Reflecting on Tech and Future

Okay, so Valve sent me a steam machine today and this is the part where Brad would usually go huh , but he's still out on a family matter. So the cold open is just me today. I'm going to talk a little bit about the steam machine give, some first impressions , and then we're going to move on to the real show . I'll have a full episode next week. I just got it in too late to give it the time that I needed to do to do a real evaluation and decided to go with plan B instead. So we'll talk about the Steam machine on next week's episode, unfortunately, that's after the pre order window opens for anybody who's interested in it. My guess is that there's probably not all that many people who have access to pre ordering it, so it'll probably be fine . But the first impression is really positive . Pricing stuff aside, which we'll talk about in the full episode next week . The hardware feels much more like a console than any PC I've ever plugged into my living room. It does the console stuff. Like it does one set of updates. So the system updates everything all at once . There's no kind of he,y I, have to do update the OS, I have to update steam, I have to update, you know, drivers, whatever. You just hit a button every once in a while and it does the update. You can power it on by pressing a button on your Steam controller. You can it'll do the HDMIC stuff to change the inputs on your TV and receiver . You can change the volume from inside on the TV from inside the Steam UI . That stuff is working really , really well and generally speaking the games that play on the Steam Deck are playing fine on it as well. I kind of got into some of this stuff on NextLander this week with Vinny and Alex , but I've been really pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to launch games and to kind of dig into like how much it gets out of your way and just lets you play the games. Other stuff to talk about on the kind of first impressions , the box experience was really nice. They packed it in a bunch of cardboard. It's all recyclable . They sent me the premium the more expensive kit with the two terabytes of storage and the two faceplates a, red cloth one and a brown wood one . Both of those face plates magnet on so you can just pop the front one off and pop the pop them on and off really easily . The noise on it is very, very low. I haven't heard it sp in up yet, even when I was playing what I would consider modern console games like let's see I played a lot of zero zero seven. I played a fair amount of High on Life two , which is a relatively new release . And all of the kind of stuff I've played just kind of works. I haven't heard the fan from where I sit across the room eight or ten feet . It doesn't turn off the TV when you turn off the console or put the console to sleep. Oh, other things it can do. It can sleep and save the state in your game and then resume and the game comes back. That hasn't failed at all on me, which I thought was interesting. So yeah, like it's a pretty consolely experience for a personal computer, especially one that's running Linux . I haven't done any kind of Linux desktop work with it yet. I haven't had to I haven't gone to install anything. I haven't installed the glorious egg roll versions of Proton. I haven't installed heroic or any of that kind of stuff. I haven't installed Decki Loader . I'm just using it as I would a console so far. So the stuff to test for next week that I haven't gotten a chance to look at yet, which I really do want to spend some time on before we do the episode are things like, hey, how does the desktop work? Can you actually use this as a real computer I need to pop it open and see whether I got one of the two eight gig stick models or the one sixteen gig stick models. I didn't notice any kind of performance hits, so maybe the running single channel RAM thing really isn't a big deal , but yeah, so that's that's I want to dig into that. I want to look at things like how the different face plates perform in terms of noise and stuff like that . I'm looking for ter E easgg s still. There's a couple there's a couple of things you can change the startup video. You can set the startup video to launch every time you resume from sleep or you can set it to never show and you resume from sleep, which I thought was interesting. It has a little LED on the front. You can control that. I made mine look like depending on who you ask, either a cylon or night writer, just kind of switches back and forth with a red light . It's been a really pleasant experience so far and is I gotta say it's much more polished. I guess I didn't get a Steam Deck at launch because there was a pretty good waitlist on that, but I got the Steam Deck Midwin is maybe six months old, the first one and this feels much more polished than that did even then. So this is definitely benefiting from the subsequent few years of Steam Deck and Steam OS development. Now, there are a few things I noticed that are very decky. I think the system , the name of the system when I looked at on the network is still Steam Deck. You know, obviously I'm using this pre release, so I'm still seeing what I assume are much more frequent updates from Valve for the system than you will on the shipping machine. So I've had a couple two or three updates . The steam controller, the puck, all that stuff is updating frequently. I did manage, I paired I tested out the steam controller working with multiple radios . So now I have steam controller, a street steam controller that's paired with both my desktop PC in my office and with the steam machine and you switch between those two by holding down either the right bumper or left bumper the A button and the A button while you press the steam button to wake up the controller and that's actually a really incredibly convenient feature coming from like PlayStation and Xbox controllers that don't have any kind of similar functionality. Other stuff that I need to test before next week, I haven't used any other any other controllers with this yet I've exclusively been using the Steam Machine controllers or the Steam Controller, the second gen steam controller . I want to make sure I test Xbox and PlayStation controllers and as well as the APITO game pad that I use on the reg and then I want to run a couple of benchmarks. The like I said, the performance I think I think somebody on Giant Bomb the other day described it as Cromulant. The performance is Cromulant, which is exactly right. Like it is it is entirely capable , nothing special . It like feels like Vanilla Current Gen Console to me in a positive kind of sense . So it gets some actual numbers there so we can talk a little bit about that. But we have a guest coming to talk about that next week. We might even see if we can get a couple of people in for that one and that's that's pretty much it. That's what I got . So there's a quick , let's say, five or six minutes on what I think about the Steam machine so far. We'll have a full episode about it next week where we'll dig into the pricing stuff. I think the pricing is we talked about this on Next Lander a lot. I think I don't I haven't done the full exercise yet and I haven't really dug in and tried a bunch of different options. I think it would be really hard to beat this price by more than fifty or fifty or seventy five bucks bucks , which is more of a testament to how bad the hardware market is than the work that Valve did But we'll talk about that next week's episode, I'm sure. I guess this is where I usually say something funny, like this time the machine steams you Welcome to Brad and Will Made Techpod. I'm Will. As I said in the cold open Brad's still out on a family matter and this week I am really, really stoked to welcome a new guest to the show, our guest this week is the senior writer is a senior writer at PCMag , a co host of both the material podc ast and Android Faithful and also was an intern at Maximum PC roughly a hundred years ago when I was still at Maximum PC. Welcome to the Flow Show. Welcome to the show Flow . I love that. The Flow Show. Finally, somebody gives me a show . Hi, so okay, so people over the years have accused us of not talking about Android and Google stuff enough on this podcast because both Br ad was a Windows phone guy for a really long time . And then he became an iPhone person again. Yeah, I know, never forget . But now we're back and you do you've done Android stuff for years. You do a podcast in addition to the stuff at PCMag, you do a podcast with Andy Nako, you talk about Android stuff and what's going on with Google and all that . And I am curious to hear an Android faithful by the way . Of course. That's with our friends over at DTNS, right? Yes, that's correct. Yeah. We love that. Correct. We're big fans over here. We yeah, I miss doing my Tuesdays over there. I used to come on Tuesdays, occasionally and chat and then I started doing PC World stuff. Android' fsaithfuls on Tuesdays if only used Android, then you could have something else on your Tuesday slots. Look, I'm like a Linux is like halfway Android at this point or Android is halfway Linux, but I've been an iPhone person since I met you as I look a little intern. So I did when the pixel came out, I bought a pixel one and I used that for a year and then I bought a pixel two and my wife who I loved dearly was like, hey , you're messing up the group chats. This was back when that was still a problem. No . And then as a result, for marital harmony, I chose, I made my choice and I bought my iPhone ten because also it was shiny and new. And then I haven't been back since. So but Google IO was last month and you were there. You were also at WWDC. I was and I'm kind of curious like but first off I want to start off with like what's the vibe at one of these develop er conferences? Now, I haven't been to one in person in a long time and they used to be really like enthusiastic places where people were really hyped up to be there and like it was it felt like a place like okay, Microsoft build was never like that, but like the WWDC and the Google IO crowds were all people that were really like they were true believers. It was like it was like Tim Cook or Steve Jobs was stand up on the stage at WBC , Larry and Sergei would stand up at Google IO and it was like they were preaching to the faithful. And is it still you still have that vibe there or is it just like your work made me come to this conference kind of situation or somewhere in between . That is a really interesting question . It feels by the way like months ago that I went to conferences because they took over my life and I got like fully ensconced in the worlds . I will say the people that are more of the of the fans that you would say is WWDC because Apple still has like a really like the fan base is so loyal , they will find any reason to continue loving Apple like Apple could start a world war and it wouldn't matter. I have accepted it and I have accepted that. Like I've accepted that there is something about this ethos that really speaks to people on a very deep psychological level that nothing else does in this world. And you absolutely get that being at WWDC. I dress differently for WWGC . I do my makeup different. Like my demeanor is very different. I'm a different flow. I code switch to be there versus on the Google campus. Okay, I got to dig into this in a second, but like it was unclear to me if they didn't invite me, but yeah, do they still invite like there's still people that come to WBC in person, right? Yes, developers, lots of them. It's like when they move them going yeah as they walk down Cupertino streets . Okay and it's just like a bunch of nerds instead of the bunch of nerds walking around Musconi we used to play a game when we would go to WW C at Maximum PC where we were like, Is this person talking to themselves? Is this a person talking to themselves or do they have like an AirPod in and they're on the phone? Because you often couldn't tell from behind, but you could hear the muttering . And it was most often somebody with the headphone in, but sometimes it was just somebody with a think different shirt that was talking to themselves joyously. Is it still that same vibe or is it is this like app developer hipsters these days? Well, hipsters aren't around anymore because they went out with millennials. With the Gen Z. I don't know what they're called now. This is like the six seven kids now. That's where we're at? Is it an alpha? Yeah, no, I'm aware . I'm learning this too, man. I'm just learning . Look, I have a teenager. I know all this. I know I'm no longer the dominant generation. So I've had to come to terms with that. No, but in all sincerity, I would say that there like's more of that on the Apple side of things than there is on the Google side of things. And let me say part of that has to do with the AI . Since the Gemini talk has really taken over the show and they took they plucked Android out of the main keynote and they made it like its own pre week keynote. So now you have the Android show that comes out a week before the very public. I mean, it's still public. Like they still put it on YouTube and they live stream it, but it's all it's for the Android developers who are going into the code reasoning the source code who are submitting apps to the Play Store. Like that's who that is for. And then now Google IO is about here's what you're going to build with Gemini, here's what Gemini is going to do for you . And the crowd has really changed . It used to be really sorry, I'm like on a roll now because I'm a moment don. I'm re living it. So but the crowd has really changed over the past couple years because this was my thirteenth Google IO . Wow , yeah . That's that's started at Muscony and yeah, well so now they do Google IO down at Shoreline. I wondered like one of the things that I've noticed in game stuff lately is that the industry for traditional video games, console and PC g ames pretty evenly split between people who are a lot younger than me and people who are my age. There's not a whole lot of in betweens. The millennials it's like the elder millennials and the very young millennials in the Gen Z around , and there's not a lot of people in their like early forties at this point anymore, which is weird to me. Like it's like that whole generation skipped making video games for probably good reasons because it seems like a disaster is an industry now That's interesting. And and then the tech spaces seem to be the same. Like I look at the people on stage at like a tech keynote and it's a bunch of people that look more like me than like somebody in their twenties at this point . And I don't I don't know exactly like I don't know if this is selection bias and I'm just seeing it because I see people who look like me and like there's a lot of us around it turns out or especially I mean white guys with glasses and beers all look the same. We've known that for a long time but but I wonder if it's just because my generation has accident ally aged into being in charge of things despite our best efforts not to , or if it's that the youngs aren't going into these jobs anymore because they don't perceive them as like the desirable good jobs for kind of a lot of good reason given the layoff situation in both tech and games over the last decade, five years, whatever. I mean, it would be a little of column A and B at that point, right? Yeah . So that's interesting you say that. I've been coming to that point where I'm meeting all these new people and they are so much younger than me and I'm like, oh , I'm feeling like that now. Like I'm starting to miss out on reference like things are kind of flying over my head. I'm like, that's not good , you gotta get you got to get into what the kids are into. You got to start playing adopt me and Roblox. And so I've been hanging out around them, like in the press room, which I don't want to, but it's necessary for the job to do that kind of bit of social engineering. And so now we have influencers in the press room. Wow. And in the beginning, I was definitely very gatekeepy. I was like, what the heck are you doing here? Like you guys are just noisy and annoying and like some of us are trying to work, some of us have degrees . But yeah, but that was just, you know , take your selfie stick and get the hell out of here. Yeah, it was just my own insecurities because at the end of the day, like we're both producing content or for someone or something , for some audience . It's just very different what they do versus what I do, but it's still like a ton of freaking work . And it's because I just start incorporating some of their work . And so hanging around them, you know, yeah, it becomes a little bit of sponge, but it definitely skews younger. It definitely skews younger because that's what their generation picked up to do with work. I guess that's the answer to the question is that generation went out and they all became influencers instead of, you know, getting grown up there are a lot of them just it's a side hustle too for a lot of them because they'll have a main hust le and then they'll have the influencer hustle . You know ? There's nothing more Gen Z than having three jobs. Yeah, I know. So okay, so Google IO is more about AI. Can we talk about the Android stuff a little bit? I've been told that there are at least dozens of Android users in the tech bot audience despite our best efforts. Brad and my best efforts. I'm joking. I'm joking Yeah . Flo made a face there. Three billion devices, but go on. They used to be excited about that. They used to be mainstage worthy, but now it's like kick us off to the to the B stage where the silver sun pickups are. Because they can get a bigger measurement through saying how many devices have gemini? Yeah, how many tokens have you spent today flowing? Noticed , actually, I've been running into the token limit. It's been annoying me . Because they limited us with this last Google IO. They started limiting the tokens and now I'm like in the middle of a research project and then suddenly it's like sorry baby, you ran out of tokens for the day. You're going to have to go down to flashlight. Oh, I don't know what that means, but that sounds bad. They downgrade you from Gemini Pro to Gemini Flashlight, which is like the lightest chatbot. It's the lightest knowledge graph. It's become a big part of the Android experience . And it's hard to talk about ' peoplecause are like , oh, that means you like it. And I'm like , it's a part of the platform now . And I really need to understand this beast is really what I'm I'm studying it. It's like I'm surveying it , you know, I'm doing my own little AP testing. You're doing it in research, but actually for real, not just the way people mean when they say yet, I'm actually giving Google all that data so we know what they're going to do with it. Well, it's funny because it's one of the things that's kind of pushed me away from Google over the last few years, even on terms of like desktop services. A lot more people away. Yeah, because it's my experience has been well, the generous stuff has its own problems. We've talked about to death on the podcast. We haven't get to that. But even like the interpretive stuff so like the stuff that they're putting in the Google s of searches and stuff like that kind of sucks it's it's it's it's not when it's when it's good, it's fine but, when it it's wrong,'s usually hilariously bad. And I worry I just don't trust it. I fundamentally don't trust the stuff that they're feeding me in the in the Google searches and like the mail notification summaries and all the different places. And so I've shifted my usage to places that I don't have to deal with that, which is like my personal choice. And I'm lucky that I'm an independent contractor. So I work inside the spaces that people provide me and then for my own stuff, I can do whatever the hell I want, which is, which is nice . Okay, so WWC, I mean Google IOs almost all AI at this point . Like what you're walking around shoreline for folks who don't know, Google IO happens at Shoreline Amphitheater down south on the peninsula, which is a place that you go to see Jimmy Buffett and like Jimmy World and I guess there's other bands of strike. Actually saw Jimmy World there last summer. Yeah , fortunately. Yes, fortunately about COVID but yes , it's like one of the big open the big open air amphitheaters. It has a it has seats in the front, lawn in the back and then there's a bunch of like hot dog and corn dog sands as you walk through to get to the to the arena during the developer conference. Of course, they are. They cater . They get catering. They get outside catering to come instead. Okay And it's the thing is for the developers, it's fun because they have all these like places where you can like sit your picnicking and you're meeting people and you're networking and they're having talks about everything from Chrome to Gemini to Android development. So it's not , you know, there's sandboxes, there's oh this year they had what was the bit for Morosa development with the banana stand? Yeah, there's always tense in the banana stand. Yeah, they had chocolate covered bananas , the chocolate covered nano bananas. Okay . Is Nano the name of the new Android or something? Is this the snack food that they don't generate the generative art thing? It's called nano banana. Oh, that's why the banana was on all the stuff. When I watched the videos I didn't get that I watched the recaps and they didn't even the joke in the recap but they were the joke was everywhere Oh the joke the joke is a big part of it. The nano banana joke some some she's very high up, but she came up with it in a very cute way, mind you. It is a very cute story , but it is a big part of the branding to make it more palatable for people. It's, you know , let's make it, like, let's give it a mascot . And instead of saying, this is version number whatever, we'll say this is the new Nano Banana . This is the image generator thing. Yes. . It's the one that you use inside GBoard. It's the one that you use. Anytime you do an image generator in Google's ecosystem, it's nanobana. It's a terrible name flow . It's cute . Okay, I mean, look, it's supposed to be cute. Naming stuff is hard. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna joke yes, and these, you know, computer scientists. So yeah , like the thing about Google always was that like you go to Apple or Microsoft or whatever and Microsoft seems like these people in Dockers and Dockers and golf shirts and Google is like at least Microsoft had Coca Cola, okay? Actually, and so did Apple, thank God . What did they have Pepsi at Shoreline ? Is it a shoreline venue? Yes . And then in the press room they didn't have any soda. They need croi The influencers don't drink bubbles man. It's just it's a kombucha and okay so they so the main stage conference was all AI stuff. It was all like Gemini. I saw a lot of stuff about the Gemini, the four point five, three point five, something five . I think it's just Gemini four now. Okay . four point five I don't know. Does it matter the variance? Like it does because the higher you go, the more powerful it is with what you can do with it and what you can feed it. And the more tokens you spend per query. Yeah, exactly. But the more it can do and the more it'll think, it'll take longer to process, but it'll think harder and more and then use more resources. Yeah. Give you an answer. And like it seemed like the big brunt of the Android stuff this year was new ways that they can jam the AI stuff into the Gemini stuff into Android. So for me, somebody who kind of actively has ignored this stuff , Gemini is the overarching AI brand, right? And then all the other stuff lives up under that, but also they're jamming Gemini into every service that I've ever used from Google, it seems like at this point. Okay, so here's the way to think about it. And I actually had a chat with the VP of Android Development about this a couple weeks ago because I asked him myself I said , you know , what so what is Gemini to the Android operating system? And he's just like, it's an agent . That's all you have to think about it. So yes, it's it's in Google's version of Android and Google has managed to bring Samsung on board and all the other manufacturers that want to play within its ecosystem will include some of that stuff, but the real agent is just contained within Gemini and it's such a big part of the Google ecosystem . So the more Google you go with your phone , the more Gemini you sort of invite in. So okay, so this is I'm going to ask a really stupid question now and you can laugh. It's fine . But when Google in the old in the olden times back when I used to have a Samsung phone , Samsung took the basic Android kernel and then put all of their own stuff on top of it with mixed results. It was kind of up and down for a long time. Very different now. Okay . So and actually, what's really interesting is what you're describing has been a big friction point for a lot of Samsung like Die Hard Samsung users because they liked the stuff, like the ability to change the font and all these other things that you could do, but Samsung very slowly has been taking that out every time . So Android, the actual Android OS, they've been doing a lot of foundational work on it . Google has. Google has, that's right. Yeah . For it to sort of be able to scale everywhere, like that was always the goal was for the Android to be the thing that scales everywhere. It's the thing you plug in, and then you plug in Google into that. It's like the Linux kern for client devices basically. It was there. Yeah. Their thing is called One UI . Okay . So it is a different, it's an interface on top of Android. So it's like a launcher skin or something like that. It's more than a skin . Okay . It is Android. Yeah, yeah. It is Android in Samsung's way, but when you do that, you get like Bixby . You get the Samsung AI st uff and you get Gemini . And now you get perplexity . What's perplexity? Is that the Claude stuff? It's Claude. You're right. It's Claude. And I forgot, that's his name. See, I , I feel less bad for this being inscrutable because it's a lot. Like the whole thing is I'm just still getting a hang of Gemini because I have to understand it in some sense to understand what is happening with Android . So okay, so Gemini's the bucket for all the AI stuff at Google, they're jamming it into everything that they make, it seems like. It seems like that's the core. Google views that as the core product that they make at this point. And then everything else seems secondary is the vibe I get . Oh, that's one thousand percent. Okay. Yes. It's written right there in front of you when they took Android out of the keynote. Yeah , well, but also it seems like by this point Meadow would have renamed their company to Gemini if they were Google, right? Like No, because Google still, I think the Google brand . It's still a sub brand under alphabet. I looked it up before we started talking about this. It does, but alphabet is the investor. It's the investor folder. Like yeah alphabet. You never talk about alphabet as an entity . It's just the invest or folder and Google is the big brand name. That's the big brand that's behind everything. So like when I tell people Google is behind Waymo, they're like, oh yeah . Oh, people don't know that. That's wild to me. Yeah, I mean there are people who have no idea about all this like tech oligarch that exists to which I say I'm so jealous at this we at this point, it's funny because like living in the space, I always assume that everybody knows like I assume that the people who are into these things know the things that are common . Like hey RAM cost four times what it did this year, this time last year . And it turns out the people who understand that and know that and have internalized that are just a tiny, tiny, they're the bubbles of sea foam on top of a very deep ocean of people who are blissfully unaware. Yeah. It was perfect metaphor, by the way for the Bay Area because there's a lot of that. Look, there's going to be a lot of people that are really surprised that their iPhones their pixels cost two grand this year, I think I am asking myself if I'm going to upgrade because I upgrade every year just so that I'm on the latest pixel and that I own it so it's my it's my phone that I'm using . But even I'm wondering to myself like, am, I really going to want to do that? I probably will still do it for the bit . It's an anecdote at the end of the day , but I won't be happy about it. So it's funny. I used to be an every year upgrader and now I just do it every two or three years and it turns out I'm fine. It's because I cover phones. If I did not cover phones the way that I do, I think I would be a lot more lax on it. And I miss being that way. I do, but yeah. Okay, so what's what's happening in Android? Is there anything interesting happening in Android that's not AI? I guess is my big million dollar question. Should we ask Gemini? No, no, that's the problem . I'm kidding. I switched Flo, I'm paying for Coggy now . I switched search for the like I've switched search a couple times in the past ten years , but I have stopped using Google on the day to day because I got I literally I got I can't remember what I asked now, but I asked it something and it gave me an answer and I was like, this is the most this is absolutely ludicrous. I am I'm going to signal my dis my dislike of this new this new technology by disengaging as much as possible . Also, I know that Cocki has an AI tier. I'm not paying for the AI tier. I'm just using the give me search like it's twenty ten tier because like I want to go back to the good days. The good days. You could use the URL. Yeah, it's it's enough of a pain in the butt to make that happen that the UTM fourteen or whatever. The other thing is they put it right there in the little carousel at the top so you're like you're supposed to scroll over to Web Mode and click into it . Too many clicks. I know, I know. I just want to type something into my browser loc ation bar. But back to your question. Yeah , Android is still the most customizable mobile operating system . Okay , so it's still you could do so much with it. And I know that that doesn't sound like much with everything that's happening with AI . And I still think one of the big issues with Android is that it is too much of a blank canvas for a lot of people , you know, they really like the way that Apple presents it for them. They really like the package and everything. They're like, this is great. I'd rather have this than whatever that is. But then there's people like me who like to use automation apps and like to have all these like little smart home things that are turned on, you know, by random devices, like just the ability to be able to do that makes me very happy because like that's exactly why I'm still using . Well it seems like the parody is there on both like there's very little difference when I watch the keynote for this and watch the Apple keynote and like everybody's talking about hey man, we have we have this that doesn't Are you talking about like icons and things like that? I don't the design I don't care about the design designs come and go. I was in a meeting earlier today where people were working on a game and they were showing one of the designers who was a child when you and I were both working already was talking about digging up old Skew morphic phone OS designs as a reference point for this game that they're working on. I was like, oh my god, I just turned to dust. People are nostalgic about the wooden bookshelves at IOS. One of my Gen Z friends got a Fruitager Arrow tattoo . Gorgeous tatt oo . Yeah , but when I realized that that was like a really big part of their Zeig , I was floored. Anyway, I don't think I even know what that is flow. Fruitish or Arrow. If sorry, Search Yes , it's like Windows eight era . No, this is Windows X P, isn't it? No, this is fifty Oh, this is like thousands yeah . This is Vista. Vista. Yeah, yeah. Arrows Vista. It was Luna was XP . Wow, that's wild. Okay, so note. Yeah, no, no, I'm but I'm looking at like the I'm looking at like the list of things that they're rolling out and none of it's none of it's revolutionary. It seems like it's actually almost all. It's like, hey, you can scan your receipts and it'll OCR them all automatically using the power of Gemini. Or you can recap a book. You can get cliffs notes generated by Gemini or you can detect scams and like the thing that I miss about Android and I'm curious about where it's at is like I mean I don't I switched to Linux last year and I'm not probably ever going back at this point spoilers for the one of those final . Look, I have I have had the beard for it for a long time so I might as well get in there . But but it's the beautiful thing about it is that you can make it exactly what you want, right? Like you still can. The desktop environment, the how the why I thought about that is because I turned my phone on and I just have the very simple Niagara launcher and yes, my duchy . But you know yeah, so you can still rip out all the stuff that you don't want and put whatever you want in. They haven't they haven't locked it down to that point at this point. All of them and people are still doing interesting things, but also the phones are more interesting. Like this one has this one has RTP lights on it Probably good . RGB lights . Okay, that is basic . And it has a cooling fan I don't hear no, I have enough fans of my life. I don't want to be more fans. No, you do. It also has liquid cooling. Nope, that's too much. Is this a gaming phone? Is this a game phone? Yes, it's the red magic eleven S. And then I've got the nothing phone here with the time on the back. Why does it have time on the back? Why not? I don't ever look at that side. That's the side for other people to look at. I know. Well, I put it two seconds on it and I look at seven hundred seven. Seven seven . It's seven hundred eight now. Did it change? You did. Okay, is it see my, phone is the most accurate clock ever made by man because it uses the power of time servers or something. I don't know So okay so was there good stuff on the AI front? Was there stuff that was exciting ? This seems like a kind of, you know , you know people who have the luxury of being able to afford like an assistant . Yeah, I've heard of that. Yes. And their life, like, they get that stuff taken care of. So there's a goal. My understanding is there's a goal that Google is trying to bring this sort of experience to the platform and I can see what they are attempting because their big thing this last Google IO was the daily brief . And like I wake up every morning and it basically reads my email and my calendar and my messages and says what's going . I mean, that kind of stuff, that I like to think of that as like interpretive AI and that feels good to me. Like I realize that there's some fundamental problems with the technology . Here's the thing. Yeah. And I'm not gonna lie about this. Does it work? It works way too well because I gave Google complete access to my personal information for it to be able to do that . So the problem is and this is where people get sucked in is because you get into the chat bot and then and I know this goes beyond Android and I'm sorry. I know a lot of people Yeah , yeah, but I do interact with a chat bot and the way it will reference private things that I've spoken to it about because I'll like I will talk to it like I'll use it for trying to prop myself so I can write something or whatever . Oh, I was also I fed it my live journal archives . What? This was a bad idea. Oh , this is a bad idea. It's up there. I fed at my live journal archives because I'm working on a memoir and it started referencing them in its replies to me. And there was this one point where we were talking about something unrelated and then it said to me , but that's because you're a hot topic girl, not an Abercrombie girl , which is something that I mean that is real It is real because I had written it in my live journal in the two thousands and you know, you know, would they say that everything you ever post on the internet's going to be there forever and it's going to come back to Hawaii. I didn't expect you to feed that into the machine voluntarily. This is the HTML files that I extracted and took off the website . Oh yeah , before the Russians bought it. So yeah . But then I fed it back into the computer and it's been interesting I've been very curious to see how personal it's going to get with me with this information of mine. And I've been telling I'll tell a couple Googlers. Yeah, like Gemini and I kind of went a little too far the other day, you know? It's like big eyes there. So okay, so I did this. I did I didn't send it my live journal because I'm too old to have a live journal. But I did I talked about it a couple weeks ago in the episode, but I set up open claw locally and was running local models on it and gave it access read only access through the API to my fast mail email archive , which also gave it my calendar, also gave it my calendar and gave it I think access to Blue Bubbles, but I'll read only because I'm nervous about writing . And Blue Bubbles is the thing that lets you get i messages on Android and IOS and Android and Linux and Windows . So it had text messages basically. And I and I ginned up my own pay every morning at six o'clock , give me give me the rundown of the email s that I need to make sure I don't miss because like, I mean, I'm sure like you, like , I'm sure you're in a similar situation. I have about fifteen email inboxes. All of them occasionally get something important in them, but some of them also get like five hundred messages a day that are like ninety nine percent spam . And it's a problem to sort through them. And this is literally the first time in the last fifteen years that I've had a tool that managed that since since Google killed Inbox, this is the first time I've had a tool that managed that well. Well, they took the guts and they integrated it into GMAL and made it worse . Yeah Look, I'm not you're not you're not here so I can you're not here to take Google Zets. They know I'm not I just I wanted to just also say that my husband had OpenaCwl go and scrape for his live journal because after the Russians bought live journal , yes, the Russians, sorry, I'm not . There's a lot of it. It's not all Russians. It's a Russian oligarch by Russian bought live journal and they removed the ability to export the data because that's not in their digital constitution or they don't have to offer that. So he sent OpenClaw to go scrape it for him and they ended up blocking him . Oh because he had a terrifying law to do it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, but the open cloth thing like it didn't for anybody who tries that until I rebooted that machine and I hadn't saved my stuff right so that it saved the memory files and all that and then I had to recreate all the work and I haven't done that yet. It was incredible because it gave me a look at like my appointments, what I needed to do to prepare for stuff. It looked at my to do list, it looked at all that and it was like it was a legit productivity thing. It was the closest I've ever had to having an assistant, right? Having somebody helped me manage my time and the work that I need to do. So I totally get that. I'm also super skezed out by giving Google access to that information . It is I've sort of offered myself . I mean, you're doing it for science. That's fine. And I have been for really a long time. I've been doing this for fifteen years, feeding them my data and doing all of this. And do you ever wonder what their file on you looks like I get I feel like I get inklings and sometimes I do worry , I sometimes do worry. They had that library too, you know? I know that I know from my husband working in Silicon Valley that it really is just as easy as just going into a folder and seeing data . Yeah, it's it's there . So do you I like that they did the airdrop thing? That's exciting. Like they added airbags. Halfed work with Apple on that and then the other half is they just backwards work something to make it work on their end . That's fun. I mean, just there's I think there's like three tiers of airdrop support on the IOS side. There's like the direct point to point one that's kind of iffy and if you walk away too soon then the file just doesn't it just disappears into the ether . And then Apple added some newer stuff that basically s ays, Hey, here's a token that lets you download this file that you'll the other person will upload as soon as it their internet connections . Yeah. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's street pass, but with a payload basically '.s It like a malware delivery used for good, not evil . But yeah, it's it's like it feels very different than the olden days when you would go to the Android or IOS and IOS was the same where you go to the new feature page list and it's like, hey , here's three hundred and fifty five new features each of and it wasn't like all of them were going to matter to you, but some large percentage of them were things that were like, Oh, I actually will use this. Oh, this sounds good. Oh, the game controllers work now. That seems nice . And now, you know, now it's like, hey, you can get all the dresses that look like this from your shopping app. No, and yes, that is like a big thing that they I think they're trying way too hard to try to get the mainstream because they want what Apple has with influencers so bad . Like that's why Apple now has more journalists on the campus is because the influencers were like you need to let us in and they had to eventually let 'em in and they figured out a way to do that. And Google is very jealous of that even when they have tried to give like product to these influencers, the influencers don't end up using any of that stuff . Yeah. And it's frustrating because there are some reasons like I love all of the call screening stuff that the pixel does. For me, that's totally worth that in the camera algorithms are worth it for me just from the pixel alone. T meell me tell about the camera st . Well just I just I like the way that see I'm a little hesitant because I've been liking it up until the Pixel ten Pro , things are starting to change a little bit now that they want you to really go into Google Photos and have Gemini . Oh soup up your business. They want Gemini to soup it up. Okay . So what they started doing, I noticed so I noticed this when I reviewed the Pixel ten A and the Pixel ten A is the budget version of the last pixel flagship. The A series is the budget version of it's the iPhone E, right? Okay . They was I like with this. They have an actual tuning algorithm when you shoot photos with the A because it only has basically like one main sensor . Oh, so they're not doing the multi camera racketing thing. Yeah, yeah. But the other thing is it's tuning in a little bit because the photos that I take with the Pixel ten Pro are very very plain . They're not very post processed because they want you to go in and do all of that with Gemini and go es after. No, thanks . And also, all the stuff that they've been doing with Super Zoom has been not good. The concert pictures that I've been taking this year with the Pixel ten Pro have not in nice as I've wanted them to be what is super zoom? Digital . Oh, it's a digital zoom with AI fill. It's a one hundred X, yeah, digital zoom. Hundred X. Yeah. That's true. Samsung. Samsung did it with the Galaxy Ultra series and so Google was like, well, we can do that with Gemini, you know, or whatever with our AI . Wait, hold on. How is that different than when Samsung got in trouble for replacing your picture of the Moon with their picture of the moon . The thing is they still kind of do that. That's what AI is doing if they're replacing if they're upscaling with AI. If you're of an airplane far away , the AI is correcting the lines on that wing for you before you actually see the picture . Yeah, that's wild. That's a choice. See , okay , this I went and bought an SLR a few weeks ago and I'm like just taking old school photographs again, like by holding by I put manual lenses on it flow. This is I think I'm reverting to the nineties . I'm taking my three DS out for a spin. That's like the new thing now to take to shows by the way. People street passing again ? Yes, well, the DS will then Z is bringing the DS back . Well, okay . And they take and they film concerts with it and then they put 'em on YouTube. But the three DS, that's that's insane. And all the DS with the cameras on them. Yeah, yeah, the yeah, everybody's DSI finally is useful. Yeah. Have you been to do you know about the electronics flea market down south the Bay Area Electronics flea market? Yes, I do. Okay . I've been going to that for the last few years. It's like the second Saturday of summer months, basically from March to September . For a long time, it was a bunch of people sorry. Tamagotchi, I should be going to that. So for the first year or so I went, it was a bunch of guys that looked like me except for ten or fifteen years older. And it was very much shit that I stole from my office twenty years ago and now need to get out of the garage because I'm cleaning it out the garage . And then last year, the year before , we started seeing kids coming in and they were like, Hey, does he move any mini disc players ? Oh , I know where you're going this. And now it's like it's gone from like one or two kids per week per every month to like a pretty good cohort now they're moving around in gaggles . Oh yeah. And they're looking for like old MP three players and cassette type players and the eBay prices of MP three players now. I'm trying to like add to my Sony collection, not a good time. Not a good time for collect ing. I just replaced the battery in my zoom HD the other day I'm zoom in again . I blow it reaching offscreen. So first of all , vintage Sandrio Tin right here. Well, and then this Sony MP three, which actually, no, I did not have when I started at Max MPC No because my ex boyfriend wore it when he got in a fight and it got broken. This is the this is a new well I bought so ld on Flo is that covered in your live journal ? Yes . Actually it's part of the lore. And I've told Andy this story several times about like my deadbeat boyfriends who've broken my gadgets over the years because I always had gadgets and deadbeat boyfriends, but that's another story for another day. Yeah, that's a different podcast. Yeah, that's a different podcast. Anyway, I bought one of the last Sony MP two players that they made with a removable hard drive and a removable battery. Oh nice . And there's such an incredible modding community now . All of them Yeah, they all have modding communities like the iPad, the iPod, the zooms, the those bad creative players that were never good, but some people like excuse me, I had the creative Zen vision M. Yep Yeah, I know. Yeah, it was yeah, anyway. Yeah, the kids the kids are into the old the old disconnected business and don't want Spotify . I got myself an update through player. I got one of those cheap ones on Amazon. Ooh , and I've been loving the heck out of it. It has Bluetooth five point three . So it's got really good range and I am just like, I listen to it with my Sony's. So I love I've been I fixed the zoom up. I found it when I was cleaning up my office a few months ago and I was like, oh, the battery's dead, this sucks. And then I started looking at it and I did the whole thing to fix it. We talked about it. The forearms . Yeah, I look, I went and bought a dodgy battery on Ili Express and then had to do some soldering and clean out a bunch of weird corrosion and it's all good now . But it also was like a time capsule of the last time I synced that thing in twenty twelve, which was awesome . And it's lovely to go on walks and not have the phone going beep, beep, beep, beep beep beep . I agree. I've been really enjoying just going with the music. Yeah, yeah, it's I started doing the thing where I would be on my on my daily walks with my head craned in my phone reading social media. Why are you doing that? No the social media is bad for us, it turns out. It is. So okay , back to the topic what is there anything out of IO that you were like that genuinely made you go Oh man this is really exciting. I'm I'm thrilled about this or what made you excited? I guess is maybe the less loaded way to ask that question . I actually am excited about some of the the agency of the AI . The agent stuff is interesting in with a grimace. Asterisk, yeah, some of it. I think if I if I was a programmer, I'd probably be more interested, but I agree with you. I agree with you. It seems like the one place that it's unequivocally people seem to like. And like not just people like me that don't really know what I'm doing, but like when I talk to people who are who I consider to be smart programmer types, they're they're like, oh yeah, this is actually making me more productive. Well, I'm thinking about it from an assistant standpoint because I'm thinking about all the so I'm thinking about all the stupid , all the stupid things that I have to take care of , like managing , okay, it's not stupid. I love her, but managing my daughter's social life. It's it's like another thing that I have to manage. On top of mine, on top of all the other stuff going on in the suburbs, I'm trying to be a good townspers on. At the same time, you know, I've got a really demanding job and , you know , having a little the idea of having gemini spark that I could kind of tell it like I need you to go help me figure out what I'm going to do with fifteen kids on this day like between these two locations in the Bay Area, make sure that nobody has to take eight y to get there. You know, like sincerely the ability to be able to do that, like that's the emotional labor I want to give to AI . Well, yeah, it's funny. My wife and I talk about this a lot. The cognitive load of being a mom is high and under reported and she follows, it's funny. She sent me a couple of TikTokers that she follows and I started watching. I was like, Oh, Jesus, this is a thing I do and I don't even realize it . Which is good because knowing is the first part of fixing the fixing the problem it turns out . But yeah, like the managing I think I think it's funny. I had a demo a few years ago that was a it was a good pitch and the demo went really badly , but they were like, hey , have you ever had a barbecue and I was like, yeah, I used to do that. I used to have people come over my house every Friday night and we played rock band . And then like the cognitive load of that became such a problem. Ay, nobody wanted to play rock band after a while, but be the cognitive load of managing what should everybody bring became kind of like a full Friday afternoon job . And like it's like, oh, okay . Because if you just put up a spreadsheet that's like, hey, we're having a barbecue on Saturday. Everybody put on your bringing. Then you get a whole buttload of Lecroy and a bunch of potato chips and like three packages of two bite brownies and one pack of hot dogs. And there's thirty people around looking at six hot dogs. Like we're stab going to somebody . And if you add in the complexity of scheduling that, so you're like, Hey, what weekend can everybody go to a barbecue and you send that out to twenty people, then you might as well have another job . Like it's awful. Yeah. Yeah. It's awful . Yeah. So so I totally get that. And I think like if they can deliver on that, it's a really good thing and it's not generative. It doesn't feel icky. It feels like an actual positive use of technology to me. But I did write like the caveat is that you have to give it access to all of your personal information. And I mean, I guess technically you would do that with a human assistant too, but at least the human assistant you, can physically see them and you know you can also fire if they annoy you and Google I can't fire. I'm stuck with Google. And the thing is the thing is they are going to make a big to do about like well you can go in and you can edit stuff and you can say what it has access to. You can tell to forget stuff . You know, and I think it's because they know this is a very creepy thing to know. What are they ? Like this is the other time I get to this point I and ask my self what are they getting out ? Like are they charging is this is this a paid service? Do you have to pay into Google one to get this ? Not yet . Yeah. So they're giving us some services will be put on behind the paywall . Yeah. So the more intricate they get . Yeah, the more tokens you use, right? Because the tokens ain't free, it turns out. Yeah. So I wonder and I wonder then , you know, when I gave when when they gave me a gigabyte of storage for email, I was like, oh, okay, this seems this is weird, but I'll take it. I get a lot of mail. It's nice to be able to save images in there, whatever. You stayed at one gigabyte. That's incredible. No, I'm okay . Do you want to know? It's bad. No, I don't want to know. Do you want to know how many how many unread messages are in my no? I'll share this information if you want. No, no, no, no. Every month I go through and control A and then just mark everything red . It's just they're constantly on me to pay more money. So that's why I was making that joke . Yeah, I'm at fifty four percent of two terabytes used right now. So that but that includes the photo library because Google is the online backup for my photos, which I am like has been the one Google like I've like I said, I've gotten I'm mostly off of Gmail, mostly off of calendar. I use Google Docs because you can't avoid that working in corporate America at this point. It's cheaper than office Well it's cheaper than office and unless you're talking to lawyers, it's better than office, I think for most everybody. Lawyers always want Microsoft because you mess up their subheads. They do. But I don't Google Photos is the one that I actually like, it's the one Google service that I still actually really like. They do a really good job better than Apple of exposing things that aren't gonna leave me emotional trauma, dealing with, you know , lost family members or pets or whatever. Oh really? Mine keeps mine loves to show me my cat. And I'm like, it's been six years . I had to block it was like, Hey, don't there's a three period in August that I don't ever want to see pictures of again . Then my daughter probably did something really awesome that time that I'm never gonna remember but that's f ine. There's it's weird , but it's weird having this huge chunk of memory at the whim of this corporate this giant corporate entity and also the other problem is I'm starting to see a little bit rot in the photos sometimes and I don't feel good about that. That feels really weird to me that because like the whole point of putting them online and not destroying them with my nas in the garage is that I expect them to do a better job of that than I can do . And so far it's a little up and down. Some of the old videos don't work anymore, and I'm like, why is that? That's weird. Bit brought man, I haven't even thought about that. That makes total sense because of course, that would happen with CDs and with tapes and all that. So I've been thinking about that too , by the way, sorry off. I've been thinking a lot about that too because I realized the other day that like I've been going to concerts for so long. Okay, so like I'm going to the warp tour this summer. I went to the Wpar tour back in the two thousand s, but you would have no idea because I took no pictures. All I have is my memory and I think about now and I feel like it's hard is it harder for me to get things out of my brain because I'm so reliant on the smartphone to sort of capture it for me and fill in the blanks when I need it . Like did I give my brain this sort of handicap by overleveraging your tools sincerely. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that lately and I'm in forty now. So I think about Oh gods. No, that's not possible Flow. Wow, okay fresh faced intern flow I just like look, some skills are okay to atrophy. Like I don't need to know how to nap flint in the modern era. Right? I'm good with good with not knowing that. I took a class one time because I was like, I want to learn how to make flint tools. That seems fun. And I went out and my knuckles were as bloody as they've ever been. It was absolutely miserable. My hands hurt for like two weeks afterwards and I kind of made something with a little bit of an edge that lasted about thirty seconds when I started trying to use it to cut something. So like then I went and took a milling class and I learned how to use a mill in a lathe and that it turns out is an actual practical skill that I have used off and on, not frequently, but like if I need to go into someplace, I can probably start the mill and not hurt someone if somebody reminds me of the safety stuff before I get it because it all comes back every time I done that I feel like I used to be so I went to a ton of concerts in my twenties and thirties, and I got a cell phone when I was thirty two, I think. I got an iPhone came out when I was thirty two and I was on board immediately. And when I was thirty five, iPhone ten came out and the photos actually coming out of the phone started getting good . And that was when I stopped kind of carrying a point and shoot camera. Like I had a canonn power shot or something that I carried around for years just in my bag or in my jacket pocket . And when the ten or iPhone four rather came out in twenty ten , I stopped. Those pictures were good enough . And from that time forward, my memories are mostly related to the photos I've taken with the smartphone. From that time previous, my memories are things that I remember doing and thinking about and there are a handful of pictures, but it's definitely like hey I, took eighteen thousand pictures the year my kid was born and I took three hundred pictures in two thousand seven , right ? And it's just it's both a huge data problem because like realistically of those eighteen thousand pictures there's probably three hundred that are really good and I don't really am I ever going to go through eighteen thousand pictures and pick out the three hundred that are good? Probably not . So I need something to surface that for me and hopefully avoid the bit rot as at the same time. So we'll see how that goes. Anyway, got existential. Sorry about that. Yeah, no, I mean, look, mortality a real's mother fucker. Yeah. What anything else? Anything else like what they talked about the audio glasses? Did you get to try those? DC seemed to do they have a camera? Yes, I was I was one of the first people to try those out back in December which I actually felt very like I was very excited to be invited to that because I've been really wanting Android smart glasses . I want an alternative. I like the meta ray bands for them for what I would be using them, which is my first person hiking, which is like listening to music that way, which is maybe asking a question about what I'm looking at while I'm hiking. That's sort of what I'm interested in the glasses for. I'm not interested in using meta to do that. I'm more interested in using who I've already given all my personal information to use Google. You got a sunk cost there. So you might as well go exactly. So can we just stick with one ? Yeah, one faceless multinational corporation . Yeah . Were they good? Like what was experienced? Is it the same as the metaglasses? It's similar to the metaglasses. I would say they were a lot lighter than the metal. To be clear we,'re talking about the metaglasses not, the the ones with screens, just the ones with the camera. And yeah, I'm just talking about the regular old bay band metawayfarers that you can buy right now very easily. That's the pair that I have . And then I am really looking forward to so I got to wear the Warby Parker version of the glasses. Okay not into that because not into that whole aesthetic . The gentle Monster version that is coming out this fall . I am on the waitlist . Oh , I they're they're very they're very feminine . They have like a little sort of like they're like a little cat eye almost. Yes, a little bit. More opal oval, I should say . And then they have the cameras in them, of course, but I like the fact that they just look so chic Can you do like that? Can you do camera stuff with those that doesn't rely on like the metaglasses , I think one of the things that I was conceptually for me they were interesting to like, hey, it would be cool to do a cooking live stream where you have the glasses on your head because like I follow Kenji Alt Lopez and he does he straps a GoPro on his head and then live streams that from his kitchen and he's looking down. Like having hands free access to a camera is super good. Like I had a pair of Google glasses a hundred years ago and it was great because I could take pictures of things and I could show things, shoot video things that traditionally are pretty hard to shoot video for. I remember you were one of the original people to really be gung ho about Google Glass and I pissed away a lot of tested freelance, a lot of tested contribes budget on stupid things, and that was probably the most expensive of them, but I don't know for sure. So yeah, can you can you do live streams off of those? Are they going to let you hook those up to Twitch? Or are you going to be able I assume YouTube you'll be able to stream too? Not yet . I recall vaguely like three meta connects ago or maybe it was two that they said that they were gonna do something similar on the rebands. The thing is, it's all contingent on the phone in your pocket. It all goes to the phone. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the batteries right now are not so good. And also the Raban Metas , for example, they were overheating on my head . Oh, that seems like a bad experience. Because it was very hot outside at the shoreline and so I was using them to take a little B roll of me walking through, you know to send to the social team. And then when I click the button, it goes, sorry, device is too hot right now . It does get hot down a shoreline . Yeah, but I was really surprised at how hot the sunglasses got because I had put them like taken them off to put a top of my head and so the sun was directly hitting them. And I started thinking about it like it seems like a usability problem they should caught the development process. 'cause like you don't we sunglasses when it's forty degrees out usually you wear them when it's hot and sunny and like it's gonna get warm . Exactly. Well So the Google ones are coming the Warby ones are out now or they're coming up this fall. Okay. Yeah, so they were just basically showing like pre release hardware. Okay at Google IO same functionality as the meta stuff basically . Pretty similar except you can do extra stuff like take a picture of something and then have Nano Banana draw something for you on it. That doesn't sound good, Plo. And then send it off in a message . That also sounds I mean, the message part sounds okay, but the nano banana bit I don't think I'm ever gonna get behind. This has been this has been fun. Thank you for coming on the nano banana note I'm going to it's very interesting where we are now versus where we were just ten years ago. So I mean it so this is you've done this for for six years less than I have or seven years less than I have at this point, I think. Yes . For me, maybe a little bit more than that. But the point is it's hard . There was a period of time when I was very enthus iastic about it because it felt like things were getting better. For a long time , having a cell phone, a smartphone felt kind of like a superpower, right? Because you got you could do things that other people couldn't do. Yeah. And I haven't had that feeling from technology in a long time. It's just kind of an impending sense of dread about a lot of the things that are coming down the line. The assistant thing actually sounds really good. Like that sounds like an actual measurable improvement because but it also seems a little bit weird because hey, the problem of the deluge of information and constant and like the proliferation of messaging applications and like, hey, I'm getting too much spam and all these. These are all problems that were created by the these companies . And now they're like, hey, we have something else we can sell you that's gonna fix your problem that we created for you. It's almost like there's a system building. It's like the simulation is overheating and we're on somebody's forehead in the in the yeah anyway exactly at theorel Sineh correct. Yeah. Sureline. Yeah, exactly. Next dimension up . Floa, where can people find you? Where can people find your work? I mean, you can find me at PCMAG. com, but really you can find me at Florence Lion dot com. So that'll have links to all my podcasts and everything that I do and that's a good place to find me. I don't listen to your Android podcast as often as I as I should, but I love your podcast with Andy. Andy's one of my all time favorites. He's an absolute absol,ute gentleman. He took me on a tour Boston a hundred years ago and I was there one time and we walked around and had a delightful time and then had a slice of pie and and it was it was one of the all time . That's an Andy Date. That's that's exactly an Andy Date. He was like, let's go look at some cool sculpture. There's some cool statues. We're gonna check out the library and then there's a dope diner. Yeah . And yeah, and it was I'm going to go and tell you, damn good p ie. So Bandi ever says, Hey, you want to go get some pie? Oh, no. I know. Andy's taking me to the opera. Thank you very much. Ooh, okay. Oh wow, you know you hear that. So I wouldn't have guessed you know, I have only been podcasting it for nine years, so I assumed you put that in the live journal too, so I don't know. Yes . Behind a paywall . Thanks, Plo. We'll have to have you on again sometime soon . Thank you so much for coming by Flow. It's a pleasure to chat and catch up and talk about the weird state that Android is in and what Google's doing with AI and the places that AI is weird and good and bad and interesting and scary . So we'll have to have you on again sometime in the not too distant future. This is the part of the show where I thank everybody for listening and supporting the show. As always, Brad and Willmade at TechPod is a listener supported show. We would not be here without you the listener. So if you would like to find out how you can support the show, you can go to patreon. com slash techpod where for five dollars a month you gain access to the Patreon exclusive discord. You get the monthly end of month Patreon Q and A episode or sometimes it's not a Patreon Q and A episode. Sometimes it's just an exclusive where we talk about projects and upcoming things and things that we're interested in, but maybe don't think warrant a full episode. We don't take ads. 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