgency of live.
Leo Laporte [02:23:54]:
Yeah. That's why everything I do is live still. Because I do love live, you know? If this weren't live, would we have Joey Davila singing because of AI? No, I think not. I think not. All right, ces, you're not going. Neither of you are going. Next week, we will actually tell you what was gonna what happened at CES because father Robert Ballast will be here. We're gonna get Jason Heiner on, I think too.
Leo Laporte [02:24:18]:
He will be there.
Dan Patterson [02:24:20]:
Love, Jason.
Leo Laporte [02:24:21]:
Yeah. Jason Squirrel and Jennifer Patterson Tuohy as.
Joey de Villa [02:24:24]:
Well, who will be.
Leo Laporte [02:24:24]:
Oh, and jpt, she'll be covering home automation at the show. So, yeah, really good panel next week for covering it. We're the three who aren't going and are happy to say that Sony has their Honda Afila. This is the car they keep showing every year. The Afila one will be showcased. That's the worst name for a car I have to think they were thinking of. I feel you right. For almost a decade, they've been showing off this car.
Leo Laporte [02:24:59]:
We don't know what it's going to look like because, you know, they, they, they don't. They only show you a teaser video that'll be streamed Monday, January 5th at 8pm Eastern. So tomorrow, 20s and CES 2020, they've been showing this car. Will they ever sell it? I don't know. They say it'll be $90,000, but I don't think they're making it yet. Tim Stevens, good friend of the show, said it feels like a PlayStation 4 in the PS5 era. Oh, that stings. Samsung's gonna be doing their thing tonight.
Leo Laporte [02:25:38]:
Their first look CES 2026 presentation. The first press conference. It's tonight in just a couple of hours, I think 7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern. You can watch it on YouTube or on the Samsung newsroom, or if you have a Samsung tv, guess what? It'll be on the Samsung tv. Plus, they are going to be announcing, I think, the newest QD oled. I have their original QD oled. Which is the best? No, don't confuse it with qled, which is an LCD screen. An LED backlit LCD screen.
Leo Laporte [02:26:13]:
QD OLED is a true OLED screen, but brighter. With quantum dot technology. They say they have the brightest QD OLED they're going to announce tonight. I think they said 500 nits. I really. It is my favorite TV, the QD OLED. I'm not crazy about Samsung TVs, you know, all that Samsung stuff in the back. But okay, you've got some stuff, Dan, you're looking for.
Leo Laporte [02:26:45]:
Really? You're gonna get one of these. The clicks communicator.
Dan Patterson [02:26:48]:
No, I just think like when I think about the interesting things at ces, I really have a hard time because it is a cycle.
Leo Laporte [02:26:58]:
A lot of the stuff that's announced at CES never makes it to.
Dan Patterson [02:27:01]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:27:03]:
Like the Ophelia.
Dan Patterson [02:27:06]:
This is the one thing, if I thought about a thing at ces, I like this thing.
Leo Laporte [02:27:14]:
Is it a phone? Because.
Dan Patterson [02:27:16]:
Yeah, I mean it's an Android phone but in a BlackBerry format and I.
Leo Laporte [02:27:21]:
Kind of like that.
Dan Patterson [02:27:22]:
I'm also. I'm not on social media and you know, I'm an iOS user, but I always have some sort of Android backup and it, it just, it looks, it's compelling because of the price point and.
Leo Laporte [02:27:35]:
Looks kind of sexy. What doesn't it do?
Dan Patterson [02:27:41]:
Well, it's half a screen and has a massive keyboard board on it. I'm sure it'll do all of.
Leo Laporte [02:27:46]:
I'm sure you could do Instagram on it. Does it have a camera?
Dan Patterson [02:27:50]:
Yeah, it seems like it has a pretty perfunctory camera on it. It just seems like compelling because of the price point and because of that keyboard. But the real story or the thing that I am most interested in is the storing price of ram. And what's that? What the impact, the follow on the knock effects of RAM prices on consumer electronics.
Leo Laporte [02:28:18]:
That is one of the reasons I bought that, that ThinkPad now is because I was very worried how much a laptop would cost. Later this year I want to get Apple's, you know, it's rumored and I think it's probably true that they're going to announce a fully redesigned MacBook Pro at the end of this year or early next year that will have an OLED screen. I only buy OLEDs now. I'm sucked in on by the OLEDs and it will have the, I guess M6 processor. So it'll be a brand new 2 nanometer TSMC2 naming system on a chip. So it's A reasonable upgrade for my M3 MacBook Pro, but I'm afraid about how much it's going to cost because with any reasonable amount of RAM and now with AI these days, you want 64 gigs. In fact, you want more if you can get it. Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:29:05]:
Totally depends on how Apple builds the M series of chips, because unlike most other laptops, the RAM is incorporated directly in like, it's all there on that single chip versus most other laptops. The win.
Leo Laporte [02:29:23]:
You still have to buy drams, though, to put it on there. So it's not like they're not affected by the price. They might be less affected only because they buy everything.
Dan Patterson [02:29:32]:
I was just going to say.
Joey de Villa [02:29:34]:
Yeah, well, I'm not sure how they make the M1s, because I think the actual memory circuitry is part of the product.
Leo Laporte [02:29:43]:
It is on the die.
Joey de Villa [02:29:44]:
It's right on the die. I don't know if they buy that separately or do that of TSMC when they're making it. Yeah.
Dan Patterson [02:29:55]:
Apple's supply chain is unique and you might be right because they are so differentiated and in the market. But I, I think everyone will be constrained by RAM prices in the next 36 months or so.
Joey de Villa [02:30:11]:
Like, yeah, like, is Ram. Is Ram the new air conditioning copper pipe? Like, are we going to just start having people steal it?
Leo Laporte [02:30:19]:
The other thing that might protect you is Apple already grossly overcharges for memory. They have a certain amount of headroom built into this. Right.
Dan Patterson [02:30:31]:
And they, they put in these orders long in advance. And I think that that might be something that insulates them a little bit. Whether it insulates consumers, who knows?
Joey de Villa [02:30:41]:
Yeah, because that, yeah, because Tim Cook is a supply chain genius. That. That was his.
Dan Patterson [02:30:46]:
And going back to Apple in China, it describes much of those processes in China, the supply chain and their buildup in China.
Leo Laporte [02:30:56]:
So DRAM prices have doubled, in fact, so much so that Micron Consumers has decided to stop selling to consumers because there's so much more money to be made selling to manufacturers.
Joey de Villa [02:31:12]:
That is a shame because, you know, I love Crucial ram.
Leo Laporte [02:31:15]:
I know Crucial's great.
Joey de Villa [02:31:16]:
It's in the Windows machine behind me. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:31:21]:
Apple, I think, gets its drams from Samsung and we'll be facing, I think, price increases if they haven't already locked in prices. And that's what you're saying, Dan, is they probably have locked in, locked it in a long time ago. Right now, DRAM is more than twice as expensive as it was this time last year.
Dan Patterson [02:31:43]:
And VRAM is bananas.
Joey de Villa [02:31:46]:
Maybe we should put out a call right here on Twitter, intel. This is your chance. You started in ram. Come back to ram, please.
Leo Laporte [02:31:54]:
Intel, right, Come back, start making. So I found an article from Tech Nave that says that Samsung's agree rather Apple's agreements with Samsung and SK Hynix are expected to expire in January this year.
Joey de Villa [02:32:10]:
Oh.
Leo Laporte [02:32:12]:
If that's true then there could be a crunch. I don't know. Apple has done a pretty good job so far of insulating. I mean the iPhone, which again was premium price to begin with, did not go up in price, particularly this year. Right. The iPhone 17 is roughly the same price as it was last. The 16 was last year.
Joey de Villa [02:32:33]:
Maybe there might be a trend towards hyper efficient, hyper memory efficient programming. Like it's time to break out.
Leo Laporte [02:32:41]:
Oh, would that be fun.
Joey de Villa [02:32:42]:
C books. It's time to. Time to pull out the Kernahan and Richie book. Everybody learn C or relearn it.
Dan Patterson [02:32:49]:
The gaming world is melting down right now though.
Leo Laporte [02:32:51]:
Yeah. Oh yeah, GPUs, well that, but that's been, that's an ongoing thing because Nvidia GPUs went through the roof and of course those.
Dan Patterson [02:32:58]:
Yeah, from two grand for the five series to five.
Leo Laporte [02:33:03]:
Amazing, amazing. So this has already been a problem for years in the, in the gaming community now with RAM and GPU prices skyrocketing. And the thing is, AI also drives that. Not only does AI use GPUs, but it needs RAM. I bought a framework desktop with 128 gigs of RAM so I could run local AIs. And it's running on the AMD STRIX Halo platform, which means like Apple has the RAM access is universal to both the GPU and the CPU. So you can use much, I think up to 92 gigs of that RAM as effectively as GPU RAM as, as your AIs RAM. So that's why I bought that machine.
Leo Laporte [02:33:45]:
But, but that's gonna, you know, it's not just OpenAI that needs ram for its training, it's everybody who wants to use AI in their businesses and their homes, local AI, that kind of thing. It's going to be a crunch. I've pointed this out before though, remember every time there's a shortage like this, companies respond by bumping up capacity. Now they have to build new factories to do that. They're already at capacity with existing factories, so it's not going to happen this year. But in a couple of years, RAM may plummet again because of oversupply, because they've built so many new factories to take advantage of this windfall pricing. So we'll see. I wouldn't be surprised to see RAM come down in two years to even cheaper.
Joey de Villa [02:34:31]:
Yeah. But you know what? The quantum people will then hog the RAM just like.
Dan Patterson [02:34:35]:
Yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [02:34:36]:
There's always somebody, right?
Joey de Villa [02:34:37]:
Yeah. Because before it was crypto. Right.
Leo Laporte [02:34:39]:
And that this has become a very Manhattan centric show. We're going to do, as I do usually at the end of every show, kind of obituaries, end of the line. And the. It was the end of the line for the Metro card this year. Now, you know. I know, Dan. And when you ride that subway into town, you. You have that little yellow card with the mag strip on it.
Leo Laporte [02:35:01]:
I probably have a few. Every time I go to the city, I buy a Metro card. Well, you won't need it. In fact, the last time I was in the city, I think Jeff Jarvis said, oh, no, don't buy a Metro card. Use your watch.
Dan Patterson [02:35:14]:
Yeah, watch. Or just tap your phone.
Joey de Villa [02:35:16]:
Your phone.
Leo Laporte [02:35:17]:
And I didn't even need to sign up. I just tapped my watch and it went. And you're in. I don't think I got the senior discount. The Metro card. There is Even a video YouTube video Star podcast where he interviews people pretending the Met on the subway, pretending the Metro card is the microphone. It's hysterical. But that credit card is going away because the MTA is phasing it out in favor of tap to pay.
Leo Laporte [02:35:48]:
The new system is known as Omni 1 Metro New York. It'll save a lot of money for the MTA every year. Less plastic waste, shorter lines. And, you know, if you've got a. If you're lucky, you got a watch or a phone, you just tap it. I don't know what people do who don't have that, though. Do you still have subway tokens?
Dan Patterson [02:36:07]:
Oh, God, no.
Leo Laporte [02:36:09]:
No, I. I grew up in the token era.
Dan Patterson [02:36:12]:
Yeah, I. I remember the tokens, but the tokens have been. Metro card's been around forever. I think I might frame my. I can't. I cannot remember a time where I don't have a Metro card in my wallet.
Leo Laporte [02:36:23]:
Jody Shapiro, who is the transit museum curator, said when the Metro card debuted in 1994, everybody was like, I don't want to give up my tokens. You'll get my tokens out of my cold, dead hands. But, of course, tokens went away. Everybody got used to the plastic Metro cards. And. And, you know, you have to. It's not easy to swipe those. You got to really know exactly.
Joey de Villa [02:36:48]:
It's an. It's an art.
Leo Laporte [02:36:50]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:36:51]:
It's an Art. But you know what? It killed the great token counterfeit token industry.
Leo Laporte [02:36:56]:
Oh, the great token market. Yeah. Or black token market. Really didn't. Did tokens, they had, they were like Chinese coins, right? They had a hole in the middle, right? Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:37:05]:
In New York. Yeah, that was in Toronto. No, we had tiny, little, tiny tokens a little bit smaller.
Leo Laporte [02:37:12]:
What does Toronto do now? Do they have cards or do they.
Joey de Villa [02:37:15]:
There's a car. Yeah, there's a card.
Leo Laporte [02:37:16]:
Yeah.
Dan Patterson [02:37:19]:
In France you have the. Be it.
Leo Laporte [02:37:21]:
It's. It's the end of the line for the Metro card. And I guess if you don't, what do you do? I don't understand what you do. Does everybody have to have a smartphone now?
Joey de Villa [02:37:31]:
I know, but the other thing is, you know what? That might also put a damper on the great New York tradition of jumping the turnstile, because if your phone's in your pocket, it'll register it.
Dan Patterson [02:37:44]:
We're getting rid of the turnstiles. There's new non jumpable.
Leo Laporte [02:37:49]:
Are they gates?
Dan Patterson [02:37:51]:
Yeah, there's gates and big barriers on the turnstiles now and then.
Leo Laporte [02:37:56]:
I guess the last story is a sad story. One of the people who started this business, Stuart Schaffe, the creator of the Computer chronicles, passed away December 28th. He was 87 years old. I'm sure most of the people who watch this show, our show, or watch tech TV remember Stuart. In fact, I interviewed Stuart on a triangulation episode where it was just fascinating. He told the story of how Computer Chronicles started. He was a station manager at a public TV station in San Mateo, California, KCSM. And this was in the early 80s.
Leo Laporte [02:38:35]:
He decided that maybe they should do a computer show and created Computer Chronicles. But he said I wasn't like a coding geek. I was just a regular geek, a fan of technology. And so I decided I had to have a coding geek on the show. Here I am interviewing Stuart in our old studio. So he found somebody, a guy named, you may remember this name, Gary Kildall, who created CPM and then founded digital research, created Dr. DOS. And in the early days of Computer Chronicles, it was hosted by Stuart Schaffet and Gary Kildahl.
Leo Laporte [02:39:20]:
There are videos, lots of them on YouTube, of the original Computer Chronicles. Here they are at Comdex speaking of trade shows, showing off the first Macintosh computer. There's Gary interviewing somebody at the Telos booth. This is a lot of fun for me. If you haven't seen Computer Chronicles, Stuart told me that the best place to get it is not on YouTube, where they're kind of pirated copies of VHS tapes. But go to the Internet archives where they have all of the shows. Stuart donated all of his masters to the Internet Archive and you can watch, there's Gary Kildall. You can watch the old Computer Chronicles shows if you want.
Leo Laporte [02:40:10]:
And it really is a trip back in time. There is one I've seen on YouTube but I'm sure they have it on the archive as well. With John C. Dvorak looking particularly nerdy in his aviator glasses. Stuart Chefay lived a good long life. Passed away at the age of 87. But he was so instrumental in really was the first, I'm pretty sure the first computer TV show and paved the way for all the rest of us. So Rip Stewart, you'll be missed.
Leo Laporte [02:40:42]:
He's a great guy. And the triangulation episode is on our website at Twitt TV Tri. It was episode 114 from August 7th, 2013. It was a lot of fun to sit and talk to Stuart and remember the good old days of computing. Dan Patterson, great to see you once again. I'm glad you're doing well. So nice to know that help this better. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:41:12]:
Senior Director of content Blackbird AI Daddy to a 3 year old teaching how.
Dan Patterson [02:41:18]:
To read a pie clock and soon a flipper zero.
Leo Laporte [02:41:24]:
That's next. That's next. Very important. You know, you gotta, I think honestly bringing a kid up nowadays you gotta start to introduce technology at some point. At the same time I understand why parents are very reluctant to get their kids in front of a screen. What are you going to do?
Dan Patterson [02:41:45]:
Boy, that's a challenge. I know a lot of parents just do Apple Watch, but I mean really, I'm just going to teach literacy and skepticism.
Leo Laporte [02:41:54]:
Good, you need both. And of course she'll be using Compass Blackbird AI at a very early age. Subscribe to Dan's new newsletter. It is thenews.danpatterson.com thank you, Dan. Thank you nerdy little Joey de Villa. GlobalNerdy.com, which is by the way, a site devoted to kind of just fun stuff, quirky stuff. How long have you been doing that blog?
Joey de Villa [02:42:27]:
Since 2006. Wow.
Leo Laporte [02:42:30]:
This is a blog in the original sense of a blog, isn't it like where you just put stuff that you're interested in, quotes, pictures, stories. It's really good. I highly recommend it.
Joey de Villa [02:42:41]:
GlobalNerdy.com yeah, the domain actually came from an app, the application I built for two cows called the Duke of Earl URL, spelled that way. And basically you'd give it some keywords and it Would suggest available domain names for you, and Global Nerdy was one of them. So I said, hey, I like that. I'll buy that one.
Leo Laporte [02:43:05]:
Is there. You have also the Adventures of Accordion guy in the 21st century.
Joey de Villa [02:43:10]:
That is my original one. And yeah, that's from 2001. And I made it because Corey. I kept sending Corey suggestions for stories when he was on Boing Boing and he said, start your own blog. And I did.
Leo Laporte [02:43:25]:
Yeah, Corey's no longer with Boing Boing Boing Boing lives on.
Joey de Villa [02:43:28]:
It's been. Yeah, it's been a while.
Leo Laporte [02:43:29]:
Yeah.
Joey de Villa [02:43:30]:
So, yeah, that one. That one's been going on since 2001.
Leo Laporte [02:43:33]:
Nice, nice. The adventure. Is there any accordion music on here?
Joey de Villa [02:43:39]:
I need to get back to that.
Leo Laporte [02:43:41]:
I used to do more because of AI. Did you. You got to record that and put it up somewhere.
Joey de Villa [02:43:46]:
Well, that's. That's on the global nerdy YouTube channel.
Leo Laporte [02:43:49]:
Oh, okay.
Joey de Villa [02:43:51]:
All right. So, yeah, I do a couple of versions of it and I'm trying to do a full one with more verses, including one about the price of RAM and getting catfished. So all the usual. Yeah, all the usuals. All the usual stuff. And I need to record the oompa Loompa Service Pack 2 song.
Leo Laporte [02:44:10]:
All right, Global Nerdy. It's YouTube.com global nerdy. Let's get some more subscribers in there and look for the accordion music.
Joey de Villa [02:44:22]:
Yeah, that's a relatively new project and I've got to start covering some of my AI projects, including what we talked about in Intelligent Machines, the Too Many Cats, MCP server, and other.
Leo Laporte [02:44:34]:
That was great. Yeah. I learned how easy it was to write an MCP server thanks to you. He is a AI developer, advocate and available for contract work, of course, or hire.
Joey de Villa [02:44:50]:
Do you have insurance? I love insurance and rsus nowadays. See, this is rsus.
Leo Laporte [02:44:56]:
What, you miss leaving Canada? You know, if you're still up there in Toronto, you'd have healthcare.
Joey de Villa [02:45:01]:
Oh, yeah, I do miss that part.
Leo Laporte [02:45:03]:
I know, I know. Rene Richie, when he struck out on his own on YouTube, said, I couldn't do this if I didn't live in Canada. But I can do it because I have health care, have health insurance. Otherwise I'd have to have a real job. Of course, he ended up taking a real job at YouTube.
Dan Patterson [02:45:18]:
Anyway, Renee's been okay.
Leo Laporte [02:45:21]:
It's hard to turn down when Google comes to calling. Hard to say no. Thank you, Joey. Thank you, Dan. Great to see you, both of you. Thank you, Joey.
Dan Patterson [02:45:32]:
Great to meet you.
Joey de Villa [02:45:33]:
Great to meet you.
Leo Laporte [02:45:35]:
Some real history with Joe, I didn't know that. Wow. We do twit every Sunday. Next week, our CES annual CES show with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and Father Robert Balaser, the Digital Jesuit. We're hoping to get Jason Heiner on there as well. 2 to 5pm Pacific, 5 to 8pm Eastern, 2200 UTC. We stream it live. So you can watch live if you want to.
Leo Laporte [02:45:58]:
You don't have to, but if you're in the mood and you want to chat with us live, you can do it in a variety of ways. Club members, of course, can do it in the Club TWiT Discord. But everybody can see it on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com TWiT we're also on Twitch TV, TWiT, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik.com so six different ways you can watch live after the fact. On demand versions are available at our website, Twit TV. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech that's got the video. We've got audio and video and you could subscribe and you your favorite podcast player. Audio or video? Or both. Make sure you leave us a good review now.
Leo Laporte [02:46:36]:
So you tell the world about the. Well, one of the longest running, if not the longest running tech show. I think there are actually others that are a little bit older, but 20 years we've been doing this and it, you know, after 20 years, it's hard to get the word out. We're not the new kid in the town. So tell the tell the world about this week in tech. Thank you everybody for being here. Happy New Year to you all. We will see you next time.
Leo Laporte [02:47:01]:
And as I've said for 20 years, and I will say for another 20, God willing, if the Cricks don't rise, another twit is in the can. See you later.
