This Week in Tech 1017 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Tweet this Week in Tech Great panel for you. Christina Warren is here. She's got a new job. Maybe we can find out what she's up to. Shoshana Weissman from R Street she just wrote a piece on age verification and why it's a terrible idea. And Dan Patterson, whose company specializes in disinforming disinformation Does that make sense? We will talk about an amazing week in ai not just deep seek, but new models from open ai. The breakdown of government websites, 8 000 websites and counting disappearing from the internet, and 23 and me is about to sell your spit. It's all coming up. Next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust.

00:48 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
This is twit.

00:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit this week in tech, episode 1017, recorded sunday, february 2nd 2025. Yellow-bellied marmots. It's time for TWIT this week in tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news, which is mostly AI this week, but that's all right, because we've got a panel that can handle the tough stuff. Shoshana Weissman is here from our street. Great to see the chairman of the sloth committee in person's, not a sloth.

01:29 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
That's a marmot. Yeah, yeah, thank you for having me and my marmot oh, are you now the chairman of the marmot committee? No, but I've taken them up as an interest. Look how fun it is oh, marmots are wonderful. They move faster than sloths, but not much I mean not not when they're this chonky, but uh, but they, they can move fast other times they're all chonky.

01:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they have iron butts. Did you know that?

01:51
they have iron butts they're a problem in australia because they roll up, uh, when they're scared, and they roll up on the highway and you hit them and it's really like hitting iron because, yeah, they dive into their holes and they leave their butt. This is not a nature show, but, thank you, I have some. Uh, I have some interest in marmots as well. Apparently, dan patterson is also here. He's director of content at blackbird ai, a regular writer at zd net. It's great to see you, dr dan uh, youtube, but keep going about.

02:24 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
The marmots mean this is like the best start of a show ever.

02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't really know if that's. I thought we'd be talking AI.

02:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I didn't expect marmots, I'm not being sarcastic.

02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, they're amazing animals. Yeah, but that's for another time.

02:40 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I do the same thing when I'm scared.

02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, roll up and stick your head in your hole and stick your butt out, and that way you'll never get hurt. I guess, don't we all? Yeah, christina Warren's here with no job. Hi, christina, but she is living in the Simpsons house, so that's okay.

02:57 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I am.

03:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm in Springfield you know, almost every state has a Springfield.

03:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I know, I know, I think that's one of like the brilliant things about them, like choosing, uh, that is like the name of the of the town, because for so long you know, people like, well, where is this, where does this take place? It's like, well, it could be anywhere it could be anywhere.

03:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is it by there is also. I mean, this is incidental, but there's also also a Laporte in most states. Did you know that?

03:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No.

03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's because Mr. Laporte got around Many, many years ago, my ancestors, I think. He was a trapper, a fur trapper, but he really, yeah, he got around.

03:46 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Did he trap marmots?

03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I certainly hope not. I don't think the marmot fur really makes for much of a coat.

03:53 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, I wouldn't think so.

03:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have a picture of a marmot that I took. I was. I know what are we doing here. Why are we here? What is going on? I was, I know what are we doing here. Why are we here? What is going on? I was in Tasmania on a photo shoot expedition with some really good photographers and for some reason I decided to lie in the grass and a marmot came trundling toward me and I didn't really know if they were dangerous or not. A marmot came trundling toward me and I. I didn't really know if they were dangerous or not, so I said help and they just laughed. I don't know if I could find it. It's buried.

04:36 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I love that.

04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's buried somewhere in my, my, my pictures, but yeah, I'll, before the show's over, I will share my. This is a little tease to keep you all watching, I will share my marmot photo with you. Okay enough, let's talk ai. Much more interesting six takeaways from a monumental week for ai from the wall street journal. Guess. All six of them were about deep seek, the Chinese AI, which has really rocked kind of rocked the stock market, rocked Nvidia.

05:15
Deep seek claims. We don't know actually, I be curious what, what you know, dan, covering AI and all this. They claim that they trained their model for a mere $6 million with an M and it's very efficient and they, because of the export restrictions, weren't using the latest nvidia cards, didn't need to, and this, of course, tanked nvidia's stock. It was the world's most valuable company the week before went down 17 mond and has been going down all week. One trillion dollars worth of stock market value gone. Uh did start to recover towards the end of the week, but we don't really know, uh, what deep seek cost. I mean, we just know what they say. What do you think, dan? I mean, we just know what they say. What do?

06:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
you think, Dan? Well, I think, you know, as a reporter and as somebody who works in AI, I don't know anything more than anyone else.

06:11 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, we don't.

06:14 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I do think opacity is the story here, right Like this. Launched onto the market so quickly, it was so disruptive and we know so little about it disruptive and we know so little about it, but it had such a great, so many great knock-on effects that it's almost impossible to look away. Yeah uh.

06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then of course, open ai, in the funniest uh reaction ever, said they stole our, they stole our stuff from our model, they copied us, which, of course, is funny because open ai basically copied everybody else. You know they copied the internet in order to train their model. Deep seek apparently used a technique called distillation, which is training your ai model by asking another ai model questions and learning from its answers, and of course, you could do that at great speed if you're both ais. And deep seek said it distilled from an open source model from meta llama 2 and from one of its own. But open ai said we're looking at indications. Deep seek used us for distillation as well. So what is my reaction? Like well, that's fine, yeah, that's how it works I think it's.

07:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's so interesting that we didn't know anything. I mean, we didn't really anticipate this product happening when, but we could have certainly anticipated this event happening and the ai bubble taking a hit like this, uh. But there are so many fantastic questions that this opens. I mean, was it trained for so little? If that is the case, then what are the implications for all of these models and and companies seeking billions, if not trillions, of dollars?

07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, um I'm also not sure it. It, uh, it hurts us. In fact, sam altman had an interesting uh tweet. He kind of said open ai has been on the wrong side of technology. Uh, it's really. It was a. It was an odd thing to say, I think. He says I personally think we need to figure out a different open source strategy. Open ai has been on the wrong side of history when it comes to open sourcing its technologies.

08:25
It's hysterical well, not hysterical, but it's interesting to note that open ai was founded specifically to be open, hence the name is the name and uh, and that eventually, I think, they realized it was going to cost a lot more to train these models and they created a kind of a for profit and they hid, and they hid their weights, which, uh, so uh, it basically became a proprietary, closed development. He said not everybody at open AI shares my view, but it's also and it's also not our current highest priority. Being open, we will produce better models going forward, but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years.

09:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Um, I guess it's funny because there really isn't much to say, is there? It's like okay, it's interesting messaging. I mean, they could have been defensive and they could have been opaque themselves, they could have been aggressive, but instead it seemed to be a fairly conciliatory and, yes, I mean I would call it a smart comms response yeah, I mean, I think it's a good consequence. I don't know if it's sincere or not, but it's a smart response yeah, I would agree with that.

09:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I do wonder, though um, it does seem to go a little bit against the other reporting, which is that they think that you, you know they stole their research, their data, right? So it's like so which is it right? Like I think that it's a conciliatory response, it's a good response. I think that being defensive about this wouldn't be good, but at the same time, you know you say this right after you know their report's going oh well, we're going to look into how do they do this, because this was clearly using our inference or data, or whatever the case may be, which. How anyone's ever going to prove this and how you would, even if you could prove it, how that would change anything at this point, I think, is a very open question.

10:21
But it's not a bad response. I think that it would look a lot worse if you came out and you said you either tried to diminish what the technology actually was and what the breakthroughs have been, and, and we don't know how much this costs. We only know what they say it costs, and, and that could absolutely be false, but we do know that this is something that seemed to come out of nowhere, that you know, even compared with what we saw with R1, versus what we saw at Christmas, you know, a massive improvement and definitely, you know, from a cost perspective, is already making the other, you know, companies, you know, alter some of their strategies, which is which is fine.

10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which is fine, right, this is what you want, you want competition, you want back and forth, you don't want to operate on disinformation and of course you know the Chinese government might indeed have incentive to destabilize our stock market and NVIDIA's stock price given the sanctions against it.

11:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Sure, sure, I mean it's at that point. That's why my one kind of question about this and a lot of you know, the most important kind of data we got from this was from scales, kind of benchmarks, which you know just kind of showed how good it was, in addition to just anybody using it themselves and seeing, hey, wow, we're getting really good results and we can do these things incredibly cheaply, on local hardware even. But one of my questions is okay, you know they claim that we were and this is a very common Chinese government tactic and from Chinese companies to say, oh, we did all this ourselves and we didn't use any of your stuff. And we know they did use some NVIDIA chips. We don't know how many, I have no basis of knowledge for this at all. I want to make that clear.

11:53
This is just strictly speculation, but I have a feeling that that number is higher than what they are letting on. But we saw this with ZTE and especially with Huawei, where the Chinese government wanted to tout what types of chips and breakthroughs that they have themselves to create without TSMC and others. And it turns out the reality, once you get past those things, isn't quite there that that's probably also the case in terms of you know how much um, how many nvidia gpus they were using, and, and how much this cost and how much time this took. Some of those things might not be exactly as they appear to be, but even if that is the case, this is still incredibly impressive and and shouldn't be something I think that people should be angry about. You know, it's like this is progress, regardless of who came up with it of course.

12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, david Sachs politicized it. He's this the AI and Bitcoin czar in the new administration, and he, his contention is that he said well it's. He was on Fox on Tuesday. It's clear there's substantial evidence that deep seek used open AIs models. Yes, and right and what are you going to do? You're going to say exactly and you're going to right. What can you?

13:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
do to do. You're going to sanction them, right, and what can you do about it? You know you're already putting those things into place. It's like this is not, they are not beholden to you Like.

13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate to break it to you, david Sachs, but I want to, by the way, just parenthetically apologize to our friends from Australia that it was not a marmot, it was a wombat, right? Is that a wombat, shashana? Yeah, it's a wombat. Uh, so is that was that?

13:32 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
a wombat on your.

13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is. This is. This is my wombat picture, but that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about things yeah, I confused the wombat and the marmot. The wombat started coming for me. This is uh, it's walking closer and closer and this is where I was a little afraid. I said, do they eat humans? But no, they don't. They don't. They are really cute.

13:54 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I didn't remember Australia having marmots, but I was excited that maybe they do.

13:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So are you in marmots or are you in wombats? I'm sorry, what is your investment? Marmots?

14:05 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
or are you in wombats? I'm sorry.

14:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
What is your investment, marmots? Okay, I'm a wombat guy myself. Huh, shoshana, is that your photo?

14:10 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
No, that's not mine. I have a lot of really good marmot photos, but none were really suited for a background.

14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can see why I'm confused, doesn't?

14:16 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
that look just like a wombat. They look very similar.

14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They look very similar. They're fat little babies and I love them like they're so cute. It is the wombat that has the hard butt though not the marmot, so I was please don't run over marmots.

14:31 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I was gonna be surprised if they had a hard butt.

14:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I feel like I would have known that you know, squishy, I think they're squishy yeah oh, so just just to show you that talk huh I was just gonna say there's a tiktok of a guy in australia who has like a pet wombat with his, with his daughter, and it's the cutest thing. It's like. It's like they go around and like like the little girl. She's probably two years old, three years old, and she and the wombat have basically grown up together and it's the sweetest thing you will ever see in your life. It is, it is great, it is like the best, most pure.

15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love wombats, but marmots look pretty good too. Anyway, I just wanted to show you that humans are capable of hallucinating as well. You know they get mad at AIs, like if AI made this mistake, people would go. You see, you see. But if a human makes it, it's just like, well, he's just an old man and he's Dottie.

15:25 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Well, you know what's kind of funny with everything too. I saw a lot of people trying to trick the model to saying anti-China stuff or just make China look unfavorable.

15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you can't get Tiananmen Square out of it, that's for sure.

15:36 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
But I actually thought it raised a really good point that OpenAI has its legal limits but our legal stuff is different than their legal stuff has. It's like legal limits but our legal stuff is different than their legal stuff and people kind of overall they kind of get it, but when it comes to china's legal stuff, it just makes it less useful for people. It's like it can actually infringe on just the usability of the platform and I think that kind of sets it up for failure. Like I know, people have issues with tick tock and I do too. I have some issues with tick tock, but they don't censor stuff the way that DeepSeek is. It's a very, very different kind of thing and I think when you have that state censorship at that level, it actually sets it behind and makes it less usable overall, which is kind of an interesting, almost like diplomacy problem within the AI world within the ai world.

16:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is an issue with uh safety and deep seek, not, you know, I have um, mixed feelings about this whole ai safety thing. I feel like, um, you're telling the ai, uh, you know, don't talk about, say, tiananmen square or how to make atomic weapons or whatever it is. Is is really artificial, you can't. But anyway, deep seek, uh, uh, researchers at Wiz which is, I guess, a security, an AI security firm, found a major security lapse in the Chinese AI deep seek. Uh, actually it's a pretty bad one, but it's happened to many companies all over the world. They left a database exposed, a ClickHouse database, with a million log entries containing chat histories, secret keys, back-end details. This happens, you know. You forget that you have an S3 bucket that has no controls on it. The database allowed full administrative control without authentication.

17:25 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Such a comforting breach. I mean, I don't mean.

17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm more worried about breaches, frankly, than safety, than AI safety. I think that's more of a concern.

17:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, for sure. And it's like, oh, if all of these fancy, super intelligent, very forward-leaning systems. It's like you had a perimeter breach of a database.

17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, usually what happens is the poor programmer makes a Git commit that has the secret keys in it. This one, they didn't have any secret keys.

17:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It was just unlocked. One way you save on cost is if you just don't have an IT, if you just don't do it. Yeah.

18:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was going to say right, it's like I have to remember from a year ago, the Rabbit R1, the other R1. Yeah, the other R1.

18:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
The other R1. Did you buy one of those? I did yes, of course. I did A thousand percent you got one Dan.

18:25 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I got one. It right here. It's the cutest thing ever for, but it's so cute. It's so cute, but I'm there with you yes, heck, yeah, heck yeah.

18:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
But no, it makes me think engineering, I mean like that's exactly how I I justified it.

18:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was like this is the dumbest thing and this is fine and and um, and then it turned out to not live it up at all to its hype. And then the the thing was is that we realized the security was basically non-existent and that they were asking you to like log in with your, your uber credentials and stuff and so that it could, you know, have their, their, like what they called asians, but really it was just macros do stuff for you and. But the security was like so bad and and I I saw how the um, the login works that it was just like a vm thing, like in the browser, and some other people who are smarter than me were able to even go deeper about how they were able to get doom running on like the vms, and it was just there's a good use for that, though.

19:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good thing. You know, if you can get your r1 to run doom product out there. These are the brilliant glasses nice, which don't do anything I also just bought. This was shown at ces. This is is the be AI device. It's recording everything, all the time.

19:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I got one of those in June. It's not the final form factor. I got one when it was still like a pendant that would go over your neck and turn it off yeah.

19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm loving it because it says kind of it's kind of silly, but we're gonna get the creators of it on our new show about ai. But let me just read you some of the daily memories. This is this is from yesterday. Piano melodies, leaky decks and sinatra's palm springs filled the day. But actually that's all true. It sounds weird. Leo had a productive and enjoyable day. He made significant progress on a new piano piece true, mastering the challenge of playing chords with one hand and melody with the other Sounds weird. Leo had a productive and enjoyable day. He made significant progress on a new piano piece True, mastering the challenge of playing chords with one hand and melody with the other. He shared a laugh with Lisa over funny video and received encouragement to record his piano playing. Later, when Leo went grocery shopping, he and Lisa discussed dinner plans. I mean, this thing is listening to everything and I gave him access to my Gmail and my calendar and my contacts. What could possibly go wrong?

20:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean.

20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why are you laughing at me, Shoshana? Shoshana's laughing.

20:35 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
That's so stressful to me. Like that's so stressful. It's funny, christina, what you're saying about the Uber credential for the login. So I'm not sure if you caught this, but it's just funny because it's like another layer of the same problem. Last year it turned out that the age and identity verifier for like Uber, for every like big Twitter, like Bumble, was breached for a year and a half and I've been into this stuff, I know, I know, I know They've been into this stuff from the age verification stuff because they're like it's secure, you don't have to worry about anything, you're being silly. So, like when I saw that, I'm like, oh my gosh. So it's so funny when you mentioned it, that like that it was happening through like your uber credential, and I'm like, guess what? You have to like be careful of that stuff already, because everyone knows it, because nothing's secure so I I mean I have.

21:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My attitudes towards privacy are probably not typical of most people. I don't really care because I'm I'm on the air all the time, so it's nothing really private. They give you a. This thing generates facts and then says are these true? So this is one of the facts it just generated. Leo has issues with ankle socks not staying up. That's true. Uh, leo's concerned about the freshness of grapes. That's true. Leo considers fish a light meal option. That's true. Leo has meatball mix in the freezer from Whole Foods. That's true. Leo has a task related to getting Brewers tickets. It adds this test to my to-do list, by the way, which is great, and that is also is also true. Uh, let's see, I'm showing you these. Leo is comfortable using voice commands to interact with technology. That's true. So it now knows so many facts about me what's your issue with ankle socks?

22:16 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
they fall down so, like they, they keep slipping under right. Yeah, so you want the ones with a little tab on the back that, like changes, it changes life. Like I'm like loyal to little tab ankle socks you see already ai is changing my life.

22:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's making it better. I'll get the tabs, thank you you're welcome, yeah I always thought ankle socks were dopey. I used to wear socks all the way up, but my, that's stylish now higher socks I was going to say I was going now, Higher socks are stylish.

22:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was going to say I was going to say, stylish socks are now in vogue and in fact like, if you have like, because I used to always wear no show and then no show last year became like passe and so now you have to wear the high socks.

22:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to see men's ankles Women, it's okay, but men's ankles shouldn't wear those with sandals. Am I right?

23:02 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
the right socks, right yeah well, actually, if you wear them with, uh, the sandals that go across, not the toe sandals, that's like sporty and stylish, you know they're saying, it's not the ai that has changed my life, it's shoshana.

23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true. That's a good point. That's a good point, um ai systems with unacceptable risk are now banned as of today in the eu. Don't know what an unacceptable risk is apparently the eu isn't really clear either.

23:35
Uh, a, the it's designed to cover use cases where ai might appear to interact with individuals. Okay, minimal risk is for, for instance, spam filters will face no regulatory oversight. Ok, limited risk includes customer service chat bots. They'll have a light touch regulatory oversight. High risk AI for health care that's a good example. Yeah, will face heavy regulatory oversight. And then the unacceptable risk applications, which is what these new laws or new regulations cover, will be prohibited entirely. Ai used for individual social scoring, like in black mirror building risk profiles based on a person's behavior. Ai that manipulates a person's decisions subliminally or deceptively, like convincing me to put tabs on my ankle socks. Ai that exploits vulnerabilities like age, disability or socioeconomic status. Now, I know you are not a fan and our street in general is not a fan of over-regulation. Shoshana, does this seem over-regulation or appropriate?

24:43 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
So they don't know what they're doing. I mean, like Europe's just been trying to like kill technology for years now and it's absurd, seem over regulation or appropriate, so they don't know what they're doing. I mean, like they, the europe's just been trying to like kill technology for years now and it's absurd and it's why they don't have a lot of tech companies. I think, like like with mental health and health services in general, I think it's worth having oversight of ai. But there's, I mean, the way they're going to go about. It is just fine everyone and like like be really um, stick over carrot. I've been talking with uh, utah actually, and they're doing some really cool stuff and how they're trying to regulate ai. They're just trying to figure out, like, what's the framework that's going to work, work best in each situation, because they want ai to be something that can help people for health services. But obviously they see the risks. So they're working like really cooperatively with a bunch of different companies to figure out, okay, what's going to work best here, what's um. So they're working like really cooperatively with a bunch of different companies to figure out, okay, what's going to work best here, what's? You know, they're taking a really collaborative approach and I think it makes sense to do, especially with emerging tech that's happening fast, that, like you, don't want to stop this from, you know, from growing, but you also want to make sure that it's safe, especially in certain circumstances.

25:42
But Europe has just tried to crush everything and get lots of positive attention for crushing things. So even here I'm not and I don't think even we're against regulating a little bit more here if it makes sense. It's just about figuring do regulations already cover this? Discrimination is already regulated in a lot of cases. Providing crappy health services is already regulated in a lot of cases. But if crappy health services is already regulated in a lot of cases, but if there's additional layers, that's you know, it's something we're open to. But Europe is a terrible model for that stuff you know?

26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I feel like their GDPR is giving us in the States some degree of privacy, whereas our Congress seems unwilling to do that. So there's some things that they're doing that are good you think GDPR? Goes too far.

26:28 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think, from a cyber security perspective, at least when it comes to AI and regulation, we've found or I shouldn't say we, but I like I have found and seen that Europe has been pretty amenable to a lot of types of, uh, innovation, but that is at least in that limited experience and and from a cyber perspective, but it, I mean right now, it kind of seems like uh, a very good place to look at cyber security.

26:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ai, biometrics, to infer a person's characteristics, like their sexual orientation, is banned. Ai that attempts to this is interesting. This is something we are doing, I think, in the united states attempts to predict crime based on people's appearances. Oh no, that's just what the cops do. Ai that collects real-time biometric data in public places for the purposes of law enforcement terrible.

27:18 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Have you guys read the book ai 2041 by kaifu lee.

27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, oh, oh, kai Fooley's great.

27:24 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, he is, it is, Leo. As you're reading this, it kind of feels like almost a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of this. It's really a book of short stories but they're all thematically connected, but it is. You know, we talk a lot about the future and we love science fiction because it kind of helps us imagine the future, if not predict it directly. But this is a very down to earth. Because of kaifu lee's background, this is a very down, not down to earth, but a very, uh, practical forecast of where we could be with ai, uh in, by by mid-century. And again, as you're reading that list, leo, it really feels like this book come to life yeah, and he's warning us against this, I presume I, I don't know that it's.

28:15
There are certainly some warning, uh, warnings in the book, but there are also it's. There's more nuance, um, it's. It is from a Chinese perspective, but there's, especially when it comes to the relationships we will form with artificial intelligence and the way it could augment our life and become a type of relationship. If you know, right now we look at like well, maybe there are human, like avatars, this kind of short-term thinking, but as we, as we progress, we might find these agents are part of our life and express themselves because they have such access to data in really, really unique ways.

28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we in california had a similar uh, anti-ai or I'm sorry, not anti-ai, but uh regulating ai uh law that this the governor declined to sign. He vetoed. That required, among other things, that companies of a certain size would have to have a kill switch for their AI, unlike RoboCop, I guess it seems I don't know where I come down on this. I feel like, just as in the early days of the internet, you could make a mistake by rushing to regulate it too quickly that it can, and we didn't, and we didn't do that with the internet. We, the congress, was very careful to kind of have a light touch on the internet because we didn't know what it was going to be. In hindsight, maybe you could say, well, they should have done, they should have done something more to protect us. I don't know, uh, but I worry that by and I maybe the eu is doing this by over regulating ai, we're preventing it from growing in a way that might be very useful. Agreed or disagreed is that? Am I wrong on this?

29:58 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
yeah, that's where I come down, basically, um, and our street worries about too. We're always down to figure out in certain use cases, in certain if there seems to be more of a risk in one area than another. There can be, like, regulations that attack this. That we're not, you know, opposed to, but so much of this just seems to be broad and tons of requirements that don't really have a real focused end. It's just like, oh, you know, these systems should have to tell the government everything, which I don't think is great either, because people, you know, you want to be careful from the privacy angle.

30:31
When it comes to the government itself, we're also for a national privacy law, but that's a whole, you know, other debate and we're also really interested in the cybersecurity side of stuff. So, like, one thing on that side we're doing is trying to get the federal government to align its cyber standards and reporting standards across agencies so that companies know what they have to do and it's a little easier to hold them accountable as well. But when it comes to AI, it's just, it's so unfocused and it's so I mean. So so much of government is, I think, afraid of experimentation here, but then you even see, like other parts of government really embracing it implementation here. But then you even see like other parts of government really embracing it, like a couple of states have used AI to try to review the regulatory code and make it in human language and simpler and something that they would pass through, yeah.

31:13
There's so many good uses of it to make government better. Another one that I found out about is using it for permitting applications in, I think, california actually, and that it got through permitting requests a lot faster, and I think you can use that for occupational licenses and other stuff as well. But it's always a little bit frustrating because you know government is so focused on stopping things just in case, rather than focusing on fostering the good potential and figuring out where the problems are and how to narrowly address them, and I just I worry about that because it's sexy to be against tech. I think that's starting to go away a little bit, I hope so.

31:51
We're definitely in an era where it's just sexy if you're a regulator cracking down on evil big tech, you know.

31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, you agree Dan?

32:02 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That it's sexy to be against. No, no, the earlier premise that we shouldn't over-regulate AI until we understand better what it's doing and what it is yeah for sure. I mean, I'm not a policy person and I think Shoshana is a million times smarter than I am about this, but I do think that we need an environment that safely fosters innovation. Um, I, I have some trepidation. If we look back at how social media played out, I think that perhaps we could have introduced regulation that encouraged innovation but slowed things down a bit. So I, I mean, I have some trepidations but that's in hindsight right.

32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's in hindsight right. We didn't know.

32:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Right, we didn't know. And maybe the benefits exceed the cost. I don't know Right now I'm not a big social media person. Anyway, I think I agree with Shoshana mostly, but I opt for safety over speed.

33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, safety over speed. Christina, your vote.

33:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I mean I would definitely say safety over speed. And I would go further to say this I think that I would feel differently about how some of the regulation frameworks have come into place if I felt more confident that any of the people regulating this industry actually knew what they were talking about.

33:22 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

33:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And so this is an area which is difficult, right, especially when we're talking about emerging technologies, where your experts are going to be your researchers or your people in industry and not people necessarily making policy.

33:34
But there has been and I think I do agree with Shoshana it has become popular and sexy to be against big tech, and that is for some good reasons.

33:41
I think big tech has made a lot of decisions and made a lot of moves that have pushed the pendulum was in one very positive direction for a very long time.

33:49
And then, because of things frankly, around privacy, around, you know, user protections, around things that now regulations, I think understandably want to curtail people's perception and you know, the attitude from people in making policy has shifted into the other direction and so, but because of that, there is and hopefully this gets better there is now this friction between the people doing the research and creating the products and the people setting policy, and friction isn't a bad thing, but I think where it is a bad thing is when you have the people who are setting policy who genuinely do not understand tech, and this has't a bad thing, but I think where it is a bad thing is when you have the people who are setting policy who genuinely do not understand tech, and this has been a problem for decades, but it's only getting worse. And I do sometimes think, especially in the EU. They almost in the United States, to be clear, but in the EU it almost seems to be a point of pride, right, like we don't understand this and we don't care.

34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think that they I mean of the mistral, for instance comes out of France? Some of the best AI models are European. Do you think, though, that this is kind of as we feel about? We're xenophobic about Chinese AI.

34:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They're xenophobic about American AI maybe um, or or maybe just their. Their perceptions about how uh Tech works are different, right, I mean, like they, they have been much less risk averse and they have much stronger labor standards. And different things are. You know, the way that the EU operates, the way the United States operate are just different, and I think that having caution and having skepticism is good.

35:21
I think sometimes setting policy before you even understand whatever things it is doing can be both a bad thing because it prevents positive use cases from taking place, and it can also be bad because you might be, you know, setting to motion, you know policies that prevent you from um, preventing the really bad stuff that could happen, right like it's. So I don't know. I feel like I would feel better about this if I actually had any confidence that the people setting policy knew anything and weren't just, you know, either listening to the experts that are saying what they want to hear, which oftentimes is that the sky is falling. You know prognosis or, you know, had any amount of digital sensibilities at all and, at least in the United States I can't speak for the EU, but in Congress, the number of our people, both in the House and the Senate, who have any sort of digital literacy is almost non-existent, and that's very scary to me when we look at what's going to take place from a policy perspective.

36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'll cop to this. I am an AI accelerationist. I've kind of come to the point of view. My attitude is I'm so blown away when I can do by the, by coding, by, uh, just answering questions. Um, I talked to a chat gpt. I have my action button on my phone. It opens up chat gpt01. Uh, actually it's the. I think it's the new one three mini yeah, oh, three mini exactly.

37:01
Uh and uh. I ask it questions, all it's at my research assistant. I am blown away. I think maybe we've gotten complacent about what's happening, but we are in the middle of a revolution, it seems to me. Now. This is just my attitude, and you can tell me I'm full of it, and I'm many have, I feel like. So what if? If it's smarter than us or we hate the singularity? Let's see what happens. This is amazing, and I think being cautious is going to put a damper on something that could be truly revolutionary, and it already is. It blows me away what we can do in a year I I agree with that, with with a couple of caveats.

37:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
One area that I do actually I'm in favor of more regulation for and and and I'm that bothers me very much is when we see these systems being used in cases like trying to um identify, uh, you know, um people who might have committed a crime but all right but be used to judge you know sentencing guidelines or to be used when you went to see the Eros tour.

38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there was face recognition as you went in because Taylor Swift has had stalker problems and it was looking for her harassers to stop them. Right, that's okay.

38:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And and and look, that's fine, and if you have those systems that are fed with data that can maybe show things, fine. What I'm talking about is like there are startups that are basically saying we want to basically ride along with police officers and take their body cam, that's fine. But I'm not at all comfortable from like so many, you know, like basic, like you know, like constitutional amendment perspectives. I am not okay at all. Fourth Amendment, fifth Amendment like both of them, I'm not confident with saying that the cops should just be able to have AI generating those police reports. So many problems will happen there, right and to say, oh well, we're going to describe what happened in the video and we're going to write these things out in a better method.

39:09
No, I'm not okay with that at all and so I feel like there are some, because we've seen as good as these tools are, we've seen how they're not perfect, how they can hallucinate things that aren't there and, frankly, because it is your job. That is your job as a police officer. If you want to help, like, go through a transcript and make sure that you didn't miss something, fine. But, like, your job is to actually fill out the police paperwork and to do that and that, if I'm being charged with a crime, you better have actually done the work and not just trusted a computer to generate a report based on you know what was on the body cam footage and what it picked up. You know what was on the body cam footage and and and what it picked up.

39:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, based on on what voices it hurt, like well I'm not okay with that one of the things the eu law uh prohibits is, uh, I guess, profiling people pre-crime, trying to say, well, that person looks like they're about to commit a crime, and we know that face recognition often makes mistakes when it comes to people of color, does false positives, uh, people have been arrested, they've been jailed, they've actually been convicted from uh, speciously from uh from false reports by ai face recognition. So that's a problem. I agree, I think we should work on that, but I want to prohibit face recognition because there's some real valuable and honestly I don't. If I mean, if you can use an AI to generate your report, I think you should have to check it and you should have to sign it and say I verified this, but I think that I mean we're using AI to generate show notes.

40:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I understand that's not exactly a mission, no, but I feel like those are completely different things right, Like show notes for your show If you get something wrong it's not the end of the world.

40:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody goes to jail for that.

40:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
If it's part of a police report where that is going to be used as the basis to charge someone with a crime and then take them through the process. I think that's completely different. At the very least, there should be massive red flags so that lawyers know this was was aided with this instance of ai. But you know they won't do that. You know they won't. And and I just feel like this opens up lots and lots of you know, like I just see lots of false convictions happening because of the basis of these tools and that does scare me, and so, on the one hand, like I think we should experiment, on the other hand, like I'm very nervous about how this could be used in law enforcement, just because I don't have a lot of trust in a lot of law enforcement anyway, and and these sorts of systems could make that even more complicated. That's just me.

41:34 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I think a good example here is like the from the bias that they found an AI system, just like how police bias can get into anything, just like any other bias can get into something. So if they're like working with a police force that just for whatever reason, there tends to be a lot of biased members and like they could have um, they could have data that shows like more aggressive reports about black people, just for example, and like, uh, and if that goes into the data, then that could be dangerous. I'm open to testing it, but I definitely wouldn't want that to be like the final thing, at least for a long time. Like there should be a lot of work to make sure that like bias doesn't get in there, which is a hard thing in general to do, but yeah, bias gets in from humans?

42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, of course Very readily.

42:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
There's a differentiation here between when we talk about safety and AI, and they're both important, but they're two different things. What Christina is talking about is maybe the expression of, or the potential dangers to society which could happen, the actual capabilities of these models. Two very different, very valid conversations, but different and distinct, yeah.

42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a little break. We have lots more to talk about and, of course, I mentioned somebody was saying in the chat you guys should have an AI show. We do have an AI show. It starts Wednesday. We're rebranding this week in Google to Intelligent Machines. The guy who coined the term Intelligent Machines, ray Kurzweil, will join us next month on the show and we're going to bring in AI experts, because I freely admit I don't understand it well enough to have a strong opinion. I just I'm excited about what it's doing and what it can do, and I think we need to make, we need to talk about it. I think it's an important part of our mission. So, uh, tune in wednesday for the first episode of intelligent machines. 2 pm pacific. 5 pm eastern, 2200 utc. On twit. Uh, great panel, so nice to have. Christina warren, you're going to tell us what your new job will be some time tomorrow maybe yes, yeah, yeah, it should be sometime tomorrow or sometime next week.

43:44 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Uh, starting next week, um, I it will be, uh when do you start? I start tomorrow. Um, uh, technically I don't know when I will have access to all of my work systems and whatnot. But yeah, I probably will make the announcement tomorrow are you gonna move? No, no, at least not right now. Um, uh, no, no plans moving. Um, I mean, that could always change, but but the I.

44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure GitHub was sad to lose you. That's all I can say.

44:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And I was sad to leave them. It's the most amazing place, the most amazing team.

44:11 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You're a great representative.

44:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm a huge fan always forever of GitHub and GitHub Copilot, I think, is one of the best tools out there.

44:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's an example, yeah, of pretty amazing that AI can do. Bully agree. Yeah Well, good luck with the new career. Thank you, and we will stay in touch.

44:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Of course we will.

44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Unless they say and no more of that podcasting thing.

44:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You know what? I'm very hopeful that that will not be the case, but yes, it could happen.

44:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could happen. It happened once with Dan Patterson when he left CBS, but we're glad to have you back. Director of content at Blackbird. Ai danpattersoncom Still writes about technology for ZDNet Always a pleasure. Yeah, it must be hard when the company says, yeah, we don't want you talking on podcasts anymore. Is what it is. It was sad we lost your input input.

45:04
We're glad to get you back, appreciate it to be here, yeah, and shoshana Weissman, our street is enlightened and says talk as much as you want. Head of digital media at our street. I guess when you're the head of digital media and you're hanging with marmots, uh, you know, not a wombat no, no, not a wombat wombat heads are bigger, I've been told, so that's how you could tell yeah, that's a really good point.

45:29 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Also, they're they're gray. There's a variety of colorings and marmots. This is the yellow-bellied marmot that's like common to uh, the west of america. There's. There's a bunch of variations, though I there's got to be at least seven subtypes, like there's a himalayan marmot totally different I now have a new insult you yellow-bellied marmot.

45:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You great to have you. Shoshana, thank you for being here. Our show today brought to you this week by us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement. Why would you want to replace microsoft? We've been talking for a few months now about US cloud, the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. I can give you three reasons. Number one you're going to save. Switching the US cloud can save your business 30 to 50 percent over Microsoft unified and Support. Maybe that explains why 50 of the Fortune 500 now use US Cloud for their Microsoft Support. But it wouldn't be any good if it was just less expensive. It's also got to be as good, right. It's better than Microsoft Support. Faster twice as fast average time to resolution. Twice as fast average time to resolution versus Microsoft. We're talking minutes, but now US Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering. They do a lot to help you save money, not just by cutting the cost of your Microsoft Premier Support, for instance, their Azure Cost Optimization service. This is very cool. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? There's a little bit of Azure creep in there, right? If it's been a while you probably have some Azure sprawl, little spend creep going on. Good news it's now easier than ever to save on Azure.

47:17
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48:03
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49:45
All right, we're not quite done with ai. We'll, we'll move on, but that you know that was most of the news this week was was deep seek and ai and open ai. They said that they are going to partner with the us national laboratories on scientific research and nuclear weapons security. Maybe this is this is this is the kind of thing that might have made you get nervous. Uh, they're going to work. Uh, they're going to deploy an open ai model on venado. That's the supercomputer at los alamos national Labs. Los Alamos is where, of course, our nuclear program, our nuclear weapons, get developed. 15,000 scientists working at the National Labs will be able to access O1, the new reasoning series. Openai will also work with Microsoft to deploy one of its models on Venado. Venado is powered by nvidia and hpe working on nuclear weapons. Quote focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war. Shall we play a game? And securing nuclear material and weapons worldwide? It's I. I think if they work on security, that's probably a good thing, yeah, yeah go ahead.

51:09 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
My, my strong, informed opinion is just securing nuclear weapons as opposed to leaving them unsecured is yeah, I'm for it general yeah yeah, but if, if we give the engineers access to 4.0, doesn't 4.0 also have access to the engineers?

51:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good question. No, because I guess it's running on the computer inside the labs, right? So in theory it wouldn't exfiltrate stuff out of the labs. That's always a concern, like my little AI friend here who's recording this entire conversation. They don't even I don't even know where it's going. It could be going to china, I don't know, I don't care. Listen all you want.

51:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Um, if it, if it wants to hear me play, uh, the saints come marching in over and over and over again on the piano, go ahead, listen in okay, so let me ask a question, though how would you feel if everything that you said to this thing was released somewhere and then emailed to like your top 10, like most contacted people in your address book?

52:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it's not gonna do that. But even if it did so, what?

52:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm just saying because I think that that's the real kind of worry that a lot of people have about this stuff isn't so much like oh, these things have my system, but like this could get out there and I am not knocking anybody's desire for privacy.

52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is absolutely your choice. I think I gain an advantage. I think, by the way, this is what. So one of the things people are talking about is, uh, apple intelligence and how stupid it is and it's bad because it's private, it's on device, it's limited in the size of the model, but also it's limited in what it knows and honestly, I think I I think, if you're willing to give the ai everything, even if it emails it to my 10 top contacts, you're going to get more from the AI, right, and I think that's what Apple's finding out.

53:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Maybe I think there's like a broad spectrum between the two though of uses.

53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wear this to my doc. Somebody's saying what if your doctor was wearing it? My doctor does record our conversation. He has a sign sign that says I'm going to use ai to transcribe this. Then we're going to delete it, but I also am recording him and that way I you know when I, when I uh, I get notes back like I don't remember everything I get. I think it's just. It isn't obviously a complete trade-off between privacy and intelligence, but I do think that the more willing you are to give up on privacy, the more valuable the ai will be they said the same thing about social media yeah, and I fell for that too, but I've deleted all my tweets since.

54:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Me too.

54:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still, by the way. I still check X, but that's kind of part of my job, right. I have to see what's going on out there. It's interesting. The national what is it? The NTSB National Transportation Safety Board, has announced that it is not going to update the press in the way it used to, with emails, press releases. It's all going to be on Xcom. This to me seems like a bad idea. It seems like it's really kind of a little well backsheesh to Elon Musk, right.

54:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, clearly, and putting aside who controls X, because that, or Twitter, whatever we're going to call it, because that, to me, is the least, most bothersome part about this. It's like these are third-party services and you're talking about like official communications, that you're relying on a platform that might change its. You know, mail-in might change like what it wants to do, like what if they decide that they don't want to.

55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, display things the same ways, like if there's gosh what if the entire us government decided to use x or worth's truth social for all of its public announcements? It seems like that would be a misuse of our taxpayers' dollars. National Transportation Safety Board will only update the press about plane crashes on X, not over email. They announced on Saturday they will use the at NTSB underscore newsroom account to share news conferences or other investigative information. They said this is to help them better manage their incoming emails. Ntsb later said reporters should email media relations at ntsbgov for all other inquiries. Oh, it's specifically about those two incidents the, the two plane crashes okay well, I'm not.

56:01
I'm not against uh using x in addition to the normal, but if you stop having press conferences and media briefings, you just use x.

56:10 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
That's not good yeah, also, like I mean, the government was kind of slow to adopt social media in helpful ways, and I'm all for having stuff in more places, like hook up the automations, have everything go everywhere, and I'm all for that. But, yeah, it doesn't doesn't make sense to do it this way. Even if they only want to open up inboxes in certain places, like if you can only inbox them via, like like the regular email plus Twitter DMs, like I get it, because most people use their Twitter DMs as, like a secondary inbox if they're tweeting a lot. So I get that. But yeah, this is, I mean, like that's bizarre. Even I mean, even if they wanted to do this for these two incidents, just host it like, make it a page on the site where, like follow these threads, you know.

56:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like make it easy to find for yeah, no, I have nothing against them announcing stuff on x just not exclusively x.

57:00 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
that's what's weird, no the exclusive thing and requiring a login.

57:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, right, oh, that's right.

57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to have a login, don't you? You can't just look at a tweet.

57:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, and look, not that this would matter with this administration, but I think that that login thing that you bring up, dan, which fantastic point that might violate some sort of either accessibility or some sort of other like actual, like government guidelines that exist in terms of getting people access to these sorts of things, so, um, yeah, one of the replies on x is ntsb is breaking the law.

57:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Government agency is not permitted to restrict its obligation to inform the public by making available only on a privately run platform.

57:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Precisely right, like I think I think habit on x is great, like that's actually a great use case. And to shoshana's point, I think government was slow to adopt some of those things and and and you know um, maybe too slow. But like, have an rss feed, have like a, a separate page that's up where you can put your updates that are cross-posted across those things. Set up the automations, you know.

58:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Even their own government, mastodon, for instance. Sorry to cut you off, christina.

58:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, yeah, no exactly.

58:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this, as somebody on X said, a new level of transparency? I don't think so.

58:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean you certainly Not unless we redefine transparency. Yeah, I mean you certainly Not unless we redefine transparency.

58:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, well, just curious. By the way, that's the same platform that the naked video of the current new secretary of transportation, a video of him dancing naked on the big brother. But that's an. It's another story the real world.

58:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
The real world, I mean yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, it's nice to know that he's got.

58:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He can let his hair down, have a good time. There are no videos of me dancing naked on real world. I just want to say, even if, meaning, even if this records everything, all right, let's talk about oh three mini. This was uh released. It's interesting, uh, open. Ai responded to deep seek and this is why competition is a good thing responded to deep seek by saying oh, oh, oh, let me, let's release oh three mini. Uh, its latest version of oh three, the reasoning model.

59:20
I like these reasoning models. Deep seek is a reasoning model too. They take a longer time, but you can watch them as they kind of come up with the answer. I think it's kind of an interesting thing. Sometimes it takes 15, 20 seconds a minute, but often they say the answers are better. Openai is saying the new model is both powerful and affordable because it is mini, which means it's smaller Reasoning models. Fact-check their answers before giving out results. O3 Mini, fine-tuned for STEM programming, math and science. I immediately gave it a I cut and pasted from the advent of code day seven problem that has been stymieing me since December, and literally in 30 seconds it came up with the correct answer and all the code in common lisp, no less an ancient language intelligence I'm just looking at my phone right now when apple intelligence um opts to use gpt plus, do we know if, if we are able to choose the model?

01:00:29
yes, you can you can well, I pay for it.

01:00:31 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So but if you have a, paid account.

01:00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you go to your chat, gpt app. Uh, there's a dropdown and you can choose and so, yeah, so if under model I can choose GPT 4.0, 4.0 with scheduled tasks, 0.1, 0.3 mini and 0.3 mini high.

01:00:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And this is what it responds to. This would correlate, then to using the Siri button on your iPhone right Like that's oh, I see what you're saying. You're asking if I use Apple intelligence yeah, right, right, can I choose?

01:01:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't think so. I think Apple made a deal with OpenAI to use GPT-4, period.

01:01:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's just for. That's kind of what I thought.

01:01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But so I do almost-. I'm sorry, I thought you meant in the chat GPT client, but no.

01:01:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean that's a good tip too, because I didn't look to change that. I do something very similar with the action button, but I put it on perplexity. Same thing, the same thing right, but it's a little easier to choose the model, and that's why I do it, because in the interface it's just fast and easy to choose the model that I'm interacting with.

01:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had perplexity until 03 Mini came out that I changed it. I go back and forth Every once in a while. I change it to Claude as well, yeah same same. They're all different, but they're all kind of I feel like remarkable. Am I just being suckered?

01:01:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
No, I'm there with you.

01:01:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I am too.

01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's very easy for us to kind of take it for granted. But look at what we were seeing two years ago. Compared to what we're seeing today, we're making amazing progress.

01:02:16 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Look everything on our site at Blackbird not to log roll for us, but everything we partnered with this great firm Punch and every design on the site is AI generated. And my role is I work with AI engineers on one hand and on the other hand, I work with intelligence analysts, and often they both send me this incredibly intelligent buckets of notes. But I use AI every day to synthesize that. Otherwise, it would take me forever to do my job with GPT-4.0 and perplexity that really chaining those things together. Well, chaining those things together, I can also see the power and potential of agents, but that is my day is throwing things between different AI systems.

01:02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Agentic AI does stuff for you right. It books an Uber or it writes a little script to get you to automatically download every article mentioning Blackbird AI. That kind of thing.

01:03:09 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah right, I think you might hear a lot of jargon. I mean, I know you're going to hear a lot of jargon about this and I really dislike jargon because it's off-putting and it doesn't bring people in. It kind of creates a shield and a wall. It doesn't bring people in. It kind of creates a shield and a wall. So, really, agentic AI is automated tasks and that is one certain capability. That's a consumer capability. But if we look at agents at large scale, especially running in the enterprise, there's a lot of potential because you could chain very complex tasks together and run them automatically. But what we? We're also seeing this.

01:03:48
you know, one of the really disruptive and very interesting knock-on effects of I keep saying knock-on effects, sorry for that cliche, but one of the knock-on effects of DeepSeek is well, if this really did cost just five million dollars to train, then maybe we could see a crazy democratization of agents and of different types of ais. What really might happen, the very the potential future that I'm excited about with artificial intelligence is if the cost to produce it and the energy cost to produce it and to produce high quality generative results has sunk dramatically. I mean, that's from an environmental perspective. That's really incredible. It also makes these things far more accessible to broad numbers of people, far more than it is now.

01:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Christina, with the co-pilot, of course. Used to work for github, but uh and. I'm sure you only want to say good things about your former employers, but uh, in general, the people that you talked to you were in developer relations. Were they using co-pilot as an assistant or to actually write code?

01:04:59 - Christina Warren (Guest)
it was sort of very right. So think primarily assistant. But the models have gotten better a lot faster. So you know Clog 3.5, sonnet for code especially is really good.

01:05:09
In my opinion it's the best one of them and Copilot right now offers I think they just added O3 Mini into Copilot chat and O1 preview, and O1 Mini was available at the end of last year. Gemini one, dot five is available for some users and that has obviously a really big context window, which is awesome and, you know, of course, like the original GPT-4.0. But, like in my experience, Claude has been really fantastic at code and so the primary way to use it right now is to kind of, you know, be kind of autocomplete and in some cases maybe generate, you know, big blocks of code or functions, depending on what you want to do. But what's starting to shift and we've seen this especially with less technical people who maybe don't have like, maybe like the fear about, like how to interact with these systems and hear me out, because that sounds antithetical but kind of makes sense where you know they will go into ChatGPT and be like help me write a program for this and get fairly far along, Whereas people who might have a little bit of experience might be more hesitant to chat with the assistants the same way. But what we've seen, especially with some of the newer models and with reasoning, you can start to actually get some really good solutions with this, with things like O1, and, I'm sure, with O3 and R1 and things like that, would be to solve and kind of debug more difficult problems. And in that case, I do think that we've started to see, and you can see, more code generated from end, code generated from, you know, end to end.

01:06:44
That's AI. Now, how much stuff is going to be committed to production that is AI generated? I think that that's going to be more minimal, Right, but in terms of running tests, sure, and maybe in doing certain sorts of reviews or helping do debugging, that's already happening. And then you have tools like Spark, which the GitHub Next team is working on, which will kind of allow people to kind of enter it in plain text. Well, I want to do this and help kind of create smaller, you know, mini apps to do those things completely in natural language. Github Workspace, which is similar but also can bring, you know, give the user a lot of a higher level of control involved with those systems too, can do that. And so I think that the primary thing right now, to answer your question in a very long winded way, is still kind of completion, but it's even in the last three months, the amount of code that can be generated and generated well has exponentially increased.

01:07:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg said that he thought this year they would be able to replace senior engineers with an AI.

01:07:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know about that. I mean, I think that maybe with the right instruction and with the right kind of babysitting, you might be able to have things that says okay, you know, create these things. I don't know right. And he obviously has access to way more research than I do, and that certainly-.

01:08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he also and this is something we have to remember about Sam and Mark and the whole gang is they have a vested interest in selling this. I was going to say they do.

01:08:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They're marketers, yeah exactly, and that's why I'm saying I'm trying to like put some realism there. I think that some types of code you could generate, yeah, and in some ways, like I even know, just from from using you know systems like like, like Copilot, chat, or even like Claude, to say, help me write you know a regex that that might be like a really difficult one, Like I did one.

01:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, yes yeah.

01:08:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
There was. I stumped it actually and it took me a few back and forth to go with it. But the reasoning models were really interesting because they would run tests against it and then say, well, that didn't quite work, let me try this again. Well, that didn't quite work.

01:08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that fun to watch it think.

01:08:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah.

01:08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of amazing.

01:08:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It is kind of amazing, but that was the sort of thing where I had to kind of go back and forth with a few prompts to get the correct regex. Now, to be clear, it still took me a fraction of the time. It would have if I had to write that manually. But these models are getting better and better and so I think that with the right prompts and the right kinds of instructions you might be able to get solutions that would match whatever engineering level they're wanting to claim might do.

01:09:18
But in terms of how much handholding will be involved in that, I think that the idea that you could just let these systems loose and just give them a very simple prompt and they would give everything back exactly as it needed to be, I think that is not going to be accurate. I think that what is more likely is that these might just be more assistants that could work alongside senior engineers who know what they're doing, and they could go back through and kind of code review and go okay, this was correct. Now I can move on to another task. But that's not the same thing as just being able to take anybody off the street and say, oh well, you can be, you know the person who just writes the instructions now, and we have this senior AI engineer who can write it all and we don't need to worry about you being able to check if it's good or not, because you don't think that's just around the corner?

01:10:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you don't think I don't know how?

01:10:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
far that is, I mean I, I don't know if it's in a year, uh, five years, I wouldn't say I wouldn't bet against that, but in a year, I I don't know.

01:10:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still feel like I think it's gonna happen this year. Thanks, I think it's gonna happen this year. I'm with zuck I. I know that he you know that could well be hype, but I actually think we're very, very close. Remember, instructing a computer what to do. See, I think AI, creating art, writing music, pictures, that's one thing. That's a human skill that requires humanity. Coding is very much the opposite. It's telling a computer what to do. What better agent to do that than another computer?

01:10:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You're not wrong, but I guess what I'm pushing back on is the idea, and I don't mind I mean.

01:10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not like. I mean as much as I like to code and it is an art form for me. There isn't much future for artisanal coding in the world.

01:11:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I guess what I'm pushing back on is how much someone who doesn't already have an understanding of what is being generated is correct or not, like if you're still going to need someone who can help do the review and make sure that things are being done the most efficient way, that you don't have lapses, insecurity and whatnot.

01:11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you could write tests.

01:11:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You could write test harnesses Of course you can, of course, and whatnot? Because I guess you could write tests. You could write test harnesses.

01:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of course you can, of course, and you can run those tests, but I'm saying you still need someone who's going to know what a test is is. Yeah, just another, just get the get clawed to write the code and then, uh, oh, three mini to write the tests, and if they agree, everything's fine yeah, that won't. That won't lead to any humans are notoriously bad at writing code, I should point out.

01:11:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, we are, we are, but I feel like because of that it's not like we're the paragons of perfection.

01:11:47
No, I just feel like that's why you try to have actual as many eyes on something, reviewing it as possible before things go out, and obviously we could always have more of that. And I think that these systems, especially in automated natures, if I think that these systems, especially in automated natures, if they can look over stuff and go, hey, we saw this string and this seems malformed and this could be a security issue, alerting things in advance, I think that's an awesome opportunity and a use case. We've already seen with some AI systems. I'm just saying I think that this idea that we can just have these things running autonomously without having to have any human interaction or checks at all, at least in the next year year.

01:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that that is going to be the case. Why did you buy your r1? I want to ask both you and shoshana what you thought that little orange thing was going to do for you. Was it just a curiosity, shoshana?

01:12:36 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
oh, I didn't buy one, I don't have that oh, you have one.

01:12:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, shoshana and I are the only ones who didn't. I tried, by the way, but my credit card was refused so I did not get one, but I did try. Uh right when it was first announced. So all right, dan, why did you buy the r1? Was it just an experiment? Was it like me buying my little b computer?

01:12:56 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
it was. I mean first of all just fun, like it was, like it wasn't a crap ton of money. I like teenage engineering.

01:13:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was cheap, right, I mean still overpriced, as it turned out, but cheap. Cheap at the time.

01:13:09 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Right, we just had a conversation about like how we put chat GPT into our phone and talk to it and you know I can take a picture of stuff and I mean that's really what this represented in a fun design. And I mean really the selling point was it came with a year of perplexity. So it was like, well, if I'm going to pay for a year of perplexity anyway, then that's a good point.

01:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't get it, but I did pay for the year of perplexity.

01:13:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Did I know how fun this story of Rabbit would turn out to be? No, Leo, I didn't anticipate how incredibly entertaining this story would be leo, I didn't anticipate how incredibly entertaining the story would be. However, I I mean, like I maybe it does feel a little obnoxious to my broke punk rock youth that I would have an extra 200 and some bucks to like blow on a thing that I don't care about but like beyond that, whatever well, these meta glasses cost me that much and they're equally they're fantastic, but those are awesome.

01:14:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Those are awesome. Are you kidding me? Those are the greatest things. I think the meta, I think the meta glasses are great.

01:14:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm what do you use your meta glasses for?

01:14:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in a million years just listening to music, win the ai race well, apple, we're gonna take a break, but when we come back, apple has decided not to compete and we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Good, do you think they look good? I look a little nerdy in these, no, but I am listening to uh, to rap music while we're talking right now amazing yeah you can't hear it, but I can't listen to the boys of summer with your weight the boys, yeah, you got wayfarers on yeah, yeah, gotcha.

01:14:36
Oh hey, good, yeah, good, good catch. Let me see if I can get that to uh. Could, yeah, good, good catch. Let me see if I can get that to uh. Play boys of summer. Anyway, christina, I'll find out why you bought that little orange doohickey in just a minute. You're watching it's playing. Uh, I don't know what it's playing. Is it doing it? It's playing something can you?

01:14:57 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
hear it even if you have a monitor in.

01:15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, can you hear? It Sounds like Miles Davis. It's actually quite nice. Anyway, that's rude of me to listen to music while I'm talking. We'll have more with Shoshana Weissman rstreetorg, dan Patterson blackbirdai and Christina Warren, an employer to be named later as we continue this for one more day one more day.

01:15:28
I'm glad you took a cruise. That's a good use of your time. Yeah, I'm a little nervous about leaving the country. I'm afraid they might put a tariff on me when I come back. I don't know. I'm just nervous about leaving the country right now. I don't know if we're would be very welcome as we travel around. But the bahamas, that's nice.

01:15:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Everybody loves you in the bahamas, right I mean I, I mean I went to the, I went to the, the um cruise lines, um uh private island.

01:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that was it, no ferners yeah, I, I've seen nassau before.

01:15:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was fine with that. I was like I just want to be in a hot tub, I'm good.

01:16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The best time on a cruise ship is when everybody's gotten off NASA, and then you have the ship to yourself.

01:16:07 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Exactly.

01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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It's hard to do a honeypot on your own. It's non-trivial. Uh, I know because I've, I've, I've talked to the guys who wrote the first uh honeypot steve benelvin, and we had bruce cheswick on and he's he wrote the first honeypies. It was. It was hard. No, it's trivial, it's easy. Canarytools slash twit. Don't forget the offer code twit in the how did you hear about us box. We just think the world of these things and we're really glad to be able to tell you about them. If you have a network, if you want to protect it, you need a Thinks Canary Canarytools slash TWIT. What did you buy your R1 for? Christina Warren.

01:20:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's very similar to Dan. I mean, the main thing was I didn't even know about the free perplexity subscription when I bought it. I don't think that that had been announced yet, so for me it was just like they had announced it at CES and I was like this looks dumb, but it's Teenage Engineering and they designed the box.

01:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They weren't the company.

01:21:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, and I knew that, I knew that. But I was just like, hey, it'll look cute next to my playdate, which is also, you know, uh, teenage engineering and a much more useful little device, honestly. But, um, yeah, the plate, it's fantastic, but, uh, I just are they still selling it?

01:21:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, the play date no, no, I know the play date.

01:21:35 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I have a play there are one I have no idea, I guess they are look, look, yeah, yes, they are Look, look yeah.

01:21:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Buy now, you can ask it questions Really, can you?

01:21:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You can. But but I mean, you know it, it, it works fine. It's just I think they got a little ahead of themselves in terms of, uh, how automated the stuff would be. But I was just like, okay, whatever, we'll do it. And then they were like, oh, and you'll get a free year, perplex Sea. I was like, well, that would cost as much as the device did. And then it became to Dan's point like funny. Also, as you know, leo, I like to collect like effed company or potentially effed company things. Defunct stuff.

01:22:12
And I was like, look, this is going to be great, this is going to come in favor someday.

01:22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And look, you never know.

01:22:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
What other defunct tech tech have you acquired lately? Well, lately not much, but you know, what was interesting is that I I found and I have it around here somewhere. I don't know if I'll be able to find it or not um, but I had a. I had a pebble. I have a number of pebbles awesome, they're back, baby, that's what I was gonna say.

01:22:33
That's what I was gonna say, and so I was so excited about that because I was like oh, I have like a brand new unboxed pebble steel that I got at a conference, like a monogrammed one, I have a bunch of pebbles because because I I interviewed eric a lot back in the day and I was a big, I was an early backer of theirs.

01:22:46
I was a big fan of what they've done and I was so excited when I saw the news this week when I was on my cruise that that pebble is coming back and that google open sourced the, the old os, and I was like that's fantastic, I'm gonna yeah, actually micah interviewed eric uh for um tech news weekly this week awesome, and they're talking about the fact that he opens.

01:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is so great I don't know why more companies don't do this. Open sourced the pebble uh software and eric uh mijakovsky, who founded it, said we're going to even make Pebbles again because Google I guess Google, which bought Pebble, yeah, and incorporated some of it, I guess, into the Google watch well, well, fitbit bought Pebble, but most. Google then bought Fitbit, so you're right, I left out of stage, okay so.

01:23:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So it took from, I mean, um, and, and Mike interviewed him, so so he would know more than me, but from, based on the things I read, like it took you, I mean, and Micah interviewed him, so he would know more than me, but from, based on the things I read, like it took, you know, maybe finding the right people at Google and asking would you be willing to open source this? And they did, which I think is amazing. And now I think they're all working to say, okay, can we get these things to build, can we get the firmware to build, because you know a lot of these systems might be, you know, eight or nine years old, um, and, but then they can like go from there and yeah.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eric's talking about you know making hardware again and he told Micah. He said I decided to start making new, a new Pebble watch hardware, hardware that will run the Pebble OS. That, by the way, I wish more companies like did what Google did, which is okay. We're not going to use it. Let's open source it, let's let it free. I think that's exactly what you should do. I wish we saw that more often, instead of just killing products. Uh, mijakovsky said we're going to do this a little bit differently this time. The name of the game is sustainability. I'm not sure what that means.

01:24:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think that means not trying to go immediately from like you have your, your, your Kickstarter kind of backers and people who are interested in it, to being in Best Buy stores to try to like take on Apple Watch right. I think that what he's written before about kind of like why Pebble failed was you know, it was this perfect kind of moment when it launched and it was a very good product. I thought the design was very good and I thought, especially for the price point, like it was a very good smartwatch.

01:24:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But then you immediately had competition from like the, the, android um stuff and especially the apple watch, and they tried, just didn't seem to have. Yeah, google just didn't, I don't know. They bought fitbit and then they incorporated little bits of it, but they didn't really continue on with the mission. I guess that happens big companies buy little companies. Well, I'm glad that Eric was able to get the code back and I'm thrilled.

01:25:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was an e-ink.

01:25:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wasn't it an e-ink display?

01:25:30 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, it's an e-ink display and so it had great battery life and a very, very robust developer community from the beginning who were building things around it, and they even hired some of the people who kind of worked on on the um, you know, kind of the community side to work for pebble, um, uh, the company when they were starting up, because, like I remember the early days when, you know, the first version came out, it was just on kickstarter and then it, you know, broke a lot of records and, um, the number of people who would just create their own little watch faces and little apps and and even a really robust iOS apps.

01:26:02
It always worked a little bit better on Android, but, but you had some really good iOS apps and integrations too, and the community of, you know, hackers around the community was just fantastic. And I I'm excited to see that ethos kind of return, because I feel like there is a place for it. It doesn't have to be something that sells millions and millions of units. It can have kind of a small community of users who likes it and hopefully sustains it, which is exciting.

01:26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently there are a lot of people in our community who have one, dominic says. I just took my Pebble Time out of the drawer After hearing the news. It still works great. He's in our YouTube chat In our Discord Grammages. Is still managing to keep a pebble steel alive.

01:26:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Only smart watch I've ever liked yeah, it was great and what was funny was interesting is that, uh, the original idea for it started as a companion for a blackberry.

01:26:54
Because, oh, my god, it is retro yeah because eric well, eric is from the universe, he's canadian, he went to the university of waterloo and he had kind of an idea of having to be a blackberry companion sort of thing, and kind of hacked up a, a kind of proof of concept, I think, with like a blackberry bold, and then a few years later they came up with the concept um, put it on kickstarter, and then it, it went from there I'm trying to remember if I had a pebble watch.

01:27:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's long gone. It feels kind of like a retro. It's like a zippo lighter or something.

01:27:22 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It kind of yeah, kind of what was cool is the original one like like the steel looked a little more professional and the round had a good look, but like the original one kind of looked like a swatch watch. It was just kind of plastic but you could get them in different colors and and people would even make little wraps for them and whatnot. And, um, eric was kind enough, uh, to give me a pink one once so I had cause I had like.

01:27:43
I backed one on Kickstarter and then I received a number of others over the years and he gave me a pink one once, which was which was very kind of him. I hope I have that somewhere.

01:27:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you been schlepping all this stuff all over the country?

01:27:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I'm a hoarder. What can I say?

01:27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See I give it all away and now I'm kind of regretting it. I see I give it all away and now I'm kind of regretting it.

01:28:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I used to remember in the old studio I had a museum.

01:28:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had all the stuff, yeah, and I gave it all away. This is. This is all that's left. Well, a pdp 11 an inside altair but that's an altair, it's altair yeah, it's a fake one, but it's a it's still a good recreation.

01:28:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's a real mac, original mac, 128k mac though oh my gosh, I was gonna say, is that the berkeley systems? Uh, after dark or whatever?

01:28:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
dark still works, still got the flying toasters. Amazing, I am not going to throw these, uh, these, these glasses away, although apple, according to uh, bloomberg, according to Mark Gurman on Bloomberg, has decided to can its AR glasses project, which surprises me. Yeah, me too, is it? I mean, clearly they don't think the Vision Pro is the future, or do they?

01:28:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They can't Come on. They can't Come on, guys on.

01:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can't come on, guys. Um, so it seems to me that apple's, by killing their, remember these were going to be glasses like the orion glasses that meta is developing, that look like regular glasses but uh, have a heads-up display and so forth. Um, the one that they were working on tied to a mac, which is a little bit of a disadvantage. You're not walking down the street with it, but it's the first step. It seems to be that if they give that up, that must be kind of tacit admission that there's not much future with vr ar either, right, with mixed reality at all oh, it could also be directly tied into or very related to their position in the ai race.

01:29:41 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean, those meta ray bans are only it is only ai that makes them do the the cool stuff that they do right, and and I, I mean meta is a leader with llama. They, it's undeniable that llama is one of the best models and meta has a ton of exclusive data uh, exclusive data that nobody else has between all of their, their social apps. So I, I mean, if I'm apple, I maybe sit here and I think, well, you know, the vision pro is a boondoggle and, um, we don't have enough data to at least, I mean, everything. Like you said, leo's from apple. Intelligence is running on device. That's great, but on device, on your classes do much hard.

01:30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, these I mean the meta classes do tie to an app on the phone yeah, that well, that's what I'm saying.

01:30:31
Like your phone is a lot of computing power and a lot of storage and a lot of ram. I mean, these things are really many computers, super computers. It's just in some ways in your pocket and they're always connected. I mean, it seems to be. This is a perfect match. Apple is going to announce um new uh. Well, uh, it's not. It's not it's apple, but it's the um, it's the uh. What do you call them? Headphones? Not the uh. They're not airpods, sorry, no, the other ones. I've forgotten the name dr dray's beats. Thank you they're gonna.

01:31:07
This week they're gonna announce an update to the beats that will do, uh, heart rate monitoring, which the airpods do not do yet. So that's interesting. It sounds like maybe apple's thinking that the future is not in vision but in the ears, or wearables in general. But that's the thing Killing the glass is wearable, which surprises me, frankly.

01:31:31 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, it's also possible that there could be two things right. It's possible that they could be killing maybe, that particular version, but there might still be dedicated to doing some sort of glasses or some sort of AR VR thing. But maybe that particular implementation they just project, they just aren't committed to, but they might be having something else right. The fact that it was tethered to the Mac might be a deal breaker and maybe they are looking at like ultimately having something that can either, you know, sync with a phone or do something else wirelessly, where you don't have to have that kind of accessory component.

01:32:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know I mean you start. You start by connecting it to a mac. That's obviously not the long-term uh, future, uh, but it makes sense to develop it. You know, from that point forward, there's basically a little mac in your vision pro.

01:32:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's why they're thirty five hundred dollars, right, and you have to have a battery pack. I was going to say you have to have the attachment and so you know. But so I don't know. I'm just saying like I could see them. You know, maybe, and they could always revisit that idea later on too. So I don't know. They've invested a lot in Vision Pro and in this AR VR thing. It would be odd for them to give up so quickly. I wouldn't necessarily say it would be a bad thing, because I don't think Vision Pro is it, but it would be odd for them to give up that quickly. But at the same time, I think that it's undoubtable like AirPods are one of the best things that have happened. You know, I think they're one of the best products that Apple has introduced, period. And you know the airpod pro 2s um, my mom and my dad are both using the hearing aid mode and really do they like yeah yeah, I mean honestly, my mom really enjoys it.

01:33:10
My dad, I'm still having a hard time getting him to use, um, the in-ear things did they have regular hearing aids ever, or was this in lieu of a hearing aid? This was in lieu of. I've been trying to get my dad to get hearing aids for a long time and I've been.

01:33:24
I've faced a lot of pushback on it yep um, my, my mom, um isn't quite at the point where she would need them, but even having a fairly decent you know hearing test built in just to kind of show what sort of loss there is was helpful. And she loves her airpods and she wears them all the time anyway because she's always listening to podcasts around the house and so having that mode on has been really great. But for my dad we were even noticing. You know, I got him for him for Christmas, but it's like the third time I've bought him AirPods and he finally has tried them for more than like 30 minutes.

01:33:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just do not give up, do you?

01:33:57 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, at this point I was just like this could really help you Dad and I really wanted him to get hearing aids for a long time.

01:34:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How deaf is he? Is it pretty clearly?

01:34:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean it's not at the point where I think it's like. It's not like the point where they are basically like we will be of no help to you, but it's, you know, I guess, whatever the level higher than moderate is. So it's definitely, you know, could be, could be useful so how about your mom?

01:34:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
she, she does, she have, she's like she's like.

01:34:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
She's like moderate or or white I think it's in some and she thinks the airpods are good, are good enough to uh. Yeah, hearing aids for yeah yeah for her, I think so, um, I mean, I think what's great about it, I mean honestly, is that there are a lot of people who will never take a hearing test and might not even be aware of how things can be improved.

01:34:46
And it could be a boon right, and they're over the counter. Could you get better ones? Of course you could, but for a lot of people it might be better than nothing.

01:34:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not bad.

01:34:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And, if anything, hopefully you reduce the stigma I wear.

01:34:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
$7,000 Oticon hearing aids and that's a lot of money for people to pay.

01:35:04 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
And I tried the.

01:35:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AirPods Pro and they do pretty much the same thing. There's really one difference, which is normal hearing aids don't block your hearing, they don't seal your ears, they just sit little speaker in your ears to amplify voices. The rest of the stuff still comes in. When you're wearing the AirPods Pro you're kind of sealed out with transparency mode.

01:35:22
You know you're relying on them for all the audio and that's a kind of a different, and I don't like it quite as much, but but it does the job and it's for 250 bucks instead of 7 000 bucks well, that's the thing, right.

01:35:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And then, and it already has the bluetooth built in, I'm sure yours have your oh yeah, I can use them as all of that stuff.

01:35:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:35:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But sometimes you have to get, like the you know attachments to your TV, the, the, the you know the voice, coil and all that stuff. Yeah, Right, exactly, and, and so I I feel like for a lot of people, especially since you know, medicaid or whatever doesn't often cover, you know hearing aids, and so you have to pay out of pocket and, um, I think, yeah, very, very little insurance coverage.

01:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you'd have to have really spectacular coverage medicare does not exactly.

01:36:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, um, yeah, medicare excuse me, I always get them confused, um, but uh, yeah, I mean, I think it's great to bring more of these sensors to things. What's interesting is, I guess they don't have the um same, I guess, patent issue with with doing the, the you, the heart rate and monitoring and whatnot. Oh yeah, massimo, well, that was blood oxygen.

01:36:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are the Beats. These will come out February 11th. These new Beats, power Beats Pro 2. And they have the same chip that's in the AirPods, but they do something the AirPods do not do. They have the H2 chip, but they do something the AirPods do not do. They have the W2 chip or H2 chip. Sorry, but they do also have heart rate monitoring, which Apple has yet to do in the AirPods. So I'm thinking of buying a pair just to see how they and I like having the over the ear thing I was going to say the Powerbeats have always been really really good for you know anybody who wants to?

01:36:59 - Christina Warren (Guest)
work out a little bit more, right? Because you wouldn't like I've got AirPods in right now. I would not want to. I mean, like if I were on the treadmill like Shoshana, I would probably be okay with them, but like I would not want to be like going on a job.

01:37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shoshana, you're on a treadmill right now.

01:37:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, she's not. She was talking with you. She was earlier.

01:37:20 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
She was talking about.

01:37:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
you know, that would probably be okay, but like I would be concerned if I were going for something more strenuous.

01:37:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they fall out yeah.

01:37:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, whereas the Powerbeats are great, and I guess that's why they're introducing that.

01:37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting $250. So they're the same price as the Pros.

01:37:35
Basically, right, february 11th Cool New colors, including orange, in case you want everyone to know An impressive orange, impressive orange that's what Mark called it, and I don't know if that's the name impressive orange, although that would be a good color name. That's a Samsung name impressive orange. Yeah, we are almost exactly one year in on the Vision Pro and I'm just wondering if Apple's killing the AR glasses. But you know, what Mark says is that executives didn't want to have them attached to a Mac because that's not portable, but they found it drained the iPhone battery if you have it attached to the iPhone. So they needed the Mac for the processing and the power. But that's, I mean, look, look, the vision pro wasn't exactly a consumer product either. You have to start somewhere. If they're killing the ar glasses, I wonder what their commitment to the vision pro is a year in yeah, I just think also like the glasses didn't have a great like regular person appeal.

01:38:40 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I I think I might be wrong on this, but I think it was Meta that did a commercial where you have some model just like swirling around with her glasses on to show look at me, I have glasses. She's like very like high-end wearing clothes that look terrible but like in the way that it's like high-end, and like she like translates some Spanish that says there's a party and like she goes to a freaking party, but like none of that is like relatable to a person.

01:39:05
Like they're not going to be going to parties in other countries that often Like that's not a regular through your day thing, and I feel like there's other ways to get people interested, but I just think all of them have done pretty crappy jobs at marketing because it's and you're not a model, you're not wearing crappy clothes and you're not going to parties in other countries, like. When I'm watching that, I'm like why the hell do I need this? I don't get it.

01:39:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm sorry to interrupt you, shoshana, though that was exactly. You reminded me of that early iPod commercial. That was relatability, human, like making the iPod look human and relatable, more than human. Cool, right, right, cool, it was like. Could you see it? Like the iPod commercial for the Vision Pro.

01:39:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't look cool wearing a nerd helmet. I'm sorry.

01:39:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, you don't. Well, not only that, but like it's heavy on your face, like my biggest concern. I didn't buy one for a lot of reasons and almost none of them were the price. I mean, the price was part of it, but it was mostly because I couldn't live with myself looking at it not being used and knowing how much I spent on it. It really didn't have anything to do with like, oh, because I'll spend $200 and never use it again, fine, but like $4,000, that's a little much. But like I didn't want it on my face because I'm like this is going to leave marks this is going to leave marks.

01:40:20
This is going to be bad for my circulation. This is going to be a problem for wrinkles, for all kinds of things.

01:40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your posture, if it's that heavy on your head like, oh my God. Well, I mean somebody, scooterx in our Discord, is saying, well, they just killed that one product, I don't know. I mean that product is a stepping stone to continued ar glasses development. Um, it's hard to tell. It's mark german, it's a rumor, it's not. Apple's not announced it so it's hard to tell, but it it's. He says liter. This is a quote in from the mark bernberg power on newsletter company just canceled plans for a pair of ar glasses that would pair with a mac. The ultimate goal making standalone spectacles with augmented reality is probably at least three to five years away. So he implies that they're still working on it. Um, it's hard to tell. This is a leak, it's not. Uh, it's not an announcement from apple, and apple never talks about unreleased products. So we will. So we will never know.

01:41:21 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I just they didn't hire a swirling model that they'll have to fire now, Like it would feel really bad for her if she had to go, like find another job where she could wear bad clothes and swirl, you know.

01:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Key raises a larger issue, which is that Apple is really failing at AI and that Apple is not impressing people with apple intelligence. They're advertising capabilities that aren't even in the phone yet that are coming. Um, he says. The ai machine learning division, which acronym is a, I m l, is mocked by employees at as aimless. The group german rights has missed several deadlines and its large language models are less powerful than those of rivals. And it is true. If you play with Apple intelligence as it stands today, it is unimpressive, to say the least.

01:42:13 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
You know what? It's actually really interesting to me that I don't think Apple intelligence I don't have an iPhone, but I don't think Apple intelligence does this, and I don't think Google phones are doing this either. It's something super obvious for AI to help with scam texts. Why isn't it help identifying a scam text?

01:42:31
and other scam interactions on your phone. You're right, they're not. That's like such a perfect use of AI, something like everyone would love. I think you know and even say you know this is experimental. Take it with a grain of salt, but like we want and you can turn this off.

01:42:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Whatever. We think this is spam, we think this is. This is incorrect. This, yeah, and you're exactly right, cause they already have signals of who's in your contact list and you know people you frequently communicate with, even if they're not in your address book. They should know, presumably, the language when you report. You know presumably the language when you report that this is incorrect, that they could train their model based on those types of things.

01:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Instead they're doing notification summaries that are basically useless. Here's the one from my ring. There was a person at your front door multiple times.

01:43:17 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Oh my gosh, you know what's wild. I saw a commercial for Ring where they're like oh what. It was like the, I don't know pop culture, but it was the two famous like Amy Poehler and someone else.

01:43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tina Fey.

01:43:30 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, and they're like, oh, what was the tacos we got the other night? And they're like we can search Ring. I'm like that's creepy. I don't want a full record of.

01:43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like everyone, the doorbell knows the doorbell knows.

01:43:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, I can zoom in I saw that commercial. I have the same response because I saw that commercial too and they're like oh, I'm gonna zoom in on what, what type of bag it was. I'm like, just go through your door, dash history, oh my gosh. Yeah, like this isn't.

01:43:54 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Do you really want your doorbell solving?

01:43:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
to know all this yeah no, no, I don't.

01:44:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm already bothered that my neighbors have ring and so that means that they can give my stuff to the cops anyway, like that already bothers me right like I'm already very bothered by that and I can't do anything to stop it, but like now, ring is like just fully leaning into it. Oh yeah, we are absolutely a surveillance device. Zoom in and see what brand of tacos again. Just open up your DoorDash history.

01:44:21 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
It's easy, their other commercials were bad, like where they're. Like oh, it's what happens in your life. See, when you guys got excited over your daughter getting into college, like that was creepy enough. But I'm like this isn't, this, isn't. You have this elsewhere. Like you have a checking account, you have a credit card. You can go online, worst case, and check out where you paid for tacos. Like this isn't like ring not helping you.

01:44:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's just no, no, if anything, I would be like that would be a much better use case for, like the the b thing that that leo was wearing right where I would be like well, I opted into this and I knew that this is what this is doing. So if I could be like where did I order tacos from before? Right, like see.

01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To me that's one of the advantages of this that's what I'm saying is I can say good, hey, lisa and I were talking about something the other day. What was the name of that, or? Yeah, that's valuable, I think that is and but, but.

01:45:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Again, I think the difference is is it's like you go into it without expectation and you go into it I gave it, this project that's

01:45:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right right, whereas this is my doorbell, you know I have a ring doorbell, I have to say, but I actually I've said I have like two cameras on my front door.

01:45:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I also have a ubiquity camera, yeah so I have lots of information.

01:45:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, I just saw amazon drop off a package, so I'll be right back and no, I'm gonna stay here. Just have to think about what it might be. How exciting, um, apple did have the quarterly results. That looked pretty good on the surface. Uh, they made a ridiculous amount of money. Yeah, most there always is every quarter is the most money ever. Um, they, they made what was. It was, uh, the equivalent of something like eight billion dollars a month. They were making two billion a week in. Well, that's revenue, profit. I'm sorry, profit was only a billion dollars a week only. That's kind of mind-boggling.

01:46:20
Uh, so it's not like they're hurting, but there were times of trouble in paradise. China iphone sales down 11, which is probably going to get worse, I would imagine, with tariffs and so forth. Actually, apple's got to be a little bit worried the last time. Uh, in the last trump administration, he did announce tariffs on Chinese goods and Tim Cook went to him and said if you tariff the iPhone, people are just going to buy Samsung phones. You're punishing an American company and rewarding a South Korean company. Do you want to do that? Trump backed down, but he's talking again about tariffs for everything coming out of China. But he's talking again about tariffs for everything coming out of china. Uh, he's also talking about, apparently, tariffs against taiwanese chip makers, which is specifically, I think, targeted at tsmc, which makes the chips in all in the iphone and the mac and the ipad uh, the the primary processing uh system on a chip in those devices could raise the cost of iPhone significantly.

01:47:25
There's some headwinds for Apple, I guess. Look, I'm not making stock recommendations. I neither buy nor sell tech stocks and I certainly don't recommend you listen to me when it comes to the stock market. But just as a business, I think, think apple is. They're feeling like they're getting a little behind now. They've been there before and come back. Is apple in trouble?

01:47:54
and to find trouble yeah, they are a three and a half trillion dollar company, so they can afford a little trouble I mean.

01:48:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, I don't think they're in trouble, I think I don't think that anyone would argue that they are leading the conversation when it comes to to ai or virtual reality or any of the next generation of technology right sure, no right but so, but I don't think anyone would argue that.

01:48:17
But they are still the most valuable company in the world and and they still make you know, like you said, a billion dollars in profit every week and eight billion dollars in revenue. Um, I think that, uh, it was interesting to see, based on conversations with with people that I know. Um, I think that a lot of the the push for Apple intelligence was relatively quick, and that's one of the reasons why it's taken a long time for some of the things to show up and that things weren't maybe finalized and I think that they were kind of reacting almost defensively. So I think that Apple has been there before.

01:48:56
As you mentioned, they've definitely been seen as being behind in certain scenarios and come out OK, I don't know if their own models and what they're doing with AI is. I don't know if it is going to be able to be competitive, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be. It might not be right now, but we're at the beginning of this era. I don't think that anybody is finalized yet. I mean, we people were the whole market freaked out because of, you know, r1. Um, apple was, was relatively insulated from that which is is that's true, a good thing, that's a good point.

01:49:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It hurt. It hurt nvidia, it hurt microsoft, it hurt. It hurt all of the ai companies but apple, because they're not a player didn't hurt them.

01:49:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They're kind of like, not part of it, um, but also they're building their own hardware, which I think is important, right. So they also have a little bit of insulation, whereas, you know, they kind of have this cold war with nvidia, um, although they have made some conversations about working together, I guess in some small context, but nvidia hardware is never going to be in apple machines, right, um, and so I I think that, like I said, I don't think they're leading, but I don't know if I would say that they're in trouble. It doesn't necessarily matter.

01:50:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're famous for not being the first to market with anything.

01:50:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, absolutely I would be more bothered if, let me put it this way I want to wait until we can see what they're going to kind of show off at WWDC and what statements they say in the future at WWDC and what statements they say in the future. If there aren't looking like they are, you know, kind of making investments in some ways, at the very least for some of these other models to interact on their systems. You know, if the user chooses to allow them to, then I would be bothered by some of those directions. But I don't. I think it's too early to be doing a bloom about them.

01:50:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me correct the numbers. I gave out apple revenue 124 billion dollars uh for uh. The year is that wait a minute no, for the quarter. So that is a billion dollars a week. But that's revenue profit. I'm sorry, it was only 36 billion dollars, so that's a billion a week. So it's still a lot of money.

01:51:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
46 margin is a pretty good margin on your what was so interesting then versus now with apple, is they were always late to market, but they came to market with a great product that fit what consumers wanted, was simple, and did something that was useful and easy to understand. Let's go back to that iPod example. Think of those dancing commercials. The iPod was iconic because it was simple, it was easy to understand. The same with the iPhone, even the iPad people mocked, but it was pretty easy to understand. When we get into VR and AR territory, but it was pretty easy to understand. When we get into VR and AR territory. We've said this a million times. But who's the market? What is this? Why? Who cares? Right, I don't mean that in a flippant way, but I mean who cares?

01:51:57 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
No, I'm with you.

01:51:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I would say who cares, who is the market for this, and what is the plan, what is the goal?

01:52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's not like you can't run all of the AI models on an iPhone. I mean, I have ChatGPT, I have Claude, I have everything on here.

01:52:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean, that's why they're saying the M4 is so great because local processing right.

01:52:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I'm not running it locally. When I run DeepSeek, it's going to China, it's going straight to China.

01:52:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, but you could do some of those things. No, but I think that's a great point, dan. Who are these things for and how is it being positioned? And I don't think they nailed that, whereas very polished and hasn't had a great experience, people have kind of a negative, you know line through it and and siri already has a bad reputation, deservedly so um, she's just gotten started.

01:52:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
How did they let that happen?

01:52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, well, I'm tell, I'm my, it's my attitude, that it's because apple's decided that they want to be the privacy company and that as long as you are unwilling to uh, you know release that information of the world, you're never going to have AIs that's as smart. So they they've hobbled themselves by deciding to protect the privacy of their users. Now users will get to decide which they want. Do they want, you know? Are they, on the one hand, going to be put in a device that listens to everything and sends it to china, or, on the other hand, are they going to keep it all on their phone and keep it private and have less intelligence?

01:53:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
um, that's where that's a choice right, and I think that's exactly where apple is position positioning themselves right now, which is really interesting in the middle. You can make that choice and you will continue to make that choice. They're pushing the M4 and you can process locally or they integrate with open AI. Anyway, I'm just saying it's an interesting position for them. It's new.

01:53:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is, and I don't think it's. I mean, it certainly hasn't hurt them yet.

01:53:57 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
We'll see I think it's kind of like in the do everything social media era where Snapchat is like hey, politicians, come on to our platform and reach kids and it's like what? No, no one is on Snapchat. To like check on Hillary Clinton, make sure she's chill Like that wasn't a thing.

01:54:14
And I think, you're getting that with like some AI stuff. That it's like like there was a meme of a place and I think it was a real place called, but what was it like like coffee GPT or cafe GPT or something like that. It was like ridiculous. But we're kind of we're going to be in that era for a little bit of like AI, for like your hair or like just dumber.

01:54:37
Yeah, it's just really stupid stuff. Yeah, it's just really stupid stuff and I think, like I think some companies are flailing because this is a understandably like a bigger buy-in, because it's like social media has wide applications but ai is even far wider applications for all kinds of things. So like they want to be in it, but like they don't know why. It's like a. It's like a uh, like how pokemon was so popular and like parents didn't understand it. It's like a trend that they can't get their hands around for the trend part, but they're forgetting the trend's not why you sell your stuff.

01:55:11 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
The purpose of how it's used for people is why you sell yourself iPod was a thousand songs in your pocket and this is like AI assistant in your pocket yeah, one is cool. The other is like ai assistant in your pocket, like, yeah, one is cool, the other is like ai, yeah but, but.

01:55:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But if you said all of human knowledge in your pocket?

01:55:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, yeah, okay, there you go, yeah yeah right, all right much better yeah, better you win?

01:55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
fine, yeah, you win an expert in your pocket. Ask them anything and they know and they can answer I wait.

01:55:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
No, a thousand songs is still cooler. Less useful, but cooler it was cooler.

01:55:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, it was cool, but yeah. But I really do think if you, if you sold it, as, like you know everything, all of human knowledge in your pocket, or you know, get, get you know, information, what you want. I think that that would be cool.

01:55:56
I still think oh yeah it's cooler, but like, but you could but but I think I think that's how you'd have to position it, and instead it's kind of like this weird thing like oh, we're going to help you with your writing, but it doesn't really, and we're going to summarize stuff, but in kind of an annoying way, and the summaries take up more space than just the the you know subject line would on the emails. And I'm like how do I turn it off? Because I need to know how all this stuff works. And yeah, yeah.

01:56:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to. I have to. Unfortunately, I take a break. I don't want to interrupt because it's a great conversation. Hold that thought, put a pin in your head and we will continue in just a moment. You're watching this Week in Tech, our weekly tech news round table. You're going to hear a lot of AI in all of our shows, of course, uh, but we have now an ai show starting wednesday. This week in, google mutates into intelligent machines. Jeff jarvis, paris martineau and I will talk about ai with ai experts and it's going to be a lot of fun, so I hope we'll see you on wednesday. This week's twit is brought to you by zip recruRecruiter.

01:57:00
According to research, a major challenge many employers face is the pressure to hire quickly. It's so funny because when you put it that way, you know it's very sterile, but I can tell you as an owner of a small business when somebody leaves your company and it's a small company that's a crisis, because you have now two weeks to find somebody to replace them or you're gonna have to do their job. It is and and while you're trying to do their job, you're scrambling to hire. It's very difficult. It's a tough hurdle to overcome because it's so time consuming to search for great candidates, to search through applications. So time consuming to search for great candidates, to search through applications. That's why, when people leave our employ and it doesn't happen very often, but you know, sometimes somebody says, well, I got a job closer to home, or whatever. We go to ZipRecruiter. If you're an employer, have you ever tried ZipRecruiter? It is incredible. They have figured out how to solve that crisis where you've got to fill that position. In fact, four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. It's been our experience that it's within just a few hours. We'll post. You know, lisa will post the job at breakfast.

01:58:18
Now what happens immediately? A couple of things that make zip recruiter great. First of all, that post goes everywhere. More than 100 job boards, automatically social everywhere. So you're casting the widest net, which means you're going to get a lot of applicants and, by the way, they don't call you and they don't go to your inbox. They go to the zip recruiter interface where they they actually reformat resumes so you can scan them quickly. They have screening questions, a lot of tools to make it very quick and easy to rank.

01:58:46
But then something else happens. It's really cool zip recruiter. People come looking for work to zip recruiter so they have more than a million current resumes on file. They use ai then to look at those resumes, look at your requirements and make matches and and they will actually, within an hour or two, give you a list of people who are looking for work who fit your requirements. You can then rank them, rate them and invite the best ones to apply.

01:59:11
Now that does a couple of things. First of all and you probably know this if you've ever looked for a job if a company comes to you and says, hey, we like you, we would like you to come to work for us, you go right to the top of the pile. Right, I'm going to apply to that company because they everybody wants to be liked. So in a competitive environment it is very competitive now to hire the best people you're going to go right to the top. You're also going to get great candidates fast by lunch. Lisa's going oh, hey, here's a great. I mean, we're worried. Right, how are we going to fill this position? Oh, here's a great one, oh, here's another great one. We would literally by by by noon, have two or three really excellent candidates thanks to zip recruiter right now. You could try it for free too. So give it a shot.

01:59:54
Ziprecruitercom slash twit. G2 says zip recruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the most, and, and I would agree, that's what we use. How fast does ZipRecruiter's smart technology start showing your job to qualified candidates Right away To the largest pool as possible? That way, you're most likely to reach the person the one perfect person and fill that job fast. So take it easy. Relax employers, let ZipRecruiter take a load off. Speed up your hiring. See for yourself. Go to ZipRecruitercom slash twit. Try it for free. That's the same price as a genuine smile from a stranger or a picture-perfect sunset or a cute dog running up to you and licking your hand. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Ziprecruiter is the smartest way to hire, and I know from personal experience. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Uh surveys over right benito we. This is it. They stopped it on friday, I think so thank you for everybody who submitted.

02:01:00
Uh, we appreciate it. There's still a way you can help us and that's by joining the club. We have advertisers, we have great advertisers, but they don't cover the full cost of what we do. For that we need your support and I am very pleased to say we have 12,000 club members. It really is great. We keep it affordable bucks a month.

02:01:23
You get ad free versions of the shows. You don't have to listen to ads even this pitch you don't have to hear if you don't want to, although I know a lot of people still listen to the ad, the ad supported versions for some reason. You also um, you also get special events that we do. You get access to our club twit discord with really fun, interesting people talking about all the nerd topics. I think it's a great club to be part of and it really helps us keep the lights on pay our staff.

02:01:50
It is not cheap to do what we do and I feel pretty strongly. I mean, I'm ready to retire, I have saved up, I could retire, but I feel like, more than ever, the next few years are going to see some remarkable developments in tech and I think it's really important that we as consumers, as users, as people impacted by tech, understand it, and that's what I think our job is, and I want to do that job as best we possibly can. So please join the club and help us do that. Twittv slash Club Twit, and I thank you in advance and I thank all of our fantastic club members. Is Taylor Swift going to win a Grammy tonight, by the way?

02:02:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't think so.

02:02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, she doesn't have a new album.

02:02:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, no, she did have a new album, the tour's her post department and it was a good album. But the problem is she won last year for a not great album, in my opinion, which she went up to the eras tour and the album she did release it she, there's a lot of competition and, uh, she already won last year?

02:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
who's got record of the year and and uh album of the year? Who's gonna win? Who's gonna? Who are the big winners?

02:02:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know any of these people's names I mean, there's a big push for Beyonce to win one of the big ones, but I don't know if that's going to happen. I think Chappell Roan had a really good year.

02:03:11 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
She had a great year, didn't she? She had a great year.

02:03:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That would be kind of my pick for some of the stuff.

02:03:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're going to get this show over before the Grammys start so you can watch. We are missing, though, apparently, right now open AI is doing a stream of some kind that they announced at the last minute. I don't know what they're announcing, but if anybody's watching that at the same time as you're watching the show, you can. You can fill us in. They're not streaming on x. We are. We got 400 people watching us on x. Hi, hey, everybody, we stream. Did I mention we? I didn't mention this. We stream in eight different venues now, uh, as we do the show live. The show's never been really. It's not a tv show. We don't expect you to watch live, but if you want to, you can.

02:03:58
2. 2 pm Pacific on Sundays on YouTube, twitch, xcom, kik, linkedin, facebook, tiktok. We're on TikTok and I'm missing one. There's eight of them. What else am I missing? Twitch, youtube. Anyway, you can watch us live. We are live.

02:04:20
As I said, 400 people watching us on uh twit, but I don't see the open AI thing, so I don't know where they're doing that stream. Let me see if it's on their website. They've been. Yeah, there it is. They've been really uh active in the last.

02:04:36
Oh, deep research is introducing deep research. Okay, so isn't that what deep seek is? Is deep research that kind of reasoning? Yeah, all right. Well, we'll keep you filled in and we'll talk about it on Wednesday, won't we Kids? Oh, what was I going to? I had something for you that I was gonna ask you about, but now I've knocked. Oh, here it is. We were talking about x. Elon's done a deal with visa. They're gonna have x money. Elon's always said he wanted to turn x into the everything app right and the first thing would be financial services. Yes, he said on uh. Uh this week on tuesday that he struck a deal with visa to be the first partner for what they're calling the x money account. It will. Visa will let x users move funds between traditional bank accounts and their digital wallet, make instant peer-to-peer payments, kind of like venmo or zelle. Uh, do you trust elon and x to make uh your financial?

02:05:46 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
uh, worries go away I kind of trust visa, I trust I was surprised that visa said yes I don't remember they're gonna mess it up like, the world has changed it?

02:05:57
no, it's true I just feel like visa is probably going to keep stuff like in some. So I don't. I'm not that good at this kind of coding at all. I can like html it a little bit, but I'm sure they're going to keep some stuff in a container, away from like where it can be harmed, because they know that that would really mess with their brand reputation. Plus, like I forgot which freaking agency was going after them and it was for something totally stupid, but they still he's suing all the other advertisers for boycotting him.

02:06:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know if you can sue him For not advertising.

02:06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think I could sue people who don't advertise on Twit, could I?

02:06:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, maybe you just aren't trying hard enough Leo.

02:06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't even understand the rationale. How do you sue people for not buying ads?

02:06:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I guess the argument is that they have been pushing others not to advertise with them, right? So it might not be enough that, like Nestle and Lego and whoever being like, we don't want to give you money, but by being part of some consortium, they're encouraging others not to advertise. I still feel like that's a speech issue. Yeah, I don't know. I still feel like that's a speech issue.

02:07:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know. I still feel like. I still feel like that's a speech issue. Can you believe he's suing? I can understand suing Nestle, but suing Lego, that's like I don't know, that's like suing mom or apple pie. Of course they are Danish. Maybe it's part of the overall anti-Danish movement in the United States iteration of advertisers, which immediately dissolved, by the way I respect that.

02:07:30 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I just do like find us.

02:07:33 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I've actually seen that in other cases, uh in, in, uh residential cases where like there's like an entity, like an hoa or whatever, that's like bye, like we don't exist, sue us.

02:07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said he started this in federal court last year. Uh, in cvs he sued. He sued twitch. Early on saturday they amended the complaint last, uh yesterday to include lego nestle. Tyson foods the chicken maker. Well, they don't make chickens. God makes chickens, but tyson slaughters them and brings them to your door. Abbott laboratories, colgate, palmolive, pinterest and Shell they're going after everybody.

02:08:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean like, like, pinterest is such a weird one like Shell. Okay, when I'm really getting into the war with the oil companies, all right.

02:08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Elon's feeling a little empowered right now it's. It's become apparently clear that Elon has moved in to the office of personnel management, that the letter, the email that was sent out to government employees saying you could quit in September, we'll pay you through, then you don't have to do anything, was actually Elon. It was almost identical to the letter that he sent to ex-employees that it was from Elon's people. I think he feels empowered at this point. Not sure that that's a good thing. I think he is empowered. I think he feels empowered.

02:08:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
At this point Not sure that that's a good thing, I think he is empowered. I don't, I, I yeah, I think.

02:08:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got the president on his side.

02:08:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
He does, he does. Now, how long this bromance will last before the egos?

02:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought they would have broken up by now, but I have. We did have a pool and I went back and checked and my I said by June. So did have a pool. And, uh, I went back and checked in my I said by june.

02:09:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So I have a few more months you have a few more months, you have six more months, you, you've got some time, but, like I, I don't think he feels empowered. I mean, I think that we should just call a spade a spade. I think he is empowered he is.

02:09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he is. He's the uh uh first, uh first friend or something. I just want to point out that goldman sach Sachs claim is trying to get desperately out of the Apple card deal. They made a deal. Of course they're the bank behind the Apple card. They say they've lost a billion dollars. I don't know how you lose a billion dollars on a credit card. Yeah, I know that takes a unique ability, did they?

02:09:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
not have a credit limit.

02:09:52 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Like were they just like spending on that card?

02:09:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because that's the only way, like I don't understand how you lose a billion dollars with a credit card, but they did, in fact, well, goldman had never done consumer banking that was the problem.

02:10:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That was the problem and and then, from what I understand, like, uh, american express I mean this is from reporting the wall street journal and others have done over the past few years the terms that Apple wanted were very advantageous for Apple, not necessarily advantageous for Goldman Sachs, and Goldman Sachs, who had never done consumer before and has now exited consumer entirely, except for the Apple car deal, which if you go to chase or if you go to you know city, or you go to american express, which is the obvious partner for apple, they are not going to give apple the same terms that gold that's what happened.

02:10:36 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I'd like to point out the layers of irony in that that they didn't understand the disfavorable terms of doing it I agree deal with a larger and more powerful entity Shocking.

02:10:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder what the deal is with Visa and X. You know you got to think X really wanted this, but on the other hand, maybe because of the political climate, it was Visa said. You know, probably wouldn't be a bad thing, I think they've been working on that for like over a year.

02:11:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So, there've been reportings about that. So I don't know, I mean, and who knows like what the terms are there. I mean I, I and I don't know how demonstrably different it is than like when jack dorsey owned twitter and you know like there was kind of the square integration and then square.

02:11:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously, you know, has some ways well, now the good news is uh, elon can debank people. He has some more power.

02:11:28 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Um, if you are you really debanked if you just have like a visa pass through?

02:11:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, really, I I mean, oh, I can't. I can't use x to send my buddy money. Oh well, oh well. Linda yaccarino, uh, the ceo of twitter, xing what is she posting? She's eating. Another milestone for the everything app. Visa is our first partner for the x money account, which will debut later this year. Um, first of many big announcements about x money this year, lfg, which is uh code for let's freaking get it. X money, does have an account. It has 192,000 followers for all your money moves powered by X.

02:12:18 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I'm so tired.

02:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I don't, you know, it's hard. I don't want to get into politics, and yet Elon is in, there is in. You know it's hard. I don't want to get into politics, and yet elon is in. There is in, you know, is a tech mogul and he's certainly embedded in the government at this point. Uh doge, the department of governmental efficiency, uh, we had the story last week that was really just taking over for usds, which is united states digital service, which was uh started by silicon valley people, including our friend matt cuts, who ran it for a while. He was the director to uh help the government after the failure of uh, the aca website to help the government modernize its technology. Goodness knows. That's a good thing, but now I'm thinking it's more than just a doge. Thousands of US government webpages have been taken down since Friday 8,000, according to the New York Times, across more than a dozen US government websites have gone down, disappeared, in fact, you can go to GitHub and watch them disappear in some cases.

02:13:27 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I think it's just confusing for people here too. It's just like, even if you don't like the stuff said on it, it's confusing it just in general what's also kind of yeah, and I think one. One thing too, though, is uh, I was surprised that vivek lasted less long than elon at doge. I would not have bet money on that at all that. That's like this whole weird dynamic there.

02:13:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You could see this 10 miles away. He had no power, yeah.

02:13:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Elon in the long run, because he's the richest man in the world.

02:14:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
They never wanted him. Look, I mean, just like the inside baseball DC, they didn't want him for two seconds.

02:14:08 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I don't get how he got in. I know you're in dc. I don't mean to talk down to you, no, no it was a weird one, because I didn't get how he got there in the first place. And then I'm like all right, I guess he's there so. And then when he went away, I'm like all right it's cronyism, yeah, but cronyism only goes so far, right?

02:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so somebody's saying, oh, all the pages that were removed were dei pages. Well, well, more than 3,000 pages from the Centers for Disease Control, including 1,000 research articles filed under preventing chronic disease, std treatment, guidelines about Alzheimer's warning signs, overdose prevention, training, vaccine guidelines for pregnant people. The Times hypothesizes that perhaps the words pregnant people could have contributed to its removal really, really.

02:14:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, maybe they just did like a find and delete and then just it went broader, like that's kind of like what this is striking me it feels a little overbroad perhaps.

02:15:05
Yeah yeah, I know it is not uncommon when new administrations take over that, like the old website will go down and that you might have 404s and whatnot. I think it's just the breadth of the number of pages, like, because typically what happens I mean, I think what the Biden administration did was that they would like create like oldwhitehousegov live on for government transparency reasons, which is a good thing, and instead it seems like you were now just left with a bunch of 404s and no real idea if any of these pages will return, whether pregnant people has been replaced with the language that they prefer or not, I don't know.

02:15:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I can go on and on. Read the New York Times article. It's 8,000 pages. Maybe it's an accident, I don't know. The Musk aides have locked workers out of the Office of Personnel Management Computer Systems. Musk's aides, some of whom are as young as 19 years old, have access to the database, which contains personal information for millions of federal employees, including social security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, pay grades, length of service. This is a quote from Reuters. Who talked to one of the OPM officials. They talked to two OPM officials. Who spoke from Reuters. Who talked to one of the OPM officials. They talked to OPM officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said some career employees at OPM have had their access removed. We have no visibility into what they're doing with the computer and data systems. That's creating great concern. There's no oversight. It creates real cyber security and hacking implement implications.

02:16:49 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Remember OPM was hacked, yes, and millions of government records were released some time ago some years ago and the government's just hacked all the time when I did my age verification thing, I'm like hey guys like careful do you really want to give your personal information to the government?

02:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, because like it can't manage it well, it is hacked all the time all the time, so much yeah so I mean, in that regard, I I would love it if doge came in uh with some smart technology people and helped them lock the systems down and so forth. Uh, I have learned that uh, better cyber is good, uh, I have learned that uh better cyber is good that uh sisa employees are exempt from the uh request to resign, so that's good news.

02:17:40 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Oh interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't have expected that, because he's had a lot of issues with uh, with sisa and the stuff they've been doing. That actually really surprises me yeah.

02:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's hard to get any information about any of this stuff. By the way, this comes to me from a friend who is in the works of the dod, who said, yes, this was exempt. Many government officials are locked out of the office of personnel management while meanwhile, uh doge employees, who were basically not elected, just chosen by Musk, have full access. This is from Mashable, I guess it's in Yahoo Tech. Musk employees have embedded themselves deep within the agency. Since january 20th, doge has morphed from a non-government advisory panel to the rebranded tech unit inside the white house. According to the report, the team set up sofa beds in the opm director's office to work around the clock securing access to the enterprise human resources integration database.

02:18:52 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
That's got every why he likes sleeping in the office so much like, I just loves that it's a thing he likes. I just don't get it.

02:18:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like it sucks musk's jet has not left dc since inauguration. He's. He's there, he's embedded um the highest ranking of career official. The treasury department on friday resigned after refusing to grant musk's operatives access to the government's entire payment system, responsible for six trillion dollars in payroll annually. So you know, behind the scenes there is this um move into government with access to these systems, mashable rights. Musk could bypass legal hurdles and potentially shut off funding for social programs opposed by him and trump, further expanding his grip on federal operations. So I guess you know this is how you cut $2 billion from the federal budget, more than I mean the pages, the number of pages, the variety of pages. They even pulled down a video entitled here's how to Avoid IRS Penalties and Interest and the form private schools have to submit to certify they've not engaged in all racially discriminating behavior. There you go. Two dozen research notifications from the nuclear regulatory commission, but they were all just from the year 2000, so it seems kind of random. I guess there's nothing more to say. It's just happening, right, we're watching it happen in real time.

02:20:44
Google has decided to rename the gulf of mexico to the gulf of america. Um, it's also going to rename denali to mount to the Gulf of America. It's also going to rename Denali to Mount McKinley, its old name. These are two things the president requested in an executive order and of course, the executive order changes this with the. What is it? It's called the Commission on Geography. Let me find the name. But there is an official uh united states geographic commission and they name the names. But google says it's only going to change the name. For people in the united states looking at the maps, if you're in mexico, it'll still say the gulf of mexico. Google says we have a long-standing uh practice of applying name changes when they've been updated in official government sources. So the geographic names information system, or genus, has changed it to the Gulf of America. So Google says OK, that's fine, then then we'll change our maps. Apple has not yet changed its map.

02:21:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Good for them.

02:21:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, not yet changed its map. Good for them. Yeah, I mean you can name it whatever you want, I guess.

02:22:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean I'm used to the gulf of mexico, I don't think it's an insult to the united states, as long as you put in parentheses, right?

02:22:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
so we all know like what we're searching for yeah, it shows how inter, how, how interrelated our chains of information and services are um, and whether google wants to or doesn't want to make this chain. If they're saying it is because of a policy change, uh that they rely on, it just demonstrates that one policy chain change uh upstream, can have some pretty significant effects by the way, somebody in our youtube says I love the guy in the attic critiquing the wealthiest man in the world.

02:22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I should. I got nothing to say. He's the wealthiest man. He must be the best man in the world if he's the wealthiest right yeah, I think that's how it works, that's how it works.

02:22:54
Of course, we reward him for being the best right it wasn't a nazi, some I so I for years have, of course, gotten a hate mail from people on the right saying you're just a libtard and stuff like that, which is fine. I understand that. I am now getting hate mail from people on the right saying you're just a libtard and stuff like that, which is fine. I understand that. I'm now getting hate mail from people on the left saying that's funny. Why didn't you call out elon's nazi salute? You can't, I don't know.

02:23:20 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I know it's not, I don't, you know it's always been the same for me for years, maybe at least for the last 10 years. People always say I'm a right wing nut job or not, though for a liberal, uh, I get both, and I'm just like you get both.

02:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

02:23:34 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I'm like whoever is being stupid, I'll say they're being stupid.

02:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We might disagree on what the stupid is, but like I know some stuff our street is typically thought of as a conservative thing, not a right wing, but conservative think tank.

02:23:47 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah more center right than anything.

02:23:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Center right yeah.

02:23:50 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, we do right stuff, we do center stuff, whatever makes sense, but we're about being free market, so markets guide our thinking. When government does stuff where it doesn't create the right incentives, we just remind people like hey, markets are good incentives and when you can create markets for something and encourage competition, it usually works out better. Stuff like that.

02:24:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You write about age verification. You actually wrote the article a couple of years ago about why age verification systems are inevitably a bad idea. Any update on that, because we're starting to see it. Certainly the uk now requires it oh my gosh, there's a.

02:24:24 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
There's a new model for app store age verification that the porn companies are like cool with because they don't have to do it. There's no porn in app stores, and I'm like. So all all these companies are like oh, you know what? If you want to stop kids from watching porn, verify an app store. There is no porn hub app like it's ridiculous they just want to pass the buck right they say well, you know, it's the app store's job.

02:24:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do make the point. The app store might have a better idea of what your age is.

02:24:50 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, but it all comes down to the same problems. Because when you say you know you have to, these bills all say you have to have parental consent to download any app. Well, social security numbers don't even tie you together that way. Like you would probably need like a birth certificate to prove the parents the parent and the child's the child. You know parents don't always have the same last name as their kids. There's all different issues and like if it's to mean anything, it probably would have to be a birth certificate, otherwise your 19-year-old sister could say, oh, I'm the parent and like you at 16, get to do whatever you want and have that verified.

02:25:25
And the worst part is these bills like don't serve a purpose. You can already do this with your phones if you want. Say, if you're getting, come here and like connect your phones and then verify and then say without putting in your most sensitive information and then say, okay, I have to approve everything you do. But instead of doing that, we're forcing the government to force like privacy violation and first amendment issues to do that. And I'm like, hey, guys, still not winning it, still some issues here. You're gonna end up back in court and like they just don't want to hear it yeah, um, I'm in favor of giving parents control.

02:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The parent knows not the age of the kid but the emotional age, the capabilities of the kid. Who better than a parent to decide what a kid should and should not see? Oh yeah, so put parental controls in. That's appropriate.

02:26:20 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
They already have them, though they just don't know how to use them and haven't. And I get that some of it gets a little bit confusing. But what these bills are requiring is already there and parents just are sometimes using them and sometimes not. And then these bills just reinvent the wheel with security and first amendment issues. But it's, it's the do something. And like Utah has one of these bills and I'm like, hey, buddy, like I love, I love the sponsor, he's a really great guy. But I'm like, dude, come on, talk to me, to me first, sometimes like let me walk you through all you're talking about Mike Lee no different one.

02:26:52
Uh, uh, I I've I also uh made clear to other offices. But with uh Todd Weiler in Utah, he's fun, he's a bit of a firebrand, but he really does try to solve problems and he keeps doing um porn age verification bills over social media ones. But like I don't think he understands like the problems he's running into with the way he's doing it and I just wish he would talk to me you.

02:27:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I imagine you get to brief members of congress.

02:27:19 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yes, oh yeah, sometimes their staff too, um some members or talk to the staff.

02:27:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you talk. The staff is kind of who talks to the member right, and you talk to the staff generally yeah, sometimes the members too, depending on, like, if they vibe.

02:27:32 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
There are some members who vibe really well with me, but then other members are like staff, you know right, I hope they listen.

02:27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you know, christina was earlier complaining about the lack of, uh, you know, technical sophistication and members of congress they're, but they're smart people, uh, they didn't get there by being morons well, except for lauren bober, but they had to, I had to, I had to do that, but, uh, sorry, uh, generally I think they're intelligent and they just uh, they need staff to explain stuff and they and and need to listen and understand the technical issues. And and need to listen and understand the technical issues. Um, sometimes it's easier politically just to say well, I, I know there are technical issues, but we're not, oh, yeah, we're not gonna. I think that's mostly what's happening, isn't it?

02:28:19 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
it's like it's that, and it's also I'll give staff this like they have to cover so many issues. Like, no matter where you are, you just have to cover so many kinds of things and it's impossible to know them all well, which is part of the reason. Overall, I want government to do less so it can focus on the things it needs to do. There's other problems with like, and this isn't to like, get on a soapbox about it, but it's interesting. I've been running into this a lot lately.

02:28:40
One of the problems with having government do a lot of things is it never budgets enough for enforcement, because it's impossible to enforce everything and we need to pick and choose what we want to enforce wisely to make sure the right stuff's enforced. And like, laws against hair braiding are, like, not a priority. You know for government that they can selectively enforce, but in Congress it's a lot of showboating. It's a lot of like trying to do something even if it's not the exact right thing. Just hating tech companies was, and still is a thing a bit, but there's just a lot of bad incentives here and including the like, staff not having, you know, all the time they need to really dive into these issues. Well, yeah, uh rstreetorg.

02:29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No constrict conscripting the app stores doesn't solve the problems with age verification. Josh withrow and our own shoshana weissman. Thank you, shoshana, let's take a little break. More to come. We're gonna wrap this up pretty quick. We're getting to a grammy, uh, grammy award time. How soon before the grammys start? 15 minutes oh my god, last time you were on I let you go early so you could go see taytay's last show was it amazing it was amazing.

02:29:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was so fun.

02:29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had the best I'm so glad you got to see that. The last show in the era's tour. Wow, was it tearful at the end I mean it was.

02:30:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was kind of like I was still so jet lagged from being in south k like 20 hours earlier that it was all blur. But no, it was really amazing. It was so cool to be there with so many, you know.

02:30:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Real fans, I mean anybody who's there, is a serious fan right. That's a very special ticket it was really cool. I'm glad that we could do that. You don't mind missing the opening act.

02:30:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, not at all, not at all, not at all, not at all, not at all. We're good, taylor won't be on for the first hour. You know that. No, no, no, no, she just her red carpet look just debuted. She is in a short red dress. Looks really good is it sparkly? Um a little bit, but it's very different from what she usually wears.

02:30:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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02:34:37
Let's see, comcast is, uh, embracing a new technology from the ietf, the internet engineering task force, the l4s standard. It's a little geeky but this is good news. Comcast is the biggest isp in the united states and it's expected that comcast adopting it will encourage other isps to adopt it. It's ultra low lag, particularly useful for what we're doing right now. Zoom calls gaming, uh, and gadget describes it this way if a packet traveling between your device and the server experiences congestion, it will report that on arrival, which can improve future packets journeys. Sounds very cooperative. Um products from apple, meta, nvidia and valve are the first to support the technology. They were initial partners for testing the low latency connectivity. You can see why gaming companies would do this yeah yeah, comcast.

02:35:44
Uh, other developers can choose to take advantage of the open standard. Once comcast has fully rolled it out, it will be available to all of Xfinity customers at that point. Right now it's a pilot program in Atlanta, chicago, colorado Springs, philadelphia, rockville, maryland and San Francisco. I hope I counted San Francisco. We're about an hour north.

02:36:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Is Comcast your ISP or are you someone else? They are. I have a Comcast business account.

02:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's you, someone else, they are, they are. I have a Comcast business account. That's what I'm talking to you now, and I have a fallback with Starlink. So there's a Because Comcast comes and goes sometimes.

02:36:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, sometimes yeah.

02:36:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And when it does, in 10 seconds the ubiquity stuff will go oh, there's no internet, and it'll go up to the satellite and it'll come back and that's worked pretty well. We've used that a couple of times. Comcast is also rolling out DOCSIS 4 in the next probably this year, at least in our area which will greatly improve upstream bandwidths as well. So while I am not a fan of Comcast, I wouldn't qualify as a fan.

02:36:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, I don't think anyone would qualify as a fan.

02:36:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's nice to hear that they're adopting the new technology. That's great.

02:36:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, that is cool. It's good to see that they're pushing things forward, and it's probably because they face competition from various fiber providers increasingly. But of course, that's the thing about the United states. That's hard, I think, for people who don't live here to understand. Very few of us get to choose who our internet service provider is, so, um, wow, that's cool that's, I'm sorry.

02:37:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was looking at taylor. Swiss red dress yes, it's good, right, it's good wow, and she's got a little t uh her, whatever. What do you call jewelry that suspends from the bottom of your dress? Well, I know that's a thigh.

02:37:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know. I have no idea what you would call that, but it's.

02:37:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's thigh jewelry.

02:37:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I guess so.

02:37:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the T is for thigh, not tailor.

02:37:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Or Travis, I guess. Oh, I think that's the thought, that it's Travis.

02:37:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Travis, not Tay-Tay. It's Chief's Red. Wow, oh, it is Chief's Red.

02:37:55 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Is she Christian? I don't know.

02:37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like a cross.

02:38:00 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, I was going to say she's worn crosses before.

02:38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think she's.

02:38:05 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Maybe it's all three. It's like all.

02:38:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all three Holy Trinity Travis, taylor and maybe it's all all three. It's like it's all three holy trinity travis, taylor and the big j. Yeah, uh, yeah, see right there it says page six says taylor swift wears chief's red on the grammy carpet all right ahead of the super bowl. Yeah, her boy's gonna, her boy's gonna be in the super bowl. Gonna, her boy's gonna be in the super bowl. It's so funny because, um, I I follow the nfl on reddit and they post how much air time taylor gets compared to travis. It's been going down, though I think that the broadcasters have kind of gotten over that they're kind of I think of this.

02:38:44 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think like last year I think it was a much bigger deal and I think this year they're like okay, yeah, she's, she's another wag, but yeah, it's good for the NFL.

02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got to say it's good for the NFL yeah.

02:38:59 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, and look I have to say usually her clothing choices I'm not a fan of, and I can't blame the stylist.

02:39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think at a certain point we have to go. It's not the stylist's fault?

02:39:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
uh, it's taylor's fault. You think she has bad taste? I mean, look, we're not, we're not. No one is perfect, but I will say that her street style looks at at his games have been so good. I thought so I'm like god, why can't you dress like this when you go to award shows sometimes? And and I haven't been able to look I like the little top hat, uh, circus, uh.

02:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't been able to look. I like the little top hat circus ringmaster outfit. That's cute. Does she wear that? That's really old.

02:39:33 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I like it. No, no, it's like old style circuit. I'm here for that. I like 30s, 40s influences. No, I'm the only one. Oh, I like that too.

02:39:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No no.

02:39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think sometimes it can look good, but sometimes like when I look at her grammy, look from last year, which was not good, that was a weird look.

02:39:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, it should like she had like this, this, like you know, black arms, uh, and the stuff she wears the vmas is really, yeah, she's, she's mixed, but but the street style has been very good, especially with the football games I have here.

02:40:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, here is uh thanks to vogue, uh every uh taylor swift. I searched for taylor swift nfl fits and uh found this article all of the stuff that's cute.

02:40:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, love that. That's very cute. Yeah, that's good. By the way, that's her mom. That's so cute. That's Travis's mom that's Travis's mom that's Travis, just like Taylor's mom, okay they look similar yeah, yeah, and who's that?

02:40:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, we don't know some bodyguard some bodyguard? Okay, that's interesting. Plaid sundress, interesting combo, the big t-shirt always, always a good look at an nfl game. Yep, does she ever, uh, paint herself red and white? Uh, and no, all right, I don't know, I got distracted. How many of you have given your spit to 23andMe? Nope.

02:40:54 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Different company, but I've, yeah, I've spread my You've donated your spit. Yeah, I've spread my spit around. I have a lot of medical tests, so any bodily fluid. I have has gone somewhere.

02:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, but you have a legitimate reason. Yeah, that's you know, for your health. I just thought it'd be fun to know if I have any irish in me. So uh, but now apparently your spit is for sale yeah, see, this is my fear with all of this.

02:41:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is why I've never did 23andme, or ancestry or those, and i'm- very and I'm very curious. Well, it doesn't really matter, because my relatives did, so you know they can create genomes based on me anyway. Thanks, uncle george, really appreciate it. Um, but uh, yeah, 23 me is about to go bankrupt, right, isn't that thing? Or?

02:41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, they're in trouble and they are seeking, perhaps, a buyer. And, of course, what would you be buying? Not the failing genetic testing company, you'd be buying the data the data, the vials of spit?

02:41:58
uh, they're. I don't know why they're struggling so much. Maybe people are more privacy concerned than I thought. 23 and me stock, which fell 82 last year, dropped another 10. It was briefly halted this week. That's not good. Founded in 2006 by one of the wajiskis and wajiski yeah, yeah, this is kind of a story of a more optimistic, optimistic age of the internet.

02:42:24 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
it doesn't seem that long ago, but but you know the the inception of this company and their peers, it was really just we thought about things much differently, including social media, and it's just kind of the sad outcome of what could have been a really transformative company.

02:42:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know well and I actually have donated my spit to other genetic companies not ancestrycom, but I interviewed George Church, who was like the father of genomics a couple of years ago on triangulation fascinating guy and he has a company that, unlike 23andMe, which does a statistical analysis of part of your genome, he has a company that does the whole genome. In fact, you can download. I did my genome. It's many gigabytes worth of data. The value of that is you now have your genome which you could send to other places for analysis. You could say well, am I likely to have breast cancer? What's my likelihood of being an addict or something like that? Is, what's my likelihood of being an addict or something like that? So, uh, while I did 23 and me, I was less than I was underwhelmed. Maybe this is the problem. They also had a breach, uh, last year or 2023, more than a year ago of seven million customers. They had to pay a 30 million dollar settlement on that. In september, the entire board quit the entire board quit right.

02:43:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I remember that that was wild yeah, that's usually a bad sign.

02:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That and getting delisted, those are. Those are kind of bad signs.

02:43:57 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
The company said this week it's exploring strategic alternatives, including perhaps a sale I'm just like surprised they can't use AI to like do stuff with, because I would think that AI would be good at discovering what, what genetic factors and what you know things in your genetics can cause different diseases. I thought that's when I signed up. I forgot if it was that or another company. That's what I thought I was getting like oh, do I have markers for this disease or that disease or whatever?

02:44:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And like now, in the age of AI, that's we can, we can like yeah, I don't know why they're not well, that's why I did the nebula genomics thing, because that was a, that was a full genome which you can download, and whether they eventually know you know that stuff or somebody else. Does you have your genome, so now you can send it out and you know that's not somebody else. Does you have your genome, so now you can send it out and you know that's not going to change. So it's whole genome sequencing. It wasn't cheap, but it's not. You know, originally it was tens of thousands of dollars.

02:44:58
I think it's gotten much more, uh, affordable, um, as the technology has improved, but it wasn't, it wasn't completely cheap. Let me just see. And it's still spit, I believe. Oh yeah, not awful. The elite package is a thousand bucks. Um, that does that, does your whole thing, uh, and then I think that's the one I did. I don't know what it was a thousand dollars poorly spent, since I don't really know what I, what I got, but I, I have my genome. Anybody wants it. You know I should just send it to the AI in the cloud and see what they say.

02:45:39
I agree with you, I think AI could, because here's the thing we don't really know a lot about what it says right. There's some markers like burke, the brca marker for breast cancer, that you could look for right but they're not. We don't know a whole lot.

02:45:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I guess more all the time when you say a thousand dollars, it sounds like a lot of money, except when you think about all of those things that maybe we want ai to do with with our right, our dna, and so then I think, well, maybe I mean, if I don't know what the business application is, if there's a b2b, but like, if they're targeting consumers a thousand bucks is a lot of money. Is there a market of people who are going to pay 20 or 40 or 100 bucks, like maybe, but does that make a business that scales? Probably, at least this business maybe not. I think there's a lot of overhead.

02:46:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, maybe their model is just targeting consumers with something consumers can't afford or don't want to pay that much money for I noticed that I just logged in and they want me to change my password and they want me to add 2fa here at the nebula. So I'm wondering it's good, good, they're focused on security, right but I'm wondering why, after they got hacked?

02:46:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah.

02:46:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It always makes me nervous. Hey, you want to change your password, Just you know, just for no reason.

02:47:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
For no reason.

02:47:04 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
No reason.

02:47:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Just saying On pwnedcom, just saying.

02:47:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
We just think this is a good idea, so we're just going to require that you change it, because we've deleted everything, because we can't save anything and yeah, better, that's the thing I mean when you give somebody, I mean they have my full g.

02:47:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now somebody said okay, you're. By the way, when george had done this originally, he did it, uh, as a project. I remember it was very expensive. I applied, he was doing it, I think at Harvard. It was called the Personal Genome Project and a number of I remember Esther Dyson did it and she said I'm going to do it because I'm at an age and stage in my life where I don't care if it gets out, because one of the things the Personal Genome Project said is we are not going to protect this.

02:47:48
The whole point of this is we could take these genomes and give them to researchers so they can use them to learn and find out more stuff. So you do this whole big questionnaire and you do the genome and I applied. I really wanted to do it. They didn't, they accept me, but I remember it was 10, 15 000. It was very expensive, so so a thousand seemed reasonable, but now I'm going to quickly change my password, if you don't mind. Uh streaming prices. Wow, netflix just raised their uh price yep uh streaming prices climb in 2025.

02:48:22
They already surpass inflation rates. Five services increased their prices this month. Well, last month I guess, now in in in january, um, do you notice that that the prices are going up of the stuff you want to watch on tv?

02:48:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
yeah, I mean. Netflix just went up to 25 a month if you want to have 4k yeah which is annoying to me because I do want to have 4k I don't really care about the number of devices I have active, but and and the thing is, is that, like that, their ads, from what I understand, are fairly, you know not yeah, I don't want ads I mean, I don't either, but if you gave me the option where you were like, okay, if you pay, you know ten dollars a month and you get 4k with ads, I might consider it, because I don't watch a ton of netflix.

02:49:09
But um, no, I mean, they've gotten up and and I have I have some sort of grandfathered in disney bundle deal that verizon still pays for most of and american express pays for the remainder.

02:49:21
What's interesting, though, and and and I it'll be. I don't think this will ever work with the big services, but with the smaller ones. So stars stars had announced, I guess, back in like October, november, they announced their quarterly results, and they showed that they shed users, and I guess that was a problem for for Lionsgate or whoever owns them, and I was paying I don't know maybe 60, $70 a year, and I don't watch stars that much, although there are a couple of shows on there that I like, and I went in just out of curiosity to like see, like what my plan was, and first I was offered a deal where they gave me like a really good deal, where they're like oh, we'll give you like a six month thing or whatever, and I and I was like, cool, I'll do that. And then I did that. I got another deal to get it even cheaper for like a year, so they were actively trying to, I guess, prevent me from from canceling or whatnot. It'll be interesting to see if, if other streamers will do that sort of thing.

02:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, where you know, if you either threaten to cancel your account or change your subscription, they'll be like oh no, please don't leave, you know uh, somebody pointed out nox harrington in our discord that it really looks like the plan for these companies is to just get rid of ad free streaming, to not only increase the cost but to force you to watch ads. Who just did that to me? I paid 99 bucks for a year. I thought, oh, I won't have any ads now I can't get rid of them. It's becoming more expensive to avoid ads on streaming services. Uh, the prices are going up for ad supported. Are they double dipping? Or is it really that expensive?

02:50:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know um, I mean, I think that it's it's the realization that their business model, that they, yeah never worked out, yeah, now it charges 19 for an ad.

02:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So for the cheapest ad free video streaming plan. That's why my 99 didn't go very far ridiculous.

02:51:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
20 a month for hulu is is too much um well, that's.

02:51:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The next question is at what point do people start canceling? Uh, ours technica quotes a digital media trends. Uh, report from deloitte that said, almost half of us consumers said they'd cancel their favorite streaming video service if the price went up by five bucks. Well, guess what it is. Let's see if they really do.

02:51:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And I think a lot of them will. What we've seen happen is it's churn, right, so you might not stay subscribed the whole year, right, Maybe you'll forego that year-long bundle, if you're like that, that year long bundle. If you're like, no, you know what, I only need to watch the shows these months out of the year and as live becomes increasingly less important. You know like, we have events like the Grammys and and the Superbowl, but other than that you're like okay, you know what, I can dip in and out and I can catch up on what I missed before.

02:52:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I think all the streamers kind of realize that it's a zero sum game and it's a race to the bottom. There will be some winners and there will be losers, and mostly there will be losers because the cost is exceptionally high. This was a bad bet by most of the video companies. At least that's the kind of conventional wisdom. Right now I don't watch much, I don't subscribe to anything other than YouTube TV.

02:52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But occasionally I'll dip in on like Severance or what god I know. I pay almost it's cable cost. It's almost 100 bucks. It's like 83 bucks a month.

02:52:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It is it is which is still cheaper than cable. I was paying a ridiculous amount of money when I finally canceled cable and I also have youtube tv, but still they're. I think that they all made a mistake when they shifted to do ad free the way they did ad free. I think that if they had maybe, you know, tempered into things, then then they would. Youtube tv started at 35 bucks a month yep, and now it's like 85, it's 85 now, is that?

02:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because the local channels are gouging youtube over the top streamers like youtube. Fubo's raised its price.

02:53:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Everybody's raised its prices some of it is probably that sling, um, slings, the thing has gone up. Well, sling has had more limited offerings to hulu. Live tv has gone up, uh, direct tv now, or whatever it's called um.

02:53:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so I mean, part of it is probably that uh, it seems self-defeating because in the long run, what's going to happen? People are just going to watch youtube. Not youtube tv, but youtube yeah, that's what I mean.

02:53:36 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I, I don't pay for youtube tv. I don't watch things like I watch a specific thing but I pay to not have ads on youtube. But I there is almost no circumstance I'm going to sit down and say, what am I going to watch? Let me browse for something and then watch it. No, no. I'm going to sit down and say, what am I going to watch? Let me browse for something and then watch it. No, no, no. I'm going to read a book or I'm going to get away from a screen if possible, but I was at the streamer.

02:53:55
I was at CBS for a very long time when I went from CBS All Access and we were there during the Paramount Plus transition. And I was at CBSN for a very long time I mean the network too, but CBSN was like the first streaming news platform and I saw all of the economics, at least when it came to the news business, and that was a losing game for news too. I mean, I love it, I love CBSN, I love NBC News Now, but those are not winners and I mean, like the consumers have voted and they don't want streaming as it is right now.

02:54:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
At least it's too expensive and too little value for that right, yeah, exactly that, yep yeah, let's take a little one last break. I gotta get this one last ad in, and then we'll wrap things up with a fabulous panel. Dan patterson, it's always great to see you, blackbird. You too ai here, the director of content. What does blackbird ai do? What is it? What are you talking? What are you doing?

02:54:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
so I, I think, visit compassblackbirdai. I mean, like, really, this is I, I don't want to call this go ahead.

02:54:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not going to call it a fact checker it is a context checker.

02:55:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, I mean like I'm happy to plug, yeah, plug, plug. But I mean like I don't want to call this a fact checker, but sign up at compassblackbirdai. This will check claims. When you see nonsense on the web, when you see a ridiculous claim, whether it's on a social media site, you can paste in a link. If you see something on Reddit, if your neighbor tells you that the sky is purple, put a claim into Compass. If you see an image and you think it's a deepfake image in there, it will give you not just like yes or no, up or down. It will give you a ton of context, a really interesting context that is useful and important and almost always accurate.

02:55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, oh, let's see, is taylor swift breaking up with travis kelsey?

02:55:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yes, exactly, and in we tracked many of the what we call narrative attacks, because we see them as analogous to cyber attacks and the narrative attacks targeting results about Taylor all through last year and much of the conversation was manipulated media and anytime. You now have a question about if something is manipulated or authentic on the web, use Compass to check whether it's authentic.

02:56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I signed up for this last time you were on it and I forgot to use it. I got to use this more. That's great.

02:56:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I really don't want the log roll roll, but this is ai, that is in the public good and I I mean I don't want to say fact check because you know it's an llm sometimes maybe a fact won't happen, but it's really accurate. I keep it bookmarked and when I have questions about what I see on the web, I use compass verify the authenticity of an image.

02:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is great, great. And there is an API, so you could, in theory, add this to your existing stack. That's great.

02:56:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
We have it. I think maybe we're working on Discord integration. We have it in our company, Slack, and like if you, I mean it's just rolling all day long people posting what claims that they see.

02:57:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Slack integration what models are you using?

02:57:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's our model.

02:57:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's your own, it's our radar it's not an existing LLM.

02:57:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
We used existing LLMs last year, but I think we're on our own models.

02:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, very cool. Let me see if I can find an image from our Discord and see if it's real.

02:57:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, definitely do that. As me, coming from being a journalist for two decades and then pivoting into tech, this is a very natural place to be, because we care about journalism, we care about information integrity.

02:57:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, really good. It's great to have you, Dan. Thank you so much. Tomorrowina warren will have a new job. Do you get? You like go to the desk and there's like a new macbook pro sitting there and a little beanie with a propeller on it or anything like that. What do you get as a new employee?

02:58:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, I think it'll depend. I haven't received my new stuff yet, so that's going to be. The interesting part is I don't have my corporate laptop yet, so, uh, I don't know what did microsoft give you?

02:58:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what did github give you? Did you have a nice?

02:58:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I did, yeah, uh, microsoft, I don't really remember um, I think I got well, they it was in person, which was uh, now a throwback and and github. Yeah, I got um a hoodie with my handle on it and I got a bunch of other stuff I have. I got like a stuffed um, um, octocat, um oh, that's gonna hook me up.

02:58:34
That's really cool and uh, as far as, uh, you know, the the new place, um, uh, tbd, we will see, but yeah, I'm pretty sure I'll get some new merch oh, I can't wait to see.

02:58:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'll be excited. Good luck, that's. That's wonderful. You deserve the best. We're always thrilled to have you on and I hope that you can continue to be a regular on our shows. I would be sad to lose you Also Shoshana Weissman rstreetorg, where she's head of digital media, and are you going to end your association with the Sloth Committee and start up with the marmot committee, or is it just a joint venture?

02:59:13 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
I think it's a joint venture. They're both like, I mean, they're actually very different animals.

02:59:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're both rodents, aren't they, or no?

02:59:20 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
No, no, no, Sloths aren't rodents, but they do both have faces of babies.

02:59:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I feel like that's a thing.

02:59:26 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, that's like my feminine nurturing side being attracted to sloths and marmots.

02:59:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you'd prefer alpaca, for instance, to llamas, because they're cuter, yeah, yeah.

02:59:34 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah.

02:59:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Guano goes great. They're very cute.

02:59:37 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Yeah, I like them. But marmots, you just want to hold them, you want to like nurture them Especially the yellow-bellied marmot.

02:59:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're cute. Rstreetorg reader writings always good stuff. Our show today, brought to you by zscaler. I love these guys because I love the idea of zero trust. That's the way to protect yourselves. They are the leader in cloud security.

03:00:01
You know, over the years, enterprises spent billions of dollars on perimeter defenses, firewalls, and then, of course, you got to have a vpn to let people in, but breaches they're not going down. It's not working. 18 year over year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024, a record 75 million dollar payout and I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the amount people reported. It's got to be more right. The fact is, traditional security tools just aren't working. They expand your attack surface. They've got public facing ips that are just like candy to bad actors, and bad actors are now using ai tools to work better, smarter, come up with new attacks and, of course, if you're using a vpn, uh, you're letting bad guys into your network, but you're not making sure that they are good guys in your network. So they're getting everything and then they exfiltrate it out through the firewall because firewalls are struggling to inspect the encrypted traffic. They can't really see it, so everything's getting exfiltrated and the firewalls and vpns allow lateral movement. I mean, once you're connected to the network, uh, you can wander anywhere, find everything you want, encrypt it, send it out. People are really unable unable to stop this stuff.

03:01:25
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03:02:24
Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. Learn more at zscalercom slash security. That's zscalercom slash security. We thank them so much for their support of the show and you support, of course, the show by using that address. That way they know. You saw it here. Zscalercom slash security. All right, burke has submitted an image for me to test. Burke, you think this is a phony image? Let me, let me go to blackbirdai and and see if, see, if I can uh, I can verify, validate that image go to compassblackbirdai and click vision at the top yeah, I'm at the vision page.

03:03:13
Oh, I can't paste it, though I have to. I have to save it and then paste it. Well, I'll do it later. We don't know, we don't know, you can even do batch. That's cool that's cool really cool. Uh, all right, we got to get going because, uh, you know you got to watch the Grammys. How are you going to watch it? Youtube TV, fubo. Youtube TV.

03:03:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, youtube TV yeah.

03:03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm recording it so you know I can watch it anytime. Those things, I like to record those because I don't want to watch eight minutes of commercials after every break.

03:03:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So I record half an hour or an hour ahead of time, and then I skip the commercials and then you can see through, which is nice. Well, and then what's great too? Uh, I'm still not used to being on the west coast for award shows, even though it's been like seven years now. Yeah, um, I will never be used to it. But the nice thing is is that like they rerun them that's yeah, the grammys.

03:04:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They show it twice, don't they?

03:04:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
yeah, and the same thing now with the oscars, and and the and the um and the, the um, uh, golden globes, or they'll just replay it, do they?

03:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do they run it again? Oh, I didn't know that.

03:04:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
At least on the last few years at least. I don't know if the Oscars, if they rerun it, but at least the other things like they'll, you know, because what else are they going to do? Like they used to always, I think what it used to be is they used to start them late, always get it delayed, but in the last five or six years they've been like oh no, we'll just um broadcast them live everywhere. But that means that if you are on the west coast, what are you going to do your?

03:04:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
prime time feed for so but you know, are we uh because next week's the super bowl? Are we going to shift the time on uh twit because of the super bowl next week?

03:04:45 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
that's the plan, right yeah noon right, yep.

03:04:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're going to launch two hours earlier so that we can get everybody in and out before the beginning of the super bowl at 3 pm pacific. So we'll do it at noon, pacific, 3 pm eastern. If you watch, uh live, super bowl ads eight million dollars this year for a 30 second commercial. Wow and uh, they're already. I've already seen a few previews. My son, who is a tick tock chef as so he's kind of a budging bud, budding celebrity chef was invited to cat's deli in new york city to watch the making of the hellman's mayonnaise super bowl commercial. It's a good deli, it's a great deli. He's friends with the owner now and awesome. I'm not gonna, no, no, I'm not gonna tell you, but just watch it because it recreates a classic film moment that was filmed at the cat's deli some years ago oh, oh, is this the one that already got?

03:05:45
yes, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, got it, got it they're a little older now, but they're just as frisky, I guess would be the word. There will be a lot of AI ads, a lot All the AI companies. This is what happens. I remember in 2000, all the dot coms, not the dot coms, the first dot com ad, which was, was it petscom?

03:06:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I can't remember, yeah, the puppet yeah the dog.

03:06:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, whatever happened to them. You know it's funny. The the conventional wisdom was petscom went out of business because there it made no financial sense to ship kitty litter at great expense to people, so they went out of business. And now we buy our kitty lighter online, and it's on amazon.

03:06:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, no, they were just too early. I think the problem then back then was they were too early. It was a lot of things like I remember there was web van, remember them. They were like the, the grocery store kind of thing and it's just now.

03:06:45
Everybody's doing it yeah, yeah, they were just too early. And I think the bigger thing too, was that, rather than charging what it actually costs to do things which everyone would have paid, they were like oh no, we're going to be cheaper because it's the internet and we have free money. And it was like no.

03:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Scale first, profit later yeah.

03:07:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Or no, scale first and then, like, cut your prices. If you're trying to do that, they were cheaper.

03:07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were in Manhattan when this was around. They would deliver cigarettes and ice cream by bicycle.

03:07:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Cosmo, that's every company, all the time.

03:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it Cosmo.

03:07:22 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's Cosmocom, I think, is what you're thinking of. I was yeah, they were early. They were like it was basically Postmates, but like 15 years before Postmates.

03:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were just ahead of it because it was a great idea.

03:07:34 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It was I used to have them delivered to. So I was actually in Atlanta, I was in high school and I used to have Cosmo deliver stuff to my school. I'm not even joking.

03:07:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to get like deliveries, like DVDs. Pizza for Spicoli, pizza for Warren, pizza I mean, I had pizza delivered too, but.

03:07:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But cosmo was the one where I would get yelled at by the, by the administrators. They'd be like christina, you have to stop ordering dvds to the front office, and I'm like oh my god I'm like, but I can't k-o-z-m-o.

03:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
K-o-z-m-o. Cosmocom. Free one hour delivery of videos, games, dvds, music, mags, books, food basics and more I.

03:08:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I got a number for that. I live in brooklyn cosmo.

03:08:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're gone, they're gone, uh, they were bought by yummycom who said, oh, we're gonna relaunch soon and then no.

03:08:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
eventually they were relaunched as a warehouse club there's a there's a documentary that is out of print, that I don't know how to find it. It's been uploaded to YouTube a few times but it's not available. Last time I checked it it's called the eDreams and it came out, I want to say, in like 2002 or 2003. And it's about the rise and fall of Cosmo and it's really interesting.

03:08:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One mistake they made. They agreed to pay Starbucks this is in February 2000 150 million dollars to promote Cosmo in the coffee shops Garrett.

03:08:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They were guaranteed to go out of business oh yeah, absolutely again the prices that I would pay as, like a 16 year old, I would like order. I'm not joking, I would like order from them and, like you know, the year 2000, whatever. I would like order from them and, like you know, the year 2000,. Whatever, I would like be ordering my DVDs and you know, candy and whatever, and it would be cheaper than going to Best Buy or you know the mini mart and then it would be delivered to my, to my high school, and I'm like, ok you're going to charge me a fraction of the price.

03:09:23
Why would I not? You know again, the only trouble I got in was like the you know, the nice ladies in the front office were annoyed. They were like we can't keep calling you to the office to get your packages. It's like noon. I was like well, but let me take it to the classroom.

03:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The former co-founder and CEO of Cosmo now is president of BibleGatewaycom. Okay, they sell Bibles, no comment. Super Bowl Sundays are very noisy. Apple Watch, as you know, will tell you if you are in a noisy environment. I leave that on. I think that's very useful.

03:10:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I do too. It's great.

03:10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have mine set at 90 dB. Any long exposure above 90 dB you're going to have hearing loss. So they did a study. Apple Watch study found that noise levels across America are significantly higher than normal for about nine hours on Super Bowl Sunday next Sunday If you were in the stadium, of course, but I guess people have parties and they shout and they scream and there'll be some eagles fans and and kansas city fans making a lot of noise average noise levels 1.5 to 3 decibel louder during the past four super bowl games. Compared to levels on the sunday following the game. It's a lot quieter now than it will be next week.

03:10:53
A reminder we'll be starting a little early next week. Join us for a Twit Early or do what most people do and subscribe. That way you can listen whenever you want. We stream, as I mentioned, on eight different platforms normally 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC of a Sunday. Again, we're going to start two hours earlier next week. You can always download a copy of the show from our website, twittv, or subscribe in your favorite podcast player or watch us on YouTube TV. There's audio and video of the show and, of course, if you're a club member, special access behind the velvet rope. My deepest thanks to our panelists. Shoshana Weissman, thank you for being here.

03:11:32 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Thank you for having me. It's always so much fun.

03:11:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always want to play. Climb every mountain when you're on. Working on it You're a mountain climber. That's so awesome. What's your next peak?

03:11:44 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Thank you, so I have.

03:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the next trip I have is coming up in May and it's to do the high point of new mexico, maybe a 14er and then whatever else I can fit in.

03:11:59 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
Wow, so cool. Do you huff it up? You go fast or you kind of oh, I'm extremely slow. I mean like I've had lead poisoning the most of my life. So now I'm like I'm hoping like I get faster and stuff, but I'm slow I train but you do it on a treadmill.

03:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On a treadmill, oh yeah, you do it. That's what matters.

03:12:11 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
And I'm getting faster. I'm getting a lot faster than I used to be Like. I pass like three years ago me easily, so it's getting better.

03:12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a slow walker, I stroll. I think it's good to stroll. Life is happening fast enough. Stroll, that's my motto. Happening fast enough, stroll, that's my motto. I like your motto. Stroll, I'm stroll, I'm the yes, stroll you. You know what you gotta. You gotta stop and smell the wombats is what I'm saying. Yeah, did you know?

03:12:39 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
they poop, square poop oh yeah, that's their thing, that's their big thing, that's their thing.

03:12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's great. Everybody ought to have a thing, thank you. Thank you, uh, dan patterson. So great to see you, as always, director content blackbirdai do that blackbird thing that is compassed up. Blackbirdai, that is so cool and that's free. Yeah, so cool. Thank you for doing your bit. Uh, to make sure that this information gets destroyed well, we like to call it a narrative attack no more narrative attacks. Thank you so much, dan, and, of course, christina warren, congratulations on the new gig. I love the new house.

03:13:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's uh, it's very attractive, very beautiful it is, it's good it's, it's a good look for me. Um, I I like. I like the pink walls. I think that it has kind of a retro aesthetic at this point, kind of 60s, kind of 80s it's really cool.

03:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I like it and the carrot uh curtains in the kitchen, that's great yeah the corn, it's great is that corn? Okay, that's corn carrots. Yeah, whatever, it's a vegetable of some sort. Thank you, christina. I can't wait to find out where you will land next. If is the best thing to do? Follow you film at film, underscore girl or um, you can find me on twitter.

03:13:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Mastodon, I have to still be on twitter. I'm asked on blue sky, all those things still film girl. Yeah, film girl, and it's usually film underscore girl, but some of the networks don't like underscore, so it's just film girl, one word, but yep, so is blue sky your preferred these days.

03:14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like everybody else, I don't know.

03:14:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean I'm I'm kind of trying to post across them. Um, I probably use threads the least, but yeah, blue sky is is definitely has the most vibes, but I still really love mastodon, you know I have a lot of people there, so it kind of I like kind of berries, yeah, I prefer hanging with geeks.

03:14:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blue sky is too much like old Twitter, which is why people love it.

03:14:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's a good, it's a double-edged sword, it's a good and a bad thing, but yeah, so still trying to figure them all out. I still resent the fact that we have to have five when we used to have one, but it is what it is.

03:14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I just posted my blog and let that post everywhere, and that seems to me the best way to do these things. Thank you to our esteemed producer and technical director, benito Gonzalez. Appreciate the work you do. Benito's working on our theme song for Wednesday the launch of Intelligent Machines. It's going to be a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday or Wednesday I should say Well, tuesday too, because I'll be here for MacBreak Weekly and Security Now, and then Wednesday is Windows Weekly and Intelligent Machines. Every Sunday it's Twit. Thanks to our club members for making this possible. Thanks to all of you for being here. We will see you next time. You know this is our. I say this every time. Now this is our 20th anniversary year. April will be the 20th anniversary of the first Twit, can you? 20th anniversary of the first twit. Can you believe 20 years that?

03:15:32 - Shoshana Weismann (Guest)
makes me feel so crazy. I've never done anything for that long.

03:15:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's wild because I remember, I remember when you launched it and and I think that's bizarre, that's amazing congratulations seriously, yeah, I don't.

03:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I don't know if it's congratulations or oh, it is initial, it's just inertia, it is no, no, it's congratulations.

03:15:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Like this is like like you helped pioneer a new medium and then see it go into all these other things, and you're still doing it, and I've been doing it long enough that it is not only no longer the new medium, it's kind of old school, kind of going downhill.

03:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I I jumped from radio to podcasting. I don't know what I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to do something. Maybe AI is the next thing, I don't know. There, you, you, everybody. Great to see you. As I've been saying for 20 years, thanks for being here, we'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.