Windows Weekly 920 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here. We're going to talk about a couple of new versions of Windows, both the dev channel and the release preview Some small changes. We'll also talk about AI, and Microsoft has made an announcement a big breakthrough in quantum computing. It's the next big thing coming up. Next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is. This is windows weekly, with paul thorat and richard campbell, episode 920, recorded Wednesday, february 19th 2025. Celebrity condiments it's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. Yes, I'm back, and so is Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. Hello, gentlemen.
01:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hello gentlemen.
01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul Thorat, thoratcom, uh, leanpubcom. Richard campbell run as radiocom. Wonderful to see you. I missed you guys last week. Yeah, we missed you too, spent the week with the rocks in tucson, how, how was your crystal experience?
01:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
was it great? I?
01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
feel energized. Washed in the, in the bathed, in the mineral vibes.
01:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That might just be silicosis, but okay, I've never seen anything like it.
01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have gold flakes on my soul. So we went to the convention center, which is, you know, like the las vegas convention center, and the whole floor is filled, and we thought wow this is nice this is nice. And then we. I asked the person on the rock committee is there anywhere else to go? She said yeah, the whole town has giant circus tents that dwarf the convention center. The whole town has taken over and some of the rocks dwarf me, I mean. I mean, it's really quite.
01:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was quite a scene big this is pretty much tucson's claim to fame. When you think about it, you know.
02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I think so this is widely considered the biggest mineral show what do we?
02:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what do we have that other people do not have rocks?
02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and rocks are rocks so um was it a good week yeah you had a windows uh update.
02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you have any, you have a protagonist of the story.
02:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anything to report.
02:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is he going through some sort of evolution? Yes, so, yeah. So since last week's show, we have had three insider builds, most recently yesterday, which was a I'm skipping ahead a little bit here, but this is a. I called it a preview of the preview that we'll preview next time, but it is a release preview build of the next 24h2 cumulative update. So if you follow the natural progression of things and microsoft doesn't always, by the way, but this time I think they are um, that means that next tuesday, which is the week D Tuesday that we keep talking about, the day that Microsoft ships the preview updates we'll see this go into a preview update and then the patch Tuesday in March. This will be that update. So this is an early look at that, and so this stuff is. I would say it's similar to the Patch Tuesday update that we had this month, meaning it's not major.
03:32
I'm actually I'm using the dev channel on my Surface laptops. I've seen this stuff before, but I like the battery changes. That's in the graphic from the article. It's like the it's green now when it's charging and in good health, in good shape, whatever. It's yellow when it's getting low and then it's just black, normal. But when you look at the icons that are still in the system tray in windows 11 and you think about it. These are actually from windows 10, meaning they have that kind of windows phone aesthetic. Right they're. They're black and white, they're transparent. Usually, you know they're not filled. Most of them, um, they're actually starting to look a little out of place. So I think introducing some color in there makes some sense.
04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of cool, but, um, and then so funny, how small these updates really yeah, well, no I, but you know what I?
04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
celebrate that because, yeah, we've had some stupid big updates come out of nowhere and I'm sure we will again, but um, but great. And then, uh, last week there was a release preview channel build for 23h2 as well, and so here you see these two things being lined up again, right. So, um, the taskbar jump list stuff, meaning the share thing. So in other words, if you have an app in the taskbar that has a jump list and is document-based, you'll be able to share from there. There's a little share icon that appears next to each of the names.
04:59
The Windows Spotlight changes on the lock screen and in windows um, nothing, nothing major. Just you know some changes to file explorer that are minor, um, all that stuff. So it's just lining up 23 and 24 h2 again, which we keep seeing. You know something that's been very consistent. But then yesterday that or yesterday, two days ago I guess there was a mysterious dev channel build that microsoft has not really explained. So dev channel and temporarily beta channel because they're lining up right now with the same builds is where you can get recall right and click to do if you have a Copilot plus PC, and I've been using recall since it first became available I think it was back in November. And when I say I've been using Recall since it first became available I think it was back in November and when I say I've been using it, what I mean is I've been allowing it to take up space on my hard drive and I never once access it on purpose because I don't really need it. But I mean, I just don't really think to ever use it.
05:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You haven't actually used the output of it for anything.
05:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So, like I did an episode for Hands-On windows where I, you know, I went through the UI and you can see what it looks like and everything, and before that show I just used it for a little while to kind of reacquaint myself with it. But I don't personally see a huge benefit to this. So the one change they oh, I don't have it, I'm on the wrong computer, I can't look at it. So the one change they did make that you can see, is you there? The one change they did make that you can see is there's a flyout. When you click the recall button in the system tray it kind of pops up and from there you can open recall if you want to. To date, you can use that to pause snapshotting right, if you want to just do it on the fly. But they added a filter app or website button to it, which is actually very useful, or website button to it, which is actually very useful. So in other words, you bring up a website you don't want the thing to record, click that button, say, stop doing it, and it will get rid of all the ones it might've recorded previously and then not record that anymore. So that's actually useful.
06:57
But the mystery is Microsoft said that they're improving recall in the next update. Now, does that mean the next update now? Does that mean the next build? Does that mean the next windows cumulative? We don't. You know, microsoft, they don't really communicate very effectively um what, but in preparation for that, they are changing recall under the cover. Somehow they're not saying how and they have to delete all of your existing snapshots. So if you've been using it all along, like I pretty much have I took actually I did take one pause in there but if you've been using it, you're going to lose everything. So it is a preview. I mean, I guess we should, you know, maybe have expected something like this, but they haven't, really, they haven't explained it, so I don't know what's going to. I will see you know in. They haven't explained it, so I don't know what's gonna. I will see you know in a future update. We'll see if they provide more information about that. So yeah, um yeah not too big.
07:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, but I assume that they stuffed that into the dev channel out of the blue like that. Like could not go to canary, like nobody knows what canary is.
08:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you've seen the george washington sketch on snl with nate bargazzi, where people ask him like why is this? And he's like nobody knows um it's. It's like canary nobody knows um, we're not really sure you may not be wrong.
08:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They might not have the keys to the canary channel anymore, right?
08:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, like I got locked out of my youtube channel and they got locked out of canary. Yeah, yeah, that could be. Yeah, um, that's funny. Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. So there is a shift going on.
08:27
This came up I don't recall if this is when Richard was around or the week you were gone or whatever but we're in a temporary window right now where dev and beta can be the same. So this is confusing. But if you were in beta, you were on 23H2. So you were testing future updates that would go out to 23H2, which is still a current version, and during the window you can optionally opt into 24H2 builds and at some point it will just switch over to 24H2, but for now, they're still doing 23H2 as well. So there are people in the beta channel who are on 24H2 and some who are on 23H2. If you're in 24H2, you're lined up with what we see in dev, but the assumption here is that when they move things forward, dev will move on to the next version, whatever. That is 25H2 probably, but they've never said that. So why would there be any clear communication? It's kind of unclear.
09:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like you think they know.
09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, Do you think they know? Yeah Right, Right, you think they don't know. You know, that would be kind of shocking.
09:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There there's an assumption of adult kind of responsibility in anything like this. Right Right, I remember before I got into the industry I would buy a. You know you go to the bookstore, buy a big, thick computer book, whatever you like, this guy is an expert. And then I realized in writing my own books that it's more likely he became an expert in writing the book that he might not not have known much about the time. You know what I mean, so that's true I've become an expert by doing these shows.
09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know nothing, but yeah.
09:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you guys fill me in well, I mean like they're different whatever we learn and become better things. So yeah, they're. But there's this suspicion now with the insider program. We're not sure that. I think it like they did, like a bring your kids to work day and then they never left. I don't know what's going on there.
10:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's very strange I think the team's turned over and different people see it different ways and there's been a limited amount of documentation between the different parts and I think there is some experimentation going. It's part of the equation. So we're not sure how this feature is going to go, so we're going to put it into insiders and see how people react to it yeah, I right.
10:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't know what the chain of command.
10:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So there is a plan I well, I think there's multiple there. That's the other part. This is not a unified you know, space here. Look I, I don't get the sense of uh, what do you call it? Like a?
10:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
chain of command or whatever you know. Space here. Look, I I don't get the sense of uh, what do you call it like a chain of command or whatever you know? I just don't get that sense anymore. Um, I know you know like microsoft is in a state of flux generally right, because of all the ai stuff, so there's that kind of weirdness. Windows, just like they were during the cloud era, has been caught in kind of a weird place although they're still trying to figure out what they're about yeah.
11:05
So then you know, honestly, they've added some ai features in windows that I think are pretty good, like they've, they've gotten there, like I think the initial round was not great, um, a lot of it, but they're, they're kind of feeling their way through that stuff at least. Okay, fine. But as far as just the like, what is the point of Windows 11 these days? Like, what are we focusing on? Where can we make a difference in people's lives, if any? I don't know, I don't know. I don't get a real sense of central strategy filtering down to the troops. I don't know, I don't know.
11:39
So, yeah, I mean there's an adult part of this business that is the part making the bills right. I mean there's an adult part of this business that is the part making the bills right. I mean like someone with some responsibilities doing that stuff. But as far as determining what goes out, where and when, I don't know. I feel like some middle management walked away from the job and no one ever replaced them and no one noticed. And now it's just, I don't know, it's hard to explain, so let's move on. No one knows what I'm saying. Nobody knows, it's funny.
12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never worked in a big corporation so I only can guess. I can only guess what it's like in one. Yeah, for instance, amazon has a big event with Panos Panay in about 10 days, announcing the new echoes, and we heard from that I think maybe the information broke it that they were going to have a meeting on the 14th to decide whether in two weeks they would announce amazon's new echo intelligence right and they got together two weeks before panos, poor panos. I think this has happened to him with other things in the past.
12:47
And they say, no, we're not going to do it. So, panos, just talk about something else.
12:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, and, by the way, that's gone. Great for him when that's happened.
12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, don't worry about that. What was that? What?
12:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you want is him without a script. He just came out and they had obviously pulled whatever he was just started wandering around the crowd like a homeless person and then like looking for change or something. I think he took someone's laptop away or something. I know he did that to me at one thing, but I'm like he was just kind of it was a very nebulous because he didn't have the thing that he was going to talk about. Right, they took it away from him, sacha did they did it away one?
13:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, oh that was right. They moved it to the keynote. What was?
13:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this was like no, I want this for me. And he's like great, now I have nothing to talk about. So, yeah, it was like the uh, the dana carvey thing. Like you know, thousand points of light, what do I have like two seconds left. He's like, no, you get five more minutes. Uh, thousand points of light. You know, like I have nothing. You know, he had nothing else to say. It was just kind of weird.
13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like jimmy fallon, actually on the saturday night live concert, where they say, no, jack white's not ready, so phil, yes, right, he started to basically. So what did we see tonight? He?
13:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
started going through. You just do it right. You're doing the frog. It's like hello, my darling hello.
13:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it was great because he admitted it. He said, yeah, they're not ready yet. So and he kept looking over Are you ready yet? No, okay, well, here's another anecdote. Oh man, that's tough.
14:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me tell some stories.
14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I don't know if they. I don't think Amazon streams those events, unfortunately, because I would love to see Panos.
14:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, right right, I'd be okay not seeing them. I don't know, I'm going to be okay.
14:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, my point being corporations work in mysterious ways. Yeah, that's right. I've never worked for a company like Microsoft.
14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've absolutely worked for a gigantic company like this, but I was mostly sheltered from the bigger company Right. And I found out why very late in the game, because when they started firing people randomly, I went what I later found out was like three or five levels above me and complained directly to the vice president, who would fire the guy who I accused of just looking at a spreadsheet, sorting it by number and then firing the two biggest numbers, which he basically admitted to. And I said you just fired the person who was our liaison for techEd at the time, and he said I had no idea. And I said I know that's the problem, holy cow. So I wasn't long for that business.
15:11
But you can work at a gigantic company with infinite resources and didn't but deal with all of the politics and nonsense. You can work at a small company and have no resources, but at least you don't have, you know, eight people up the chain. Or you can do what Panos did and work at a giant company with infinite resources that will give you none of them. And you might as well be working at a small company with no money, because Amazon will never throw money at anything you're doing Right.
15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's kind of a I suspect, though, that it might've been that keynote that he was forced to vamp at Microsoft that pushed him.
15:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that was the start, I think that was a number. There were a number of things, I think, in that chain that led to that yeah and uh, and and whatever with him. You know, I, I part of me respects, you know, budgets being slashed, products being slashed, and he's like I can't, I'm sorry, he's like this is not the business. I want to run like you're. You're just throwing this thing into the ground and if that is what happened and I think it is like I get it, I get him leaving, you know, because of that you get put into a possible situation.
16:13
Yeah, like I just have here to succeed.
16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly he was. He was pretty high level.
16:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He was like a VP level, though. Right, yeah, I mean. Yeah, I mean he was on the. I think at the end he was on the senior leadership team, wasn't he? Wow, I believe it was. So.
16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, he was running windows and surface so in some ways this is a step down, but he I think he's responsible for all amazon hardware I mean at amazon.
16:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is arguably parallel, right? I mean, uh, he's in charge of the devices, and I think services is how they describe it, and that to me is alexa plus echo and all the everything else. I mean he's in charge of the devices and I think services is how they describe it, and that to me is Alexa plus Echo and all the everything else I mean. So that's, you know. I know that business has not made money or whatever, but he's used to that. Okay, so any sorry. So since the latter days of Windows 10, early days of Windows 11, microsoft has started being more aggressive about deprecating features in Windows, right? What does that word mean, paul? Yeah, it means this feature is no longer being updated and it will be removed in a future version.
17:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I was being facetious because we did that whole thing. Oh, I'm sorry.
17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, this was always pretty clear cut to me, but Microsoft explained this a couple of weeks ago for customers in the context of support, because I guess there was some question there. So if they deprecate a feature, it's still supported, right? So if you're using it in your business, you can expect Microsoft to support it. They do. But they also recommend that you start moving users off of it because it will disappear.
17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Winter is coming.
17:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's moved to a maintenance team. That only deals with security issues and they're unhappy they don't have windows in there. You don't have a pm anymore. You have nobody who's looking for new features and taking feedback from users.
17:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like that's what happens when you're deprecated yeah, so there are big features and there are small features. Obviously, some people will tell you there are no small features, but there are.
18:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There are no small features only small people.
18:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's right, small ideas, but yeah so. But the feature they've just deprecated is called location history, which sounds like yikes, wait a minute, what? To me, location history sounds important Like. It sounds like the type of thing you would leave in Windows, because every mobile device, every device really we have, has some sense of location history. But actually location history in Windows is specifically tied to Cortana, a feature that was previously deprecated and removed from Windows. It's no longer there anyway, so that's actually all it was used for there. There are other location um related features in windows, so, for example, find my pc or find my device, whatever they call. It uses obviously your location and will show you on a map where devices are and all that kind of stuff. So that's still there. They're not turning off location anything broadly, but there was a very specific api um that cortana would use to, uh, find out the location of your devices and the history of that stuff those apis have been around there forever, yep, and yeah, they're never used and you know, somebody has somebody.
19:17
I was like on social media. Someone said well, what about the location history in the cloud? And it's like I look, I get where you're going, I'm with you. But you obviously don't understand how this stuff works, because that stuff is it's not been saved to the cloud in forever, so there's nothing there. So, and it's microsoft, so you can go and mic you know microsoftcom privacy, probably, and whatever it is, but you can do it through your microsoft account website and you can just disable or delete all that. If there there is any data there. There isn't, but if there is, you can delete it, like that's, that's always been the case. So there's no, there's no actual privacy. Worry, like like, we've been recording your history, you know your location for years and we're going to save it to cloud, like no, no, it's just nobody, they're not keeping that stuff, so you don't have to worry about that. So that's happening.
20:04
And then two app related things that are kind of interesting. So last May I think it was Microsoft announced that they were replacing parts of the Microsoft Edge UI, which previously had been written with what's that? Javascript framework, react and was slow, and they had come up with something that they described as like a markup first architecture called web ui 2.0, which, depending on the ui or whatever it is, could be anywhere from 40 to 75 faster, roughly speaking, and I sure enough. I mean, like there's a ui in microsoft edge called browser essentials, and if you launch that thing right now it's dot, dot, dot Browser Essentials. For most people it comes on like that, like it's really fast.
20:51
And they just announced now it's the first time since last May that they've updated more of the UIs in Edge. So to date they've updated 14 UIs in Edge to Web UI 2.0. And now the browser overall I don't know how they measure this, but is roughly 60 faster than it was. Just ui responsiveness. And I have to say this is I I take a lot of these kind of claims in a kind of a dubious way.
21:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A lot of this stuff is fraction of a second stuff, but I guess it all adds up it.
21:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does and I I actually noticed this.
21:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So whatever anyone, the funny thing about this is it might be a fraction of a second, but there there's some quality to it. It feels a little hesitant.
21:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a collective impact to it. That's kind of interesting. And, like I said, like the the, the example I just used is I'm not saying it's the best one, it's just when I think of, like, if you, if you open Edge and launch Browse Essentials, you'll see this thing comes on as fast as you can blink. It is actually very fast, it's palpable when it's yeah, I don't accuse Microsoft of making fast software a lot, this is actually fast. So I'm not saying this is a reason to use Edge, but it certainly is a benefit. I mean, it is, it's real. Like this is not made up, it's actually you get, you'll notice it. So that's kind of cool. And then I feel like I haven't talked about clipchamp enough lately. But they do. I don't know what the update schedule is on clipchamp, but I use it.
22:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm an admirer of clipchamp. You got the turn. You both are, you're both champions.
22:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's the thing I I I would say. When I first switched over to clip champ which was almost two years ago, I bet I was I know I was here in mexico and I was having a problem with adobe premiere elements um, just not working properly on any of the pcs I had here, whether it was like hardware acceleration or not or whatever. I would spend all the time rendering a video and then it would have little hitches in it and I'm like I just got to get this done. I'm not trying to spend my whole life rendering video, like I just want to get this thing done. So I tried a bunch of different things.
22:55
You know, davinci's Resolve is incredibly complex. Today I would probably look at something like CapCut, which is actually pretty good, or whatever, but Clipchamp spilt and I'm like I gotta get to take a look at this thing. So it looks I looked at the time a little cartoonish, like a little, you know, like a little happy consumer app, whatever, but it was really powerful and work great and so I've been using it ever since. But the thing I've noticed using it ever since is this thing has evolved pretty dramatically. So the basic UI is the same. The thing you launch into is the same.
23:24
The editor at a high level is the same, but if you actually look at it, there are a lot of little things and it is becoming more professional looking, if that makes sense, I think. Before it was very approachable and surprisingly powerful and now it's starting to. It's not getting harder to use or anything, but it's. It's just starting to look more like what it is, which is a very powerful app for editing video like it's. It's come a long way. It's really, really interesting. So they point out some things that are new recently with, like, light mode support okay, great, um, if you want that for some reason, but to me it's the like, the video editing and the timeline, the ability to group assets and use them as a group, because a lot of times you might want to select, uh, two, three, whatever number of elements and have it have all. Have like the same fade in the same fade out the same, whatever it is, transitions and things, so you can do that kind of stuff like this is a, this is a really powerful.
24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's gradually becoming da vinci well, that's well it does.
24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's looking more and more like iMovie, or you know it kind of, yeah, like a prosumer kind of a tool yeah or, dare I say, windows movie maker.
24:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah well, which, for a brief shining moment, was actually better than iMovie, right?
24:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
like they didn't you know, they stopped doing it, but yeah it's always a battle of a simple enough for a hobbyist to use, but powerful enough that they can do what you need to do they're not trying to compete with DaVinci, or or?
24:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
well, yeah, but I think they're a better option for most like mainstream people, like normal people, whatever. But I the secret to me to this app is that it's always been super powerful. I think it was a little off-putting to professional users or more experienced users for video editing it was.
25:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looked a little because it wasn't a timeline right.
25:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, no, they always had a timeline but it was it was just kind of cart, not cartoony, it just looked like a, like a it looked too simple a little. The ui made it look so simple, even though they were actually hiding great power in there. And now I think it's starting to get to the point where it looks and is what it looks like is more like what it is. Yeah, which is a really nice kind of prosumer video editing tool. It's nice.
25:36
It's not free, right? No, it is free, so you can. If you pay, you get things like 4K exports, the ability to store your assets in the cloud, which is really nice if you go from machine to machine, right, because it's sent, and then there's some branding things, and if you get more of the assets that they provide, like video, audio, whatever graphical assets and so forth. But no, I mean honestly, I actually do pay for it, but what I do, I could get away with not paying for it. I could do everything I do without pay for it, but what I do, I could get away with not paying for it.
26:06
I could do everything I do without paying for it, but I do pay for it, primarily for that syncing capability, because I do actually use a lot of computers and it's kind of neat, like we're doing now, we're recording a video. I'll do that on Zoom with my wife, say, and then get off the phone. I'll have it render here, which, well, it has to. It's not my choice, but and I can take that thing, push it into um clip champ and then just go in the other room and I'll use my other laptop. But it's already there, you know it's. It's really nice. It's so cute that you're in the same apartment.
26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She goes into one room, you go in another room, you join almost 10 feet in that direction.
26:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't understand why this is confusing you should get what Richard has the road video thing right.
26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could have two cameras. She could be sitting side by side. You could have a mixer. It'd be like a TV show, I don't know what to get you for Christmas now.
26:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you don't have to convince me of this. What I'm going to do is I'm going to bring my wife in here and you can say this to her and you'll just see how she oh she's, she's gonna be like yeah no, she doesn't want to be in the same room with you.
27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, she doesn't want to be in the same apartment with him, we're stuck how do you like? By the way, richard, how do you like your, your roadcaster video?
27:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
well, we've still. We've been tweaking it further just today, right, it's been. It's an impressive device. It's not cheap it's 1200 bucks but it definitely took over for the a10 mini pro and the p8 right. So I've been using it for audio recording as well as some video work, and it's got how many cameras does it support? Um looks like eight seven eight seven yeah, it's crazy um four hdmi inputs and then at least two USB-C inputs.
27:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do they have like a half size version of this? That does no, this is the small one. Yeah, see, I don't really like that's overkill for anything I would ever need.
27:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, it's not. Everything else would be more overkill than this, right.
28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I want. Even an ATEM Mini would probably.
28:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the ATEM Mini, still, you're gonna to give you four channels right, but it does, but it doesn't handle uh the good microphones yeah, this has the phantom power xl, a pair of phantom power xlrs on it, which I only need one of, but we're really happy.
28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was, you know, when we closed the studio. We set up the studio here in the uh in the house. Uh, I think it was anthony Nielsen. Our team said get the Rodecaster Duo for your mixer. I said, come on, I mean, that's amateur hour. I'm going to use a Zoom like you do, or?
28:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
used to.
28:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to the P8, yeah, or sound devices or something, and they said, no, no, get it.
28:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I got it and it's been fantastic I tell people this story a lot because when you started Twit and were kind of replicating, what was the TV studio?
28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tech TV. Yeah, it was crazy.
28:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Much lower cost and whatever. But it's weird, because of the evolution of technology that became kind of big, heavy, expensive, whatever, and now, 20 years-ish later, almost you can again do the same again at much lower cost. It's so funny. No, it's amazing. I mean, this is not Wurzlar exactly, but it's that benefit you get from technology improvement.
29:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I would have bought this if it existed when the ATEMs came out. I suspect I'm going to donate this gear to the high school.
29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what I did. It's funny that you should say that that's exactly what we did it. Well, some of it went our fancy audio equipment which was very expensive, from telos, the axia stuff went to a community broadcaster up north. And then there's a high school in la that got all the cameras and this and the tricaster and everything. So it's a great. But honestly, nowadays anybody can do what we do out of their house with fairly minimal investment.
29:47
Yeah, the funny thing is I just read this, this uh piece why every podcast should have video.
29:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh jeez, and I thought yeah you know, they laughed sure, lauren, they laughed when I sat down at the tri-caster remember when we started uh, it was audio, it was only audio oh yeah, we started audio for everything yep, but it wasn't it was only a few years before we thought.
30:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought, and I think it was because in hindsight it was dumb I was trying to recreate tech tv.
30:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was a little bit of a you didn't want to be too overt about it, or whatever well, I just let me, let me, let me let you in on a little secret. I don't call it the super site for windows, but throtcom that's the super you could be down.
30:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we're stilla little salty over the whole thing, yeah yes, as you would be.
30:37
You know, as one, that one is hey, let's take a little tiny time out. Uh, I'm gonna do an ad and then we've come back with more exciting stuff. You're watching windows weekly with paul thurot and richard campbell. Our episode today brought to you in part by us cloud, the number one microsoft unified support replacement. I asked them why do you call it us cloud if you're a support replacement? They could. They couldn't answer that, but once I talked to them and understood their business, I thought I don't know why everybody doesn't do this.
31:07
We've been talking for a few months now about US Cloud. They're the global leader in third-party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 50, 5-0 of the Fortune 500. And one of the reasons they're very popular is because it saves you a lot of money. I mean's better support, faster support, but but it's roughly in many cases 30 to 50 percent less than microsoft unified or premiere support. So half as much, twice as good that seems like a no-brainer it's. It's twice as fast on average time to resolution versus microsoft.
31:41
They do something else that I think is really cool. They really support, uh, their users. Something else that I think is really cool. They really support their users in ways that Microsoft is an incentive to do right. Microsoft wants you to spend as much money as possible on Azure. They're never going to tell you oh, you know, you don't really need that Azure VM. I see that it's not being used. Well, us Cloud doesn't make money on your Azureure consumption, so they're happy to help you optimize your azure costs. They have a new azure cost optimization service. Now think about it. When was the last time you evaluated your azure usage? If it's been a while, that's, you know, not throwing stones. We all have this problem some azure sprawl, a little spend creep going on. Good news Now you can save on Azure and it's easier than you think with US Cloud. They have an eight-week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox, it runs for eight weeks, identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment, and it's not just automated. You're going to get the expert guidance that US Cloud offers. They're senior engineers with an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. I mean, these folks are the best. At the end of the eight weeks, you're going to have an interactive dashboard that will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused Azure resources, which means you can take those precious IT dollars and reallocate them towards something better, like perhaps investing in US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a lot of US Cloud customers do. They end up saving money on Azure enough to completely eliminate their unified spend, so it's a win all around right.
33:23
Here's a very nice review we just got from Sam. He's the technical operations manager at Bede Gaming B-E-D-E. He gave US Cloud five stars. He said quote we found some things. This might sound familiar. We found some things that have been running for three years. I mean these VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month, he said Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it can really start to add up. Isn't this a great idea? And you can see why this is something a third party has to do, because Microsoft's not going to tell you. Stop overpaying for Azure. Identify and eliminate Azure creep, boost your performance and you can do it all in just a couple of months with US Cloud.
34:11
Visit uscloudcom right now, book a call. They're really nice people. You'll enjoy talking to them. I was impressed. No hard sell. They're very matter of fact and they'll show you how much your team can save just on azure, but on your microsoft unified support uscloudcom. Book a call today get faster, faster, better microsoft support for less. They don't say better, but I, but I say it for them uscloudcom. And if they ask, would you please say hey, I saw it on windows weekly, so they know you, you know that they're. They're getting their money's worth when they buy an ad here, which I know they are. Okay, paulie, little paulie t and big richie c, it's the new, their new rap gang here. Goodness, let's talk microsoft 365er. What are you laughing at?
35:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't even imitate what I want to imitate. I want to start off with like a hey, doug, but I can't, I can't pull it off. I've been hanging out with my son a little too much.
35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's exactly how he talks.
35:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like talking to my son. You're like dude dude.
35:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, dude Language man, no you know I, he talks, yeah, it's like talking to my son.
35:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like dude, yeah, dude, language man, now you know I'm a writer, right, anyway, um, so you know I'm a. Deeply this hurts me. I don't remember if it was a week or two ago, but there was a microsoft support document that said that they were pretty dramatically changing the sign-in experiences on the web for personal microsoft accounts, uh, and apparently also enter id accounts, although I don't recall that being part of it, meaning that if you signed into the web using your account, you would stay signed in unless you signed out. So if you're sharing a computer, maybe don't do that, or maybe use an incognito window or whatever. So that was kind of confusing. All these online accounts have some sort of a timeout. I know with my google account, because I use it for email and calendar, that I don't know. I want to say every 30 days, it might be every two weeks, whenever it is, I have to re-authenticate, right, let's say, hey, we just want to make sure it's you and I have a passkey, so it's quick, whatever, um, microsoft must do something like that.
36:22
But apparently they were going to stop doing that, but apparently not because Microsoft and this is so bizarre the way they say this they said media reports were based on incomplete information mistakenly published by a Microsoft product team. So it was our fault. We took something public facing that you wrote and we took it at your word and that was our mistake. Sorry, we'll never do that again. Uh, it turns out they're not doing this, so they're not changing how enter id or microsoft account sign-ins work on the web, so everything I just said is not happening. So I don't know what that was all about, but for some reason on a public facing website, they said that it was changing. But it's not okay. Uh, this is coincidental, but sometime, I don't know, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I switched from gmail on my phone to outlook, which is the microsoft uh product using outlook as the back end or gmail as the back end.
37:19
It's still gmail in the back end, but it's the outlook app and the reason.
37:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
An interface to gmail yeah.
37:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the reason is that microsoft does a better job than google at uh display scaling and they, they, they support or they better support the display scaling. That's built into the os that I have set up and with gmail I used to have to set the display scaling like on a per app basis and put it up as high as it could go, because the some of the text was tiny and some was. It was just very strange. So I've actually come to like it a lot, uh, assuming I don't ever have to search for anything. Um, that stuff works well.
37:54
And then this past week they've announced three new. I guess they noticed there were all these new users, meaning me and now they're adding all these new features, some of which will be familiar because they've existed before on other platforms. So Outlook Mobile meaning the version for iOS and Android is getting a new font picker. So when you write an email, there's a little toolbar-y thing that comes up that gives you various options related to the message, but now you're going to be able to choose the font and then font styles and all that kind of stuff.
38:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's kind of cool, how often do you change the font on your email.
38:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well and all that kind of stuff. That's kind of cool how often you change the font on your email. Well, I think you could like do it in settings for all email, right? So now you can do it like, if you want to, if I want to send you a message, it has different fonts for some reason. Oh, that's important actually.
38:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you can do it on the fly plus, I will have a different font for the list of messages. That I do for the messages.
38:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, different fonts were fixed with right here I thought you're different fonts within the email, because I've received like a. Like a.
38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a uh, what do you?
38:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
call like a hostage uh yeah, yeah, ransom note no, hopefully don't do that. Uh, although I have been using the ai powerade explosions in uh I message on the iphone a lot, I've been enjoying that quite a bit. So if I want to emphasize things now or make people feel like children, I'll send them an explosion of confetti.
39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does it look like, though, if somebody's not on an?
39:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
iPhone. It's a little picture of dog mess and it says you should get an iPhone. Oh you're using Android. I'm paraphrasing, but it's something like that. It's a really low-res dog, mess too, it rez a dog mess too. It's not even just be comic sans all the time.
39:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, that's right. Yep, it's just in a symbol font you can't even read.
39:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, oh, it's all dingbats now. Excellent, yes, yes, right. Uh, they're also adding the ability to recall an email which you know has been in the desktop version of outlook since I don't know the stone age, or something and it works.
39:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But at least it's there so you can at least show you were flailing to try and clean up your mess, right um, and then a minimize email message feature.
39:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so in other words, you, when now when you write a message it works like it does in like kind of a web client, so the window kind of comes up in front of the app. You can see over the top, you know the top, the app still you can minimize that thing because a lot of times you want to reference something that's not in that email thread maybe, and that's something I do like on desktop all the time. I have to say it's a pretty useful little feature, so that's kind of cool.
40:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Add a sync. Wants to know if you use wingdings in your email.
40:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but I do eat ding-dongs sometimes.
40:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ding-dongs are good. They're good Saturday night or like 1 o'clock in the morning.
40:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ding dong is sounds like the right decision. It's right, it is a wing ding are you eating a ding dong? No, why? I hear crinkling in the dark? What are you doing?
40:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not doing anything all about the little debbie's little debbie's, oh little debbie, snack cakes and your annual dose of trans fats in one easy package? I don't imagine that trans.
40:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's nothing wrong with trans fats unless you care about your health. All right, so they're going to be. There are two rust related stories this week. Go figure rust as in the programming language yeah, that's an oxidation of iron oxide, right, okay, the first is pretty straightforward and non-controversial. So ExpressVPN I want to say it was about four years ago announced a new VPN protocol called Lightway, which is secure, fast, whatever, blah, blah, blah. So since they announced and released it, they've actually been busy rewriting it in Rust and they actually just finished that effort.
41:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's very cool. 100% functionally identical to the previous version Is that ExpressVPN is a sponsor.
41:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh well, there you go.
41:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, sorry, I didn't know that, but this is See, he didn't even know that, folks, that was an unsolicited plug.
41:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I wrote about this independently. So Rust is memory safe. It's more secure than C. But what they're saying is the code it creates is more lightweight. You have to write less code to get to the same place, and it works better with multi-core processors. So it's also more efficient. This is why people love Rust.
41:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right.
42:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we're going to get to that, but, yeah, in this case this is a 100% win. So, when you think about any kind of code refactoring, which means you've written some code, so maybe it's an app or a service, doesn't matter what it is, the goal is always to write. If you have to, for whatever reason, you're changing it, you're improving the code, but you want the end user experience to be the same or better, I guess but you don't want, as anyone, to notice something change or something's worse, right. And so for people that use ExpressVPN, if they had never said anything, you probably never would have noticed, you know, like it just actually works better, but it's. You know there's no functional regression whatsoever.
42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also a plug. It's open source and it's open source.
42:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's been independently audited to security firms for some sort of recognition that actually this does exactly what they say it does. It's really cool. Yeah, gpl too, yeah, yeah, so really neat.
42:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why we like them.
43:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we'll talk about Rust again. I promise More.
43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rust to come. Yes oh yes uh, you know what? I know, I have an ad, I can keep going.
43:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, skip it, because we just did that so I've been sitting on this one for a couple almost a week, maybe more than a week, I don't know and, um, one of my favorite stories of all time, someday I'm going, someday I'm going to write an article about the times where I didn't understand anything that someone was talking about in a sort of technical, work-related way, because, to my sort of mainstream, normal friends, I'm like really technical and sometimes I'll be talking to someone like me and they're like, do you even hear yourself talking? You're even talking. You're not even speaking english. I don't know what you're saying and um, that's how some things have been for me in my professional life.
43:52
But the worst example, or maybe the best example, is quantum computing. So back in 2017, there was a big splash about microsoft and made some kind of a quantum computing breakthrough. They announced it at ignite and, uh, I sat there in the audience and I was like nope. And I had a meeting the next day or that day, whatever it was, with the guys who were on stage from Microsoft Quantum these aliens with the glass fish container thing on their heads and I had no idea what they were talking about.
44:20
Yes, Thurot, what would you like to? Know and they're like listen we're going to explain this to you in terms anyone will understand. I'm like fantastic, that's what I need. 45 minutes later I walked out of it like I'd been punched in the face repeatedly. I had no idea what they had said and I sat down and wrote the headline everything you need to know about quantum computing. And then the first sentence of that article said is the article I wish I could write.
44:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had no idea what they were talking about. Well, it's still pretty obscure, I have to say. Well, in 2017, they were just talking about q sharp and the quantum dev kit, because they didn't have any hardware. Well, now they do so they have.
45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm just going to read this to you because this is incredible.
45:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is. I read this to my wife because I was like you got to listen to this. So they made a breakthrough. Um, they have created a material that is neither gas nor solid nor liquid, that enables them to in turn, create what they call topological, or I think, think these are hardware, not hardware, safe hardware I forgot the term. Hardware backed something qubits is that right?
45:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, topological qubits.
45:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I don't understand any of this. All right, but here's the go. So quantum computers aren't going to use bits right. So computers, zeros and ones right. 8-bit system. Everything, every unit, is 8 bits right. Eight bits right expresses a value of some kind. 64 bits is what we have today. Qubits can store much more information. Qubits, a quantum computer. Every time you add a qubit it doubles its performance. So the scale is like this, like rocket ship of. The problem is, like rocket ships, unstable. So the more you scale, the more unstable it gets. And so Microsoft and other companies that are concerned about quantum computing are trying to get to a point where they can scale with stability, and stability means being able to control it and have it be accurate.
46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because qubits don't hang around right, don't ask me questions, I actually timing, quantum computing.
46:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that is much like the 50s for classical computing. We haven't made the ic yet. We haven't made the transistor yet that's every, and so every computer is a bit on the bespoke side when it comes to their bits, and the same is here. There's like a half a dozen strategies that are being developed for storing and entangling qubits, and, honestly, microsoft took the biggest bet with the margarine qubit because it was literally a new property of matter Like this is insane. Why are you doing this? There are much safer ways to go about it.
47:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're bending the space-time continuum for some reason.
47:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You literally have to describe new science to make this computer. Well, they expect to get 1 million qubits on a single chip, which right at that point you have quantum computing.
47:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you have an actual so a million qubits, and remember, every qubit is a doubling of performance and capability, with that capability, with stability, exponential. Thank you, hardware protected was the term I was looking for. Yeah, and so they're on the path. And so what they say right now is so they have this first generation of their first quantum processor, using this technology a topological core architecture that will help it scale to 1 million qubits, which can do trillions of operations per qubit. A topological core architecture that will help it scale to 1 million qubits, which can do trillions of operations per qubit right, meaning they will have a quantum supercomputer within years, not decades.
48:00
It's using the Maharana fermion, just in case you. I thought that was obvious to everyone. Okay, I guess, if we're going to talk down to our audience, no, I know I should actually.
48:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fascinating, it's so complicated. The physicist who hypothesized the existence of this back in the 30s, maharana etore, maharana right, was disappeared at the age of 31. He got. He may have gotten on a boat, may not, but he just disappeared and they have never figured out where he went it's it well, once they have a quantum computer, they're going to find him.
48:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's going to pop out of thin air and be like I'm back, baby.
48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, yeah, I mean this is really advanced. Uh stuff, I mean I'm I couldn't claim to understand it.
48:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, it's so far with each of these strategies. As the number of qubits goes up, it's exponentially more difficult to keep them stable. So I'm sure they say a million, but they're at eight, yes I mean literally.
48:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all they can do right now.
48:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah no, but, but again, you know it's, the scaling is so off the charts, it's, it's hard's amazing, it's hard to think in terms of these numbers. It just doesn't make sense.
49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it may never happen. It might be like cold fusion, it might be one of those things that never happens, but it's great that they're working on it and NIST believes that it's or at least takes it seriously enough that they have proposed and now adopted a post-quantum encryption technology. Lattice key adopted a post quantum encryption technology. Encryption and, yeah, rsa will not survive a quantum computing which, by the way, I'm thrilled about because that's the encryption on my bitcoin wallet, so then you can actually get it, get it out. Finally, exactly, I am just waiting for my first quantum computer in the basement and, uh, and I will be, I'll be rich, and then you can just write export it and you'll be rich.
49:44
Yeah, that's funny, that's my retirement plan quantum computing.
49:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice. Well, it will be years, not decades, so it may make sense.
49:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll be talking about this on the new show, which is back right after this, Intelligent Machines, because it is a breakthrough that may make a big difference in AI as well.
50:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's the combination of ai and quantum computing is just not a scalar compute.
50:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a different model entirely. This, yeah, I know, but it's just like the, the two of them together.
50:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know it's like, yeah, it's good science fiction superman versus the hulk you don't think it's going to happen?
50:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
uh, richard, no no, I think there's possibilities for them happening, but this is a super computing problem, specifically good at certain math yeah, it's not.
50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not deterministic, it's not good yeah.
50:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not good at scalar compute like you need for neurons.
50:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All the compute right now in AI is at the front end. It's all front loaded right. It's all done building the model, yeah, and that's where the resources are needed. I don't know if you can do it with a quantum computer.
50:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You think you couldn't? No, I don't. I think they're totally different problems.
50:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The tokenization that happens.
50:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not the same strategy at all, okay.
50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, so maybe it would be another kind of AI. Who knows, I don't know yeah.
50:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well it's sci-fi Possibilities for new algorithms.
50:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right now it's mostly science the encryption if, if the zombies come back, you gotta have a plan for that. If the robots overtake us, you gotta have a plan for that.
51:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, both those things happen at the same time, we're just gonna wing it so you're like, if it never happens, hey, at least you've got you know, I don't know a bunch of chainsaws ready, exactly I just uh you follow the rules of zombie land, you'll be fine yeah, nice, yeah, put, just put a lot of nails in the baseball bats and just in case, just uh, you know, double tap, that's ready double tap right.
51:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the key that's the thing everyone screws up in the horror movies. You got to double tap, you don't so?
51:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you think this announcement from microsoft, I mean they actually have show a picture of this thing?
51:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and it's too ugly not to be real, you know.
51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
51:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very interesting. Yeah, it looks like a steampunk chip design from the 1970s or something. It's very well 50s, whatever, but it's very strange looking.
51:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The fact that they've got Mariana Fermions even existing for a moment is a break. It's amazing on a fermions, even existing for a moment, is a break. Amazing, yeah, whether. But that's the same, as you know, being able to make a transistor. It doesn't make a computer, right, you're lost, still got way far, but you got to take that first step, richard, without a doubt, this is the this. This will be a milestone event that will be a one sentence. Uh, should they actually get through all of the hard stuff?
52:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, this isn't the hard stuff yet no, oh, never mind, I'm just saying.
52:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got an email and it said we have invented a material that is neither gas, nor solid, nor liquid. And I was like just stop talking right now wasn't that plasma isn't plasma.
52:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Plasma is another state of matter. But you get when you get down to these cryogenic temperatures you get into like bose condensates and things like there are weird behaviors of matter when the energy levels are yeah yep, and when you get to these, um, very tiny sizes too right these quantum well, you notice you got to hook the delorean up to the clock, or whatever it is, and
53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
one point hit point hit 80 miles an hour. Mr Fusion is just a matter of time now, Yep.
53:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh all right, Science fiction A little, a little outside of my normal you know.
53:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think it's fascinating. I actually bookmarked it for a conversation on the show, the next show, because it is interesting, it's fascinating. I wish I understood it better and it sounds like, richard, you've, you've, you've done a lot of research on it I've done the pieces on this and and in some ways we've been stalled for a while.
53:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the first new news in a couple of years. Yeah, although they're still fairly far behind, there's a lot of error correction stuff that's been done like. We're inching towards the 150 to 250 qubit range, which, if you can get them into stable logical qubits, allows us to start to tackle some of the quantum chemistry problems that we really would make a difference in the world long before we could attack encryption okay good, you know, I'm willing to put off the decryption of my bitcoin wallet for a little while, to understand it's.
53:59
That's much further down the path. It's a lot more qubits than what it would take to actually solve the nitrogenase problem, to be able to break down how bean plants are able to affix nitrogen to ammonia with almost no energy at all. Interesting those are real, useful problems that are probably in the 250 logical qubit realm that could change the way we produce fertilizers on the planet, make it easier to make more food like real stuff right.
54:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What you're saying is I'm probably going to be dead before I get into my bitcoin wallet.
54:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, possibly you know what your grandkids will be thrilled?
54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll give it.
54:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I gave it to my son and I've actually given it to many people at this point, because but it'll be much like you know, finding whoever can get in here first can have it. Yeah, exactly, it'll be much like you know, finding Whoever can get in here first can have it yeah exactly.
54:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It'll be like finding a stash of Deutschmarks from the 1930s.
54:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look, grandpa had Bitcoin.
54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had 7.85 Bitcoin. There you go. Maybe it'll be worth millions by that time, or maybe it'll be worth nothing.
54:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, maybe worth the electrons it's written on.
55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the time that happens, we won't have money. It will be like star trek, you know. It won't even matter. Like congratulations, you have billions of dollars. We don't, by the way.
55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't have dollars anymore, but enjoy that, you know all right, let's uh, let's take a little time out and talk about a sponsor. We can get to ai and more you know. Actually, I wanted to ask you lisa's on a mac.
55:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Unfortunately so, yeah, nobody's perfect, leo. I keep trying to explain that to people.
55:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I was thinking that Grammarly might be having trouble on Windows because of Copilot. Do you feel like that's the case?
55:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think Grammarly's having trouble because Grammarly's terrible.
55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really See, you were a big fan and user of it.
55:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I use a different service. Now she's starting to complain about it too. My wife and I you gotta imagine like how boring we are. We're both writers, so we're always like, oh, they don't even know how to like. You know, it's just, it's. I don't, I don't like this, I don't. There are too many times where, simple example, you should use this word and said, okay, you change it and it's like underlines again all right, what. You should use this word and say it's the word I just used before and you have that little fun.
56:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ron robbins she's complaining about that too, yeah it's just, uh, it's.
56:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they've lost something, so I will, I I'll well, they seem to be desperately implementing llm features too, because they're afraid of being right and they, by way they, made acquisitions in another corner.
56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know.
56:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's something called language tool, which is very. It works the same way, but you don't think Copilot is sufficient.
56:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what I hypothesized to her. Is gee, if you were only running Windows, you could use Copilot. You wouldn't need it.
56:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is a little complex. But the Copilotpilot features that matter the most, say for writing, are only available in Microsoft's apps. So you get it as part of Microsoft 365 and Word that kind of thing. In a coming version of Windows 11, you'll get some capabilities in Notepad, but we don't need to worry about that too much, but they're actually pretty good, but just saying Notepad, whatever. So what you want is something that will work in any app you're using.
57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, because yeah, well assuming you're using any app, she's using it for writing, but the problem is she's probably writing in google docs, so right so in that case, yeah, you could use something that works in the browser.
57:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could. So I use language tool, in part because it's a, it's better than Grammarly and it works everywhere. So there's an app, so to speak, that's in Windows. It will work in any app, but it also works in the browser. I'll mention it to her.
57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
57:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like it a lot.
57:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, I thought, oh, I better ask Paul about this.
57:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, my wife and I complain about Grammarly every day.
57:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately, our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly, of windows weekly is grammarly no no, no, I mean grammarly has its uses. I'm not, I didn't mean to no, they were a long time sponsor and when they were a sponsor a few years ago, you loved them, I, we loved them yeah, no, it's like a lot of things that started out great, you know, and it was you know. The free version was amazing let's not forget that they're in ukraine. It may be that they're distracted. Just you know I'm not here for excuses, leo.
58:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just sorry, but uh, yeah, I that they're distracted. You know, I'm not here for excuses, leo. I just sorry but yeah, I hope they're okay, but I prefer this other thing, so I don't know.
58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a break More to come with Windows Weekly, paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler. Now, this is a solution that does use AI, that does make you more secure than the traditional solutions we've all been using. Zscaler is the leader in cloud security right now. See, the reason is so many companies have spent billions of dollars on perimeter defenses like firewalls and then, of course, vpns, because you have to be able to get in so that you can get some work done right.
58:47
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59:06
We were just talking yesterday on Security Now about a ransomware attack that got in through a VPN. For the VPN to work, you have to have a public-facing IP address, and bad guys say, oh look, there's a hook, something I can hang my hat on. And then they're using AI tools, and it's getting easier and easier for them to break in. And then there's a problem because, once they're inside the primitive fences, a lot of these primitive people using them. Well, we have perfect defense. So anybody's in the network's got to be an employee, got to be legit. What if they're not? Now you've got somebody connected to the entire network, completely lateral movement. They can look everywhere at every bit and then if they find something they like, they can start to. And this is what happened in this ransomware attack we were talking about yesterday. They exfiltrate emails, customer information. This becomes very embarrassing. They encrypt it and the firewalls either not looking at outbound traffic or they can't see what's in the encrypted traffic. So now you're compromised.
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01:02:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You say it's time to stop the AI.
01:02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh sorry, yes.
01:02:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just because we were talking about this before, a couple of people in Discord have been talking about this. I was just reminded that one of the reasons I turned to Grammarly originally was that the grammar functionality, so to speak, in Microsoft Word started to become really horrible. And right around that same time they put out a product called Microsoft editor, which was the grammarly capabilities from word that you could put in as a browser extension and use in other apps, and that was notably bad. Still probably, as I fairly say I haven't actually looked at it in a while, but I've always I see Microsoft blog posts where you can tell they're using it because it's you know the grammar is terrible. Microsoft blog posts where you can tell they're using it because it's you know the grammar is terrible.
01:02:51
So no, I mean it, I mean it's bad. So, but that's what you would think that Word, given how long it's been around and all of the improvements they've made and some of it is just pretty incredible would have the best or among the best grammar checking and kind of AI built in stuff. And it doesn't. I don't know why. So that was part of the reason for my shift to Grammarly and now, more recently, to Language Tool, which I do prefer.
01:03:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So in case you were wondering, okay, yes, the problem is that grammar checking is a feature, not a product.
01:03:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, that's the problem with AI too. So we're going to talk. That's sort of where we're going. So I got here in a kind of a roundabout way. So I assume you folks, and a lot of people listening or watching this, especially if you're doing it live are just kind of aware of what's going on in our industry and have heard about this kind of drama that occurred in the Linux kernel management area. Right, we all know that Linus Torvald still kind of runs the show, and even if you're not a Linux guy, like I'm not, you might have some vague understanding that there's some system of kernel maintainers and people check in code and those things are accepted or denied and progress occurs. So Linux has been accepting Rust language submissions for the kernel since I think it was late 2022. Yeah, I think, but whatever year, that was October, and in December of that year they accepted their first Rust written driver into the kernel Rust written driver into the kernel. And then you kind of don't hear about it, right, and we know that Microsoft is doing something similar with the Windows kernel slash Azure kernel. Like their OS kernels, they're also doing Rust. Mark Rezinovich, who's the CTO of Azure, has been very outspoken. He doesn't want to see any more C or C plus code being written anywhere. But, very specifically for the kernel of these things, I think you have to justify not writing it in rust, that's right. Uh, he would like to see it just be rust. If you know otherwise, like, yeah, you have to explain yourself. Okay.
01:05:01
So with that as background, I would have assumed that the world is moving in a very clear direction. Um, you know, in the sense that, like C came around and replaced is a strong word, but replaced in a sense like assembly language or whatever. Like eventually C will be replaced. There have been attempts like C plus plus and objective C, et cetera. There have been other languages like Delphi, or well, delphi, object Pascal, and you know that kind of came away, you know whatever. But here we are. It's 2025. You know c was intended when 71 or you know whatever year, a million years ago. Um, okay, so we're on a natural progression. Things are moving forward great, we're all on board. But because linux is developed out in the open, we get to see some of the back and forth that people have in that little community and is famous for his back and forths yeah, he's, I mean he's.
01:05:55
He's very calm and measured. He's never yelled at anyone. He's a good guy. You know he's not opinionated, you know whatever. Okay, so whatever I mean, look, I, none of us, most of us probably would have a hard time replacing ourselves.
01:06:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know what to say to that, but so linus durval, you got to think about the amount of crap that guy's taken. Yep, oh no, I'm not. I'm actually not the reason.
01:06:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's where he is right now I'm literally not criticizing him. I don't. I will leave it the way I wrote it, which is like I don't really have an opinion, I don't. I think the success of this platform speaks for itself, which, in a way, is how he handled the story I'm about to talk about. He basically said you know, we have this system and it seems to work, so maybe the problem is you. You know, to the person who was complaining yeah, I'll get to that, but anyway so I thought he's the old guy and he's the one embracing rust that's right.
01:06:46
He, yeah, he had to okay this, for the steven happened. He was like, yeah, no problem, he has himself accepted rust check-ins. So just knowing that, like I'm on the outside of the linux community, obviously, but I I'm interested in this stuff and I pay attention to it and it's a it's a developer topic. So you know, it's kind of it's it's a little venn diagram of thing, that I things I care about. And uh, recently there was a a bit of drama around. There's a guy Venn diagram of things I care about, and recently there was a bit of drama around. There's a guy I'm not going to know anyone's names, I apologize for this, they don't really matter but he's a guy who started the I'm not going to pronounce this right either the Asahi, asahi, asahi, linux, like a beer actually, there you go. Distribution to bring Linux to the M series max right.
01:07:48
He has submitted at least one Rust-based code request and it basically amounted to an abstraction that would be in a kernel that would allow Rust code to interact with C drivers.
01:07:51
I think is the short version. There is a person who maintains that part of the kernel who said nope, we're not doing it, and his argument was that this work should occur elsewhere and we can debate all this stuff. I mean, honestly, I think the details here don't matter, uh, but as this evolved, the guy who wanted the code to be added to the kernel and was denied went on this little social media campaign to kind of crap on things and he basically didn't, basically literally suggested that what we should do is just keep this thing going. We'll submit it to Linus, linus, linus, whatever, torvalds, and if he accepts it, it won't matter what this guy said, we can just go around him. And then Linus did step in and he said nope, we're not doing that. He said we have a system and it works and maybe the problem is you. That's where that came from and that guy ended up that's so, linus.
01:08:42
Jeez, two weeks. Well, I mean, look again, I'm not-. The point of this isn't to judge who's right or who's wrong or whatever, but the point here is that this guy ended up quitting not just his kind of unofficial role helping improve the Linux kernel, but he also left the Linux distribution which he started. He's like I'm out, and this is actually the second time in the past three, four or five months, whatever, where someone has just kind of quit from this process because of the politics and drama occurring around the Linux kernel and specifically around Rust, by the way. So it was a guy from Microsoft who was contributing, I think, in an official capacity, like from Microsoft, and he's like I'm done. He's like I can't. I can't deal with this. This is childish, so we don't really know everything. But you know, again, it's a more open process. But so I'm. I'm looking at this from all kinds of different perspectives. But one thing that occurred to me is that this is something I see and I've talked about this a little bit recently where you've got this older generation that you know we're all about change for a long time, but we're all about change and then they're like you know, we're not changing anymore. And they now, these guys are in a position of power, they're in decision-making roles, right and I again, without judging who's right or wrong or indifferent, in this, there is a very good, but look, you don't knee-jerk, just accept change. Change is not always good, but you also maybe shouldn't knee-jerk, just never accept change, because change is always bad. I think there's like a there's kind of a middle ground that's not occurring here and I think this is what. No, I don't think. I well, I guess. My opinion, I guess, is that this is similar to what I'm seeing in this pushback to AI.
01:10:21
I don't I apologize if I just told this story, but my friend's wife this is many years ago now I was visiting them I brought up my laptop, opened it up it was a ThinkPad. And she says oh, you know Windows, I don't use Windows anymore. It's so buggy and terrible. And I was like okay, like when was the last time you used Windows? And she said seven years ago. And I'm like well, no offense, but your opinion is way out of date. You understand, this thing has improved dramatically. I use Windows and the Mac and I prefer Windows. Windows works great. I don't know what you're talking about. So I feel like that's what happens with AI.
01:10:53
So everyone, look, we're all curious to some degree. You try it kind of early on and you're like it's garbage or it makes something that's wrong. Maybe the thing it does is wrong, it's not what you want, and then you're done. You stop looking at it and you still keep using this example. You're like, oh, garbage in, garbage out, am I right? I'm like, yeah, actually you're not. But aside from that, you know that things change right, and AI has changed so fast that I think we're having we already live in a world where I think people have such strong opinions about things they don't know anything about, but now they have strong opinions about things that have changed dramatically since they formed that opinion, but they've not kept up with that.
01:11:36
So I originally set out just to write about this Linux thing. I thought it was kind of interesting, but then I realized there was a parallel here with AI. And again, I don't want to keep repeating myself. I feel like I can't remember where I tell stories, but my wife, who's also a writer, I must have told this one had found a way to incorporate AI into her work, not to write, but to automate the things that are not writing, so she could be more efficient and then spend more time on the stuff she cares about, which is writing. That's smart. You know she's smart and she has common sense. She doesn't care about technology other than the fact that, to her, it is a tool that she can use to get things done Right. In this case case, she's using it to save time and I doesn't.
01:12:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She's just not chipping out letters on stone anymore either. Right like right, just, they're just right tools, that's right but she's.
01:12:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But look, you can, I'm a writer, so I think it's important to have I don't know if this is empathy or just understanding that someone who is not a writer, not a professional writer, might need some help writing. You know, brad, the other morning we talked and he was outraged that he had pasted something into Microsoft Word and it pasted it in. And at the end, you know, if you paste something into Word, if there's a formatting difference, it will say, hey, did you want to paste this in as plain text? Did you want to paste it in using the destination formatting? Do you want to mix the? You know there's a choice. So it was like that. But it said do you want to paste this with copilot? And he was like you know, like everyone does, everyone's like, oh, my god, you just put your copilot in my peanut butter. What are you doing? So I said, brad, let me ask you a question. I've never seen this thing to that point. I have now seen it.
01:13:10
But I said what happens when you click on it? And he was like, really dismissive of it. And this is what people do, right, they're really dismissive. I said, no, hold on a sec. What does it say? You didn't try it, did you? Yeah, what does it actually do? Because if you don't do anything with it, it just does what it does and then you move on and you don't have to worry about it. Well, it turns out that if you actually look at that little menu that appears if you click on it, it gives you choices related to rewriting or summarizing or making shorter or longer those things that Copilot does with text. And so I said, brad, let me get this straight. You're complaining about a feature in Word that is related to words. Like, are you serious? I mean, did you even look at this thing? I'm like, look, I'm as outraged as anyone when I see the stupid rainbow colored copilot icon everywhere. But did you actually think about it? Did you actually use it? I'm like, and look, maybe you're the greatest writer in the world and you don't need that, but can we at least accept that you're in the one percent of this equation and that the other 99 might actually benefit from that? Um, so I feel like we, the people who experience I wrote this knowing that I was going to get a lot of pushback, because my audience is a lot of like, kind of older guys and they're kind of setting their ways, from what I can tell, like they're really almost militant in their opposition to anything AI. They hate it. But if you just give it a second, like I think you might be surprised. And so you know, I have these little examples Like I, before I had any real life examples, I would have said something like every once in a while I have to give a presentation.
01:14:55
I don't do this very often anymore, especially now If I have to open a PowerPoint, it's like going to a foreign country with a different language. I don't even understand it anymore. That's an example of where I could use tools like this, because that would help me, a non-expert in that product. And in writing this, it occurred to me every January I write an article about the previous year PC sales and I compare it to all the previous years going back to 2005 or 2006 or whatever year it is, and I have this chart. And so what I do is I go back in my archive. I found the document from a year ago, make a copy of it, I add the data from the new year and then I have to make a new chart. Let me tell you something. This is like me using Excel for the first time in my entire life. Every year I use it so infrequently that I look back and I'm like.
01:15:41
So if you go back and look at my articles, you'll notice that some of them have multicolor charts. Sometimes they're all the same color. I have no idea what I'm doing. So this year I got lucky or not, because actually it occurred to me after the fact that I have Copilot and Excel and it might've just done it for me, by the way. I don't actually know, but I went to Copilot, I went to Gemini and I went to chat GPT and I said here's the two columns of data. These are what they represent.
01:16:08
I would like a chart, a bar chart, vertical bar chart. I want the bars to be thick. I want them all to have their own color. Make me this thing. Let me tell you something. Every single one, each of them, did it immediately, like immediately. Now, there were little conversations that might have occurred in some cases, when I remember the details, but one they were actually thinner than I wanted. So I said this looks good. You good, get a compliment. The ai, you don't want to get mad at you. But I said could you make them thicker? And I said, yep, came right up. So here's the thing. I don't, I don't want to, uh, master excel or even one feature in excel. I only use it once a year. I don't care, and there's an example and I it's maybe not the greatest example, but it apply that to every single thing you use on your computer, your phone, your whatever it is, and you will find something where you're like, wow, okay, actually that made my life easier maybe this isn't complete baloney, right?
01:17:04
yeah, and this is richard, and I don't remember if it's you or I, or us together, we collectively at some point I want to say you did this, said look, there is no killer feature for AI, but there are going to be a thousand or a million or whatever the number is of little things, and I think what I'm saying now is that we've gotten to the point where this stuff has gotten so much better it's everywhere and we can all identify little areas where this thing has made our life a little bit better and that the sum of those things is in fact Well, I think some of them are going to be invisible.
01:17:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You don't even know that an LLM was involved in making that work.
01:17:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, which is actually to my point. I don't know this for a fact, but I actually got that chart right in January and it might be because I do have Copilot and Excel. It might have just known, because I had done it in the past and it's the same document, so maybe that's what happened.
01:17:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I'm using the GPT for the home voice interface and I finally got the new hardware for it so that it works well enough, oh, you're running it locally. You're running it locally. I haven't actually moved the GPT part local yet. I do have local wake work and local controls. But the big thing is just the synonym ability. You just have less frustration. You don't have to get the words precise every time. Yes, the tool keeps figuring you out and doing what you want. Isn't that amazing? It's quite impressive.
01:18:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not Go ahead, paul. No, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm just babble when I'm excited about something, but I feel like Google search trained us in a way to be concise. You're like, I just want to get to the point. And there's something interesting about AI, and even more interesting is how natural it feels where you find yourself conversing with it. Because, like I said, I did the chart. I don't remember which one it was, but it came up that they were thin or something, and I said okay, I said that's good. Literally, I wrote, I told it it was good. I don't know.
01:18:55
So, like I find myself, like it's a child, like good job, You're doing good.
01:18:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know this is a compliment sandwich, right.
01:19:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A compliment, a criticism, compliment yeah, the butt right in the middle. It's like this is fantastic, but I know no and then it's always a butt. But then it just did it. You know and I have those experiences and apologize to you while fixing it.
01:19:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right.
01:19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so funny because if you compare it to our experiences with siri or cortana in, yeah right, even google voice, it's a.
01:19:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a light years past right, it's, it's a little bit understands what you're looking for and ignores your stupidity.
01:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah look it's. It's a little bit of understands what you're looking for and ignores your stupidity.
01:19:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, look, it's. It's not always right. You know one of the things like in my wife's work. She writes about health and wellness. This has to be right. She can't just, you know.
01:19:40
Except she's not blindly in playing with the gadget, but she was very specific in her prompting of this thing, where she said I need at least two recent, uh you know verifiable studies in the past five years that prove that this is true or not right with citation, and then went and checked each one of them, um, which is a step a lot of people aren't going to take frankly, right, but now, and you wouldn't if you had to actually do it physically, but now the tool will do it for you yeah, but she used to have to do this herself manually. Yeah, right.
01:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So remember I've replaced Google with Kaki about a year ago which is Kaki it's $25 a month, but it was de-Googled search results Much, much, much better.
01:20:22
I just recently stopped using Kaki and I use Perplexity for all my searching. Perplexity, yeah that, and I use Perplexity for all my searching. Yeah, that's a lot of people saying this right now. It's so good and it gives you citations automatically, because it's not only a good model they have a very good, by the way, they have a new deep research model. That is really good. But the base model does the internet search for you?
01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And so it's applying current information. Yeah, I think Google's kind of here in a way, but Google has a business model. That's what gets in the way right.
01:20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I pay perplexity 20 bucks a month. It's the best 20 bucks I've spent.
01:21:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's incredible. I think we've done this without thinking. You pick up your phone and maybe you're on your computer or whatever and you're like all right, I need something. I mean, whatever it is, a lot of times it's an answer to a very specific question. Right, right, I don't want 20,000 blue links, I just want the answer. That's what's changed. Freaking question.
01:21:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Google knows that, by the way, and that's where, well, of course there are different masters to serve here, I guess.
01:21:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, I mean, we're going to look. We're in this transition period. It's going to be tough because, yeah, I don't want, you can't always tell, but like, maybe the answer is on my website and they're giving it to you, so they're not coming to my website. So I guess I benefited mankind somehow vaguely, but I actually need to feed my kids or whatever it is.
01:21:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, we get caught up in that loop, and I understand that. Look you, all three of us rely on advertising to support ourselves, and if Google or anybody just sucked all the information out of us and put it on the web and there were never any clicks, we'd lose money.
01:22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well you have experienced this. I've experienced this. They have negatively impacted my business several times, because they make some seemingly arbitrary change and all of a sudden, everything's different and there's less money coming. Things don't work the same anymore. So, yeah, we live in a weird world, but, um, I, I look, I feel like there are a lot of people listening or watching this or whatever, who are still in the. You know it's. It's like when you would go to a cat I, this is a million years ago too. It's weird, it's. This might have even been the 80s, but it's probably the 90s.
01:22:36
But I went to a, I was paying for something. I think it was bradley's. Is that something a million years ago in boston era and it's taking a long time. And the woman's like, sorry, you know computers. And I'm like yeah, I do know computers. What do you mean? What's the matter? You know, like, like we do that with ai. We're just like, we just immediately. Just well, you know, like it's ai. You know it's like garbage in, garbage out. It's like I, that's not. That made sense six months ago. I don't think you understand how this has evolved. It's changing, it's getting way better and it's happening wicked fast. I don't't know. Look, you're resisting this. I get it. I'm still kind of there Like I tell the story about my wife and I have a hard time doing that myself, like I don't. I still don't. I underuse it. I'm in many ways trying to convince myself, but I think the truth is out there.
01:23:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a UFO, but it's. It's real. I mean, it's happening, no things have changed and uh, we're in the middle of this wild change.
01:23:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's disruptive for the most part for the better right. I mean right. I'm not to to seg this too hard, but kotaku has a an article up as of today about the humane ai pin.
01:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh what a sad story.
01:23:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, acquired by hp and now hp said hp went to mark with all that web os stuff. What are you worried about?
01:23:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, it's gonna be fine. They're shutting down the cloud service at the end of the month in 10 days. Yeah, if you. Uh, if you brought it within the first 90 days, the last 90 days you can return it. If you brought it within the first 90 days. The last 90 days, you can return it. If you haven't, thanks, see, ya, I mean that's less than a year.
01:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I have to say, you and I you know what you're doing here, right, we looked at the humane pins.
01:24:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, I was going to say this looks like a prop from the 1960s version of Star Trek.
01:24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You knew what you were buying. I buy a lot of stupid AI crap of star trek. You knew what you were buying. I buy a lot of stupid.
01:24:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ai crap, right, but even I didn't buy. Yeah, like this is. You can just look at it. It's like is that a bidet? What am I looking at? Like what you know? Like what did you think it was gonna? I'm surprised it's full of it. I'm surprised it's not just empty. It just has a microphone that connects to an app on your phone or something like it's anyway, and some guy in indonesia listens to it, googles it for you and sends it back.
01:24:50
Yeah, yeah, it was that level of it's over so I I just say from hp's perspective, because I saw that headline and I thought to myself well, hold on a second. There are two hps. One thing is it hp the computer maker or hp the hpe, the enterprise company. So it's hp the computer maker, and I I don't 100 agree with this. If you follow the natural trajectory of crap, or on PCs and you know which they see as value add, et cetera. Hp is on a very big push to add AI capabilities to their computers, right, and so maybe there's some technology here. They think that will benefit, that it will sell you more.
01:25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They spent more than a hundred million for it and it had. I mean, I think there's 300 patents. So they spent more than $100 million for it and it had. I mean, I think there's 300 patents. So there's something in there.
01:25:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's something there, but they have their own AI assistant. They're doing things like look, we'll talk about AI in games later in the show, but this notion that you could use AI to optimally configure your computer on the fly as you're doing things is not far-fetched right?
01:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you know what I'm wearing um, in fact, we're going to interview the creators of this, uh, in about an hour. Yep, this bracelet, this they announced at ces. It listens to everything yeah and then I get a synopsis of my day. I've got a potential to-do list which I can then move over to my real to-do list of things that I might. That it and it's very smart. It's really interesting.
01:26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But we're going to talk about to the critics. There's all sorts of interesting stuff coming. Chairman laporte.
01:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, uh, I appreciate you giving all your data away, but um I am going to ask him where it's going, because it doesn't say yeah, it doesn't say but it's very cool and it's only with the iphone, so it's kind of you know what I'm joking A hundred percent.
01:26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to be clear. But I, you know people, people who are allegedly privacy minded or whatever, might hear what you just said and be like are you serious? But you understand, you, you give up information like this all the time to use Google maps or whatever services like this is an implicit. Or if you ask people like you know this thing is tracking you. You know, because you see ads for things that you talked about, you know it right. And they're like yep, like well, why don't you stop using that? And you're like what are you talking about? Like I rely on this thing, like I don't care, and I think that's the. I think it's incredible what's the consumer reaction?
01:27:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
to recall too right? Yeah, of course I want that. That will help me. What about privacy? Who cares?
01:27:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and so these are suggested to do's. I saved them because we're going to talk to the uh, yeah, so, but this is, some of these are very legit that I uh, and then some of them I don't care about. So if I want them, I add them to my to-do list and then it's maintaining a to-do list for me, which is awesome, right, and all of this without any typing on my part, just because it's listening to my conversations. That's correct this is.
01:27:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look again, I this is actually this thing is showing is an excellent example of because I didn't know what I was writing. As I wrote it, I wasn't sure like what is my point? Like what, what am I building toward? I didn't really know, but in the end I kind of just put it, I it, I kind of framed it as, like time saver. The time is the one thing you're never getting back right, it's the one thing you can't you know. But if this thing, ai, can save you time in little ways all over the place, then that is a net gain. And if that's what that thing is doing for you and that's what it looks like to me, then and you see the benefit of that, my God, that's incredible how many my mother, when I was six or seven years old, to this is.
01:28:20
My mother only said two things to me that were true, that were life lessons to carry, that for me to carry forward for the rest of my life. This was one of them and it's specific to me. She said you need to make lists. You don't remember anything. And she's right. And so I'm 58 years old and this past year, friends of ours we're in a bar and they're talking to someone and I was like Patty, how did you know that other person's name? It's like three people removed from us and she says, oh, I keep a list on my phone Every time I hear a name. I never remember names. I write them down. And so at the age of 58, 57, whatever it was at the time, I was like, yep, my mother was right, I got to do that, so now I do that. But that's what that thing's doing for you, right, it's doing that for you, it's saving you time. I think it's smart.
01:29:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's also more than yes, and if it only did that, that'd be fine, that'd be huge. Your mother was right, but to me it's also, and we'll talk again on Intelligent Machines with the Creators, and I think this is where they're going. It can give you insights. One of the things they want to do is and you can ask it to do is listen to a conversation you're having with your spouse and give you feedback.
01:29:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh, I don't want that, I can tell you. If there is, if you, as a man, if you possibly think you've ever won an argument in your life, if you may believe it strongly, I assure you that thing no, you that thing will tell you differently.
01:29:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah there's also another so you can talk to it through the device, so you can press it once and it gives you a variety of choices. One is a roast and it's mean as hell, but the one I use is fact checker. It's listening and you can press this button after somebody says something and say check that for me, nice, wow yeah that's a great way to alienate people in a hurry you know, and it says it out loud by the way, off your phone it goes. It says your friend, is an idiot.
01:30:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean maybe in the mythical kingdom of whatever, that's true, but here on reality land but don't.
01:30:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this kind of a fantasy that you might have had as a young person and I certainly did?
01:30:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this is the babblefish from.
01:30:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is old enough to remember when you go to a bar and actually have an argument about something that couldn't be resolved and you never whip out your phone yeah, now you whip out your phone and end it and that's and, by the way, make everybody sad.
01:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just got the highly automated version of that yeah, I have to say that's actually my goal of in most social encounters, so it's fine you can't query it okay so you can query it too, and you can also uh, you could say analyze this conversation and then it'll give you bullet points.
01:31:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, by the way, that's, I would say, from just sort of a mainstream perspective. I think that programming stuff is amazing, off the charts, useful, but as far as just general purpose, whatever, I think summarizing and that sort of thing is huge, huge it's amazing, right now yes, yeah, because there it's not hallucinating right, you're literally getting a, an executive overview. You're standing there, you're thinking about dinner and like what you're gonna? Someone's mouth is moving.
01:31:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're like yeah, nodding, yeah, and then it's funny you mentioned that whole, um, you know, recording the conversation thing. I did that with my girls when they were teenagers because they were they woke up mean in the morning and so I would play back the conversation in the afternoon. It's like no like we'd be nicer to each other in the morning, like it's just that's smart, good parenting, very nice, yeah, it was just a hit you example, how did they punish you for?
01:31:52
that, oh no, they were quite angry with me as usual that was especially in the morning, yeah I, I got whiplash from the eye rolls like it was epic, but right. But it was also just a reminder. It's like, hey, but we wake up a little grouchy in the morning it might have sunk in sell some time.
01:32:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you know that's well it's nothing like the empirical data.
01:32:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Listen to you speaking to each other.
01:32:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right what else is going on.
01:32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah in in less personal areas what else did your mother lie to you about? Yeah, she didn't get a lot right, leo, that's all I'm saying um I, my mom, yeah I know I'll stay personal my mom uh, is is in a home, as you probably know, I love her so much. They're helping her. Sure, she's 92 and she's on the memory ward because she's got a little alzheimer's right. And now when I talk to her it's like it's fascinating because it's her grasp on reality has slipped quite a bit.
01:32:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so you're just getting like an unfiltered. Here's some part of my brain.
01:32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like her dreams. She's like telling me her dreams, except that to her they're real. Yeah, and it's really the mind. The human mind is amazing.
01:33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So over the holiday there's a. My father and mother were divorced when I was three, and so when I was 17, I met my real father and, oh wow, been part of that family ever since, and so the family I have in pennsylvania. Is that family right? So the mother of my sisters. I I mean, I care for her in many ways more than my actual mother, right? She's the woman we bought our house from in pennsylvania and now we're living in her condo, right, we? Yeah?
01:33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
very close. So that's, that's your. Your she's not a stepmother, but biological family, that's no there's no name for her, but she's, you know, okay.
01:33:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, we love her. Sharon is her name and she's wonderful. We love her. But unfortunately sharon is also succumbing to similar things. It's sad to watch the way of all, but she's been. It's weird because we I've seen her lash out at my sisters and other people in the family. She's always been like she sees me and she's wonderful to me and I love her. You know we get along great.
01:34:03
So I don't know, it must have been Christmas Eve, I don't remember, but we were, she's in a wheelchair, we're taking her out of the house. And I jokingly kind of smacked her just as part of just joking around, and she looked at me and she goes. She whipped around, she goes, you're just like your father. And I was like oh, I was like the first time and I was like Sharon, I will snuff you out with a pillow. I swear to God I am, I am nothing like my father. And then she was like you're right, I'm sorry, and it was. It was amazing, but I saw it like. I saw that. You saw the flash. It was the glint of like that demon that's in there, you know, and it's sad, you know, because she's wonderful. I mean, she's the best yeah, that's what it's.
01:34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Alzheimer's can go a lot of different directions, but it's often because I think, because of the frustration of it, I think exactly you have to what it's. Alzheimer's can go a lot of different directions, but it's often because I think because of the frustration of it.
01:34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think exactly, you have to know it's happening to some degree. It must be the worst thing in the world. Yeah, it's awful.
01:34:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa has permission to stuff me out with a pillow the minute it starts it starts to go south. She says she won't.
01:35:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But she better.
01:35:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not Paul. She says she won't, but she better. It's not Paul.
01:35:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's up to you. Oh, Leo, I'm going to be next to you in the bed. We're going to be yelling at each other.
01:35:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know who are you, I'm Paul. Who are you? I'm Leo.
01:35:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's like a memento. We're going to meet each other every day. It'll be great.
01:35:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's cool. My mom has watched Succession many times because she's yeah, it's different every.
01:35:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird, because I've always asked for that Like could I erase the part of my brain that saw Star Wars as an 11?
01:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
year old and just watch it again for the first time.
01:35:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and the truth is I actually kind of have that, you know, like I don't. You know I don't really it's not actually a good thing. Oh well, I don't know how we got off on that just other.
01:35:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, honestly, this is why I'm excited about ai, because yeah, and things like this, because, as I age, it will.
01:35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will be a huge aid, exactly huge aid yep, yep, no, that's yeah, that's absolutely true.
01:35:58
It's coming in the nick of time, paul that's why I'm a, that's why I'm taking this stance. I'm like, guys, listen, I need this, make it happen. Uh, all right. So, uh, compared to what I just said, none of this other stuff is particularly interesting. But, uh, microsoft is improving the voice capabilities and that are already in copilot, basically to support a lot of different languages in both directions. Right, so that's huge, but it doesn't require a lot of conversation, it's easier. Um, I don't know that open ai ever actually received a buyout offer from whoever that was elon musk, I think. They did. They rejected it.
01:36:35
They found, but they rejected they did 97.4, but the day before they rejected it they said you know, just so everyone knows. They never actually sent us anything. So the board met. They were, I think they waited for the week to go by and they were like all right, just so we're not let me know. I'm assuming I don't need it.
01:36:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just a lesson, a life lesson for all of us If somebody offers to buy your company, on Twitter.
01:36:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Get it in writing.
01:36:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not genuine.
01:36:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do like that. Sam Altman not a person I would characterize as humorous or even necessarily human. He does not like that.
01:37:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One Did write back on Twitter and actually called it Twitter, which I think is beautiful and he said we're not interested in the buyout, but if you want us to buy Twitter for the same amount of money, we're happy to do that. I think he offered $9 billion, not $90. Oh, okay, whatever the number was, because that would be more in line with it.
01:37:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's 20% of what it was worth.
01:37:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Twitter is now worth the money Elon paid for it. Oh yeah, oh, it's every cent, exactly so good job. Yeah, he made that make sense financially. I don't know if you're following this, but there was a brief moment in time it was about a year and a half ago when I thought, every time someone comes up with a new AI model, I'm going to write about it. And then I realized that is the stupidest thing I ever set myself up for, because there's a new model like every two seconds now. Right, and so if you look just at OpenAI, they have so many different variants now of their models. It's actually really confusing. And if you're an end user and actually it doesn't matter if you pay for it, you're just using their app mobile or desktop or web or whatever there's like a model picker, it's like what is know I? This is not something to ask a normal person and so they know that they're going to fix it, they're going to simplify their product offerings over time, but I think they're moving at the speed of sound, like everyone else.
01:38:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, they, I mean you, you know for multiple models based on price. Yeah, did you want the half?
01:38:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, half a dollar a month version, the two dollar a month version, the twenty dollar a month yeah, but that's like saying, um, you can have airbags in your car, but only if you buy a really expensive mercedes, which was the case for some time and it's like what about us? I, I can't afford a mercedes no, but the reality is you.
01:38:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can you know the? The open ai interface I use for the house cost me less than a dollar a month. Yeah, nice right like you can have a very you're.
01:38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're using the API, you're paying for token access.
01:38:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And knowing that when I set up Lama locally, it uses the same API, like I just changed the endpoint.
01:38:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So is it usage-based and so it's not using too much yeah.
01:39:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's a separate. Like, I pay $20 for ChatGPT and I have all the models and stuff and you're pretty much using the api directly using the api and I put down 20 for a certain number of tokens.
01:39:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It automatically replenishes and it's been more than a year and I'm less than halfway through the money. It's amazing. Now it just means we may not be using it all that much, but the reality is it's just not that expensive, but it's there when you need regular household stuff.
01:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do feel like we're in the uber stage of where, like they're losing money but they're they're making it, kind of thing.
01:39:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody's losing money on AI, you know, except the investment guys who are who are taking commissions off the placing the money.
01:39:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had a friend who lived in New York city before the internet bubble burst. I don't remember the name of servicing more, but it was whatever door dash was at the time the first one, and I think it was only New York City. The idea was we'll start in the big city and we'll move right. And he ordered a Snickers bar and a guy brought it to him in person and he said this isn't going to make it Like this doesn't.
01:40:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We talked about this, paris had ordered from Cosmo too They'd bring you Ciggy's. Why would you do that? Why would you do that?
01:40:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like why would you? Let that happen, Like that's ridiculous.
01:40:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It went out of business.
01:40:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I wonder why this is stupid. Yeah, okay, one thing that this is not unique to Gemini, but Gemini Advanced will now reference past chats, so, in effect, is creating a memory, if you will, of its interactions with you. That makes sense to me. Anyone who's had a conversation with an AI chatbot will have experienced this right. I described the creation of an Excel chart and said this is good, but could you do this? And that's just in place context. But this is like over time. In other words, this chat history will be associated with your account.
01:40:46
I feel like what I just said was obvious. In fact, I feel like half of you are thinking it didn't already do that for some reason. That's weird. Open AI, does I feel like it does? Yeah, I think this is just one of those features Google catching up? Yeah, yep, it's just everywhere, or, if it isn't, it will be in two seconds.
01:41:04
And as Google, the same thing as ChatGPT, copilot, they're, they're revving, and, revving, and revving. And so if you have a Android phone, ios, you know it's a little different. You have to get the apps and all this stuff. So, for a little while there, google's putting all their stuff and everything, and now they're starting to scale back a little bit. So you know, like the Google app on iOS which you can, there is a Google app on Android, but really for most people it's that discovery feed that's over the side of the home screen. Um has all kinds of extra stuff going on those widgets and you know they put Gemini in there. So they're getting, they're going to, they're going to pull that out of there and just put it in the uh Gemini app. You get the Gemini standalone app, which is the, is or will be the replacement for what used to be like the. I don't know if there was a Google Assistant app on iOS, but it's replacing that. Obviously they have the circle to search functionality, which is a little bit like the. No, not a little bit, it's almost exactly like the click to do feature in Windows. That's coming.
01:42:02
Google actually did this. First. It was on Pixel. First. They added it to Samsung, I think last January, flipped forward a year. It's in other phones and they've improved it and there's a new experience for that. But the idea is that anything you see on screen you should be able to learn more about it, whether it's images or text. You know you get the idea. So they're bringing this functionality to individual apps, because that actually does make sense to have an individual app. So you like Chrome web browser, obviously browsing web. You want to. What is this picture? You know learn more about it. Circle it there you go. And then the google app which is, like I said, the discovery feed. Um on android is a standalone app only on ios, obviously and they're losing gemini but they're gaining circle to search, because a lot of people probably use that app actually like a browser, because it's a place you go. You know there's a feed. You don't really talk about the fact that you know google's dominance in search is under threat.
01:42:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, yep, I just told you I I've, I'm.
01:43:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not only post google, I'm post kaki, I'm, I am now all in. You are a being of light and logic. I haven't used Google search in a year because it's gotten so crappy.
01:43:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, that's interesting. It has gotten bad.
01:43:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's weird. Okay, I've been playing around with, like, the home screen on my phone. I literally just thought about this today. It's weird how this ties into this. If you have an iPhone, by default there's a little search button thing on the bottom of the home screen which I knee jerk just get rid of. I don't need that.
01:43:33
But I was thinking today, like I, what I, the way I search, is, I bring I open a web browser and just type something in Right and then, whatever the web browser is it has, whatever facility usually does the thing. But just today I thought, literally just today, like two hours ago, let me go find that option, turn it back on. I don't even know what it does, and what it does is well, it's stupid, but it does a lot of things. But what it does is it gives you search results from things that are include things on the phone and data and photos and whatever, but at the top is search with the browser. So I actually figured out a way to do that more slowly by adding that button back. So in my case that doesn't make any sense. I'm not going to use that feature, but this is like a thing Like I bet a lot of people.
01:44:16
In iPhones and you know, if you have an Android phone, there's a Google search bar. I don't think people think about it too much. I think that is how a lot of people just do it. You you know. But yeah, google has to. You're look they.
01:44:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They spend a lot of money on it, but I and I guess google search is in there somewhere because it doesn't actually search, it must be right like but you're also seeing now with search results that you get uh, an ai generated response first on google right, google's just started doing that, then that's there, which is to mix.
01:44:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, mixed results there so far, that's the one where you get Elmer's glue on your pizza.
01:44:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean it's going to stay together. That's what you wanted, right.
01:44:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think they've gotten better this pizza's next to my ribs.
01:45:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't imagine so. Elon Musk has an AI called XAI, right Of course? Yeah, he advertises it or bills it like it's the greatest thing in the world, which he would right. But they have a new model, Grok 3. I don't like the names and if you are paying them, which is ludicrous, you can access this.
01:45:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I have it because I have a, so you actually pay, you pay, oh, I don't pay okay, no I mean, I am what they, what cory doctor, calls a non-consensual blue tick at one point a few months ago they just turned on blue ticks for people who have
01:45:41
a lot of followers hoping that we would come back so I can play with it if you ever want to, if you ever have a question. So what elon did was really interesting, theorized, and he's not wrong. This is kind of, I think, common knowledge, common wisdom, that you could take the same tools, the same techniques and just throw huge compute at it and you'd get a better result. So he bought what was it? Do you remember Richard? Was it like 10,000 H100 NVIDIA GPUs and built a massive data center in Texas. So he bought what was it? Do you remember Richard? Was it like 10,000 H100 Nvidia GPUs and built a massive data center in Texas. Okay, and so he basically made the biggest AI supercomputer ever.
01:46:21
So he went in the opposite direction of the Chinese. Yeah, In a way right he did. Well, Chinese can't even get H100s.
01:46:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's what I'm saying but they actually had a bunch of them from before the lockdown.
01:46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot of caveats, a lot of so-called numbers going on there what's interesting is he's also, I think, using this new technique that deep seek showed the world for the first time but was not a revelation to people in the business of, uh, reinforcement learning right which gives you some. Really, that's the, that learning right which gives you some. Really. That's the. That deep research thing gives you some really interesting almost thinking much.
01:46:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What all llms do right like the second, all the second order training is reinforcement well, not exactly they have.
01:47:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have supervised fine-tuning, so this I just watched, a really good thing, by which I recommend from andre caparthi three and a half hour video on LLM.
01:47:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh no, I was just watching an hour long video about this same topic. This is three and a half.
01:47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really well done. It's for people like us, it's for laymen, but it goes into detail, and so what he describes it as it's as if you gave a college textbook in physics to an LLM. The first level is it reading that and absorbing it. The second level is it going through the exercises and solving them. Uh, and that's that's. You know. I think it was called supervised fine-tuning, but anyway the. And then you could even write questions and have answers and then say so forth. But the problem with that is it doesn't go. It can't go beyond what the knowledge is in that book. It's still based on the existing knowledge. Right at this new reinforcement learning and, by the way, the chinese are using punishment and rewards as well sounds about right. Yep, mostly, mostly punishment. But the theory is that what you're gonna? You're gonna to actually have the AI exceed human capabilities. It's what AlphaGo did in learning how to play Go. It played a billion Go games and actually came up with non-human moves that were better, and this is ultimately what we want an AI to do, right.
01:48:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Is to not just remix human knowledge. Right, because the simplistic view is you've trained it on the internet, which has contrary views about everything, so now it's mental, it doesn't get anything right. And now we have a new AI and we're going to train our AI on that AI. And now we're going to have the AI version of inbred children over some generations.
01:48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's not just garbage in, garbage out, it's even worse. So the first training, which is essentially taking all the text of the internet, tokenizing it and then doing probabilities like if you have this token, what's the probability of the next token. And that's chunks of text and it can be varying sizes of chunks. That doesn't give you a chat bot, it doesn't give you anything, in fact doesn't give you a very smart llm.
01:49:09
But the next step, well, I can tell you, the cat's sitting on the mat you know, maybe the next step is you start training it on conversations right, and you teach it how to answer questions. But there are further steps. There's fine tuning, there's super fine tuning, and then there's this new reinforcement learning. Deep seek was the first to use it, but open ai immediately said well, we knew that, but we just never released a model.
01:49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So now they have a deep reasoning model uh, grok, is deep reasoning, the key being that we're going to show you it's thinking because for some reason that's really reassuring to people like, and so you get well, that's what you see.
01:49:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's more going on?
01:49:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, of course, but I mean like, but that's part of it, it's like you know, yeah, that's one of the things you get with these reasoning models.
01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually open AI does not show a lot. They're afraid people will steal the reasoning Right, but DeepSeek does. So yeah, you can see DeepSeek goes. Hmm, what I think? Paul's?
01:49:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
asking me when I was in school.
01:50:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, exactly, first of all, and it's going back and forth with itself and then comparing different results. Uh, so it's very interesting. That's somewhat of a breakthrough. Richard, I don't think that that's something that, until deep seek, people were doing in public anyway. So, admitting to, yeah, yeah, so I think rock is also doing that. Perplexity has a deep reasoning model and it's just you wouldn't want to use it for, like, correct this writing or write this paragraph or give me some inspiration. You would use it for much things where you were patient, because it does take time, and something where you wanted to really reason something out, and it's really interesting what it's doing. I think we're making amazing strides in a very short period of time.
01:50:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's crazy, it is crazy.
01:50:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, amazing strides in a very short period of time. Right, that's crazy. It is crazy, yeah, uh. So he had a hundred thousand uh h100 gpus. Now the cluster uh don is telling me in youtube is 200 000 gpus. Um, so it is, it is a. It is the largest, as as far as we know, supercomputer ai supercomputer ever built. And that's for the. That's for the uh the pre the ai supercomputer ever built. And that's for the. That's for the uh the pre the pre-training stuff. That's for the llm building.
01:51:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It means you can use larger chunks, you could do more tokenization yeah, that was part of the video I watched was explaining just the uh, the time and math or money elements to this. So you know x number of gpus computers, whatever to you know this size model, blah, blah, blah. It's going to take eight days, it's going to cost 12 million dollars or whatever the number is.
01:51:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very expensive, it's yikes. So that's that first. That first, building the model is the most expensive, most cpu or gpu intensive and the most expensive. You then can do. Then you do a lot of other stuff. You have humans in the fine tuning where you have them write questions and answers. You'll get a phd in physics and you'll say write 100 questions and 100 answers and have the llm absorb that, but it's still building a transformer. That's what's amazing. This is still neural networks, right. It's kind of magical anyway no, it is.
01:52:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my point. I and I look, all of us have done this and all of us now have seen this, where there's just a lot of pushback on this stuff and I I jokingly, because you know I don't really I'm trying to in, trying to understand it in real time, as it's happening I have referred it to such things as the seven stages of ai, grief or whatever you know, which are denial, denial, denial, denial, denial and acceptance, or you know, you could just contort it into any seven things you want, like because you know we're trying. Look, we have this, we have our own grounding and experience and whatever it is, and this flies in the face of a lot of the things we've witnessed in the past.
01:52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where it's it's, it's hard you know, richard, give me um, give me a um, some sort of research like how, how do natrium reactors work? Or something like that, something that you would really want to think about, to ask, and we can watch the process here. That's the hardest thing for me is coming up with a question. Let's see, how do natrium nuclear reactors differ? Because you know the answer to this from the current water. It's what they're like, what's heavy, heavy, heavy water, light water, light water reactors. So then we can watch this process. Oh, wow, no, it came up with the answer. Oh, I didn't do deep search, let me do the deep search instead. Let's do this.
01:53:43
So this is the, this is the more um thinking version. Oh boy, here we go. I'm looking in a nuclear reactor, it's showing you its work. It's very fast Exploring reactor types, searching for what is an atrium reactor, browsing results, searching for 10 results found. You can see, and this takes forever. We're already 21 seconds into this. Uh, so you have to be something patient. And but, richard, you know, does this look? But?
01:54:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this isn't you know they're hitting on the. They're hitting on some key issues here. You don't want the quick, you don't want a quick answer, you want the. You know what I mean. Like that this is taking. I mean what are we talking about? Seconds?
01:54:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean yeah it took 30 seconds. And here's I mean, and this is kind of richard, if you were doing your talk on natrium reactors.
01:54:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This would be the information you would want. The question is will they include the part where natrium reactors keep catching on fire?
01:54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
passive- safety due to low pressure, but sodium is reactivity with water and air post risks. Lwrs rely on active systems and containment for high pressure safety. And here's the detailed analysis. All of this was instantly generated. Yes, incredible, just a few seconds, yeah.
01:54:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't see anything wrong. It's just a question of you know. Do you really understand the problem? Space Right the longest running sodium cooled reactors in Russia, and they've just gotten good at putting out the fires.
01:55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they talk about terror power. That's bill gates effort.
01:55:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah it's in wyoming, although they don't have a permit for the. Yeah, they don't uh I I mean look.
01:55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is instead of in lieu of a google search yeah uh, substantial, yeah, and and this is, uh, you know, based on the grok, uh llm, and then applying these new reinforcement learning techniques to give, I think it's. But, by the way, uh, you know it's hard to grade llms uh and this document is, you know, large.
01:55:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It looks like it's luxury right from a bunch of the yeah, yeah, the it's not a regional research group stuff like that's what the stuff I read, yeah was exactly, and this is summer, is there?
01:55:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is there an improvement you can think of over natrium? Let's Now, let's put it to work. Yeah, sodium's reactivity with air is a big problem.
01:56:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that whole. I burn in air and I explode in water.
01:56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that from high school chemistry yes, very dramatic.
01:56:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now make it 800 degree liquid sodium and see what happens. Yeah, the reason the Russians don't have a big problem was they don't care about the pollution they create when they put out the sodium.
01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God, yeah, they don't care about much, they just blew up Chernobyl's containment.
01:56:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They hit one of those Iranian drones, hit the roof of the crane structure. Nothing escapes.
01:56:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank God they didn't really breach containment, yeah, but honestly that's a pretty irresponsible thing.
01:56:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it was a. I think it was a failed drone. I think they targeted, oh, something else. It didn't explode. The drone fell. Oh, had it exploded, would that have been a problem? No, not likely. Their primary containment is still bloody big polycon like it. Yeah, yeah, you know you can shoot artillery shells at a nuclear reactor containment all day long. You're not going to get through it.
01:57:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, Paul. Do you want to take a break now, or are you done?
01:57:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think we should take a break. I guess I really didn't give you many choices. Those are the same choice but yeah, that's fine.
01:57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you want to make a break now or a break no, let's take a break next you're watching windows weekly paul thurot, richard campbell, I'm leo laporte.
01:57:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This episode brought to you by one password. I know you know the name one password, but one password's got something brand new. Answer this question for me. Do your end? Oh, they're so good. They always work on just on company-owned devices, and they always only use eight IT-approved apps, right? No, of course not. They brought their own phone and laptop and who knows what's on there, right? So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged devices running all those unmanaged apps? Well, 1password can do it. They have an answer. It's called Extended Access Management. 1password. Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device. You don't even need to put MDM on these devices. It solves problems traditional IAM and MDM can't touch. I mean, come on, you can't tell a contractor. Hey, before you enter our network, you're going to have to put an MDM agent on your device. No, they're not going to do that. That's why this is so cool.
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02:00:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I muted myself oh, okay, hello, ricardo.
02:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello, I'm welcome, I'm happy to be back I love having you on because you have such a wide ranging, you're such a polymath, such I'm up to stuff.
02:00:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know like to tell stories, so it's nice, I'm always concerned about these you keep talking about such cool stuff I did you know? Like to tell stories, so it's nice. I'm always concerned about these. You keep talking about such cool stuff. I know that you know. Don't ask me about college sports, goodness knows no, that's paul's bailey wick.
02:01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, is it? Is it, let's talk? Uh, you have some random dot net news here, I think yeah and I wrote some notes for you.
02:01:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mostly post this for richard because I he's the NET man. What I will do throughout the year is I kind of follow as NET progresses, each version, and every once in a while I'll be like, should they release something? And I go to the NET blog to see maybe I missed something, you know. So I just happen to look back and so I did know that the NET 9 first preview was earlier in the month a year ago, and then Richard has added some more context there, so I guess the previous version of that was actually after this date two years ago.
02:01:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're in the window for where preview 1 should be. So then I went to GitHub and actually looked at where the issue's at and they're in the unreleased phase of preview 1. So they're still gathering up issues phase of preview one. So they're still gathering up issues to get to a build. Okay, yeah, so it's imminent. I would say probably imminent. It would be surprising if it was another couple of weeks. They're they're in the span now where it should show up right, okay, yeah, that's as well yeah about par for the course.
02:02:19
It's around this time.
02:02:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'm very curious what they'll do around WPF for NET 10.
02:02:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a lot of action in the Maui side of preview of NET 10.
02:02:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and even if there is, there will be something in there for WPF, but it may not be in preview one, you know, like it might be something they don't talk about until later.
02:02:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it takes time for each of those teams to put their pieces into the overall build right nominally. This is part of the win. Sdk right, it's actually separate from the core dot net framework, so it may be maybe released into the front rail.
02:02:57
Yeah, yeah I was just wondering yeah, no, you're, you're right, you should be keeping an eye out, for it should be any time in the next week or two, normally, or there's something's happened, it'll be a little later. They did seven previews of NET 9, right, and then two release candidates. That's a lot, yep, and you got to kind of hit it all the time right.
02:03:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this just arrived in my feed while leo was doing the ad, so I have to kind of look at it for a second. But, uh, if you have an xbox series xrs console or an xbox one as it turns out, um, you have to use the internal drive for native games that are specific to that generation. You can use an external drive which is something connected via usb3, whatever it is, for legacy games, right? So if you have, like, an xbox 360 game that works with backward compatibility, you can download it to that and whatever so today microsoft has released a new system update for both of those generations of consoles with support for larger hard drives, and I'm trying to figure out what that is.
02:04:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What does larger hard drive?
02:04:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
mean, yeah, what's the number? So that's what I'm actually looking at.
02:04:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The happy number would be 16 terabytes, but you know, or maybe 20.
02:04:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's say oh, here it is. A hard drive will create partitions at a maximum of 16 terabytes, 16 terabytes per partition. So that says you could have a hard drive bigger than 16 terabytes, which you'd have a hard time finding.
02:04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would think I don't there's a few 20s out there. I wouldn't spend it on an xbox. That's kind of no, that's right. I mean it makes a lot more sense to say put a 16 terabyte in and yeah, I was like could you have a single partition, even download 16 terabytes worth of games.
02:04:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, you know. You know you can.
02:04:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you'll probably get a call from your ISP. It's like you done.
02:04:50
That's a lot of bandwidth. Anyway, I once did it. I once did it after the, the Sendai earthquake, that stuff. In 2011 we were I was one of the customers I was working with had a data center in tokyo and they wanted to move their exchange server. They were going to move it down to asaka, further south, and so they said we're starting to file transfer on this, and I think it was something like 40 terabytes and I'm like I want to sneak in at this one.
02:05:17
Yeah, gentlemen I can get on an airplane today. Yep, fly to your office, buy a couple of hard drives copy them, fly to Osaka to sell them, and you would still not be done. You have not done the math. Terabytes are big.
02:05:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I had my own experience with this over the past week or two I downloaded my Google takeout of that. You know the YouTube thing I keep talking about loaded my google takeout of that. You know the youtube thing I keep talking about and if I let me see off the top of my head, it was I the first one I did. I did in two gigabyte chunks and there were 860. It's some crazy number of files on my cat. That doesn't make sense because you have to manually click each one. It's stupid. So I was like all right, I'll take that. What's the biggest file size? The biggest file size was 50 gigabytes and I think there were 63 files. That took a while and I don't have enough disk space so you have to unarchive them and delete them and it's a pain.
02:06:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Three terabytes, man, that's just not going to happen that quickly.
02:06:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it took the better part of a week.
02:06:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just got one of these, which is an NVMe with two terabytes on it.
02:06:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So that's now a two terabyte drive right, yeah, yeah. So I have slightly bigger versions of that Like.
02:06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a lot bigger versions of that. This is a two terabyte for NVMe RAID array. That's like yeah.
02:06:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A lot bigger, of course, and we're getting too close to the terabyte that'll fit up your nose.
02:06:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing, right Is it fast.
02:06:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, wow, and it's usbc, you know?
02:06:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I'm playing with different storage options off of the roadcaster, right.
02:06:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like how do I want to do this?
02:06:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah does it get really hot? This thing has giant look actually.
02:06:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the toshiba s external ssd I have would serve as, like a mug warmer. You know, you can just put a mug right on it and be good.
02:07:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I used to do that with SETI at home. Right, I had a water-cooled PC and I had the little mug warmer water loop and whenever I wanted to warm up my cup of tea, I'd just run a SETI at home, work on you no time at all. That's hysterical.
02:07:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's funny, oh my God.
02:07:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All right, but we were talking about Xbox, yeah.
02:07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we got the console thing. Oh yeah, so second half of I wrote in the notes many other games. There's actually three other games, so a total of four games coming up between today and the end of the month through Game Pass. One of them is a big one, that's that Avowed game we talked about about it's a big about.
02:07:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was a blockbuster title at the time yep, so that's out.
02:07:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um uh, a racing game. I've never heard of watchdogs. I've heard of, but watchdogs legion is either. I don't know what that is. Rug trader, just to remind you.
02:07:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's so many more games than you know.
02:08:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep yeah, not a lot of act, not a lot of activision and not a lot, a whole lot of blizzard games in there. Yeah, so much okay, so I referenced this earlier.
02:08:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But, richard, uh, you at one point I feel like this might have been as long as a year and a half ago.
02:08:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're talking about how ai could be used to generate assets in a game like in real time, like, uh, you could picture an open world game, whether it's like out in space with planets, or just like a western on a single planet or whatever it is, and it's like we're going to do side quests and whatever, and every game is different. And uh, microsoft today uh announced something called muse ai, which is a generative ai model specifically for game. What they say, game ideation not a fan of that word, but um, but kind of touches on this topic, right, um, and you know, yeah, I mean, I feel like this is inevitable, like this, this will happen yeah, as I need to, because the gaming, gaming development, is just too expensive yeah, and even like I was, I I described this to my wife in the elevator heading to lunch because she's fascinated by everything I talk about.
02:09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I mentioned to her how you would, because she can't get away.
02:09:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
She's stuck the elevator door closed. You could hear her screaming and it was like For the next 90 seconds.
02:09:14
This ride is going to take what it takes, just suck it up.
02:09:18
No, but I did mention how Richard had talked about this and I said you know.
02:09:24
I said I know you don't care about video games but, like in this, we've been talking a lot about AI and how you know, like the conversation we had, you know that it's going to apply to places where maybe it's not obvious to you at the time whether it's an open world thing, like the type of game I wouldn't really play, whatever where now you have this infinite number of possibilities for whatever it is scenarios, places, weapons and vehicles and whatever it is.
02:09:51
But even something that you might think is a little simpler but you just actually touched on this is expensive. Like if I play a game like Call of Duty and I specifically go in and play multiplayer only and I want specific game matches or whatever, one of my frustrations with this game aside from the players, the people themselves, who are all horrible human beings is it's the same maps over and over and over again. And if you go back over the history of Call of Duty just to keep it to this one game, there are classic maps from every version of the game and they bring them back and they do these things. But I mean, it's not hard to imagine just the game type I play, like the hardcore team deathmatch or whatever. Every game you play could be different. It could be, you know.
02:10:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Call of Duty no two same maps.
02:10:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but they know what works. They know the things that resonate with players. They know the ones that are the most popular. You could just keep generating those and and you could kind of imagine the argument against it There'll be some guy who's like but hold on a second, I create these game levels Like I spent months on this and it's like right Well and that's the problem about uh, they've got a case about.
02:11:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you need a little. You don't want to have a super overlord position that everybody can you know whoever gets up there is going to dominate, like there's lots of control on that, on all those issues. But I but, I was just thinking in terms of having worked with a bunch of folks who do the voiceover work for video games. Like the scripts are massive. You're doing these multi-path possible conversations, all kinds and it's funny there was mary saying I have definitely said things nobody will ever hear in that game.
02:11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, because it was such a generate those as such a rabbit right on the fly right.
02:11:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a two pieces of that. Not only a far less work, but also you've played a game long enough that you see the same character saying the same things over and over again. The idea that this language could be dynamically created based on intent rather than that's right.
02:11:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And also like evolve Right.
02:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean not just how many times you want to hear about my arrow and my knee Right? It's yeah, yeah.
02:11:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.
02:11:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And.
02:11:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is this is going to. This is a great example. Like this is going to change everything and you know yes and feel bad for all your friends who are game makers yeah of course, but they were also struggling under the weight of 500 people.
02:12:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
$200 million in five years to make a game Like. It's just not so if the game doesn't sell several billion dollars, yeah, it's over like you made.
02:12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just lost money right which is why you see so many sequels. It's the same problem with movies, right, it's just you can't take the risk, you can't take the risk.
02:12:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's incredible. So I think this is neat. I I look nothing is uh 100 positive. I get it like. But I mean I any every technology has led to whatever job losses and negative things. But the goal is we're pushing forward, yep.
02:12:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're finding a way to get through this hurdle, it appears.
02:12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sorry.
02:12:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let's see I think it was last week we had some data from Take-Two that suggested that Microsoft might have sold about 30 million current generation consoles. We knew at the time that Sony had sold about I think it was 65 million. So not too bad a little bit worse than two to one, but not as bad as maybe some of us had thought. As maybe some of us had thought. And then Sony has since put out their latest quarterly financial results and they actually just had the best quarter that PlayStation 5 has ever had.
02:13:31
And it's not like PlayStation 5 is new. I know it's crazy. Well, they came out with a Pro. I don't think that's it. That's a very expensive console. But I have a hard time rationalizing their success in a way, because I don't feel like they've done anything extraordinary. I can't point to anything and say, yeah, clearly this is what they did, but they sold 9.5 million of these things in the quarter. They've now sold 75 million overall it. But here's the thing I, I and like I, I follow this industry, I follow this product. I. My understanding was that this generation of consoles was falling well short of the previous generation, in part because of the pandemic and the supply constraints that kind of got it off to a bad start and whatever. But if you look at a graph of this against the PlayStation 4 at the same point in its life cycle, they are 100% neck and neck, and I think the PlayStation 4 the same point in its life cycle.
02:14:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they are 100% neck and neck and I think the PlayStation 4 and they're expensive.
02:14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're more expensive. Yeah, so you know, I do know that things like, for example, the best generation for Microsoft was the Xbox 360. It sold somewhere in the 80-something million units, barely beaten out, but basically neck and neck with the PS3. Things started to go south in the next gen. Um, you know playstation overall, I'm sure the playstation 2 is by far the best selling console. But you know, if the goal is to sell better than 88 million or whatever it was for ps3, like sony has done it, like the, the playstation 4, I don't know if I have the number here, but I want to say it's 115 million somewhere in there. I don't think we're going to see that ps5. I think things are going to change more quickly now, but, um, but I would have assumed this was doing pretty bad, you know, relatively speaking, because everyone but nintendo was doing pretty bad, but actually they're doing pretty great. So, yeah, uh, good for them.
02:15:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, I'm just astonished that a what four-year-old game machine now just had a record quarter yep, yeah, that doesn't usually.
02:15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, usually the first couple years of the best and it kind of trails off. Sometimes you try to do like a well, you always try to do like cost savings. You have cost reduced versions of consoles and there are mid-season bumps, so to speak. Like microsoft tried this with the connect um with the xbox one series, they did kind of a neat job of like xbox one to series like the s to x, where they kind of improve things across the board each time. Um, playstation 4 I don't follow it as close, but I there was a ps4 pro, obviously, um, but the ps5 line, like you said, yeah, it's much more expensive and um, it's interesting that that hurt microsoft a lot when they tried to do that with the forced bundling of connect with xbox one. It hurt sony with ps3 actually, um, because they had the blu-ray was expensive at the time. It clearly has not hurt them. Uh, with the ps5, I don't. Like I said, I can't.
02:16:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In some ways, it being clear that there's one dominant machine and you should have it. This we may be seeing yeah, what we may have just seen is a whole bunch of xbox owners buy a ps5 well, yeah, now that they're well.
02:16:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, because microsoft made an ad that showed a ps5 and said this is an xbox. So I guess we're confusing people now. But, right, more and more games are going to come to PlayStation and Switch too, by the way. But yeah, microsoft's strategy to kind of meet you where you are is, you know. I compare it to what the rest of Microsoft does. This is like a Satya Nadella thing, but the reality is, if you accept the fact and you should because they are that Xbox is a game publisher, like Activision was when it was a standalone company, that is what they do, and you're not going to sell games on one thing, I mean, you're going to support as many platforms as you can. Anyway, sony's doing wild, sony's doing great.
02:17:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're doing okay. They're doing great. Playstation update for the week yes, You're a PlayStation fan boy.
02:17:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
report of the week. We're doing great, Everything's great.
02:17:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, hey, let's take a little break because, back of the book's coming up, we have about 20, 25 minutes left. It means plenty of time for you, richard, and your brown liquor pick of the week.
02:17:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got a fun one Best tip.
02:17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, I would like to get out by, uh, uh, two o'clock pacific, so that's not. We have a guest on. I am. I don't want to keep them waiting, but I think we're here to help. I think we can wrap, I can. We can do this quick.
02:17:50
Our show today brought to you, uh, by our club twit members. I just want to do a little club twit flog and plug because you guys are so great. How many do we have now? Lisa is about it's getting to 14 000. Yes, yeah, I haven't seen the number 13, 14 000. It's a good number, uh, and that's wonderful.
02:18:13
We want more, not because we're greedy, but because the more people in the club, the more we can do are. Yes, we're advertising supported, uh, for that way, it's always free for anybody who can't afford to join the club, and we like that. We also like the fact that. You know we get some pretty great advertisers, but they don't cover the whole bill by any means. There's still lots of expenses and that's where the club members make a huge difference. Now it's only seven bucks a month for that. You do get ad free versions of all of our shows, which is, you know, nice. You're paying for it, so you don't need to hear the ads. You also get access to the club twit discord, which is probably the best place to hang out ever for people like us. Uh, not just talking about the shows, but about everything else that's going on in the world a lot of ai conversations going on there and so forth. But you also get um special events. We've got some fun ones coming up.
02:19:07
Stacy's book club is a week from tomorrow. Good book, I gotta finish it, but it's real, I'm really enjoying it. Uh, those beyond the wall by micaiah johnson. Uh, we've got chris marquardt's photo workshop every month. If you're a photographer or an aspiring photographer, this is a great place for information. Anyway, seven bucks a month, lots of benefits. Most importantly, it keeps us doing what we're doing. So if you value the programming you get from uh, from twit, and you want to keep going or even expand, join the club twittv slash club twit. A deep thanks to all of our existing club members. They, uh, they really are salt of the earth, as, as they say. Uh, paul, would you like to kick things off with your tip of the week here?
02:19:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I mean I kind of ended up talking through this earlier, but I would just say, you know, for you folks out there denying ai and whatnot, uh, you know for you folks out there denying AI and whatnot you know, you deniers.
02:20:06
Yeah, the earth is flat. You know you and Shaquille O'Neal are onto something, I get it, but I think you should look for that aha moment Like you're going to find it. It may not come in that thing. That is the thing you do and the thing you care about the most, but I think that's part of the point. If you want to avoid um ai in, you know, like I'm a writer in writing, okay fine.
02:20:29
But I think we're at the point now where you, you'd almost have to avoid it entirely, to try to like to not have this happen, like I think you'd be surprised and I the one thing I didn't mention earlier was that I, I this is one thing I did talk to my wife about I, before I published this, I was like I didn't have her read it, but I was like, can I just go? I don't want to. I want to make sure I'm not insulting anyone here. Like I, I, I, I want people to actually think about this and maybe take this leap or whatever. But I was surprised that the Was very positive and a lot of people saying, actually this did happen to me and they told their little story. So I think you know I would just give it the time of day. I think you'd be surprised, and just for all the reasons we talked about earlier, so no reason to beat that to death.
02:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess Try perplexityai. The free version is pretty good. In fact, there's somebody who's saying I never pay for it because the free is just as good as the paid version, which may be true.
02:21:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in an interesting time right now where that's the case with a lot of stuff. I do pay for Microsoft 365, so I get some AI credits, whatever that nonsense is, but I use it for a lot of the images for the site. I've done stuff with Copilot, which is free for me. I've never run into limits with these things. Every once in a while I'll go look see like how many credits I've used, and even when I'm like three weeks into a four-week cycle I've used like three. It's like that. How? So like, yeah, there's a lot of free ai. There's no reason, you know, that was one thing I'd ask my wife. I said you know, she's like she tries a bunch of different things and she has never paid for anything. But she says you know, if I get to the point where I'm using it so much and it's so valuable to me, she's like 20 bucks a month. I mean like I would pay that. I'm like, yeah, there you go.
02:22:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I pay 20 for perplexity, 20 for Claude, 20 for chat, gpt. I'm sure there's others. I don't pay for copilot, it's the one thing I don't pay for, yeah. Or Apple intelligence, which is not so right, not so intelligent, yeah. If that's one thing I feel bad.
02:22:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
if you, if you think ai is as apple intelligence. You're missing the boat. Look, there are cool little sparkly effects in iMessage. I'm not really sure what you mean by that, but, um, yeah, it's not. Well, I don't use. I mean so, well, okay, I mean actually this. I actually this is something I struggle with. Like I don't really I'm. I'm trying to wrap my head around this too. So I don't look at my phone and think, okay, what could I do to make my life better on my phone? I guess I think of it in terms of productivity stuff on my computer and I run into a block with writing is good for me, because it's not my job and I'm not an expert, and that maybe is an ideal example for me, right, and so I am. I'm trying, but I also I'm trying to figure it out too, right, you know what I mean. So it's kind of I'm kind of it's I am struggling with it. Anyway, do better than I do. That's just. That's the tip. And then the app pick I.
02:23:18
I wanted to talk about this last week and we ran out of time, and now I realize I don't want to take that time today either, but I'll just say that as part of my online services stuff. I don't want to get into Richard's thing too much either. I want the primary source of my data to be local, if you will, and not in a big tech thing. I'm still going to put it in a big tech thing. Right, I need replication as well. I really like Notion. We use it a lot, it's great, but there are some downsides to it, one of which is that there's no offline at all. Basically, it's not files based and I could write in notion, but it has this sidebar with higher records of yeah, where would you save it?
02:24:00
it's weird and, by the way, what if notion does to me what google did to me and I just they? Just say, oh, you can't get into your account, yeah, I don't have any way to, there's nothing I can do.
02:24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not, it's not, it's not mine but we use it for, uh, your show notes and it really has worked so much better. We used to use astonishingly, yeah, yeah, yeah, what we used to use I forgot the name of it OneNote, it was terrible.
02:24:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mary Jo and I. We didn't argue with each other. We both argued together against OneNote Like we hated it. It was so bad with live. We would literally text each other and say, hey, let me know when you're out of the document so I can add something, and I'm like, okay, you're out, okay. And we would go back and forth. It was stupid. So there are 1 million Notion competitors and some of them are the thing I just described. In other words, it's a local file-based thing you can save to the file system. It looks and works just like Notion, but you can sync it through the thing you're already using, which might be OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever, or your NAS or whatever. Who cares. So I'm kind of investigating that and I'll I'll just leave it at. I'll look at this more in the future. But one of the big ones and most of you probably heard of it is a obsidian which is a. It's good, it's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty good. Is this a?
02:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
log seek, which I keep telling you about and you keep forgetting, l O G S E Q, which is really like more like a notion, an offline notion say that again, I'm gonna l-o-g-s-e-q-s-e-q. Okay, I'm gonna look that way I think obsidian is is starting to become the leader. You know, it's the new.
02:25:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, a lot of it has to do with the extensions of plugins, and that's huge, huge ecosystem. It's interesting, um, and then also just from a markdown perspective, ia writer is my favorite markdown editor on the mac. The version on Windows is a pale imitation. I've been using TypeHorror, which is very good and maybe a little more word processor like, but IA Writer 2.0 is now out for Windows. They had announced this, I think, in December with a limited beta. If you bought IA Writer on Windows, you're going to get this one for free, so you might as well just go grab it. While you'll get it automatically offered to you. It is better. It's still not as good as the Mac. I was like oh, maybe it's still not. You know, it's just not. It's worth looking at if you care about Markdown and stuff like that, but it's still not as good as the Mac version of the same app unfortunately All right.
02:26:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, paulul, sometime if you want to spend more time on this, I I think this is a good subject.
02:26:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's definitely going to come up again. I yeah it will.
02:26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm sorry to I don't want to trunk out anything.
02:26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I did it. I. I'm I'm actually still not ready myself, so okay, it's fine, yeah now it's time to run as radio richard campbell who's coming out more like running as administrator, but yes, so I'm 28 episodes away from a thousand.
02:26:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I gotta come up with a good party. Oh, you gotta have a party. Yeah sure, yeah be this fall.
02:27:01
Eliza Tarasilla is one of the folks working at Microsoft on Azure DevOps, and so she told her story of emerging a new product that Microsoft needed internally.
02:27:12
They call Managed DevOps Pools.
02:27:14
So this is about managing dev resources in the CI CD pipelines when you're doing testing infrastructure or you're doing pre-prod runs or anything like that, where you need to stand all these resources up in Azure and then you need to tear them back down again and you usually want to have them set up with certain standards and so forth.
02:27:33
And what she was discovering working internally with Microsoft on Azure DevOps, was that every team had their own custom code to do this, so they basically turned it into a product that is simplified work at Microsoft, and now they're making it available to everyone to say, okay, we think if we needed this, maybe you need this as well, whether that's even if it's on-prem servers or it's virtual machines or it's container infrastructure or it's instances against SaaS products. All of those things can be built into these packages that you can then assign to a pipeline for a given project, and so eventually you can come up with a set of standards for the way that apps are tested across your organization or based on particular resources, so you don't waste money and you don't expose as much security vulnerabilities. Expose as much security vulnerabilities. You know an awful lot of the future secure initiative was about old demo apps and lost sort of resources allocated to projects that aren't in development anymore that represented insecure service area, and so these are the kind of tools that help you clean that mess up.
02:28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very nice Run as radiocom. Yeah, soon to be a thousand years old.
02:28:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Jeez, I'm starting to feel that way. I haven't. I haven't. Like you, I haven't missed a wednesday since the first episode, april 11 2007.
02:28:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every wednesday you've been doing so. You've been doing it longer than we've been doing this, for sure a while yeah, dot net rocks.
02:28:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It goes back to 2002. So and now we're at what? Are we at 1939 right now? So we're sort of staring. We've been referencing like on this year, so now the whole debate is when we get to 2002, do we reference the fact that the show was going?
02:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on. So it wasn't a podcast. I mean the term podcasting.
02:29:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Anyway, it was an internet audio talk show for dot net developers. Yes, yeah, but you still did. You have an rss feed? They didn't exist, but I would argue that carl implemented. When Dave Weiner published that spec, he implemented it. That day we may have had the third RSS 2-feed in the world, one of the first. Yes, well, I think it's the only one that's still running, like it's the same URL.
02:29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You mean its daily source code with Adam Curry is no longer running.
02:29:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oddly enough, yeah, Exactly so. Yeah, we may have been the longest continuous operating.
02:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's really something to be proud of that's great.
02:29:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean there's some npr shows that are older than us that then moved over right, but uh, it moved into that. But we were there right from the very beginning and I think it's partly because the tech audience could make it work right yeah, well, exactly yeah. All the first podcasts were technology, yeah yeah, they had to be pretty much yeah we had to pave the way for the murder podcasts yep so first technology then murder
02:30:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you can actually see how that makes sense all right, I want to do some liquor.
02:30:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's get some liquor this past weekend, uh was the celebration of my 30th wedding anniversary oh, happy anniversary to you both.
02:30:24
That's great. We had a really great time. A bunch of friends came up and one of the whiskeys that was brought was signal hill, which is a canadian whiskey and it is named after the his signal hero, which is a historical landmark in saint john's, newfoundland. It has been a landmark for a long time.
02:30:41
It was arguably the site of the last battle in North America for the Seven Years' War from 1756 to 1763.
02:30:48
This was a war primarily pitting Britain and Prussia against France and Austria, plus Spain and Saxony and Sweden and a few others, and it's the umbrella term for a bunch of other wars that were going on both in Europe and North America, like the French-Indian War and the Spanish-Portuguese War and the Anglo-Spanish War.
02:31:05
But the conflict that happened around Signal Hill was when the French had grabbed that land from the British, who were blockading the St Lawrence Seaway, which is where what was then known as Lower Canada today we call Quebec, then known as Lower Canada, today we call Quebec was cutting off their ability to bring supplies to France. The British succeeded and held the blockade and forced the French to surrender and that site continued to be a defensive site for another millennia, all the way into World War II actually but arguably the most famous thing to happen on signal hill and the real reason it's called signal hill more than anything is that is where marconi set up his first wireless transatlantic message system in 1901 I wonder is that the same station that would receive the signals from the titanic seven years later?
02:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
or quite possibly, yeah, yeah, well wow, years later.
02:32:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So cool, yeah, yeah. So that's where the name comes from. So where'd the whiskey come from? And the answer is dan akroyd, the blues brothers, the ghostbuster. He has a vodka too.
02:32:16
I have his skull that's where this all starts yeah, and then in 2008 he started crystal head vodka, which, with a guy named John Alexander who made the skull bottle, that's what it was famous for is whiskey it's vodka in a skull bottle. But he also was big on no additives, because most vodkas have some sweeteners or flavoring or coloring or glycerin or any number of things. It's like, nope, nothing in it whatsoever. This whole celebrity alcohol thing is interesting because the anachron got to it very early on 2008 the only one I can find earlier than that. The one that makes me sad is sean combs, because he cut a deal with diageo for sorok vodka back in 2007. Oddly enough, that deal's ended now.
02:32:57
Uh, wrapped up somewhat acrimoniously, but uh, did they call it diddy's roofie vodka or like something? Yeah, I don't think they didn't say no additives. Uh, and some of the research I did around this whole celebrity vodka thing and it made this great statement it said in 2018 there was about 40 different celebrity alcohols. Today there's over 400. Jeez, so the reality is, of course, it's a money maker. Uh, the these celebrities and there's a bunch of different ways to go about it, like acroid, clearly is deeply involved in making the product oh yeah, I had an autographed crystal head.
02:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. I think I gave it away when we we shut the studio.
02:33:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I feel yeah but many folks, many celebrities, are pretty hands-off. The the liquor companies, have figured out hey, if I get a celebrity involved, they can give me a boost of, so you know, they'll just try and recruit a celebrity into stuff. So it depends on the level of involvement, and only a few weeks ago, when we were in Mexico, we talked about Fletcher Azul, which is Mark Wahlberg involvement, which I think was fairly hands off. So Aykroyd added whiskey to his repertoire in 2017 and wanted to kind of do his own signature on it, and so it's quite a light whiskey. Actually, it's straight corn and barley malt, so 95% corn, 5% malt. There's no rye in it whatsoever. Regardless of what you may have heard about Canadian whiskey, they don't have to have rye in them. They're not all ryes.
02:34:16
Nothing special about the distillery. It's made at the Hiram Walker Distillery, which is literally the largest distillery in Canada. They make almost 40 million liters of alcohol a year. Their original product that Hiram Walker started with we talked about this when we're talking about Canadian whiskey is Canadian Club. Although Pernod Ricard owns the Hiram Walker distillery, canadian Club, the brand is owned by Suntory but still produced the Hiram Walker distillery. So part of the business of Hiram Walker is making custom bottles of anything, and so Ackroyd's folks, the Crystal Skull folks, went to them and basically are making that. He actually hired a guy named Michael Booth, who was the master distiller at Hiram Walker, who'd recently retired, who went back to make this whiskey for him.
02:35:05
One of the most interesting parts about this whiskey in my mind is well, it's of course aged in ex-bourbon casks. It's also split into ex-Canadian whiskey casks probably Canadian club casks, if I had to guess plus some new oak. So they split across the three and then they blend them back together three to five years old. There's no age statement on the bottle. They do not use chill filtration, which is unusual for a 40 alcohol, but they say that their particular approach to making it means that it tends not to to flocculate in ice anyway, uh, drinking this stuff, we did polish the bottle off.
02:35:42
It is a very sweet to be. That much corn means very, very sweet and no spices to it at all. It's a good mixer. Vodka at $40 a bottle why not? You know you can do anything. You want what is available in the U? S and a few other countries. So of course it's a Canadian whiskey. But yeah, if you just want to a pretty harmless you know nothing. But yeah, if you just want a pretty harmless, you know nothing fancy going on here. This is a nice one. It's got a cool looking bottle and it's got a lot of color for a very young whiskey. But that's because I think of the barrels that it's aged in and they're very big on the fact that it's actually bottled in Newfoundland and cut with Newfoundland water, which is said to be the best drinking water in the world by Newfoundlanders which is said to be the best drinking water in the world by newfoundlanders.
02:36:32
That's pretty. Yeah, just a random weird. You know they bring me this whiskey. I poke around it for a bit, I find out you know dan akroyd's involved and it only gets stranger from there. But yeah, yeah that's cool.
02:36:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the most offensive celebrity, mass-produced whiskey I've run across yeah, I often wonder, like those guys probably just said here's my name, give me some money and that's it right.
02:36:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And lots have done that.
02:36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ackroyd, not so much the interviews.
02:36:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
he's given his involvement, it seems more interested in what he's making there, but he's also early in and still in, you know? You? Look at what Ryan Reynolds has pulled off with Aviation Gin, where he invested early, was only in for four years and then they sold it off for $600 million Unbelievable. I don't know how much of that he pocketed, but I suspect it's got eight or nine digits in it.
02:37:18
So he did very well for that and he did not get involved in production whatsoever. He just made the best gin ads in the world.
02:37:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just as a point of note, I think my son is going to issue the first celebrity mayonnaise, so you might want to pay attention to this whole new category of celebrity condiments.
02:37:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love it and I need this. Yes, is there a mayonnaise of the month club that I could perhaps join?
02:37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know he's got a relationship with Hellman's.
02:37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh my God.
02:37:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's beautiful and they're going to, I think, be the official mayonnaise of his sandwich shop that he's opening in New York. All right, I really think salt Hank mayonnaise has a certain ring to it. But you know Dan Akron doesn't put his name on crystal header signaling. No, he doesn't.
02:38:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just kind of known that he's involved with it and yet he was in early and he's still in, where many of these other celebrities have come and gone quickly, Like I said celebrity condiments.
02:38:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My son's going to be the first 20 years from now. You'll be thinking back.
02:38:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You heard it here. I remember when leo told me some days, all my condiments be endorsed by celebrities.
02:38:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dan akrod's mustard sauce it's gonna be great. Uh, that is my friends richard campbell. He is there in madera park, british columbia uh he's still blowing hard.
02:38:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The white caps are large.
02:38:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were worried because, uh, you have you, your power is out earlier. Yeah, I know this isn't a competition.
02:38:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's also lousy here. It's only 61 degrees out today oh shut up easily.
02:38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
15 degrees cooler than normal look at that beautiful loon lake. That is gorgeous.
02:38:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is gorgeous clouds are stuck on texada island over there, but there's white caps all down the channel. So uh it's, I think, if the wind is largely missing us.
02:39:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You see, the trees aren't moving the trees aren't really moving, so good it is blasting up trickamilly channel, so we're safe and there's our title, blasting up trickamilly channel if you know what I mean.
02:39:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you know what I mean I'm calling hr.
02:39:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what p did. He said um, richard is at run as radiocom. Don't hope, please don't hold me against him, not for too long anyway. Uh, he is also, uh, the host with carl franklin of dot net rocks, and you'll find both at run as radiocom. Paul thorat is at thoratcom t-h-u. R-r-o. Double goodcom. Become a premium member for extra goodness. And, of course, his books at leanpubcom, including Windows Everywhere, a History of Windows Through Its Development Frameworks, and the Field Guide to Windows 11. Both constantly updated. Well, certainly, the Field Guide probably more.
02:39:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, although there's definitely stuff coming for the other one too Nice. I've got to figure out how I'm going to do this. Awesome, yeah. Stay more. Yeah, although it changes. There's definitely stuff coming for the other one too nice. I gotta figure out how I'm going to do this, but yeah stay tuned.
02:40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're about to delve into ai and our re? Uh rejiggered uh this weekend, formally. This week in google, nay, this week in google. Now, intelligent machines uh, thanks again to our club members. You can watch us do this show every wednesday. We do stream it live on eight different platforms. Discord for our club members. You can watch us do this show every uh wednesday. We do stream it live on eight different platforms. Discord for our club members youtube, twitch, tick tock, xcom, kick facebook and linkedin uh.
02:40:33
So if you want to watch 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern time, 1900 utc, on one of those channels every wednesday, um, after the fact, of course, which is probably the best way to watch, it's to you at your convenience uh, you can get audio or video from our website, twittv slash ww. There's a youtube channel dedicated to windows weekly great for sharing little clips. In fact, we take richard's uh whiskey clips and we've made them a playlist so you can share those with a whiskey lover in your life, if maybe you, if that's the lover in your life, uh, and then you could subscribe in your favorite podcast player probably the best way to get it. So you get it automatically, you don't have to think about it you'll have a episode of windows weekly to enjoy every thursday morning. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Always a pleasure, uh, really enjoy the show and I will see you next week right here. Thank you winners, thank you dozers. We'll see you next time on windows weekly.
