This Week in Tech 964 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. Also, names of speakers may be incorrect at times.
0:00:01 - Leo Laporte
It's time for twit this weekend. Tech it's the return of Stacy Higginbotham, for one week only special appearance. We'll also talk to Ben Parr, our AI expert, and my good friend Alan Melvin tonal, former host of this week in computer Hardware. He used to be under the sea. Now he's on solid state as an SSD expert at Fison. We'll talk about, of course, solid state technology, new memory technologies, ai, ai Vanillism I say it should be illegal and a whole lot more. It's all coming up next. Guest of vision pro on twit Podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit.
This is twit this week in tech, episode 964, recorded Sunday, january 28th 2024. No one talks to the faucet anymore. This week in tech is brought to you by gusto. Running a small business. It's just plain hard. Gusto lets you focus on the joy of running your business with its easy to use payroll software accessible online from anywhere. Gusto helps more than 6,000 businesses and 90% of its customers say switching to gusto was easy. You get unlimited payroll for one monthly price, no hidden fees. You get multiple schedules and rates, direct deposit and checks you can print yourself. Plus, gusto integrates with your favorite tools to make life easier tools like quickbooks, zero Google and more File and pay all federal, state and local payroll taxes in all 50 states. You know three out of four customers say running payroll with gusto takes ten minutes or less. Gusto cares about the small business owners they work with and since money can be tight right now, you'll get three months free when you run your first payroll. Go to gusto comm slash tech and start setting up your business today. Twit listeners, you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Gusto comm slash tech.
It's time for twit this week in tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news I. This is gonna be like old home week. This is fun for me. Say hello to Stacy Higginbotham. We miss her so much on this week in Google. She is a Policy fellow, a consumer reports, still writes a little bit, does a lot of things, but it's so nice to have you back in front of our microphones, hi, stacy.
Hello it's good to be here everything going well there in a beautiful Washington state.
0:02:45 - Stacey Higginbotham
It is. It's awesome this warm winter. I know it's like the end of the world, but I love it anyway.
0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, has Andrew got you playing pickleball yet? Or? Silence spoke a few words At least, and I have been playing the old pickleball. It's kind of fun.
0:03:07 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh see, I thought you'd want to know how many connected devices I've taken out of my house.
0:03:11 - Leo Laporte
Have you? Have you been able to remove them now? Stacy, of course, had a Stacy on IOT comm and the IOT podcast and all that stuff and just kind of let that all go and, as a result, you had to have all this IOT crap, you had to go to CES, you had to do all sorts of stuff you don't have to do anymore. I.
0:03:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
I still went to CES oh.
0:03:30 - Leo Laporte
Well, there you go. A good, I'll ask you about it. Also here, ben Parr, a good friend, long-time friend of the show, author of the AI analyst, he is eight years ago founded an AI startup, octane AI, right in the nick of time and writes about AI for the information.
0:03:48 - Ben Parr
Hi, ben, hello why do you have a little?
0:03:51 - Leo Laporte
reddit guy behind you, is that just?
0:03:53 - Ben Parr
oh, that is actually the mascot for a company octane. I had his names, octi, actually, hold on, I've got the plushie version. Do you want a plushie version?
0:04:03 - Leo Laporte
I will, oh, I would love that he does look a little bit like the reddit guy.
0:04:07 - Ben Parr
But oh yeah, it's a little. His name's Octi. He was invented in 2016.
0:04:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
He, I guess, around, I guess all floating very popular with kids all floating, you know, but you robot yeah they all look alike.
0:04:18 - Leo Laporte
They all look pretty much the same, right, if they don't look like it?
0:04:21 - Stacey Higginbotham
looks like.
0:04:22 - Ben Parr
Eva from Wally. That's right yeah yeah, they don't.
0:04:27 - Leo Laporte
yeah, you don't want them to look like you know one of those dogs from Boston Dynamics, so I guess it's fair, that's fair. Hello Ben, welcome, good to see you again. And who else is here? Formerly host of this week in computer hardware SSD expert, our SSD expert forever, he is now SSD technologist at Faison what I don't know the name, faison. Should I Alan Malventano?
0:04:53 - Allyn Malventano
Good, because their controller technology is in an awful lot of SSDs.
0:04:58 - Leo Laporte
Oh, so they're infrastructure Behind the scenes kind of right.
0:05:04 - Allyn Malventano
I've been. I've been working my way further and further back in the industry.
0:05:09 - Leo Laporte
And you see behind him the remnants of all the things.
0:05:13 - Allyn Malventano
Remnants of all the things. Yeah you know, I find problems at one company and then it's like, oh darn, we have to work around the problems that come from the controller. Okay, well, let me just go work for a controller company, then I'll just fix other problems there Before they even get to the SSDs.
0:05:30 - Leo Laporte
There was a. I actually saw a story this week and I thought you know I should ask Alan about it. It's not exactly SSDs, but it's memory technology. Samsung has introduced this new LP cam memory Technology that is, in theory, gonna replace something that's already been replaced. So dims, but they say it's faster than LPDDR5.
0:05:53 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, yeah, it's a wider bus. It's just. You know a lot of Dim technologies in general, there's a workaround where you have to. You know the bits have to go across a fixed number of lanes, right, and if you can make that, that bus more efficient, wider, any of those things you know, especially on mobile, leads to better performance and battery life.
0:06:18 - Leo Laporte
Of course, a number of companies, including Apple, have started putting the RAM on the Package, which I think eliminates that bus. You have a unified memory. Eliminates that bus head overhead right.
0:06:31 - Allyn Malventano
It does well, the bus is just way faster yeah you're right next to the process. Yeah, right, but that. But there are other cons to go with that. Sometimes, if you're stacking directly on top now, it's harder to get heat out of the heat producing thing underneath the memory, or that's a point? Yeah, I have it.
0:06:46 - Leo Laporte
So so kid this cam have a future. This compressed attached memory module We'll have to see.
0:06:52 - Allyn Malventano
This is one of those where it's just been announced and it's not. You know it's, it's not. It's not one of those things where, hey, this is out now and it's all of a sudden ubiquitous, everybody's making a thing with it. So, yes, it's a standard as a thing people could use. We have to wait and see okay, we'll see.
0:07:08 - Leo Laporte
I see these things and I think, boy, I wish Alan was here. So now that you were here, I asked you.
0:07:15 - Stacey Higginbotham
Can I ask Alan later about risk 5 adoption? And yeah, sure, let's ask him now risk 5 adoption Stacey.
0:07:23 - Leo Laporte
When we were on tweed we talked a lot about this open source architecture to replace x86 or I guess even arm risk letter v for 5. But I've seen why Intel's a doubt you. When you were an Intel, they were doing it right.
0:07:37 - Allyn Malventano
Well, I don't. I didn't get that much in the leads when I was at Intel to even be able to speak on it right. I was more worried with evaluating the performance of the platform and the SSDs versus comp. I wasn't. I didn't usually have to go so far back in the chain where I was talking a six.
0:07:52 - Leo Laporte
But you can still, you must still have an opinion on risk.
0:07:56 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, it is like Western Digital was one of the big adopters of it, for Like early adopters, oh yeah, anyway, we don't have to talk about this this week and risk adopt this week in.
0:08:09 - Leo Laporte
Increase so Dynamically because people they're talking about risk 5, everybody come on over.
0:08:17 - Allyn Malventano
No, I probably not listen as far as SSD Things go, anything that can move the bits faster and more power physically and that's good and accomplish all of the tasks that the SSD Controller needs to do is a viable solution for that right. It just depends on who does it then, if they choose to or they know what's the cost benefit for it.
0:08:36 - Leo Laporte
All right, I know what everybody wants us to talk about, or, conversely, doesn't want us to talk about, which is that Friday, february 2nd, people will start getting the vision pro headsets from Apple and you're gonna start seeing YouTube actually sooner than that, probably Cuz, cuz, I'm sure. The people who get loaners from Apple will be off embargo probably Wednesday, so you'll start seeing Wednesday the reviews and you'll see the thumbnails on on YouTube going. Yeah, ben, you ordered one. You must have ordered one.
0:09:08 - Ben Parr
I Did order one I got up at was it like one two of the board? Make sure to order five am Pacific.
0:09:16 - Leo Laporte
I am whatever time it was, it felt like one or two, did you know? Here's the critical question Did you order it to go pick it up in the store so you can get that 25 minute pitch on how great this thing is, or did you, like Alan, like Alex Lindsay and like Jason Snell, say no, you just send it to me, I'll figure it out?
0:09:36 - Ben Parr
I Did the store version. Good, gonna be a hair faster. And you know what I got a report. I got to like do a video or something, put it on, tick to yeah. Yeah, mike is going in there.
0:09:46 - Leo Laporte
I wonder if they'll let us, you know, do do a little video of him. You know getting the tour, I want to see Ben Pahr's spooky eyes on the front of it.
0:09:54 - Ben Parr
That's gonna be really next time I go into it I'll wear nothing, but would you please do the entire time, just see if I can did you send them your glasses Prescription?
0:10:03 - Leo Laporte
are you gonna get this ice lenses?
0:10:05 - Ben Parr
I don't, so I can wait. I can see just fine without the glasses. They're just like.
0:10:10 - Leo Laporte
I'm like to make you look smarter. Is that it? I?
0:10:12 - Ben Parr
I literally just got my eye exam like an hour and a half ago. Funny enough and Like it's. It's enough. It's like where it's nice for me to drive, I could theoretically drive without. Okay, the world seems a little clearer, but close up stuff like it's actually better for me not to wear glasses.
0:10:29 - Leo Laporte
Don't need it, so well, you have one advantage you can lend your vision pro other people.
0:10:35 - Ben Parr
It won't be my fiance has got to go and play around and do stuff. You know we got to watch.
0:10:40 - Leo Laporte
I don't know she's a playwright so I imagine she'd be interested in in how vision pro might have impact theater.
0:10:49 - Ben Parr
I I wonder if you could. I had to see if, like they have like easy switching accounts, because then you could like have your own work.
0:10:54 - Leo Laporte
They have a guest mode? I think there is a guest mode, yeah because I would.
0:11:00 - Stacey Higginbotham
Is your fiance interested at all? I have literally asked all the normal people that I talked to and they are just like what the hell? I have zero interest in this and All of my efforts to drum up any sort of excitement. So I'm just curious like here.
0:11:15 - Leo Laporte
Here's the real people in that risk. If it had risk five in it, maybe there is no, just called the swift five.
0:11:23 - Ben Parr
Here's what I think, stacy. I think that no one outside of developers has real interest and the goal for Apple this year is not to get mass adoption. It's like get it in the hands of developers who will get excited and build some stuff for it, and then they'll go more mass market and cheaper afterwards. But in the interim, you know, if your friend has it, you're gonna be like, sure I'll try it and most likely be like, oh my god, this is awesome, maybe. And then they hear oh, it's a thousand dollars cheaper next year. Oh, I think I will go and get it. That's my guess. With how Apple is rolling this out, it needs a couple years to get more developers on board, but if they drop the price, which they'll be able to do in a few years, they can get more adoption and in line with what Ben was just saying there, the thing that I think is missing from it so far that's not to say that it's not great.
0:12:12 - Allyn Malventano
In the experience appears to be pretty impressive, but it's missing the killer app. Right, it doesn't have not just the killer app at the killer app category, like right.
0:12:23 - Leo Laporte
What exactly do you need this for?
0:12:25 - Allyn Malventano
right, yeah, and, and so I think, in order, you know they're, they're in this chicken in the egg. The proposition right now, where they need to get the hardware into way more hands so that there's enough developers out there to Try to do something cool with it that really sets off, sets it off, and then don't be surprised if somebody does something really impressive with the technology and then Apple just immediately requires that thing and then spins on it for a year and makes it, you know, way better and then Ships it, as you know, with, along with whatever, the next generation any, any guesses as to at least the, the area?
0:12:59 - Leo Laporte
Will it be a game? Will it be watching our videos? Will it be that spatial video that they're pushing, where you could take a pic you know a 3d video with your iPhone, and then it's like you're there in the vision pro? Will it be a? They're also talking productivity, which is bizarre to me. I I can't imagine trying to do an excel spreadsheet on that thing. Right, what will it be? What category?
0:13:23 - Allyn Malventano
I think. Well, a lot of those things you just mentioned were already shown and we're just. It remains to be seen, as how it plays out, whether or not those would be deemed a killer. App Right, you've already watched a movie. That's already a capability of it.
0:13:37 - Leo Laporte
It's not something they added later, although both you all, youtube and Netflix have decided not to put out a vision pro app, probably in a fit of peak About the app store, more than anything else From there it makes that sense of their perspective.
0:13:54 - Ben Parr
Though it's gonna be so few people in the beginning, they can always launch one later, right here from now, two years from now, and they have a bunch of other stuff to do. It's what I. I get the decision to go and do that. It's probably a game. If I had to give the first version of something like. People are always surprised by how much the like meta's, you know Quest sells. They sell a lot. They're very popular at Christmas time and Games are probably still the biggest thing with workouts and a couple other things. Still no idea what the like killer app is gonna be. That's just gonna take some time.
0:14:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
Okay. So I think there's niche gaming opportunities as a killer app. I think working out that's a popular idea for people. I don't know why, because strapping something that weighs that much to my face and sweating in it is like the least, the least exciting.
0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
Saber on my Oculus Pro, my quest pro, for about half an hour and yeah it's, you feel pretty grody at the end.
0:14:54 - Stacey Higginbotham
I look at it and I think we're going to. It feels like a flamingo in an egg kind of situation or some bird that nobody.
0:15:02 - Leo Laporte
Dodo in an egg perhaps no I.
0:15:05 - Stacey Higginbotham
Why did we kill the Dodo's? Did we eat them? I don't know.
0:15:09 - Ben Parr
There's a whole history there.
0:15:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, no, I'm like I don't actually remember why the Dodo's died, but so I look at this and I'm like Passes like society, we'll have to get really terrible passenger and the no, no because they had value, like we wanted passenger pigeons. I'm not sure we want this. Yeah, we thought passenger pigeons were yummy.
Yeah, one or but I feel like the the opportunity that this offers so far and We'll probably offer for a couple more years, is a true escape from the world we live in, and and I don't know if the world is that bad for that many people just yet, I think it could get there.
0:15:51 - Leo Laporte
It's interesting, I think that's what would drive adoption? Because all of the VR sci-fi stories, those VR helmets, whether it's Neuromancer or ready player one, are used as an escape from a dystopian future Like the world's terrible, and you want to live in the universe.
0:16:11 - Stacey Higginbotham
And if you're like a Gen Z kid who's like stuck in an apartment with like eight people and you work all like that feels like A couple years from now, that could be good for you, like, but it's still super expensive and I don't see that pretty dystopian view though it's like, and I agree with you because one of the things I don't like about it is it isolates you.
0:16:29 - Leo Laporte
Even if you're watching a movie, you're watching it all by yourself. We have a pretty good Experience, with a nice TV and a good surround sound and a couch where we can, you know, communally enjoy something, but that's not the VR experience. It's a very solitary thing, but you make a good point. If you have eight roommates, maybe that's not such a bad thing to be solitary, or you're on an airplane.
I don't think you're gonna see, are you gonna get on a plane next week and there'll be people wearing vision pros up and down the aisle.
0:16:57 - Ben Parr
So I mean, someone's gonna do it for the fun, for the.
0:17:00 - Stacey Higginbotham
Seattle to.
0:17:01 - Ben Parr
San Francisco. Okay, look, I'll do it for the novelty factors. To someone asked me a question, it also just to report on it. Not but am I gonna bring a $3,500 computer device on trips with me? No, not normally, but I did have an idea through this conversation. Vision pro for toddlers you put on the thing, you don't have to worry about your six. It's like killer a high-tech pillowcase.
0:17:28 - Leo Laporte
You just you put them in it and that's it now you, you, and I hope you can translate this, because you put the Ming Chi quo article in on the vision pros first weekend pre-order, but it's in Chinese. So he said what? 180,000?
0:17:45 - Ben Parr
I can't keep scrolling down. They have the English. Oh, there's the.
0:17:48 - Leo Laporte
English Okay, base.
Thank you. Based on pre-order inventory and shipping time. Ming Chi quo, who's you know, usually fairly accurate Estimates that Apple sold 160 to 180,000 vision pros During the first pre-order weekend it did. The date did slip out to a month. I don't know where it is today. He says about five to seven weeks, within hours, they say.
Apple says I think that they can make as many as half a million a year Because of the limit. The limitation is actually those Sony screens inside it, and Sony has said we can't, we can't make that many, so half a million a year. It's not intended to be a big seller, though. This is Apple releasing something for a very niche market they hope mostly developers and then using some very high-end Apple fans as beta testers, basically for a whole new concept of computing. That's what I see it, and Jason Snell explained this on Mac break weekly said if you're Apple and and you know you need the next best big thing right after the iPhone, because the iPhone's not gonna last forever, so you know that you've got to find something.
One of the things you're gonna try is this kind of maybe a our glasses idea, but you don't have the technologies yet to release that. So in order to be ready when it comes ten years from now, maybe you've got to start trying stuff out now, knowing it's a small market and it's an expensive market to be in it and it's all. It's gonna be a money loser for years to come, but this is, but Apple can afford it and this is what Apple needs to do. You agree? I?
0:19:23 - Stacey Higginbotham
mean. That's what Google thought when they released the Google glass way back in the day. We've all seen, we've all seen. Yeah, we've all seen this before and I wonder if 2024, given all the craziness around the election, given interest rates, given all of this, if the in Apple has tons of money, will investors let them play this out to the extent they need to? And that's a really open question.
0:19:49 - Ben Parr
Thank. They get a lot of leeway. It is an open question, but they're going to also let them do a car in some amount of time, the. I feel like there is actually a lot of interest in like smart glasses, like the meta. Ray Bans are actually more popular than people think people do like those, mike Elgin was on a couple of months ago and he's swearing by me.
0:20:09 - Leo Laporte
He got me this close to buying them and those are prescription glasses. You have good speakers in the temple piece and they're decent. Battery life I think he said four or five hours, right, and it's got a camera built in. They just added an AI feature where you could take a picture of something and the glasses will then tell you what it is or do some sort of you know Google lens style search on it.
0:20:32 - Ben Parr
I want them, although they're they meta. Ray Bans, make a wider version, because even your wide version is just a hair too tight on my face.
0:20:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you're like me. You got a fat head, I got a fat head, yeah.
0:20:45 - Ben Parr
But the idea I think Stacy's makes the exact right point with. Like you know, they're thinking like 10 years down the road. Maybe the technology is good enough to get into like a glasses format which I think people are interested in.
0:20:56 - Leo Laporte
I think people do want this, yeah, but there's a lot holding it back, stacy. There's battery life, right, that's a lot of compute power If you're really going to do something more than these meta glasses do.
0:21:08 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, there's tons. I mean there's tons of hardware development. There's I mean there's quality internet connectivity that really hasn't been solved for something like I know, like we think it has. But you get, I mean like there's a lot that needs to be solved here, and I get why companies are like yes, we must invest in face computing because that's the next obvious option.
0:21:29 - Leo Laporte
I am calling it face computing from now on. Apple is really a great going to great things. That makes it spatial computing. No, it's face computing. Thank you, stacy.
0:21:40 - Stacey Higginbotham
It is like spatial computing to me, like we want to get there. That's like that smart does. That's the, that's the sci-fi. You know, I'm flinging up a screen and you can do that with AR glasses.
0:21:51 - Leo Laporte
But it's face computing, face it, it's Face it Apple. Yeah, all right, but you know, I the real question is I mean, for instance, 5g, it's it's. We have the technology to put ubiquitous high speed internet at pretty much everywhere. I mean that, you know, maybe it'll have to be improved a little bit. Maybe a Wi-Fi seven is going to help. I'm sure that's part of the point of Wi-Fi seven. So those things are you know you can see them in the future. But battery technology has not been leaping forward. Right now you have to wear a separate battery pack with a wire to use the Vision Pro for any length of time. Even then it doesn't go for very long.
0:22:31 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, both 5G and Wi-Fi are hugely battery intensive.
0:22:35 - Leo Laporte
Yes, right, I mean look, so there's technology that I think that they don't even exist right now.
0:22:44 - Ben Parr
It's 10, it's 10 yet, like the people working on the battery stuff, but decade away.
0:22:50 - Leo Laporte
You think it's a decade? Yeah, yeah.
0:22:52 - Ben Parr
I've. I've write up some stuff. There's some interesting stuff being done and interesting approaches. I have a hard time predicting that one, because that one ends up also in the physical limitations of our ability to power things. I hope it's a decade away. I think Apple probably thinks it's something like that, which is why they would come up with something now with a bigger thing, because eventually they may be like super battery. It's in the thing, but it's still years.
0:23:16 - Leo Laporte
But you do raise a good point, stacy. How long will stakeholders put up with this, especially if it's a big drain on Apple's resources? Right now, apple Apple shareholders are pretty darn happy with Apple. They're not. They're not exactly leaving the stock in droves.
0:23:33 - Stacey Higginbotham
We have a story later on about layoffs and talking about how shareholders are thrilled about that. So I look at I mean, if you're like, really considering investors and shareholders and these sorts of conversations and calculations they're not long-term thinkers.
0:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
0:23:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
That's right, and if they're spooked right now because of everything, then that's a. It's just an open question.
0:23:58 - Leo Laporte
That's a great point. They've got to convince the board and the shareholders that you know to put in what had Meta put into its VR efforts more than $10 billion a year, which is not a success, yeah, and it's not paid off.
0:24:14 - Ben Parr
They pivoted to AI.
0:24:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah yeah, they pivoted to AI, in fact. That's the other question. Maybe Apple's making a mistake going all in on AR. Should they be going in on AI harder?
0:24:27 - Stacey Higginbotham
This is such a dumb question, sorry.
0:24:29 - Leo Laporte
Thank you. I appreciate that. It's good to have you back, Stacy. They were wondering. They were wondering how long it would take, and I think that took about 12 minutes. So thank you so sorry no no. I know, I know it doesn't bother me at all. It is a dumb question. Tell me why.
0:24:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
Because look for any sort of AR experience. I mean, if we, if we think about the hardware that we need to have for shrinking the hardware down to give us, like true computing on our face or whatever, spatially they're going to have to be new interfaces, the best interfaces that we can possibly have are going to be if not driven by, like AI, like learnings at AI I'm losing my words here, but AI is just a crucial part. It's like saying I want to build a computer today without considering the latest wireless.
0:25:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you need AI in these glasses. Yeah, you need it. It's not nearly as useful, but if you can use the glasses or the spectacles or the nerd helmet or the whatever you call it, if you can use it to look out at the world and get in from, get you know, analysis and information back, that's much more useful than if you're just, you know, playing pong. So I agree with you yeah, it is a lot of.
0:25:45 - Ben Parr
I mean, look, there's a lot of reports. They're working on AI for sure, uninteresting things internally. Apple is just always later, but they do it where it's much more perfected than others. So it's. I keep on saying over and over again if there's just one company where I'll never really bet against them, it's Apple you know like people are like the watch man. The watch is pretty dang popular Like they've done a good job.
0:26:07 - Leo Laporte
It was a form factor we already were wearing. It was something we're used to wearing and I admit I wasn't sold on the watch at first, the iPhone was not.
0:26:16 - Stacey Higginbotham
You're right, the iPhone was not Okay With the iPhone came out, we were already hungry for Internet. On the, I will say the iPhone, okay, the watch I like. That was actually a really slow adoption curve. For the first two years of the watch, nobody actually like it was a failed product. But the iPhone like I don't know about y'all, but like I remember driving around trying to like search for things on my palm pilot you know we had our like Nokia phones, like that just democratized it. So I think the demand and hunger was there for yeah, we all had blue bear blackberries.
0:26:50 - Leo Laporte
We have blackberries, blueberries. I'm dressed as a blueberry. There's a difference. We all had blackberries by then, hi this is Benito.
0:26:57 - Benito
We all that also had Google Maps, so like that's kind of the killer app that you're right.
0:27:03 - Leo Laporte
So so killer app for the iPhone was Google Maps. It came with Google Maps, yes so, but then, I think, also Safari. The fact that you could use a tiny little screen in a browser and actually browse desktop websites was a big deal. Remember, you could tap it, it would.
0:27:20 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, I think location, like the personalization that came with something. Knowing your exact location was what drove adoption. Like, remember we were so excited I don't know how old you are and and but she knows how I am kids.
So low mo co. What was it? Social mobile, local, blah, blah blah. We were like we're so high on that and that's that. That was kind of the benefit of the iPhone and I don't know. I don't know what we're high on. For VR in AI. I mean, look at, if I talk to like Qualcomm, they're going to tell me about AI for, like, antenna modulation, for like, delivering 5G to the phone. Right, that's it. That's important, Right.
0:28:05 - Leo Laporte
But that's one of the coolest things about AI is it is. It is like computing in general is a very wide range of applications, structure or well, it can be, but it can also be. I use an AI expert system with coding and that's really amazing. I mean, there are some definite uses for AI right now, out of the box, whereas I don't see those.
0:28:27 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh yeah, no, I'm arguing that AI is infrastructure, which is why I think it'll be necessary.
0:28:32 - Ben Parr
I see it's the same as the Internet in the sense of Internet, is infrastructure for our lives. Ai is infrastructure, whether you see it or you don't. Right, like you know, there's AI algorithms handling a bunch of stuff on on our zoo meetings, and then when you look up on TikTok and then when you go and drive your car, and it is just like a broad like it is such a broad term that applies to a lot of things and people may disagree and we're like talking beyond generative AI, which is its own little subcategory. But yes, like they's absolutely right, it's infrastructure, absolutely.
0:29:03 - Allyn Malventano
All sorts of things, and it's been around, and it's been around for longer than you might realize, right?
0:29:09 - Ben Parr
I came up with a report on AI Investored Trends. It's in Benparcom, I'll have to plug it 110 pages.
0:29:17 - Leo Laporte
Yes.
0:29:18 - Ben Parr
And one of the things I found when I was doing it was I did a report in college on AI in 2005, 2006. Wow, and I found like I was like you know when where the term AI was really first coined. It was a conference at Dartmouth in the 1950s. I was like, oh yeah, this has been around for a long time.
0:29:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, john McCarthy, we were people of my age have been through more than one AI winner as well. You know, we've watched AI be overhyped, you know, and die a miserable death more than once. I think two or three AI winners we've gone through so, but I don't think this is the same. I honestly don't. I'm completely turned around on AI. I've become much more bullish on it since you last joined us, stacey, because I've been able to use it in so many interesting and powerful ways.
And you, I see with one of your slides in the deck, you show a slide 110. You show an image, ai generated image and absolutely I mean for image generation alone. Ai has been fascinating. I've become and I don't know if you're on the same train as I am, ben, but I have become so bullish on AI that I'm and much to my the dismay of many of my co-creators I'm kind of saying just let AI have everything, don't limit AI to uncopyrighted or free material. And actually we're starting to see that a lot of news organizations are blocking AI scrapers. I think that training is really important and I think you should. I think AI should have access to everything. It's not stealing your information, it's learning something and I think it's going to be so valuable, I don't want to see any limitations on it.
0:31:07 - Ben Parr
I see the debate scream agonize.
0:31:09 - Leo Laporte
You can see, oh yeah, you know how much people hate that one. Especially creators hate that when I say that.
0:31:16 - Allyn Malventano
Well, with valid justification based on some. You know, when you see an AI image generator spit out a thing that still has the watermark but it's not.
0:31:26 - Leo Laporte
It's a little bit like the watermark, but it isn't it's not Getty's watermark.
You can tell that they're, that it ingested some Getty images, which is put which, by the way, Getty has put online. Right, I just think that there's. Here's why I say this Look, I understand if you're a copyright holder, you're terrified, blah, blah, blah, but. But there is so much value societally to be gained from an AI that's smart and there's so much to be lost from an AI that's hobbled.
You know, one of the stories this week is that it's AI has not been allowed to scrape things like the Washington Post and the New York Times, but right wing news media has been welcoming AI scraping, and so what you're going to get is AIs that are trained on right wing media but not left wing media, and I don't think that's good for anybody. And so I think it's a mistake to say what AI can read and not read. It's not the New York Times lawsuit saying oh, you're going to read the New York Times in an AI in a chat, GBT, instead of in on our pages. Copy is nonsense. No one's going to do that. They're just trying to extract some money out of them.
0:32:33 - Stacey Higginbotham
As a creator, I don't think that's wrong.
So, first up, as someone who's created content, if you have created your content with the idea that it is for people and reading for people right, and for a certain use case, like as a journalist, it's a service to my readers or whatever I have an audience in mind. I think that's an important thing to like. You can't go back and change that contract, which is kind of what AI is. They're like oh yeah, we're going to now use this thing that you built, that's still technically owned by you or your publication usually, and we're going to use it for this instead. I don't think I think your arguments about like, oh right, wing media is going to allow it to be trained as opposed to left wing media I think there's a place for making that argument and then having people produce content for AI that is, quality content because of the benefits to society or whatever the hell we want to argue, but I don't believe that saying I should give my content to a multi-billion dollar company just for better training of something they're going to make money on is really.
0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
What if they? What if it weren't for them to make money? What if it were open source? I do agree, I don't want to see Google or Microsoft dominate, or open AI for that matter. Dominate AI. I think it should be open source. But so if you would be OK if it's, if it's, if it's somebody's not going to make money.
0:34:03 - Stacey Higginbotham
I would want someone to ask I mean, it's kind of like someone walking into your house and being like man, this place is super nice, you know? Let me settle on in.
0:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Well, interestingly the reason this is happening is because these companies are saying you have to ask and and open AI and Google and others are asking this is from originality. Ai, which is an Ontario based AI detection startup via Wired magazine. Data collected in mid January on about 40 top news sites shows that almost all of them use robotstex or something like it to block AI web crawlers the New York Times of Washington Post, the Guardian, the Atlantic Bleacher Report. Open AI's GPTBot is the most widely blocked crawler, but none of the top right wing news sites surveyed, including Fox News, the Daily Caller, breitbart, block any of the most prominent AI web scalpers. So they're actually explicitly saying the sites that are blocking are explicitly saying no, you can't look and, to their credit, open AI and Google are honoring it. But you can see the problem from a societal point of view. Even to that.
0:35:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
So yeah, well then, what? What's to stop, I don't know, microsoft or Google from saying, well, we have a huge bias problem and it's partially because of our trading Right so biased. Well, we see that happen.
0:35:21 - Leo Laporte
What.
0:35:21 - Stacey Higginbotham
I wondered about.
0:35:22 - Allyn Malventano
We see that, have a face recognition.
0:35:24 - Leo Laporte
I mean, face recognition is notoriously terrible on people of color because it's most and this is just an inadvertency, this isn't even intentional, but it was trained mostly on white faces, so of course it's terrible on people of color. So, but you want to fix that? Or do you just want to ban and face recognition and say, well, we should just never use it?
0:35:44 - Allyn Malventano
Something I was curious about after reading that article was is it specific to AI, or is it just that you have a set of websites that are trying to get as much traffic as they can more aggressively, and so they're just a lot more lenient with the robots text file versus the other sites?
0:36:01 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, I didn't know.
0:36:02 - Allyn Malventano
See, that's and it wasn't, and it wasn't clarified in the article either, right, so I don't know what you can't.
0:36:07 - Leo Laporte
You can't determine the the intention. You can just merely look at their robotstxt and see what they're doing, right?
0:36:13 - Ben Parr
This is also deeply related to and I know is to the state of media which we talked about before we got in the show, which, you know, if media were doing really excellent right now, there'd be less issue. Media is suffering. We have seen lots of layoffs in the media world among our friends and the like. This might be a killer for some who have really slow margins or thin margins, or it might be a savior if they can get a payout from someone like an opening eye or other. But like long term, you know, cat is out of the bag. People are going to have like this is why they're mistral, and others like raise money because they're building the open source for us. You could run the large language bottle from your phone around your own device and eventually people are just going to have their own stuff running and the thousand people a billion, a hundred thousand people are not going to all ask for permission each and every single place.
0:37:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, but really the interesting thing is so you're talking about Mistral, I use that and I use open AIs rather of Facebook's Llama, both of which are open models. But those models, those are the ones that are being trained on this giant database of internet material. When I put this on my local machine, I'm doing the fine tuning with various content and stuff. Right, so it still has to be. These are still from big companies training giant models and very expensively, by the way.
0:37:36 - Ben Parr
I'm not going to be shocked. If you just like and I'm already seeing it's more and more starts than others like doing their own training of their own models, and it'll become cheaper.
0:37:43 - Leo Laporte
That's interesting.
0:37:44 - Ben Parr
Go and do that and it'll be easier and more effective to go and do.
0:37:47 - Leo Laporte
Who does Mistral? Where does Mistral come from? That's a company, Mr La I right.
0:37:52 - Ben Parr
Yeah, they're based in France Anderson, Horowitz, Bactam. They're not that old, they're like less than a year old or so, but it's like top researchers got together and sometimes you know they throw a lot of money, something like that doesn't work. They do seem to be working. It's providing a different kind of value for those who want to have a lot more control for their large language model. They're a couple.
0:38:15 - Leo Laporte
Go ahead.
0:38:16 - Allyn Malventano
So so, on the subject of that training at the edge and training with your own data sets and this was the last thing I was expecting when I was in talks to move over to Fison they're working on an AI thing Interesting I was, and it was shockingly not gimmicky like my immediate assumption initially wait, what are you guys doing? And then, no, actually it was a completely legitimate use case and there's like, okay, well, you have a GPU. It only has so much memory. How do you train a model that's too big to fit in the memory? Oh, you can add some SSDs, A swap file, that are meant for that. Yeah, oh, look, in essence, right, but you, but you have to. You can't just plug that in and hit go. It doesn't work that way. You have to develop the actual technology and the software and everything to work together. So it really is a gold rush.
Yeah, we tease that at CES.
0:39:00 - Leo Laporte
We're working on a thing. It's a gold rush.
0:39:02 - Allyn Malventano
Like for a legit purpose.
0:39:03 - Leo Laporte
So I've used two different programs and I would like to tell people about them. One is called Olama at olamaai and it's based on Facebook Meta's open AI model, Lama Lama 2. But you can download other models, including the MISTERO models. I've set that up and I've also played with something called GPT4ALL from NOMIC. Again, the idea is you download these models that are trained by sometimes by a big company, sometimes by MISTERO, sometimes by a variety of people. These are the various models you can download. You can show the screen and then you would then either fine tune it or create your own AI. One of the most popular things to do is to create a PDF reader that could summarize content for you, and I've been doing that locally and it's great. It's really. It's kind of amazing what you can do, but you do still need these big models. I think that'll be very interesting, Because do you think, Ben, actually there's going to be a lot of people who will be training their own models eventually?
0:40:04 - Ben Parr
Oh yeah, I've already seen more and more startups with a lot of resources training their own models for very specific things Already seeing people with trained models like they might use the basis of an open source model and they train it a lot more, but they're training it on things like the medical industry, for example. You're not going to go and use out of the box chat GPT open.
0:40:25 - Leo Laporte
AI. Well, you might use the large language model, like Llama, to do the basic language stuff. So somebody's generated that and then you're going to fine tune it for a medical application.
0:40:36 - Allyn Malventano
Well, and you have to compartmentalize that for HIPAA. You can't, the data can't go the other way.
0:40:40 - Leo Laporte
Can't go out of your. That's really interesting, boy. I feel like AI is the thing that people should be focusing on right now, not AI. But, as you say that's a dumb distinction. Stacey, I'm making it a silly foolish.
0:40:55 - Stacey Higginbotham
You're saying AR versus AI is dumb.
0:40:58 - Leo Laporte
It's not really the way it is. They go together, you're right. That's an excellent point.
0:41:02 - Allyn Malventano
The next thing I want to see, which I don't know if it's going to happen. I hope somebody does it. If anybody's listening and just working on it, then more props to you, but like we're getting pretty close to. If you've ever seen the movie Her or they had the AI you downloaded the software on the phone and I want to see the thing where you train your own model. You plug in some pieces of software on your desktop, you train your own model on all of your own stuff.
0:41:24 - Leo Laporte
Right, and you go hey, what's that email from? That's the fine tuning.
0:41:28 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, I want to just do a hey. What's that email from five years ago about this thing? You know and just find it.
0:41:33 - Leo Laporte
I think that's going to happen in the next few months. I don't.
0:41:35 - Ben Parr
I think we're there already, practically you can already use Rewind to do some of that stuff.
0:41:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, are you going to get a Rewind? Are you going to do the Rewind?
0:41:43 - Ben Parr
I'm buying every single hardware.
0:41:44 - Leo Laporte
Did you buy humane?
0:41:47 - Ben Parr
I have not bought humane. I will do that. That one is a hard value prop. Yeah, like the Rabbit. R1 is a much more expensive device. Did you get a rabbit? I got a rabbit.
0:41:57 - Leo Laporte
I really wanted the rabbit. I bought every one pending, yeah, yeah.
0:41:59 - Ben Parr
I will see. I'll get a humane pen and go and try the whole thing out. I'll try every single one.
0:42:04 - Leo Laporte
So all of these, devices are designed to have. They still, I think, all phone home, though, right these running locally, especially the R1, which really doesn't even have any apps, it just phones.
0:42:14 - Stacey Higginbotham
You can't run any of those locally.
0:42:16 - Leo Laporte
But it's adding the fine tuning from your life Not so much rabbit, but definitely rewindai and the humane AI pin. It's recording your experience, your exchanges, your experiences and stuff and then adding that as a fine tuning to an existing LLM. I to me. You're right, that's her. In fact, it was no accident, by the way, the ChatGPT, when they added an iOS app and an Android app, had one of the voices sounded surprisingly like Scarlett Johansson, like a very they didn't call it.
0:42:46 - Stacey Higginbotham
It could just be she has an amazing voice, yeah.
0:42:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
0:42:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
Hey, we got to take a break.
0:42:51 - Leo Laporte
This is a great conversation. Don't hold that thought, alan. I want to keep going, but I do have to take a break or we will be going way too long. Our show today. We got a great panel, by the way. Stacy, it's great to have you back. I missed you. Welcome back. You and I are going to do the book group on February 8th. Right, we are. That's the most depressing book I've ever read.
0:43:13 - Stacey Higginbotham
I want to thank you for that. Y'all did we really need to do this one so?
0:43:18 - Leo Laporte
depressing. I love Paulo Guido Machia Colubbi. I loved the windup girl. His new one is the water knife. I haven't got to the end. I'm hoping like that, suddenly the sun will come out and it'll start raining. Everything will be beautiful, but maybe not. I don't know. It's a little grim. No, that's not going to happen, is it? Well, we'll talk about it February 8th in the club that's going to be Stacy's book club. Maybe next time Can we choose a happy book, just next time, please.
0:43:42 - Stacey Higginbotham
I put happy books on the things.
0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
It's the people. It's the people. It's the voice of the people. The voice of the people. Ben Parr is the voice of AI. He is the author of a great book. You should read the AI analyst co-founders. Eight years he's been doing AI at Octane AI Great to have you. And, of course, alan Malventano, now at Faison, which is just as easy to pronounce as Soledine, but only a little bit hard, harder than Intel. He's been at all three.
0:44:12 - Allyn Malventano
I am dragging the SSD industry into the future.
0:44:16 - Ben Parr
His next company will be Cyberdyne.
0:44:18 - Allyn Malventano
Cyberdyne. We thank you, and then you might as well. You know I'll be working with Ben and we'll just take over the world.
0:44:24 - Leo Laporte
I thank you all three for being here. I showed it. They brought to you by NetSuite. Once your business gets to a certain size, the cracks start to emerge. You see this happen every time. Small business, you know everybody's name, no big deal, you know. You get to the point where do we hire? You, or you knew, and then there's just too many people, too many manual processes to keep track of. If this is where you are or about to be, you should know three numbers 37,025 and one. Okay, I'll explain. 37,000, that's the number of businesses that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
Netsuite is the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, hr and more. 25, that's, that's how old NetSuite is. It turns 25 this year. That's pretty impressive 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books in days, not weeks, and drive down costs. I bet you can guess the one. You're the one. Your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all your KPIs in one efficient system. A single source of truth that's another one right there. Manage risk, get reliable forecasts, improve margins everything you need to grow all in one place Right now, download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist, designed to give you consistently excellent performance and it's absolutely free. Netsuitecom slash Twit. That's NetSuitecom slash Twit. Get your own KPI checklist any TSUIDE net suitecom slash Twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech.
Great conversation about about AI. I'm like you, kind of been. I want to try all the AI things I don't want to try. Unlike you, I don't want to try any of the VR things. I, you know I got this close to buying the vision pro. I mean I literally I did the vase scan, uploaded my prescription and I got my finger hovering over the $3,500 button. Actually it was more because I had to buy the $200 travel case. I had to buy the extra sweat band. I had to 99 bucks. I had to buy the glasses because I do need corrective lines. It's $149. So I got it well over $4,000 before I was done.
And then I said no way. I said I have an Oculus, I have a MetaQuest pro that I spent $1,400 for. That's been just. It's got a nice thin layer of dust on it in my office collecting dust. I knew this would. I would buy this, I would use it for a week, get all excited about it and then it would just collect dust. I couldn't, I couldn't justify that, so, unlike you, I'm not buying one of those.
0:47:10 - Allyn Malventano
So my my point before the break, which will parallel us into the rest of the topics, I'm sure which applies to both the vision related things, the VR things and the AI.
The discussion we just had as far as having a thing that's very powerful, like in your house, in your possession, right, and the reason I'm bringing this up is all these technologies that were like, oh well, this might never get here to this state where you can just have the thing in your house doing all of it. It's going to have to go to the cloud unnecessarily, right. Like about this 25 years ago, this is a smart media card. For those who remember what they are, this is too mag.
0:47:44 - Leo Laporte
Wow, wait a minute. What? Wait a minute? Oh yeah For giants. Yeah, look how big that is.
0:47:52 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, okay, look at how big that. Well, it was really thin, but you know okay.
0:47:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I had one of those.
0:47:57 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, but this, that's too mag. Few years later, sony made this little micro vault USB thing. That was really tiny, that's two gig. Wow, right yeah. And then here's an M.2, 2242, two terabytes. Wow. Right, yeah, and that's across the span of 25 years. That's a million X.
0:48:16 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of remarkable and we saw this with hard drives too but it's really remarkable. And what I find fascinating is that there was a lot of concern early on that these would not be as reliable as spinning media. They're what's your experience. They seem like they're actually as reliable, if not more reliable.
0:48:33 - Allyn Malventano
As long as you understand what the caveat is, which is just for flash memory. There's a finite amount of times you can rewrite us right on it.
0:48:39 - Leo Laporte
But you got ware leveling Surprisingly.
0:48:41 - Stacey Higginbotham
Technology. I did not understand, yeah.
0:48:47 - Leo Laporte
And there's technologies to you know, I remember was coming onto the screensavers in about 2002 and he had a USB key around his neck and he said this is two gigabytes.
0:49:02 - Allyn Malventano
Everything, everything I could ever want is on this. Actually it might have been this, because it came with a little silicone pouch and a little yeah, a little probably was that, and I was thinking, oh, two gigabytes and it's.
0:49:17 - Leo Laporte
His whole life is around his neck. Now my iPhone, this has 512 gigabytes, or some people are getting the vision pro with a terabyte. Did you get a terabyte, Ben?
0:49:28 - Ben Parr
I did get a terabyte. I'm going to get the bills out of space.
0:49:32 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, that's good. Now your future, proofing it.
0:49:35 - Allyn Malventano
Yes, yeah, but all but all these technologies that you would think have to use the broader internet and the cloud and has to be in a big server somewhere on another state. Not necessary, right? Just give it a few years, it's the same compute will be in your house. Yeah.
0:49:52 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't think the business models like. I would love that and you're right, we totally could have computing more, do more locally. But the business models don't make sense because then companies can't control it to the extent that they want to and monetize it to the extent that they want to. Yeah, it's mostly business models, but also people have become less trained for it.
0:50:14 - Allyn Malventano
I'm not cynical about this. Yeah, leo, I don't know if you have an article related to this for this week or covered in recent weeks, but there's a big battle between the home cloud, where you take all your devices and have them on your own server, versus using whatever the company's cloud-based server is. For example, there's been a thermostat company in the news recently that was going after your home lab type. Someone made a plug-in for I forget what the Home assistant, home assistant, right Home assistant right?
Yeah, there's people going after home assistant developers that are just for free, reverse engineering protocol and just making hey, I just want to control my thermostat from my house if I have no internet, and apparently that's the thing that these companies are taking issue with.
0:50:59 - Leo Laporte
The public is a little schizophrenic on this because, on the one hand, we talk a lot about privacy and we don't want these companies scraping our data and we know that Internet Connect, the thermostat, is, of course, sending that information to the company, which is then selling it off to somebody who, for some reason, wants to know how hot my house is. So, on the one hand, we talk about a lot, we talk about, oh, this is a bad thing, but on the other hand, we really don't want to run these things at home and I think, oh, maybe, maybe risk for things like iCloud and OneDrive and Dropbox, and I mean Well, I mean, I have some HomeLab things.
0:51:38 - Allyn Malventano
Right, I don't do Dropbox anymore so much I have my own, you know Docker.
0:51:43 - Leo Laporte
You have more storage than God. You're not, well, you're also way more technically, a debt.
0:51:49 - Allyn Malventano
Well, here's a better example. Here's a better example that someone can even run on a Raspberry Pi in their own home with a Docker container and that You've talked with Steve Gibson on security now a bunch about this. Where you can have a Docker container that holds all your passwords On a very small doesn't need a lot of storage. That's a completely reasonable thing, especially given all the data breaches you hear about. You know right, that's a very scribe information.
0:52:10 - Leo Laporte
You would think people would be interested in doing that, and our sponsor, Bitwarden, among others, allows you to do that Right. I don't think a lot of people. I think there are people like you.
0:52:20 - Stacey Higginbotham
Ellen, people do not want. No, yeah, they don't want a Pi for everything they. I don't even do it.
0:52:24 - Leo Laporte
And I'll tell you why I don't do it. But I think Bitwarden probably is better at securing that vault than I am. I'm much more likely to do some dumb thing with that vault, aren't I Seriously?
0:52:36 - Allyn Malventano
Well, so the part of it where I have I don't want to call it a disagreement, but I mean I have a Nest thermostat. I'm not, you know, I'm not relying on that thing, but if I did want to use Home Assistant and switch stuff over to my own for some functions, I should be able to do it Right.
0:52:54 - Leo Laporte
I shouldn't be like no of course, you should be able to do it, and I think my opinion it's just I saw it's related to right to repair it's companies should just go ahead and do it, because 99% of their customers are not going to do it. So just let them do it. It looks good for you and people are still going to do the convenient and easy thing. It's why it's so bizarre that Apple is being so malicious with the EU over its app store, when it knows perfectly well, even if there is a third party app store available on the iPhone, that most iPhone users, like 99.9%, will never even know it exists, let alone use it, so I have a theory about this.
Yes.
0:53:37 - Stacey Higginbotham
I think what's happening is they're not thinking today about the issue. They're thinking about the long-term implications. So think about Like, basically, my child doesn't pirate music because they never have had to right, but I can pirate music because when I was growing up you know how yes, really keep writing right and you had to right Right. That was like how you got music. The kids. Today, when you're looking for cheap solutions or reliable solutions and that's usually people who have less income and more time, so generally younger people they'll train themselves to pull away from the traditional business models and use this stuff, and companies don't want to open that door. I don't think that's stupid of them.
0:54:27 - Leo Laporte
Interesting. So Apple's concerned about. See, I always thought when you put a lot of anti-piracy protection on stuff, it teaches. This is my example. I know this isn't exactly applicable, but copy protection teaches people to be pirates because it's only normal end users that are baffled by it. Pirates know perfectly well how to get around all this stuff. They're like Alan. They know how to have all the storage and do all the things. But normal people who are thwarted by copy protection learn how to get around it. So the best answer in fact, this is what the music industry finally came to in Apple is not to have copy protection and just make it easy to buy music, and that's why your kid just buys music, because they don't know that there's other they don't buy music.
0:55:20 - Ben Parr
They don't even buy music, they read it.
0:55:22 - Leo Laporte
They read it. They don't even buy it.
0:55:23 - Leo Laporte
They read it because they don't know of any other way, right?
0:55:26 - Leo Laporte
But you don't want to train people on how to get around stuff. So you're saying, Stacey, that by providing a third-party app store, Apple is teaching people that they can't get around it.
0:55:37 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, what I'm saying is, by leaving those avenues open, more and more people will see value in going around it and then, over time, the number of users of the legit app store reduces. And same thing with home assistant or people. It's not so much the issue today, it's the people who are like oh, I'm going to use home assistant. And then more and more people do it and they make it easier. Home assistant's getting better and better over time.
0:56:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, just for people who don't know, including yours truly, home assistant is an open source home automation tool.
0:56:15 - Stacey Higginbotham
It is an open source home automation tool, so this is like open have, or one of those Nobody uses.
0:56:22 - Leo Laporte
You told me, you told me, don't use it. No one uses open have Nobody uses anymore.
0:56:25 - Stacey Higginbotham
Home assistant's the way to go if you're going to do it.
0:56:28 - Leo Laporte
I think, though, by the way, anybody automating their home is already in the category of Super Geek, but that's just me.
0:56:35 - Stacey Higginbotham
You don't.
0:56:37 - Leo Laporte
You take a lot of home automation out of your house Stacy, when you didn't have to do it anymore.
0:56:43 - Stacey Higginbotham
So I took the MadamA devices, so the Amazon Echo devices all left because they were the most annoying devices. I kept the Google and I'm still hoping they get their app together on their stuff and I did eliminate a lot of the stupid gadgets that you have a faucet that you could talk to.
0:57:04 - Leo Laporte
Do you still have a faucet you can talk to.
0:57:06 - Stacey Higginbotham
So I still have a faucet that I could talk to, but that faucet only worked through MadamA, so now I can't talk to it. Perfect.
0:57:14 - Allyn Malventano
That's a harder. That's a harder uninstallation process, leo. It requires plumbing.
0:57:19 - Stacey Higginbotham
So it actually, so I installed it myself. It wasn't so bad.
0:57:24 - Leo Laporte
But I like to do things. Do you run Home Assistant now Stacy still?
0:57:29 - Stacey Higginbotham
No, no, I don't. The only thing I do is I mean I have more home automation than the average bear. It's mostly just lights.
0:57:38 - Leo Laporte
If you might remember, if you watch this week in Google used to her husband used to complain about how hard it was to open the blinds. Do you still have blinds you can talk to?
0:57:51 - Stacey Higginbotham
No one talks to the blinds. Theoretically, you could talk to the blinds, but everyone has forgotten the fact that they could talk to the blinds.
0:57:58 - Leo Laporte
They pull the string attached to the blinds that opens them.
0:58:01 - Stacey Higginbotham
We still have remote control.
0:58:03 - Ben Parr
Oh yeah, that's okay. This is reminding me my fiance. This is when I saw you. A year and a half back in, my fiance had a play premiere in Sonoma called Atlas Loan in the Gibbon. It's about a smart home going awry and it starts with the fridge exploding and goes through all sorts of stuff and the impact of what if you have AI running things, but also the impact of how that affects things like relationships. I just had to go and plug because I love my fiance. But also we are entering a world where these are going to be the conversations I think. Going back to Stacy's original point, before you have a free time as a kid, you're going to hack whatever thing you have availability to hack. Right now, you don't have the availability to hack on the iPhone.
0:58:45 - Leo Laporte
Kids don't have nothing, no more. Kids don't even know how to type. Kids don't know nothing. Kids know how to hack Kids are too busy playing the tick tock on their phone.
0:58:57 - Stacey Higginbotham
You want to see a kid hack something? Take tick tock off their phone.
0:59:02 - Leo Laporte
That's all I mean seriously you just have to know what they want. What they know how to do is hack mom and dad. Yeah, they hack the parents.
0:59:09 - Ben Parr
They'll learn how to pirate. By the way, complete aside, Leo, while we were having the conversation, I did make a phone. I did make a majority of you as a pirate. I put it in the show notes. Oh, I do, Pirate Leo.
0:59:22 - Leo Laporte
No, and I'll confess to having downloaded I think, 90,000 songs on Napster Back in the day. Who didn't? That was around, yeah, who didn't? And that's why yeah. By the way, mid journey does not know what I look at. Look like. I just want to say it is.
0:59:43 - Ben Parr
I've had that problem it looks pretty close, if you think that looks like me well upper right upper right is John Cleese. Yeah.
0:59:52 - Leo Laporte
It's just an old fat guy, basically with gray hair. I'm the generic old fat guy with big nose and gray hair. That's it right there. You might as well have just used that as the prompt. At least I got the hat right, Actually, my.
1:00:07 - Ben Parr
You did get the hat right.
1:00:08 - Leo Laporte
Somebody was asking me about my chesscom login because I used a AI for it of me and it kind of from a distance it looks like me I can't show it because I'm not logged in, but all right, I'll use this pirate somewhere. Thank you, ben You're welcome, I love your journey.
I think playing with mid-journey is great. It's one of the pieces that made me kind of start to think. You know, I want a smart AI, I want a good AI and I don't really care if Thomas Kincaid, the painter of light, is pissed off that mid-journey can do a crappy painting like him. That just doesn't seem to me to be a societal problem. The heirs of George Carlin Look, you know I understand I support the heirs of George Carlin who are very upset about this fake George Carlin comedy routine titled I'm Glad I'm Dead. Okay, maybe that was a little offensive. It's not very funny but it is. But for people who are George Carlin fans, maybe they're kind of happy. It came out a couple of weeks ago on YouTube channel. It's from a podcast called Dudezy, will Sasso and Chad Colkgren. They're being sued now by the state of George Carlin. We have to draw a line in the sand, says daughter Kelly Carlin. Do you think they're win this suit?
1:01:36 - Allyn Malventano
I feel like they have a fair argument.
1:01:39 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, I really agree with them. I would sue in that case too.
1:01:42 - Leo Laporte
I think they're going to lose.
1:01:46 - Ben Parr
I am not a legal expert. Do you, can you sue?
1:01:48 - Leo Laporte
Rich Little for doing an impression of George Carlin.
1:01:53 - Allyn Malventano
That's different.
1:01:54 - Ben Parr
Is it so?
1:01:55 - Allyn Malventano
it is.
1:01:56 - Ben Parr
Legitimately. Over the course of the next two years, we're going to start to get some answers to a lot of questions that are surrounding the legality of certain things with it From courts. From the courts. It's going to take a while. I don't expect major rulings are like to be in effect this year. It'll take several years probably.
1:02:14 - Leo Laporte
You know. What I fear, though, ben, is that we're going to get conflicting rulings because there's so many courts involved.
1:02:20 - Ben Parr
Oh, for sure, and so you're going to get some.
1:02:22 - Leo Laporte
It's going to end up having to be but and then the Supreme court's not going to really resolve this. I don't think. I think they're going to do a very constrained Well in this one case. I don't know.
1:02:34 - Ben Parr
Supreme. If there's lots of conflicting cases, the Supreme court will.
1:02:37 - Leo Laporte
They've got to resolve it. They've got to resolve.
1:02:40 - Ben Parr
It's going to. It's going to be a thing that, like, we really will have to figure out, like what is like the right line and what is the right legal line. And there's, this is. This is complex stuff that like well, how to just get like four lawyers to go and debate for a couple of hours. I will watch that.
1:02:55 - Leo Laporte
I will too, cause I don't. I don't think there's a. Even among our panelists, there's no consensus at all.
1:03:00 - Ben Parr
Well, the other thing is like remember too, we don't fully understand every aspect of the technology, like AI. Like there was a story last, like earlier this week, like an AI like that started, like a, like it's poisoned itself. It was essentially poisoned. It was actually a plant rogue and it was actually deceiving the people who had trained it and lying to them about like it's training and it could not. They could not get it back on track for training at all, so they had to abandon it. And like that kind of thing is happening and there was no real explanation yet from some researcher. So I get. My whole point is like this is like all cutting edge stuff. There's amazing things you can do with AI. We do not fully understand every aspect of it. We do not fully understand where the legality of the things are going to go and at a certain point, the AI is just going to decide to make things on its own, without you saying anything, and then who is responsible then?
1:04:01 - Stacey Higginbotham
There's an interesting idea about like from a legal perspective making AI a separate like legal class.
1:04:08 - Leo Laporte
Like yeah, I think that's what you'll have to do, Cause humans can do and interpret, can do. You know, I can do a George Carlin impression. Humans can read your articles, Stacey, and then summarize them to somebody else and those are all. I think we all accept normal uses, transformative uses of content. You feel like it shouldn't be a machine. In fact, you're very specific. You shouldn't be a profit making machine. You would. You would say a nonprofit, that's okay. It's going to be very hard. You're going to have to create new classes. I think you're right.
1:04:39 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, and I mean there's going to be a I mean just on the create, like content creation, side. Over time, if you have AI generating everything, it's going to devolve into crap, Right? So you're going to have to have people in the mix somewhere and you're going to have to pay them accordingly. So we just we're in this like weird area where we're just like, ooh, let's arbitrage this and make all the money and gather all the gather, everything that can Well, let me ask Ben, cause you're the you're trying to make money on AI.
1:05:14 - Leo Laporte
I think there's such potential for AI. I mean, if we really want her or, you know, if we want AI to design chips. Ai has already come up with interesting new medicines. It's very good at protein folding, but those aren't LLMs that do that.
Well, whatever, just generative AI of some kind. In fact, I think it's a mistake to say LLMs are different than GANs are different than GANs are different. It's all generative AI. And then all has, and all of them have to ingest human created content. I agree with you, stacey, that if for an AI to be good, a human has to have input, but we get such societal benefit out of it, I get. I mean, really, this is going to be a very bitter argument. I can tell already. But, ben, don't we, don't you think that that's it? I think you might hobble AI. I think you might actually kill AI in the cradle by being too restrictive on what it can read.
1:06:13 - Ben Parr
This is the ultimate debate between for those who know, e slash, acc versus EA, effective altruism versus effective accelerationism, which, for those who don't know, is two camps, one being like we should move as quickly as possible because AI could save lives and every day you wait to train the AI is a life that didn't have to be lost versus EA, which is like AI could destroy the entire planet. So we should be very cautious, because have you seen Terminator before?
1:06:42 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I'm not. I'm not a doomer and I think that's a. I think maybe that's gone away. I don't know. Elon Musk was one of the. No, no, no, no, it hasn't gone away.
1:06:51 - Ben Parr
All right, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Like it's less, like a problem is before, but there's still like a lot, absolutely there, just more underground, and I have those conversations with. I'm an acceleration.
1:07:03 - Leo Laporte
You might be surprised to hear I was. I was never a doomer because I thought that's just sci-fi, but but I am now accelerationist, I believe. In fact, I might not even disagree with Larry Page, who says it's time for humans as a species to get out of the way of the next big thing.
1:07:20 - Ben Parr
You know they have merch for that. There's an EA, there's an effective accelerationist. I know I had like to. I had to send a cheat sheet.
1:07:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm in that camp. I'm in that camp. I've been, I've been. The machines have won me over.
1:07:33 - Ben Parr
I, I may. I think Leo might, may or may not be an AI. No one else.
1:07:37 - Leo Laporte
I always find the answer. Well, that's a good example. I'm a creator Now, admittedly, I'm at the end of my career but I have hundreds of thousands of videos online that could be used to train an AI and in a year or two, we're not far off from a time when you could I mean the George Carlin's surprisingly good when you would be able to create an AI, Leo that looks just like this, maybe have a human on the other end typing in some content, but you, I could go, I could live forever as this created entity and it doesn't bother me at all.
1:08:08 - Allyn Malventano
We. We even already has a pre-made avatar in the form of his digital self from the screensavers.
1:08:15 - Leo Laporte
I do. I was a digital character actually on the site, on MSNBC's the site, but even more we have in our discord, if your club to remember, there's a AI, leo, who's been getting better and better. By the way, I don't know how he's getting better. I'm a little nervous. So what are?
1:08:28 - Ben Parr
you gonna let AI Leo host the show, and then right, yeah, and then, 20 years from now, ai Leo is hosted the show. It's just a matter of time, that's fine.
1:08:39 - Allyn Malventano
Leo's in his comfy chair sipping his cognac. It's not even. It's not even about me.
1:08:44 - Leo Laporte
It's about if the content, if an AI can create good content or to solve a or cure cancer, why shouldn't? Shouldn't we want that, as opposed to saying well, no, I made this and you know I am the unique one and only and you can't have me. That's seems very selfish.
1:09:01 - Allyn Malventano
Now here's a for your go ahead. Yeah, for your case, leo. Well, obviously you should benefit from that if you like, no?
1:09:09 - Leo Laporte
I don't care, I don't want money out of it.
1:09:10 - Allyn Malventano
No, if it helps people and does you could?
1:09:13 - Leo Laporte
if it fulfills the mission that we created twit to inform people about technology so they can use it. Uh, more power to it. I now I agree with you, stacy. I don't want google to be making money off of it, so maybe that's right. Maybe that's the difference.
1:09:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, in what are the assurances? You have 20?. I mean, you're gonna have to make some provisions for if you have an AI Leo, for making sure it's still accurate, which means you need someone Because of the human job that you have the humans. Yes, so you're gonna have to have funding for that. So then, ai, you is still going to need to make money somehow to pay for the humans on the back end.
1:09:48 - Leo Laporte
A check like qa humans At a minimum well, and that's, of course, open ai's argument was it got so expensive. We couldn't be a nonprofit, but we had to have a for-profit arm to foot the bill. What do you think of the? Okay, actually, I'm gonna take a break and then I'm gonna ask you what you think of nightshade, which is a tool designed to poison AI. Gives artists a fighting chance against AI. We're gonna take a break and talk about that when we come back.
Stacy Higginbotham, ben Parr, alan Malventano great to have you the show today brought to you by Ecam, and I know you all know Ecam. We use Ecam. So when I set up twit back in the day, we have big fancy hardware, switchers and mixers and all this stuff and cost millions of dollars, very expensive. And then along comes Micah Sargent, who does iOS today all on his Mac using Ecam. It's kind of amazing the leading Live streaming and video production studio built to run on your Mac. That's all. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, ecam is here to elevate your video production from streaming and recording the podcasting to presenting To do an exactly what we do here at twit. Ecam live is you're all in one video tool Perfect for simplifying your workflow.
Ecam supports multiple cameras. It supports screen sharing, so I mean, I'm watching it happen on iOS today. Well, it will switch to rosemary. You'll switch to her screen. She'll switch to A phone. She's holding back to Micah. It's a live camera switcher that lets you and them direct their show In real time. You'll stand out from the crowd, too, with high quality video. Oh, and All that lower third stuff we do logos, titles, graphics they're all working.
Ecam. Ecam supports it. It's built in. You can share your screen and you can drop in video clips. You can bring on interview guests. You can use a green screen works great with green screen and so much more.
Join the thousands of worldwide entrepreneurs, marketing professionals, podcasters, educators, musicians and other Mac users rely on Ecam live daily. I mean, really, this transforms your ability to do video production anywhere, anytime. Try it out right now. Get a month free when you subscribe to any of Ecam's plans Ecam, eca, eca, double M, ecam, comm, slash, twit. Don't forget to use the promo code twit at checkout so they know you saw it here. We are big believers in Ecam and I'll tell you, if I was starting all over again, boy, I would be using Ecam. I absolutely would nightshade. This is a an interesting product Created by the University of Chicago. Let's artists poison their image data, making it useless or, worse, even Disruptive to AI model training, and actually screw up the model. Ben Jow, the computer science teacher who led the project, compared it to putting hot sauce in your lunch so it doesn't get stolen from the workplace fridge. This must drive you crazy, ben.
1:12:54 - Ben Parr
It doesn't drive me crazy. So like, uh, I am a person who can see, I see both sides of everything here. Like the answer probably between that whole debate of EACC versus EA is probably somewhere in the middle. Um, I definitely tend to think that, like AI will be a large scale good in the world. However, like we're going to see a lot of pain you were seeing the pain now with.
1:13:16 - Leo Laporte
We saw that with the internet. We saw that with computers. This is what happens with disruptive technology and for technology to be really valuable, it has to be disruptive, and I don't think preserving Print newspapers Is the right way to handle this problem. Uh, I don't think you know. Congress is now getting in the act trying to save am radio Sorry, it's over and and we should not be subsidizing it or forcing companies to subsidize it.
1:13:49 - Ben Parr
It's over time, and time and transition do matter.
1:13:53 - Leo Laporte
Like you've got, like you think it's so fast that we do have to, to kind of there's there this is the fastest I've ever seen any like technological evolution.
1:14:03 - Ben Parr
I sat down with like I can't like one of the world's greatest uh like investors and board members and he's been around for Many decades and never seen this quick of anything. And so there is something too like we have like the transition takes time, like we can see where it's going, uh, but it is painful. It's already painful, for you know people who need to rely on Like art or copywriting, and I already know friends and they already know people who have less work or have been laid off or their consulting business is a lot less than it used to be. Obviously, there'll be new stuff and new things, but this is why the discussion of things like Uh ubi has popped up and why even like sam altman talks about.
1:14:44 - Leo Laporte
You know, universal basic income so that every because you'll be all out of work. But everybody should get a thousand dollars a month from the big tech companies. You know, I think nightshades should be illegal. I think these guys should go to jail for poisoning AI data. That's what I think.
1:15:03 - Ben Parr
Yes.
1:15:04 - Leo Laporte
I think that's like vandalism.
1:15:06 - Ben Parr
I'm gonna go with stacey on this one. That's vandalism.
1:15:09 - Leo Laporte
You're vandalizing AI Uh models.
1:15:12 - Stacey Higginbotham
This is like if someone wants to make the.
1:15:15 - Ben Parr
Go stacey.
1:15:16 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, if you want to, if you want to, it's basically to me it's the equivalent of somebody who's walking behind you, if you're recording like a tiktok video and flipping their middle finger up Right, or like the guys who walk behind newscasters and like Do something rude.
1:15:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and you're right, it's legal, it's legal and but it's rude. Uh, and more to the point, it doesn't do any real damage.
1:15:38 - Stacey Higginbotham
These are people. These are multi-million dollar corporations.
1:15:42 - Leo Laporte
Well no, it doesn't care if it's multi-million dollar or open source, it's just gonna poison one of the things it does for instance. Here's the Mona Lisa. What it does is it does a night shade version. It looks just like the real Mona Lisa, maybe it's a little darker, but actually to an AI it looks like a cat, and so the AI is so fascinating.
1:16:00 - Stacey Higginbotham
The AI starts teaching people how the AI's see things to work.
1:16:04 - Leo Laporte
It could take fewer than a 100 poison samples to corrupt a stable diffusion prompt.
1:16:11 - Allyn Malventano
So all this is gonna end up doing is just they're just gonna adapt and overcome. Oh, believe me.
1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
This isn't gonna last five seconds. I agree with you. This is not really a threat, but if it were, it should be. They should go to jail by. So Jiao says Wow, I wouldn't go to jail.
1:16:30 - WOT promo
This is vandalism. Are we sure this is not an actual AI Leo, who is all in?
1:16:35 - Ben Parr
favor of. Ai, I'm just saying.
1:16:39 - Leo Laporte
I have the opportunity for a technology To train who.
1:16:43 - Allyn Malventano
Leo's training is future AI is properly right to be like His future.
1:16:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
Ai is way more conservative than I really thought.
1:16:50 - Leo Laporte
We have an opportunity to create Something transformative that could be Like fusion. You're saying the before the show that if we can, if we come up with cold fusion, that's the kind of thing that could change everything, and of course it could what this AI has that kind of potential, I think. In fact I might even say AI might invent cold fusion. You might be stopping cold fusion by turning the Mona Lisa into a cat.
1:17:20 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, all the, all the hot fusion guys are gonna be, uh, you know, poisoning the set with this is vandalism.
1:17:28 - WOT Promo
Maybe, it's okay, maybe they'll go to jail just a small fine.
1:17:33 - Stacey Higginbotham
What? No, this. This is the sort of thing I mean. Look at it like from a purely evolution. As a Effective altruist, you should be like grateful. This is the sort of thing like that's gonna make it bigger, better, better and stronger. You're getting great insights into how something works.
1:17:48 - Leo Laporte
You're gonna be able to prevent against really smart AI, you'd figure out how to avoid the night shade attack.
1:17:55 - Ben Parr
AI models have to learn and adapt it.
1:17:58 - Leo Laporte
It's a hostile world out there. They have to learn to be smarter than humans.
1:18:02 - Allyn Malventano
That's right, that's actually. Um, that's actually one of the biggest issues right now. I, as I see it with AI is that if your data set has some garbage in it, this is intentional garbage, but there's plenty of other content that is just like Incorrect.
1:18:15 - Leo Laporte
So that's a good point. Maybe this will just teach AI to know how to avoid garbage garbage inputs. Okay, all right, never mind, you don't have to go to jail.
1:18:25 - Ben Parr
It's okay now, it's okay. You're doing God's work convince that you are not actually an AI Uh promoting of like the AI agenda uh, which will be a thing that we have to actually question, Probably the next couple of years or now.
1:18:41 - Stacey Higginbotham
And you don't want your AI developed in this like protected hot house. Oh, that's true equivalent of a latchkey kid versus like a little helicopter parented child.
1:18:50 - Leo Laporte
We don't want latchkey AI we want helicopter. Oh no, we do want latchkey yeah. Yeah it is what we are resilient. Ai that knows how to put a tv dinner in and make dinner for itself is what you're saying it's just maybe has some mental health issues.
1:19:08 - Ben Parr
You either like put your kid in the bubble and they never get exposed to diseases. And then the moment they go into the real world. Like you get sick. It's like a you let the play in the mud.
1:19:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, let them play in the mud. Let the AI eat mud. It's good for its ecosystem. Uh-huh, now you're talking. I get it, joseph Cox. At 405 404 media, they review multiple examples of AI ripoff articles making their way into google news. Google says, wow, we don't pay that much attention to how the article is written by an AI or a human. So this has always been a problem, which is people see, you, know you, I'm sure, ben, you had articles from mashable ripped off, stacey. You had articles from stacey on iot ripped off, where somebody would just copy it and put it on their site and a few google ads to make some money, right. But now they've got it. It's smarter. They have AI writing these things.
1:20:05 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah and except uh, I've run across some of these articles in the storage industry and Every one of them so far has been grossly wrong about some. Yeah, it states things as fact that are not actually fact, like no that's not how that works or it's totally wrong, like the storage space researcher Taylor Swift said right.
1:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Hey, don't knock Tay-tay. She probably could do it if she wanted to. She probably could. It's funny that twitter finally uh added some uh moderation when they were flooded with deep fake porn videos of Taylor Swift. Then they said oh no, we gotta block it. So what'd they do? They don't have a lot of tools, so they just prevented anybody from searching for Taylor.
1:20:50 - Allyn Malventano
Swift they can't, just they can't just let grok, figure that out. Don't they have their own AI? They have an AI, use it, yeah.
1:20:57 - Ben Parr
Yeah, this is. This is two separate stories. There's the story of, like, the deep fakes becoming better Thanks to AI, which, uh, is very scary, especially for women. I was like watching a tech talk where you know, like, you know when, uh, there's like just a lot of guys who create very explicit things and it doesn't really happen. Uh, when you switch the genders around anywhere near as much, it's a really like it's a real issue. That's going to be a real problem, and these are the kind of things that we have to go and solve, which is you know why we have the entire debate that we had a little bit before, the other story being like there's just no one to moderate anything Over at x, and like it took them forever. Now I think they're not so going to try to do something.
1:21:40 - Leo Laporte
They're going to build a facility in austin. Don't 100 moderate, 100 moderators is not going to be enough, by the way. I just want to tell me one what are you nuts? I don't have a thousand people were doing it before, but that 100 is not going to be enough.
1:21:56 - Ben Parr
I mean don't, don't piss off Taylor Swift.
1:21:59 - Leo Laporte
Actually, I'm really okay. So, first of all, there's no way to stem this tide right. You're going to see deep fakes of everybody, soon and there. There'll be no way to stop this. You can't. I mean, what is there gonna? Just turn off search for everybody? Just say no, you know. I mean, basically, you have to turn off twitter. I, I feel for Taylor, I think it's terrible, but I think we just have to live with it, don't we?
1:22:27 - Stacey Higginbotham
You're advocating that there's no way to solve the problem of deep fake porn. I don't think there is.
1:22:33 - Leo Laporte
I'm not advocating it, I'm not happy about it, but I don't think there is a way to solve it, do you?
1:22:37 - Ben Parr
think it's, it's. There is absolutely a way to solve it.
1:22:40 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yes, yes, you. You find out who's distributing it and who's creating it and you punish them. Now. Do we have an appetite for doing that? No, is it scalable to do that?
1:22:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, um, we're not doing so well with sam, and we have a lot of infrastructure to fight see sam.
1:23:01 - Stacey Higginbotham
We are okay, we will not solve everything right, but the penalties for child pornography are incredibly high.
1:23:08 - Leo Laporte
They are and they should be, and I guess you're right. You could make penalties for deep fake porn. That would be equally high. That'd be fine, is it? Be fine, is it?
1:23:18 - Allyn Malventano
Well, now we're treading right back into the territory of the george harland thing.
1:23:22 - Stacey Higginbotham
Just I was like there's a couple issues here, and that is I mean Is it, is it illegal or is it just? Creepy distasteful distaste creepy ugly yeah although for a guy who's advocating for putting saboteurs in jail, I would argue that your stance on this betrays a certain lack of um, I'm still working on that.
1:23:46 - Leo Laporte
I'm thinking I feel bad for taylor I do, and I would feel bad for anybody. This happened to Uh, but I just don't know if you could stop it.
1:23:54 - Ben Parr
I, I disagree. Struggling on that one Uh one. Stacey is absolutely right.
We have to go after these people and have some actual Absolutely backbone to do that and that's, uh, I hope we start to get that. But there are technological ways to go after it too. Uh, I did that. So, like example, there's a company called the hive, the hive dot ai, and they've been around for a long time and they literally like you can detect a penis, you can detect whatever thing and it will, just, like it may remove it in live video and among other stuff. There is technology to do things like this and to detect and never underestimate the way, the logical ability.
1:24:28 - Leo Laporte
By the way, it's a I doing it. Right, yes.
1:24:32 - Ben Parr
Yeah, this is how it is. There is, the technology does exist and the technology is getting better and more of it is existing. You just have you could defense companies like uh Uh x, twitter, whatever they call them to implement some of this stuff and you're going to see a large decrease in it. You do it across other places. The technology exists, the connect technology continue exist. I am. As long as there's bad stuff, there's always people building stuff to fight against the bad stuff, and there was always a technological solution in addition to the human one, which is let's put stuff these people into jail or find them. I'm not against that I agree.
1:25:09 - Leo Laporte
You should definitely do that.
1:25:10 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, it might just be as simple as you just have to build a better a I, which I run a cop here's. Here's an even better reason for the a I on the edge thing, because you might need this.
1:25:21 - Leo Laporte
I should point out that there's a lot of not fake porn on twitter. Just doesn't feature famous people, um.
1:25:33 - Allyn Malventano
So there's been an established between something that's.
1:25:35 - Ben Parr
There's technology to distinguish between whether it's a I or dot a I. Harder problem? Yes, is it doable?
1:25:41 - Allyn Malventano
Absolutely okay, right. Have any of you recently in the past few months gotten those texts? That sounds like it's someone that's trying to pretend that they just Found your number in the phone of them every day. That's all a I driven. You're gonna need a I on the edge on your side to be able to filter that sort of stuff. Yeah, and so did you just fighting a I with a, I a, I, a, I at with that point.
1:26:03 - Leo Laporte
It's a I all the way down, isn't it? Yeah, basically.
1:26:07 - Stacey Higginbotham
So really what. I mean that was our Thinking was eventually, over time, we would have battling, battling bots right. Yeah, where I mean we're getting there.
1:26:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, very, very close to it, I guess Go ahead ben.
1:26:23 - Ben Parr
No, I can't. I have a story about battling bots, uh, and I am not allowed to talk about it in the public.
1:26:29 - Leo Laporte
I will tell you all personally.
1:26:30 - Ben Parr
Okay, offline we'll talk about it involves Governments, and I, oh yeah, oh boy.
1:26:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean it kind of is like a little terminatory where you got a I fighting a I and robots and then the humans are just kind of hiding in trenches staying away from it. I don't know if this is exactly the future we want.
1:26:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
But it's the future that will get us to strap on those face computers and just.
1:26:58 - Ben Parr
I can't wait to do. You're all cancer and all diseases. Well, both, both branches exist and they're probably going down both at the same time.
1:27:08 - Allyn Malventano
There's. Everybody will live forever so that they could sit in their bunker with their right avoiding the. Ai yeah.
1:27:13 - Leo Laporte
Avoiding the robots, yes actually there's a precedent for that, because isn't that exactly what happened with the internet? We were very bullish about it at first, but really it turned out to be everything that's good and bad. Yet human beings Is on the internet. Everything that's good and bad about us as human beings will be expressed through AI.
1:27:30 - Allyn Malventano
Except at the early part of the internet, you had a certain subset of people that were, generally, were trying to use it more for good, but they lost. They were the day where, yeah, they sort of lost to that. Well, now with the AI stuff, it's sort of flip the other way. Right, you're already seeing malicious or, you know, immoral uses for it Taking, taking grasp, even before the the real good stuff can count.
1:27:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, stuff, has has been pointed out, is happening faster than ever before, isn't it Stacey? A final thought before I go to another break. Nah, Nah got nothing.
I can't wait till February 8th when you and I are going to talk about the most depressing novel ever written. No, it's not. It's actually a vision of a kind of dystopian future. Uh, hashtag phoenix down the tubes. But it's very. It's very interesting and he is a great writer. I really love a polybotsha, gloopy stuff, so I look forward to that. That's going to be a club special February 8th. Um, what is it? Do you say? Another one of those we'd start at 9 am Things.
1:28:41 - Stacey Higginbotham
We are changing the time, so we don't have the actual. Thank you, Stacey your time.
1:28:47 - Leo Laporte
Oh, or three. Oh, hallelujah, I don't have to get up so early. Uh, we will get you the new time. Right now it says 3 pm Pacific, 6 pm.
You know, it should be prime time, shouldn't it? 95 people interested is not too late. You have time to read the water knife? I would. It's a great. It's well written, it's fascinating. He's great at characterizations, um, but it's just kind of a gloomy future. But you know, it may well be our future. So the water knife by paolo botch a galupi, you can get it on amazon, uh, you can get it at your bookstore. You can get it on kindle. You can get it at audible. There's an audible, very, very good audible Version. That's what I'm listening to. Uh, look forward to that with you, stacey, it's gonna be so much fun.
Now there is one hitch in that get along. If you are not yet in club twit, you cannot participate, but there is a way out just join club twit. This, I think, as we go forward into 2024, it's become very clear. You know, with media failing right and left, this is our future. Uh, as a podcast network is getting our listeners to support us. We don't need all of you. Yeah, you can get off the hook, but we need about five to 10 percent. We're right now about two percent. We're not really doing so well. So if you're not yet a club twit member, but you value what you hear on our programming. Could you help us out? Seven bucks a month you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get additional programming, like the book club that you don't get anywhere else. You get access to the discord All of that for seven bucks a month. I think it's worth it and you get that good feeling that you're supporting what we're doing.
Twittv, slash club twit. We are working other, less expensive ways. Right now you can get any show, including this one, for $2.99 a month, uh, but you know we're gonna look at youtube subscriptions too, because I understand, not. You know, everybody has, you know, limits on how much they can spend. But if you can, we'd really appreciate it. And if you think we're worth more than seven bucks a month, you can also, uh, make it 10 bucks if you want, or more. We appreciate.
Twittv, slash club twit our show today, brought to you by express vpn. It's common these days to overspend on streaming services. Well, since I started using express vpn, I've saved so much every month by simply changing my online location. There are a lot of reasons to use a vpn of course, for security, for privacy, but this is also valuable. You can watch netflix in Countries all over the world. If you already have a netflix subscription, it's okay to do it. All you got to do is use express vpn. They're in more than 90 countries, so you want to switch to another country to watch content from that country. You tap one button. You say I am in london right now. Now you're watching netflix england. You refresh the page and it shows up. You can even use express vpn to get discounts, because some services cost less in other countries.
At less than seven bucks a month, express vpn really pays for it self. It is security that you can put on your Router, you can put on your phone, you can put it on your computer very easy. I have it everywhere when I want to switch it on, when I'm traveling, when you know how many times you go to an airport and there's free wi-fi right. But is it safe? No, use express vpn and it is safe. It's a no-brainer. If you want to get more shows, if you want to be more secure, if you want to protect your privacy and if you want to save money while you're at it, go to express vpncom Slash twit. When you do that, you get three months free with a one-year plan. That's the best deal less than seven bucks a month. Exp ress vpncom twit To learn more. Express vpncom slash twit. We thank him so much for their support of this show. I've used them for years. Yeah, is that your favorite too? It is yeah, uh, all right, let we did. We kind of peripherally touched on it. But I think we really have to address this.
Apple's response to the eu and their digital markets act Uh, the eu said that in fact apple has got to open up their store. They've got. The courts in the us have also said the supreme court last week said we're not going to touch this case. So the courts have also told apple you can't stop people from putting a link in their app to a different payment system. So apple's got to deal with this. But it seems like in every case apple's response has been what well, tim sweeney has as the the best quote? He's, of course, uh, the guy who sued at epic Uh to get them to open up the store so he could put fortnight in an epic store on the iphone. He says it's a devious new instance of malicious compliance. Well, I'd expect sweeney to say that.
But what do you guys think? Apple is going to charge 27 instead of 30. If you have a link to your own store, they're going to charge a commission. Um, they are going to offer New app stores in the eu Exclusively, but you'll still have to run your app by by apple and get approval. And if you sell it there, they're still going to take 27 percent or 15 percent if you.
Actually I think it's free for free apps up to the first million, but, as a number of people have pointed out, that's not much of a solution. What if you have a freemium app like fortnight, and all of a sudden you owe apple half a million dollars? Uh, because you sold more than a million? That's a untenable situation. A mozilla has complained because, yeah, apple says in the eu you can have a browser that doesn't use safari's webkit, you can have your own browser. But mozilla says well, great, that's a solution. So everywhere but the eu, we still have to make our firefox browser as always Using the fire, the safari back end, but in the eu we make a whole new browser using our back end. That doubles our costs. How have you helped us? Apple thoughts have I laid out.
1:35:02 - Ben Parr
I mean the eu is gonna give some rulings that uh are not gonna be favorable to apple.
1:35:07 - Leo Laporte
They're gonna slap them down, you think.
1:35:09 - Ben Parr
Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's interpretation and I it's going to be taken to eu court and it's probably going to have more stuff for apple to Go and do and like, look like eu's always saw a couple years ahead when it comes to things like this. Uh, this stuff will come stateside a certain point. I don't know what the like middle ground eventually is, because I can understand, like apple from a business position and from a Consumer position. I can understand, but I can really understand the consumer position of, like you know, on your computer you can side load whatever you want and download things, and it's been like that for who since the beginning of time. Uh, so why can't you do that with your mobile device?
1:35:50 - Leo Laporte
So I mean, I have to channel because I think all of you will probably feel the same way. But I'm gonna channel Alex Lindsey, who argues vehemently against what the eu is doing, saying it's apple's platform. Apple says we want to preserve the security and privacy of our customers. They should be allowed to make whatever rules they want on their platform and if you don't like it, suck it, go use. Go go put an app store on android. You don't have to use, you don't have to be on iphone, and it's unfair of any company, even epic, to say oh, we want to use the iphone without paying apple, let's do apple. Apple made this platform. Plus, alex makes the point it's better for users if you don't have these different stores and different browsers. It's not. This is not as good an experience for users there now.
1:36:38 - Stacey Higginbotham
This is incredibly true.
1:36:40 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
1:36:41 - Stacey Higginbotham
So I've been thinking about this a lot, because I used to be a telco reporter and the whole idea of being a common carrier. Everybody wants to be a platform these days, right, and Apple is a true platform and has built something out. And once you get to a certain point, amazon's another great example. Do you have not? Just so you could be a big platform and be compelling to people to Not forcing them, but they would want to use your platform because that's where the users are. That's what Apple's arguing. They're like our platform is so amazing that people want to be on it and that's why people should pay us a commission right Now.
The true fact of the matter is Apple does a lot of things that are anti-competitive to keep people on their platform and to make their platform to lock folks in, thus giving them that huge user base. So if you could have a truly competitive platform, would it have zero switching costs? What would that look like? Would that make something like charging these fees fair? I would say yes, if you had zero switching costs, it would, but at a certain point, if you lock people in via All of the devices, working only with other devices, however you want to look at it. Does that make it anti-competitive? And then the EU makes sense trying to enforce these things, even though, I'll admit, its solutions are paid in the S.
1:38:16 - Leo Laporte
There's a very famous Supreme Court decision from almost 50 years ago that opened up the Bell System network Carterphone Carterphone yeah, in fact I remember seeing the Carterphone at the Computer History Museum. It's kind of a funky old device. But this was illegal. The Bell System had rules against putting third-party devices on their network. They said, and they said it's the same thing, it's about the security and privacy of. I don't know if they talked about privacy, but certainly it was about the security and the integrity of our network.
We don't want customers coming along and putting any old device on the network. You couldn't even use your own phone. You had to rent it from Western Electric, from the Bell System. Supreme Court said no, that's wrong. And they opened up the Bell System with Carterphone. Carterphone was allowed users to attach a two-way radio to their telephone. It was to be used in the Texas oil fields. I think they only sold a couple of thousand of them. But the decision changed everything. It opened up the Bell System and it made it possible for you to buy your own phone, for instance, and put it on the phone's network, the Hush-a-phone. I want a Hush-a-phone, hush-a-phone.
1:39:33 - Ben Parr
Give me one of those.
1:39:37 - Leo Laporte
This was another thing. At&t objected to this small plastic snap-on which would let business phone users, like you were talking into your shoe Business phone.
1:39:49 - Allyn Malventano
Cone of silence.
1:39:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was a cone of silence. It took the FCC seven years and they finally said no, yeah, sorry, you can't put a Hush-a-phone on the phone. Phone was a big deal, right. Stacy, that opened up the Bell Network.
1:40:09 - Stacey Higginbotham
It did to attach devices that were not owned by the Bell Company, but those were physical devices on a physical network.
1:40:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy.
1:40:17 - Stacey Higginbotham
But I think it's similar. That's why I've been thinking about this a lot, because if you're a platform, what are your rights and responsibilities to your users and to the people who come to meet your users on the platform? And it's real unclear. I wish I had a really cool opinion for you. They should go to jail.
1:40:43 - Leo Laporte
But I don't but. I'm trying to work it out in my brain. You'll never make it in talk radio Stacy.
1:40:49 - Ben Parr
I know this one is truly one where our nuanced opinion is probably the correct answer here. There was actually a great article that Steven Sonofsky wrote.
1:40:59 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I was so surprised that Sonofsky who was the much-hated guy at Microsoft who ran Windows the famous Windows 8, put out an article in favor of Apple, saying Apple should not bow to the EU. Apple is here. Here's Sonofsky's article Apple has done the right thing and they shouldn't give in. My heart sank, he says. When I read the Digital Markets Act, I could feel the pain and struggle product teams felt in clinging to at best or unwinding it worst. The most substantial improvement in computing ever introduced the iPhone. Do you agree with Steven this?
1:41:50 - Stacey Higginbotham
opinion surprised you. Yeah, it kind of did. Yeah, such a Does it work for Andreessen Horowitz?
1:41:57 - Leo Laporte
I don't know where he works nowadays, does he? Yeah, he's been in BC for a long time.
1:42:01 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, he's a venture capitalist and Andreessen venture capitalist in that, but okay.
1:42:09 - Ben Parr
Technology positivity is the name of the game over there. Yeah, I mean this is like.
1:42:15 - Leo Laporte
That's a good way to put it, by the way, thank you. Technology positivity that's really good.
1:42:20 - Ben Parr
There's a difference here between what's best for users, and the answer is it's probably a mixed bag, because you can make a real argument for both sides, and what's going to probably happen, which is that, slowly, there'll probably be some more prying up as more legal stuff comes up over and over and over again. It'll be a long time, though, and whether it's good or not, I have no idea. We will probably see that result at some point, when you have the first side loaded app store coming in and you start to see stuff, and you start to see good and bad, and who knows, but it's going to happen.
1:42:59 - Stacey Higginbotham
I find, if you think about, are we at the same point from a regulatory and a business perspective that we were in the 1800s with the railroads and the launch of electric networks and that sort of thing, where you need something like a public utilities commission? And I'm literally just wondering this, because the economics in online services, software, that sort of thing you have to be big and you have to have basically monopoly positions or a duopoly position. So when you have that, you don't have the ability to compete in the way you would if you had, if everyone could play with these things, even with startups. They just get bought by these big guys. And even if they weren't bought by these big guys and the FTC was like, hey, you can't have them, those companies would fail because they can't really go up easily against these monopolies. And so I wonder if we're going to have a much more or we need a much more kind of adversarial thing against regulators and digital businesses, which I mean we hate, but I really don't see a lot of options for us.
1:44:18 - Ben Parr
We're already seeing more of that. Sorry to interrupt. We're seeing more of that from the what the SEC, the FTC, like there is a lot more aggressive behavior. Now, some of the cases they've chosen, they have not won, they have not been great cases there's, you know, there's like clearly there's going to, they're going to win or they're going to get something.
1:44:40 - Leo Laporte
I'm rooting for them in some cases. For instance, lena Connelly, ftc, said it should be as easy to cancel an account as it is to create one, to which the cable companies responded but people might cancel by accident if we make it too easy for them. I think in this, in many cases, the regulators are fighting a good fight against companies that are rapacious, that are as good as evil. You know, here's Sinovsky has something interesting to say. He talks about a dichotomy in computing the Microsoft Android way, where it's open, but as a result, security, privacy, abuse, fragility and other problems of the PC show up on Android at a rate like the PC. But Steve Jobs had a vision for computing where it was enclosed and abstracted to make it safer, more reliable, more private, more secure. And you get all these benefits like better battery life, better accessibility, more consistency, ease of use.
He says these attributes did not happen by accident. They were the process of design and architecture from the very start. They're the brand promise of the iPhone just as much as the brand promise of Android and Windows by extension is openness, ubiquity, low price and choice. These choices are not mutually compatible. You don't get both. Sinovsky writes. I know this is horrible to say, and everybody believes, there's somehow malicious intent to lock people into a closed environment or, on the Windows Android side, and unintentional incompetence that permits bad software to invade an ecosystem. Neither of these would be the case. Quite simply, there's a choice between engineering and architecting for one or the other Openness or closed, secure or you know, choice Is that, is that the economy that's not true.
1:46:39 - Stacey Higginbotham
You can build open, and open can be way more secure because there are more people assessing it. That's that's it talking point you encounter all the time when arguing with people like Steven Stonofsky. Now, I think there is a legitimate argument for usability, like although I have to point out that IOS isn't.
1:47:01 - Leo Laporte
You know, in the early days the idea of a Macintosh was there's only one way to do anything and there were very strong user guidelines, user interface guidelines, so everything is very consistent. But that's not the case with iOS. A lot of times, especially because they've gotten rid of all the affordances like the home button, a lot of times you look at an iOS app and go I don't know what to do to get out of this. To back up, I'll just force close the app sometimes because I'm just like sitting there I don't know what to do here. That's very common because the UI is not well specified. So I think in some ways iOS can be more confusing than Android. You use Android, right, you're an Android user, I do, yeah.
1:47:42 - Stacey Higginbotham
I mean I use yes mostly Android on my phone. Yeah, yeah, you choose.
1:47:47 - Ben Parr
Sam. I mean there's enough. There's still enough consistency with the iOS, iPhone experience across things that I'm like going back and forth in my brain on this one, because you know, on an iPhone my mom has never had to worry about viruses. She's had to worry about viruses on her computer. This is probably like the basic core argument that like Apple wants to make, and it's a legitimate argument. If you have more control over what goes on to an iPhone, you never want that to be like antivirus software. Never once have I ever had to think about that core to that, oh, that's a good point.
1:48:23 - Leo Laporte
Or really, on the Mac, the Mac's more secure even than Windows and Android. Okay, so you think that's a straw man argument that Zanofsky's raising Stacey?
1:48:34 - Stacey Higginbotham
I think security is a straw man argument, especially in the year of our Lord, 2024.
1:48:40 - Leo Laporte
How about you, Alan? Where do you weigh in on this? You've been strangely silent.
1:48:47 - Allyn Malventano
I don't know.
1:48:49 - Leo Laporte
That's, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, the right answer. I don't know, I don't know. I mean I'm glad the EU exists, I'm glad they're putting pressure on these platforms to consider consumers. It's weird that we don't so much in the US that the FTC and you know other consumer watchdogs like Congress are really not getting involved in this. I guess because we believe in the US, in the free market, and we kind of have this core belief that the market will solve this problem. The EU does not.
1:49:26 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't know. I feel like the EU is more astute on the monopolies that are happening down or more or less reluctant to regulate them anyway. Yeah.
1:49:36 - Leo Laporte
I mean I bet it's but I mean I point to the EU browser cookie pop up. That is got has wasted.
1:49:44 - Stacey Higginbotham
Oh my God, I know that annoys you, but it's wasted billions of human hours clicking that thing.
1:49:50 - Leo Laporte
That does nothing. You don't agree. I guess we've had this argument before.
1:49:58 - Stacey Higginbotham
It is annoying. I'm sorry to trigger you.
1:50:01 - Leo Laporte
I don't mean to trigger you.
1:50:03 - Stacey Higginbotham
It's the little spastic like, oh God, we're gonna.
1:50:06 - Ben Parr
If you're listening to this you cannot see the spazzing that Stacy's doing.
1:50:11 - Allyn Malventano
It wouldn't. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't pop up in a different, slightly different form so annoying, every single place, especially on mobile right.
1:50:19 - Leo Laporte
Oh, there's a pop up and, yeah, literally does nothing. It's like a silly button that you know well.
1:50:25 - Stacey Higginbotham
I have been to plenty sites where they're just like, hey, we got to collect this, or they could choose not to do it.
1:50:34 - Leo Laporte
That's what we do. That's the other option. You can't. You're just like you. Oh, you mean, choose not to collect cookies.
1:50:40 - Stacey Higginbotham
You can choose to collect only necessary ones, which is kind of the option that you could.
1:50:44 - Leo Laporte
I mean, there is don't you still have to say that, though Don't you still have to put a pop up.
1:50:49 - Stacey Higginbotham
I feel like there is a lot of pressure you still have to you still have to tell people that you have your collecting necessary cookie data. When you go to my, you don't have to like, force people to go through the next screen to pick which cookies you could just be like. Eh, I don't know.
1:51:03 - Leo Laporte
When you go to my personal website, there's a button. I don't. I collect no cookies, but there is a button that lets you choose light or dark and it needs to remember what you chose, so it has a cookie. So I pop an announcement that says, yeah, there's a cookie here to remember whether you chose light or dark. Okay, but I feel like I have to do that for EU visitors. It's extremely annoying.
1:51:32 - Stacey Higginbotham
So yes, but you could also. I mean again, this is an issue where if people really wanted to solve it and only like for like that particular issue, right, if they didn't want to collect all this user data, they could create it away for you to remember, like lighter, dark preferences, without a cookie on browsers. But they don't.
1:51:52 - Ben Parr
But cookie thing is also going to start to be not a thing as like. Yes, google's moving away from cookies entirely anyway. So what are we going to still be talking about cookies in five years?
1:52:04 - Leo Laporte
Yes, because the EU is living in in some sort of strange vacuum. I'm not against the DMA, and you know what? The biggest issue for me with the DMA is interoperability, and this is the problem is, if you start to cast your nets so wide, you cause a lot. If you could just say, for instance and this is what Corey Docter is always saying what all we really want is the ability to move our data, or interoperability, so if I use one message program or another, I can use whatever I choose. That's all. We want Some choice, and I think you could do that without compromising the privacy, security or ease of use of your platform, steven Sinovsky not withstanding. Just that's all we want. Interoperability choice. Is that unreasonable? Maybe it is. I mean, maybe I'm choosing by simply buying the iPhone that I made the choice. That's your choice, leo.
1:52:55 - Stacey Higginbotham
If you want choice, buy more Android phones, although I would argue that the OS choice is kind of a false one.
1:53:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean. Tim Cook tipped his hand when he told a reporter who said well, are you going to open iMessages? He said no, but you can tell your mom to buy an iPhone.
1:53:10 - Ben Parr
I said we go back to floppy disks and Walkmans. Let's bring the 90s back, baby.
1:53:20 - Stacey Higginbotham
This is why we've got to bring back the 1880s with the regulatory commissions. I'm not kidding, we didn't have any trust in the 1880s, though, did we?
1:53:28 - Leo Laporte
We didn't we. Antitrust came later, with the robber barons, right? I thought it was the 20th century, I don't know.
1:53:36 - Ben Parr
All right, so you're saying this is a question to ask chat TPT.
1:53:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, hey, chat TPT that you know they're chat TPT is going to put you on the railroad barons, there was, I mean there were, there were antitrust.
1:53:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
I mean when the Sherman Antitrust Act, I don't remember what that was.
1:53:51 - Leo Laporte
I think 1910, something like that. Oh no, you're right. 1890. 1890s. Good job, you win. Okay, you can hit me once.
1:53:59 - Stacey Higginbotham
You're the trivia team captain.
1:54:01 - Leo Laporte
Are you? Are you really? What's the name of your team?
1:54:06 - Stacey Higginbotham
The Prickly Bears, see, every, because my kid's name is bear or nickname is bear, so we're the Prickly Bears Every every trivia team has a silly name and I love to find out.
1:54:15 - Leo Laporte
We, I, you know. Anytime I'm on a trivia team, I just call them the twits. It's very easy. I don't have to think twice on that. Iphone secretly iPhone apps and this is this is the other thing is the iPhone isn't all that secure. Iphone apps secretly harvest data when they send you notifications. Security researchers at MISC have said apps like Facebook, linkedin, tiktok and Twitter are skirting Apple's privacy rules. You know the ATT, the application tracking, to set collect user data through notifications. You don't have to be running the app since the notification pops up. They can collect all sorts of information about who you are, who a kind of device you're using, and it's not bad actors, it's big, big actors who are doing this. A spokesperson for Metta and for LinkedIn, according to Gizmodo, categorically deny the data is used for advertising or other inappropriate purposes. It's only used to ensure notifications work properly.
1:55:20 - Allyn Malventano
Well, I think the idea is that, because there's plenty of apps where if you're actively using it on the same platform, that's signed in on another device or a PC or whatnot, that it won't pop up notification on your phone, right?
1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
While you're, for example, you're notifications. I don't want to see them.
1:55:34 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, there's a tail.
1:55:37 - Leo Laporte
Whose tail was that? Do you have a raccoon? Oh no, you have a small, oh, a very pretty cat.
1:55:42 - Allyn Malventano
A small fur baby, yes, very pretty, oh yes. We love, we love having pets through here. So I see what utility there could be for that, but at the same time, yes, the Facebook would have to know that. Well, that person's iPhone doesn't need to get the notification if they're also on their iPad.
1:56:00 - Leo Laporte
So what happens is, when you dismiss the notification, you're sending a signal to the app, which now the app has permission to send all your device information back. Like Leo clicked it. So, by the way, here's his phone number, here's his IMEI, here's his kind of iPhone, here's his location. Just you know, we had to know this because he clicked it.
1:56:23 - Allyn Malventano
Anyway, I mean, didn't they already know that?
1:56:25 - Leo Laporte
Like well, you know, you know who knew that was the NSA. Oh here we go Now. You've been an intelligence officer, alan Malventano, so you probably were not surprised when the NSA finally admitted they didn't want to.
But Ron Wyden was holding up the appointment for the next NSA director. So General Nakamoto, nakasone I should say Nakam, what is it? It's the same name as the Die Hard Company, right Nakasone. General Nakasone sent a letter to Wyden saying okay, I want to retire, so please. Yes, we do in fact buy and use various types of commercially available metadata for our foreign intelligence and cybersecurity missions. Yes, including data related to entirely domestic internet communications. So now we know they do collect all this data. Are you surprised?
1:57:32 - Allyn Malventano
Well, that part that said entirely domestic, I don't think appeared in the actual letter from the NSA, because I was reading through it.
1:57:40 - Leo Laporte
Oh, I'm seeing it's in a quote in the New York Times article.
1:57:45 - Allyn Malventano
Maybe, I can give you my perspective, because I used to work.
1:57:49 - Leo Laporte
You're an intelligence right. Yeah, you're an intelligence agent. I used to do this, yes, okay.
1:57:54 - Allyn Malventano
So they have rules. It's their mandate is foreign intelligence. They're not supposed to be after the US people.
1:58:00 - Leo Laporte
Which is why domestic would be a big deal, right.
1:58:03 - Allyn Malventano
Now I will say this, having had to work there and deal with that type of information, trust me, it makes the job harder. The fact that there is the potential that there's US people information in there, right, because the issue is, if you have somebody in the US and they're talking to somebody that's foreign and you're trying to surveil the foreign side of it, then you end up potentially with the other half of the conversation.
1:58:30 - Leo Laporte
That's like the other end. Here's the letter from General Nakasone.
1:58:35 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah.
1:58:36 - Leo Laporte
Dear Director Haynes, the Honorable Director Haynes, Director of National Intelligence. Oh wait a minute. No, I'm sorry. You're right, this is from Ron Wyden.
1:58:44 - WOT promo
So that's, I get what you're saying so let me see if I can find.
1:58:47 - Leo Laporte
Here's the response. Okay, yes, you're right.
1:58:50 - Allyn Malventano
I was looking for. Yeah, scroll down.
1:58:51 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, scroll down. This is now addressed to Senator Wyden from let me just look at the bottom Ronald S Moultrie, who is somebody, he's a, he's, you know, part of the DNA. I guess, following up on the letters regarding the Department of Advancement of Perception to Paternity Prosser, providing you with a below redacted answer to a question I answer to you in 2021.
1:59:19 - Allyn Malventano
Uh, well, the? Actually, if you scroll up a little, it's the reply from Nakasone.
1:59:25 - Leo Laporte
Oh God man, this is all in here, okay.
1:59:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, we need to go all the way into reading entire pages, my God. What if we had an AI? Summarize this I wish I had an AI now. Do you have?
1:59:38 - Leo Laporte
access and use it. Here's the perspective I can offer. Yeah.
1:59:41 - Allyn Malventano
Here's the perspective I can offer. So, having worked here and having seen plenty of stories over the years, even some of which we've talked about on Twitter, even dating back to when we got the most epic spit take on Twitter of all time from Leo when he learned that I used to work for the NSA in the middle of the world, I didn't know that actually, until you told me, I thought you merely were a Submariner.
2:00:00 - Leo Laporte
I didn't know. You were also an NSA man of many talents. You were a contractor, not an employee.
2:00:06 - Allyn Malventano
It was a DOD.
2:00:07 - Leo Laporte
Well, the NSA contracts the military to have, so you were working with a Navy on on loan to the NSA Correct.
2:00:17 - Allyn Malventano
Correct. So whenever these stories come about, usually the gist of it is, and usually why I've learned that there's so much hesitation in even the NSA saying anything, is that if you look at the two stories there's, or the different perspectives, there's like a there's, there's a dividing line, right. Even the the title of the article is going far in the one side. Hey. Nsa is getting all you US person information right.
Okay, good, all right, now I can speak from the other side. Right, if there was a magical way to make it so that the NSA could do their job of the foreign surveillance and not get any single word or bit of information from the US people, I guarantee you they would hit that button because it makes the job so much harder. Right, we don't. We don't want to know what's in your email, like Leo, right, we want to know what the foreign people that were potentially plotting and doing. You know the whole, all the reasons why you would need to surveil, have a foreign intelligence program. Right, to protect the United States. Right, that's the job that they have to do all those people that are still working there.
So, yeah, like, we don't want the other side of the conversation, but sometimes you don't have a choice but to get it in the act of doing the surveillance. And if that does happen, then you have to do a bunch of extra steps required by law, as described in, you know, from Congress. This comes down this is how you're going to do your job, nsa, and they have to make sure that all that stuff is excluded or even purged from databases or, you know, by whatever means necessary to make sure that that information here is gone or doesn't go out. Any of those things. Right, it's, it's, they're. Basically, when you get right down to it, it's a job that's almost impossible to do without pissing somebody off on either side of the argument.
2:02:03 - Leo Laporte
Not because somebody said specifically, and I will read from his letter specifically the NSA does not buy or use location data collected from phones known to be used in the United States, either with or without a court order. He says this categorically. Similarly, the NSA does not buy or use location data collected from automobile telematics systems from vehicles known to be used in the United States. The NSA does buy and use commercially available NetFlow. That's metadata, non content data related. Okay, here's the. Here's the smoking gun to wholly domestic internet communications and internet communications, ah, where one side of the communication is a US internet protocol address and the other is abroad. And they've always said this. We have communications when somebody's communicating outside the US from inside the US.
2:02:58 - Allyn Malventano
Right Now. Notice that the last part of that sentence was conveniently omitted from the other. Yeah, you're right. The people making the other point, right, yeah, like they're. They're pretty clear. They're like, look like, because the reality is they don't want the other info. Right, they're not going to spend money to get info that's only US people, because they can't use it anyway.
2:03:17 - Leo Laporte
So I know you, alan, and I know you're a good guy and I trust you, and you no longer work for the Defense Department of Intelligence agencies. You're a private individual, you're going to, you're, you're, uh, somebody who we trust. As a geek, you understand our concerns and you feel fully confident that not, not Cassone is not misleading Ron Wyden, that this is an accurate representation and that they are, in fact, they don't want domestic communications.
2:03:49 - Allyn Malventano
Everything represented in that letter aligns exactly with my experience having to actually like punch the clock doing that work.
2:03:57 - Leo Laporte
I trust you. I actually trust you more than I do, edward Snowden. I mean, if you say that's the case, I believe you.
2:04:03 - Allyn Malventano
Well, no, listen. He had a point, though. Edward Snowden had a point which which we talked about in Twitter. I don't know how many?
2:04:09 - Leo Laporte
hundreds of to go now 10 years ago or something. Yeah.
2:04:12 - Allyn Malventano
But there was a case where, okay, so we just said that you know they can have this collection where, if one side's foreign, the other side's US. Well, that we learned through the Snowden uh, you know documents and stuff that you've released was that hey, there's people in the org that could potentially see both sides of that that actually shouldn't be able to right, because they're supposed to be procedures in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening, right, and there was apparently a gaping hole in those procedures and that's what Snowden, if anything. I'm kind of happy that that did happen because it was a problem, right. Uh, it's kind of undermined all of the work that I was doing, like I had to make sure nobody was doing searches on any US persons names or any of the other stuff, and to know that there was just an IT guy up at the top of the IT stack there that could just run a query and nobody would know the wiser. That's a problem. It needed to be fixed.
2:05:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, and also to be fair, it's not part of the NSA or the CAA's Charter to Spy on Americans uh, on American soil, but for that we have the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, and I do buy data too. Yeah, and I do believe they do buy location data. They buy metadata. They may even buy content data. They buy whatever data brokers will sell right.
2:05:27 - Allyn Malventano
I mean, they have whatever set of rules there, that's their, that's their their operator legal.
2:05:32 - Leo Laporte
In fact, that's one of the things that Cassani says is it's legal. It's you know, we only do what's legal and we can't spy on domestic, but the information we get is legally obtained. We don't need a warrant to get that because of data brokers. Actually, it's been my contention Now maybe, uh, maybe you want to weigh on this that one of the reasons we don't regulate data brokers which I think all Americans who are informed about them would like us to do is because Congress is periodically told Sub Rosa that the law enforcement agencies would prefer they do not shut down the data brokers because they're a valuable source of information.
2:06:06 - Allyn Malventano
Yes, I'm personally not thrilled with the whole data broker thing. Yeah, nobody is that piece of it?
2:06:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, but Congress refuses to do anything about it, right, and I think that that's probably at the behest of law enforcement.
2:06:21 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, my personal take on that is that this NS, the whole NSA story, this whole thing shouldn't have even had to happen, because the whole data broker thing shouldn't even be a existing the first place, right.
2:06:30 - Leo Laporte
So, instead of blaming the NSA or casting stones at the NSA, let's shut down the data brokers, right? Anybody disagree with that one? No, no.
2:06:42 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't think you will find a normal person and maybe even Stephen Sinovsky would agree that data brokers are a problem, although actually here's what I'm going to make a super convoluted argument. The existence of data brokers and the purchasing of consumer data keeps a lot of apps you might enjoy free and available for you to use as a whole ecosystem.
2:07:04 - Leo Laporte
You're right, that's true. I mean, we've often said the same thing about credit consumer credit reporting agencies like Experian and Equifax and TransUnion, oh creepy. But honestly, if they didn't exist, you wouldn't be able to give her a loan or rent a home or anything, rent a apartment or anything.
2:07:23 - Stacey Higginbotham
Well, you would just. I mean, there's actually a whole bunch of companies using AI to establish payback records for people Anyway maybe we don't need them anymore. Something like that would exist Right.
2:07:36 - Leo Laporte
It has to.
2:07:36 - Stacey Higginbotham
And Experian and stuff they're. They're data brokers, Right they're.
2:07:41 - Leo Laporte
Right, all right, let's take a break and we can get a few final thoughts in with our wonderful panel. I really appreciate, appreciate it All three of you have being here. It's kind of ironic. The name of our next sponsor is Panoptica. This episode is brought to you by Panoptica.
Panoptica is Cisco Cloud's application security solution, which provides end to end life cycle protection for cloud native application environments. It empowers organizations to safeguard their APIs, serverless functions, containers and Kubernetes environments. Panoptica ensures comprehensive cloud security compliance and monitoring at scale, offering deep visibility, contextual risk assessments and actionable remediation insights for all your cloud assets. Powered by graph based technology, panoptica's attack path engine prioritizes and offers dynamic remediation for vulnerable attack vectors, helping security teams quickly identify and remediate potential risks across cloud infrastructures. A unified cloud native security platform minimizes gaps from multiple solutions, providing centralized management and reducing non critical vulnerabilities from fragmented systems.
Panoptica utilizes advanced attack path analysis, root cause analysis and dynamic remediation techniques to reveal potential risks from an attacker's viewpoint. This approach identifies new and known risks, emphasizing critical attack paths and their potential impact. This insight's unique and difficult to glean from other sources of security telemetry, such as network firewalls. Get more information on Panoptica's website it's panopticaapp. More details on Panoptica's website, panopticaapp, and we thank them so much for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. We had a lot of fun this week. On Twitter, we prepared a little movie to show you what you might have missed.
2:09:47 - WOT Promo
I'm literally talking to you from the framework laptop 16 right now. This is the touchpad for the machine that I literally pulled off the laptop in front of me right now. Here's one of the spacers. Let me rip off the keyboard, oh my goodness Yank. Previously on Twitter. Tech News Weekly. You can replace the GPU on this machine and you can do it in two minutes. The idea is you buy a laptop from them and you have a future proof laptop this weekend space.
2:10:20 - WOT promo
You're thinking about renewable energy, you think about solar panels. You put them where the sun is always shining and then you beam that to earth. It seems like so beneficial. And yet here it is 2024 and we still don't have this stuff. The problem is cost. All of a sudden, in just less than 10 years, it has been proven by Starlink, by OneWeb, by KuiperSystem that you can make space systems super cheap Mac break.
2:10:49 - Leo Laporte
Weekly. We have a big birthday to celebrate. We're going to see if we can boot this 40-year-old Macintosh. Uh-oh, Is that a sad Mac. It's not seeing the disk. Once you get the case open, let's look inside. You were never, ever intended to do what we're doing, which is open this thing up. Steve in fact, designed it that way, but nevertheless he got the designers to sign the case All artists sign their work.
2:11:11 - WOT Promo
Windows Weekly. Microsoft announced and released Copilot Pro, and I'm surprised by how good this is.
2:11:17 - Allyn Malventano
It's good for your action. No, it's thumbnail images Look at this.
2:11:20 - Leo Laporte
This Halo image is incredible.
2:11:21 - WOT Promo
Yeah, the prompts for that did not say anything like be as provocative as possible and please offend Americans and religious people, and like no, it popped that out on its own. I didn't ask for that. Twitter Great tech news and analysis every week yeah.
2:11:40 - Leo Laporte
I like, if you didn't see it, it basically created the last supper with Master Chief from Halo, where Jesus would be so and then an American flag, but instead of stars it had French flur to Lee on it. So I don't know what the AI was hallucinating, but it was. It was pretty wild.
2:11:59 - Allyn Malventano
A lot of fun shows this week, Nero Patel happened to swing by the Faison suite at CES and personally broke down a framework right in front of us which is pretty impressive to see.
2:12:10 - Leo Laporte
So I had an order for that 16, framework 16 and with the AMD processor, I canceled it because I spent so much on my M3 MacBook Pro and I thought do I really need another Linux laptop? But it's. I love my framework 13. I really think it's very impressive and I love the idea that you can upgrade it.
2:12:33 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, it really was impressive, especially with the plug and play aspect of it. Where you're? He just broke down with those magnets. There was no screws, it was all magnets. I think it's magnets and like a little bit of like a clippy kind of action to it, but yeah, there's a lot of magnets. That's kind of amazing, yeah, cause I kind of slide in like it's not like, if it would. Just you know, if you dropped it, it probably wouldn't just you know, disassemble immediately.
2:12:56 - Leo Laporte
Early reviews on it kind of backed my decision not to buy it. Apparently there's some it's there's some performance issues and so forth, but I'm sure they'll fix those. I like framework a lot. I think they deserve success. Framework yeah, you could just take it apart and up. More importantly, upgrade it. Have you been par played the new pal world?
2:13:23 - Ben Parr
I am going to do that shortly. I have watched a couple of videos. I really want to go and play it's.
2:13:30 - Leo Laporte
Pokemon with guns and in fact come on with guns, so much so that the Nintendo corporation is sewing them. It's a little too much. Pokemon with guns.
2:13:43 - Allyn Malventano
The idea is what? Didn't someone go ahead and someone make a? Someone made a mod for it?
2:13:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they put actual thing, put actual Pokemon in it. The idea is you're running around and you have a ball. It looks a little bit like a Pokeball that you throw to capture your pals, but apparently you can also capture weapons, which, if you ask me, is all that Pokemon was missing.
2:14:08 - Ben Parr
Well, this game has aspects that I think people wanted in the in the like Pokemon games currently. Like you know, it has some aspects of like the like Minecraft building process. You can build your own space. You can have your own essential farm.
I can't wait to play this this looks like a great, and this is one of the fastest like growing games ever Like five million downloads in a week, which is insane, and it's the number one game on Steam because of this. Now, obviously, some of these things were like it's clear that Pokemon right there, that was evolution Too much like their Pokemon and I mean you can make the argument like actually it's a sheep and like, of course, pokemon like go based off of real animals, and so it will be an interesting case. I feel like there's some where you really can't argue. They took a little bit from, but it just. Why can't game freak the creators Like make a game like this?
They don't have to have the guns but have the open world stuff and have the like deeper interaction. That would be fantastic.
2:15:11 - Leo Laporte
It looks like there's all sorts of kind of Minecraft style automations and it really looks like a great game. I'm not surprised. It's done very well. Powell World it's called. What do you think, benito? Have you started playing it?
2:15:22 - Benito
I have not, but I kind of also wonder if this game would have even been big if it wasn't for the controversy.
2:15:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, absolutely. And in fact talk about the Streisand effect. Nintendo going after them just really solidifies the whole thing. Maybe they just want, maybe they just want a little, you know kind of a little fee of some kind. No, Nintendo is. No, they don't go along with that.
2:15:46 - Ben Parr
Get sued make bank.
2:15:50 - Allyn Malventano
All right, this is going to be an interesting test of what can feel. What's the threshold?
2:15:56 - Leo Laporte
PC and Xbox, although the Verge says don't get the Xbox version, it's vastly inferior, so get it on Steam and play it on your Windows gaming PC Powell World. Bad news for Beeper, the. I kind of think we saw this coming. The company, which was founded by the former Pebble founder, eric Michigowski, has decided to give it up on trying to duplicate Apple's iMessages on Android. Apple temporarily banned Macs used as bridges to Android devices. So you really this was kind of the kind of the end of the line for Beeper and I guess in this case I don't really think there's much of a loss, right? I we I wish Apple would open messages. I understand why, for commercial reasons, they're never going to do that.
2:16:54 - Ben Parr
They will eventually. You think they'll have to. They're not have to. There has been that discussion like you could lock some more people into an ecosystem, or they might have to. I think it will happen down the line. I do think that, like Beeper tried over, like it was always going to happen, like you're trying to force a platform to do something they don't want to do, you're going to go and fail. And the other result, too, is like and look, I use Beeper, but I did you take it off.
2:17:20 - Leo Laporte
I removed it. As soon as I saw this, I thought I remove.
2:17:23 - Ben Parr
I message because I don't, because the people are getting locked out. Apple can do whatever they want and I'd like to like not be locked out.
2:17:31 - Leo Laporte
Is it a better messaging program than, say, whatsapp or Telegram?
2:17:35 - Ben Parr
Well, it's better to put everything together because, like, I have signal, I have WhatsApp, I have I message, I have LinkedIn messages, I have X messages or Twitter messages, like it's nice to have the idea of everything all one in one place where I don't have to go look at everything.
But it's the reliability is still like an issue, like and I've had, I will just I hope the Beeper people are listening I've had enough times when I've tried to send a message and it just won't actually send and it was like over signal or over slack in the Beeper and it didn't send. And you know, stuff that I wanted to have happened didn't happen with my team or with other people, and so now I'm like I can't rely on Beeper to send the things out and like, look, I understand, like you know, it's really hard to work with a lot of these different systems and all that, but that's got to. That's the bar right. You've got to be able to send messages and receive messages on the platforms that you support this sounds this sounds so it's just blasphering the past trillion.
Pigeon, pigeon. That's a blast of the past.
2:18:39 - Allyn Malventano
I just need to. I just want to think one thing to rule them all, to talk on all the things, that, because nobody wants to just settle on one thing. So I just needed. Source army knife.
2:18:48 - Leo Laporte
So automatic. The folks who do WordPress own bought something called texts.
2:18:53 - Ben Parr
Yes, I've tried them too, I find it annoying.
2:18:56 - Leo Laporte
I actually don't want all these things in one interface, maybe because it's just not a great interface, but it does do that, doesn't do Apple? Oh, I guess it does, do I messages it?
2:19:06 - Ben Parr
does, do I?
2:19:07 - Leo Laporte
messages.
2:19:07 - Ben Parr
Yeah, we'll see what happens in the long term. Here, Like you know, there is a real desire because there are so many messaging apps and I'm in groups on every single message oh, it's so frustrating.
2:19:19 - Leo Laporte
I agree, I agree.
2:19:21 - Ben Parr
But you just have to have the reliability of you send a message that it actually sends and it like, if it doesn't send, it's a clear let you know. Hey, this did send. Please try again, stacey former telecommunications reporter.
2:19:37 - Leo Laporte
Do you? Is RCS going to change all this? You think this? No, Apple's adoption of RCS. Apple's going to do RCS. Google's been pushing RCS. It's an open standard.
2:19:47 - Stacey Higginbotham
the rich communication I think it'll solve some of the. It won't solve the like I mean we all have multiple platforms. It won't solve like I use multiple platforms to communicate with different people. But it will solve things like when my friend sends me a video from her iPhone, it's like to my Android phone. It's like this big and grainy.
2:20:05 - Leo Laporte
It'd be nice if we could all use whatever messaging platform we want and have a protocol like RCS be available in all of them so that we could communicate with people, seems like especially if it offered end to end encryption, which it does right or no?
2:20:23 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't think that's a feature of RCS.
2:20:25 - Leo Laporte
I think Google wants it to be. I don't know if it is yet it might be.
2:20:28 - Stacey Higginbotham
I don't know if it's a specific, I don't know. No, it's implementation specific.
2:20:31 - Leo Laporte
I think you're right. Yeah, it's just a protocol. You can, if you want to encrypt it, and I think Google does or intends to anyway. Finally, some good news. If you don't like swatting and who does like swatting? Well, apparently this California teenager tour swats, liked swatting, but now he's in jail and going to be extradited to felony and even though he's a minor, he will be tried as an adult wired which, I think, with unusual caution, did not reveal his real name because he is 17 years old, but he, according to sources familiar with the investigation, swatted hundreds of people. He was like the king of swatting.
Apparently, swatting, as you may or may not know, but probably should know, is when a fake call is made to law enforcement. We've been swatted. Somebody called the Petaluma Police Department and said I am holding hostages inside the Twitch studios, I've planted bombs all over the studios and I'm going to kill myself, goodbye. And then, of course, we were lucky. The Petaluma Police were smart enough to go, sure kid, but they came over and they actually brought in and it's very expensive bomb sniffing dogs and we had to evacuate the studio and then went all over the studio. You know, members of Congress have been swatted. Judges trying President Trump have been swatted. The director.
2:22:02 - Stacey Higginbotham
Secretaries of state.
2:22:03 - Leo Laporte
Yep CISA directory. Yeah, I mean, it's a nasty thing. Now I don't think this one kid did that, all of it. It's probably good if he does go to jail and does do some time as a maybe a warning that this is not a game, right.
2:22:22 - Stacey Higginbotham
Why are they trying? Who's an adult? Is it because as a? If they tried him as a juvenile, he wouldn't get jailed?
2:22:27 - Ben Parr
I just he'd be out of 18 or it's lighter. You got to send a message like this is one where I have no sympathy of any kind way, shape or form, Like we got to throw the book at these, at the people who are doing this. This is like it's insane that people are thinking, oh, we should waste our valuable law enforcement and health and services Because I do not like some of the political statements of the other side, or I do not like this person or this person reject, Throw the book at them.
2:22:58 - Stacey Higginbotham
Throw all of them. This person is not doing it for political reasons. It's a joke.
2:23:02 - Leo Laporte
It's a joke for a prank.
2:23:04 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, they're like I have power in this situation.
2:23:07 - Ben Parr
But there are people doing it for political reasons. Yes, there are people doing it for law and then we don't actually know for sure, like they're made, the kid may have some political in addition to everything else, obviously, the power thing. I just this is just a behavior that has to be punished heavily to attempt to stop it, because people feel like that if you are behind the internet and you can modulate your voice, that you are, you know, free from consequences.
2:23:36 - Leo Laporte
The person who swatted us. I listened to the recording of it, you know. I mean it's kind of chilling.
2:23:45 - Allyn Malventano
It's not just the use of resources or the inconvenience there's a risk of death.
2:23:49 - Leo Laporte
Absolutely, and there have been deaths accidental deaths, Exactly and swatting. So it is a very dangerous, dumb thing to do. Now, I agree, Maybe he shouldn't be treason adult. This is just Florida state law. It's four felonies and the Florida state law does allow him to be tried as an adult and the prosecutor is going to do that. The way it came about is interesting. He is apparently was swatting Twitch streamers. That was his favorite thing to do. If you've seen that I, but he used to work at Twitch. Yes, this was a very common occurrence.
It's a problem. You'd be live on the air streaming and police would come storming in. So a number of prominent twitchers hired a private investigator cave calf roast Brad, calf roast Dennis. He'd been hunting this guy, this kid, for two years, which means the kids started doing this like when he was 15. He was like calf calf frost. Dennis says it's a beautiful day. I'm very relieved. Tour will no longer be able to conduct his reign of terror. He swatted schools as well as Twitch streamers, public officials. According to Dennis, in January of last year he handed evidence to the FBI special agents in charge of the case. It was used that information is used in subpoenas sent to YouTube and discord. I guess they tracked the kid down would watch that movie.
Yeah, wouldn't that be interesting. I mean, it took him a while.
2:25:24 - Stacey Higginbotham
Probably be a really boring movie. I mean, I'm wondering, I'm wondering how they did it. I'm just thinking about, like what is the back end? How did you? How do you track it? Do you just look at like server logs for like who?
2:25:36 - Leo Laporte
was so. He sent them the information, they sent out subpoenas, they figured out who he was by July of last year and then at that time, executed his search warrant, seized his devices. But the FBI isn't talking and neither is the Florida district attorney.
2:25:58 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah, I mean you're making phone calls like it's you know there's, there's ways.
2:26:03 - Leo Laporte
There's ways to figure out what you're doing.
2:26:05 - Allyn Malventano
Yeah. Right.
2:26:07 - Leo Laporte
They used a voice over IP number. That's one of the ways they can keep it anonymous, right? Well, within reason obviously because they call him. Yeah, he call his. The individuals calls calls to Washington schools in May, allegedly affected 18,000 students, cost cat taxpayers $271,000 and lost instructional time. I mean it's yeah, there's a cost, it's a significant cost.
2:26:32 - Allyn Malventano
The kids really lucky that not a apparently not a single one of those was resulted in a death.
2:26:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, anyway. So I hope you all pay attention. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's not a joke. Rick Scott, a Senator from Florida, said we must send a message to the cowards behind these calls. This isn't a joke, it's a crime. Scott was, by the way, swatted in December. Just ordering 20 pizzas or something, please.
Yeah, Just order some pizzas. Do it like we did when the and back in the day. You know, just order some pizzas, it's fine. Don't do that either. I hope this does get rid of this problem, but I doubt it will. I feel like it's going to continue. Stacy, do you want to say something? No Good? In that case, go get a waffle, because we're done. Ladies and gentlemen, stacy Higginbotham, I you know, I would plug your website. I would plug your podcast.
2:27:29 - Stacey Higginbotham
I have something to plug that your audience may care about. Can I plug it? Yes, so February 2nd is the deadline for anybody who's interested to submit a comment to the Federal Trade Commission on users right to repair.
2:27:46 - Leo Laporte
Oh, please do this yes.
2:27:49 - Stacey Higginbotham
You can tell them a story. You can just say, hey, we would love it if you would, you know, make a rule forcing, or even just enforce the existing provisions that would require or that would enable right to repair.
2:28:01 - Leo Laporte
So so, kyle Wiens, of course if I fix it has been involved you can go to the repairorgcitesrepairorg to sign the petition. You need to do this before February 2nd, so the FTC sees this. There's other ways you can join the fight. I agree with you 100%, and I'm guessing Consumer Reports is also very much involved in this.
2:28:27 - Stacey Higginbotham
I'm writing our formal comments.
2:28:29 - Leo Laporte
Yay, absolutely. I mean, yes, let's get this done Good.
2:28:35 - Stacey Higginbotham
You don't have to get super nerdy on like, oh my gosh, software pairing is wrong or anything crazy. You could just be like, hey, it would be awesome if I could replace the battery in my phone.
2:28:45 - Leo Laporte
Right. In fact, they probably take that with more seriously, wouldn't they? I mean, that's a real person.
2:28:52 - Stacey Higginbotham
They're going to pour over my comments, Leo. They're going to pour over them with.
2:28:56 - Leo Laporte
They're going to believe it firmly, vividly. All right, right to repair. We're behind it. So, as the EFF, I fix it. Repairorg and Consumer Reports. Thank you, stacy, it's always a pleasure and I'll see you in a little while. A week from Thursday for our I guess it's two weeks from Thursday for our book club, so it's not too late, you got two weeks.
2:29:22 - Stacey Higginbotham
It's a week from next Thursday. It is a week from next Thursday.
2:29:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, that's right. I'm halfway through right now, but it gets happier, right. The sun comes out, the dust storms stop, the water flows and everybody has a no. No, okay, the book is actually a great book. It's good. It's good, read it. The Water Knife by Paulo Bacigalupi Right.
2:29:49 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, we're going to solve our water issues and yeah, it's going to totally happen.
2:29:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and also just a tip Don't keep hyenas as pets.
2:30:00 - Ben Parr
What about copy bars?
2:30:02 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, maybe copy bars would be okay.
2:30:05 - Stacey Higginbotham
Yeah, they're benign. Sure, they don't need people.
2:30:08 - Leo Laporte
I think they might. Actually, I don't know. That's Ben Parr. You better ask your AI. He is the author of the AI Analyst which is available everywhere, co-founder of Octane AI, and you will read his columns frequently in the information, which I do. I am a happy subscriber. Thank you, ben. Anything you'd like to plug besides that?
2:30:28 - Ben Parr
I made a one. I have two things. One, I made a 110 page presentation for a conference on AI investor trends, what they're investing in, what the numbers look like. So if you're interested in that, it's on benparcom P-E-N-P-A-R-Rcom. You can get that deck. You can go, look at all the numbers. You can find out how much more people VCs are investing into AI than other types of companies. Hint, it's a lot. You can find out cool stuff about things like Mamba and Liquid Neural Networks and all the stuff that I am watching my own. So go to that one. And then my other one is Go Lions, shut up. They are just for those who are listening to it. Right now it is. I got the notification. It is 217 Lions, so I'm sorry, no, not who are they playing. They're playing the 49er, ah, by the way there's one.
This is just a good story. Also, I'm from the Midwest.
2:31:28 - Leo Laporte
It is a good story. No, no, I got a root. It is a good story. And if we do lose which we won't, because we're going to come back in the second half, but if we do lose, at least it'll be to a team that hasn't been in the Super Bowl since how long?
2:31:42 - Ben Parr
So, god, it's like what? The 70s. It's a very long time. I'm going to like it's a very long time. That's just why people their last time in the Super Bowl. They've never been to a Super Bowl.
2:31:52 - Leo Laporte
That's the answer. By the way, They've never been to a Super Bowl, so in that case you're right. I mean, but only if they win, not if they lose. If they lose, I'll be happy. $50 billion this year, past year on AI startups that's kind of an amazing. Put that in perspective. Is that a lot for venture capital investments?
2:32:16 - Ben Parr
What's interesting is that 2021 was still just a hair higher in terms of the money put into AI startups, just because there's so much more money in 2021. But as a percentage of overall funding, one out of every $4 in venture went to AI startups last year. That number will be higher, I'm almost certain, this year, in 2024. And the real thing that moves the needle here is, more than anything, interest rates, which is just fast. No matter what you do, the interest rates determine how many dollars go into AI or venture capital, and the interest rates are probably going to go down a little bit this year, so you will probably see more money and you might see a few more exits. It's crazy.
There's a lot of predictions around how much it's going to increase GDP. Goldman Sachs predicted 7%. I think that is way too small. It'll be a lot of a larger impact, but it also have a large impact. I just go through all this stuff in that deck of where are people putting the money. I will say one other thing which is out of that $50 billion that was invested last year into AI startups that's a stat from Crunchbase Half of that went to just 11 companies Wow, and so this is also proof of what they call the power law in venture capital, which is like the biggest returns come from a very small group of companies you invest in, and so a lot of the money went to a small group of companies. But there's still over 5,000 companies in AI got VC funding last year and a number will almost certainly go up this year.
2:33:48 - Leo Laporte
The AI analyst at Benparrcom. Thank you, Ben. It was so good to see you. Alan Malventano, Fun to be here. The SSD technologist at Faison and anything else you want to plug.
2:34:07 - Allyn Malventano
I don't really have anything else going on.
2:34:08 - Leo Laporte
Go to work for the NSA kids, You'll see the world.
2:34:13 - Allyn Malventano
And you won't see much of the world You'll see the world's data and that's more valuable.
2:34:19 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, alan. Always a pleasure. I appreciate it. We'll get you back soon. Thanks to all three of you, thanks to all of you who joined us. We appreciate it. A couple more days to take the survey. We want to know more about you, if you haven't yet.
Tweettv slash survey 24. We do this once a year because we don't know anything about you, we're proud to say, unless you volunteer it, and that way we know if we're on the target with what you want to hear and read and watch. And it also helps us sell advertising. Of course, tweettv, but we don't reveal any personal information. Don't worry, it's not about you individually, just about the audience as a whole. Tweettv slash survey 24. It really does help us out.
Thank you, we will be back next Sunday. We do a tweet every Sunday afternoon from two to five Pacific, that is, five to eight Eastern time, that is 2,200 UTC. We turn on the live stream on YouTube right when the show starts and turn it off when the show ends. If you go to youtubecom slash tweet, you'll see it there. In fact, if you sign up and get a notification, of course, you can watch the show at your leisure or listen at your leisure. You'll find episodes at tweettv. There's a dedicated YouTube channel and, of course, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast client. We thank you for doing so and we will see you next week, but for now, another tweet is in the can. Bye, bye.
