Tony Hoare and the Legacy of Null

It's time for Twit. This week in Tech the Ides of March edition. Jennifer Patterson Twee joins us from The Verge. Richard Campbell from Windows Weekly and Ian Thompson. Big layoffs are coming from Meta. Plus, they don't like their new AI very much. Speaking of bad AI, we'll talk about the woman who lost five months of her life due to incorrect face recognition, the doge depositions they tried to hide, and he's back, Travis Kalinick, founder of Uber, says his new company makes gainfully employed robots. Twin is next . Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is tw it this is twit this week in tech episode one thousand seventy five recorded Sunday, March 15th, 2026. The Commonwealth C lub. It's time for Twitch this week in Tech, the show we cover the week's Tech News. And as usual, it was a big and busy week, but fortunately we've got the best panel here. I love it. Jennifer Patterson Touy is here, senior reviewer for The Verge. Hello, JPT. Hello, Leo. Lovely to be here as always. Love having you on. Of course J,ennifer is a regular, not only on uh The Verge, but on our Tech News Weekly with Micah Sargent. And covers Smart Home. And her poor family has to put up with a door that has many locks. All of Many locks, many doorbells, yeah, many robot vacuums. I have UPS guys will come up to my door and be like, okay, there's four and then they just knock. Who needs a doorbell? So many doorbells. Yeah, isn't that funny? We have a but we have a ring and nobody ever rings it. Also here, miss from this is a Commonwealth show from Ireland and the UK. Now almost a citizen of the United States, Ian Thompson, who uh does this tech finitive. Good to see you, Ian. Yes, it's always good to be on. And um yeah, here in sunny and very dry California. Yeah. And it is going to be very hot. We're going to have a heat wave. Well, very hot by California by Northern California standards. I I suspect Los Angeles is looking at us and sniggering slightly. Oh my gosh, it's in the 70s. What will we do? And host of, of course, Windows Weekly and Run as Radio, the great Richard Campbell joining us from British Columbia. Hello, Richard. Hey Leo. Nice to see you. Yeah. Born in New Zealand, grew up in Canada, so all Commonwealth all the time. All Commonwealth, except for me. I am uh the rebel son. You're the rebel. Yeah, we had a split off and we're sorry about that now. And can we come back, please? Well, I was chatting to somebody about that and it's just like yes, rejoin under the British monarchy. Oh, Prince Andrew. No, never mind. Never mind. He's not a prince. Let's be clear. Oh yes. Well no, I mean they they gr they're gradually cutting his name down. So he lost his titles, then he lost his home, and it's just like there was a British comedian called Mark Steele who was just like eventually in about a month or two it's gonna be Oi Andy You Wanker. Andy you wanna get out of the story we don't usually talk about meta on this show because meta really has become kind of legacy company to some degree. Uh, although Instagram's still going strong, WhatsApp is used all over the world as probably the preferred messaging platform in most of the world, except, you know, the US and China. Uh but they are facing, I guess, I don't know, um hard times. Meta, we are seeing is planning massive layoffs as AI counts uh costs mount. This is from uh uh Reuters. Reuters says they're gonna shrink Meta by twenty percent . Yeah. That is those data those data centers don't pay for themselves. Yeah, they say they say they're gonna spend six hundred billion uh in day uh for data centers by twenty twenty eight. So yeah, you gotta you gotta pay for it somehow. Well I got a disturbing email this week from uh a software engineer. Um not at Meta but a similar company who was saying basically for the last six months he's been instructed to use AI tools and they've been recording his prompts and his actions. Oh and now they've outsourced his job to two lower grade engineers using the information that he was forced to give them. And I think that's the way it's going. And Meta will do the same. We're hearing this story in a lot of places, in fact, friends of mine who are in fact training their replacements. Instead of a a worker from China or an India, it's an AI. Ye ah. Well, and I mean Met has been hiring AI talent from everywhere, right? Yeah, that's not working out so good is it but also that's where all the money's going right so they it makes sense they have to lay off other people because they're spending so much money on all on the AI talent and then this what was it about through two years ago they did like three or four huge rounds of cuts. Um, eleven thousand, two years ago, ten thousand uh last yeah, cuts per se because they never stopped hiring. Which is weird. We looked at Microsoft's uh annual report for last fiscal and they they laid off thirty thousand and they hired thirty thousand. So the total net employment was the same. But they're hiring for different roles, right? So Yeah, that's a great question whether that's true or not. Or is it just you only hear about the layoffs and those are good for the stock price. And it did acquire two engineers, the g the guys who did Moltbook the whole thing. Actually I w what's the only thing that bothered me about that is Ben Parr is one of the two guys. Ben's been on this show many times. I love Ben. Ben's an old friend. I didn't malt book. I would've ha I would have had him talking about that. But anyway, so congratulations, uh, Ben and uh his uh his partner, Mark. But isn't the bigger arc on this meta layoff that all of the magnificent seven are off so far this year? To the tune of a trillion dollars. Ye ah. But but there's an upside to them. Meta on Thursday, according to the New Well avocado, it's gotta be perfect, right? There's only a moment where it's just ripe enough. Oh apparently it's not ripe enough in this case. Uh so they're gonna take the seed out, they're gonna they're gonna put it in the glass with toothpicks and maybe another one will grow. Actually if you want avocado there is there chipotle has an ai they call uh something like avocado and somebody discovered that it's probably clawed in the background because they were they gave it a uh they said, Can you write a pyth after asking it for menu recommendations, could you write a Python program for me? And it did. The Chipotle AI. Yes. Oh god. Yes, on its website. Yes. So that's something you probably should be aware of if you're gonna use an AI on your website. You might want to, you know, like limit the questions. Put some guardrails up. Just a few. Just a few. I don't know if you notice this when you fire up a lot of web-based LLMs right now, they do a lot of are you a human validation piece? Right. Yeah. Like so clearly they're dealing with exactly that problem. Right. Right. R ight. Uh meanwhile, of course, Meta's on trial that big case in San Francisco on addiction. Uh the case that Snapchat and TikTok settled out of, but Meta Meta and YouTube are still fighting, and actually it went to the jury on Frida y. Uh that's gonna be really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Said the exact same thing, Ian. No, no, no. I mean I'm sorry. Mark Zimmerberg on the stand looked really, really uncomfortable. Yeah. And it's like, have you yeah have you actually built your platform wherein dopamine hits? We're obviously not gonna say that, but that's what it is. Um so a jury trial, that's gonna be really interesting. Yeah, I imagine the jury is probably not sitting during the weekend, but I mean they w they went out uh on Friday, so it should be closing statements on Thursday. Actually it's in Los Angeles. Uh the the plaintiff is a twenty year old woman who said she was hooked early on to social media and as a result has had miserable a miserable life, which by the way okay, excuse me, I'm sorry you had a terrible life, but really you blaming social media for that? Seems a little far-fetched to me. I think the real question the jury has to answer is is there such a thing as social media addiction? Is that even a thing? Ryan. I'm paralyzing this with the smoking addictions. And it also took about 20 years for the first cases to really start showing up saying this is intentional. And it led to the discovery that eventually found, you know, proved that the companies knew and optimized the product for addiction. Right. And we have that same evidence coming out of Facebook. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh the uh the 20 year olds um both defendants have plaintiff appointed this is from uh AP to a turbulent home life or the woman. Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, and there's a lot of smoking gun email evidence that they kind of did prey upon people, you know. They were trying to make them they were trying to make their sights sticky. But I mean who isn't, right? But there was that case uh about ten ten years ago where academics um did a paper on how Facebook could change people's opinion based on the news feed that they got in. And there were two scientific papers on this, and then Facebook immediately retracted them. Um Facebook as it was then. You know, this definitely has an effect. Their entire business model is built around it. So yeah, put it up in court. Yeah, but you can say there's a direct link between smoking and cancer. That's evident. Admit that she had uh a difficult home life before she started using social media. And the defense said that they she turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism to escape her mental health struggles. Uh so i it seems like from what I've been reading from our reporting and we've got a reporter there at the trial and she was saying that they basically the only thing they have to prove here is that the p the products did cause some form of meaningful harm, which is not a huge leap, especially when you're able to examine the um, as you mentioned at the the top, the kind of the dopamine hit, the the algorithms that are pushing forward, keeping you on there, not necessarily to try and um make you h happier, but to do whatever it does to pull you in. And that is the I think that's the key. It's the algorithms. Like, is it the algorithms that are actually causing harm by pulling you down into whatever rabbit hole prove that harm? I don't understand how you prove that. Well, and that's gonna be the challenge, but one of the the piece that um uh we have on the verge that our reporter, um Lauren Finer, who was there, she said the entire courtroom so there's like tickets that you can get to get into one of the fifteen public seats in much people want to see this. Wow. The entire courtroom outside was full of parents whose children have been meaningfully they believe have been meaningfully harmed by social media. Either they committed suicide, there was an instance of one girl who was able to get like uh la fentanyl laced pills off she didn't know it was fentanyl lace. Well that's different. I if you Yeah, that's that's definitely a liability. If you're buying fentanyl on Facebook, that's liability. But the point here, what's so interesting is there are so many parents that have experienced something that's caused significant harm to their children through social media. And it's it's a fascinating debate to sort of be like, well, how much of this is down to the individual? How much of this is down to what the platform is feeding them? And is the platform making it worse? And if the platform is making it worse, can you prove that that is meaningful harm? And if this I mean it's gonna be a landmark case either way, I would say, I think even if there is not a very good resolution, the fact that it's getting this attention and that people are actually, you know, finally focusing on what what social media is doing. Is it bad? You know, is it causing harm? It's conversations we've been needing to have for a long time. And I feel like we talk about it every time I come on the show, Leo, but um it's not there in the broader, you know, consciousness, I don't think. And I think this is gonna push it there. I mean, I have two kids who grew up. So I have a 15 and an 18-year-old. And so, you know, they were right on the sort of cusp as where social media became sort of all-encompassing. That's the way children communicate to some extent. And when you when you look through the issues that some people sort of say, well, some social media is actually good because it does have it's a good way of connecting, it's a good way for people to find their group. It's like back to the old, you know, chat rooms. You know, I I remember on Oscar night 20 years ago, 30 years ago, sitting up with in a chat room with Titanic fans, because Titanic was up for the Oscars, and it was like, you know, the internet lets you connect with your with your you know your people. But once they've grabbed you these platforms, if they're trying without without uh pe without any care for what cause what what harm it might cause to suck you in and keep you there, that to me feels like a step too far. And that's like with with n with the the tobacco companies, you know, they knew their product was addictive and you know, it do does Facebook, does Meta know its product was addictive and did it keep making it more addictive? And that causes meaningful harm. I mean that you're right, Leo. It's a hard one to prove, but it's an interesting one to talk about. Yeah. And and of course the next the next uh uh industry that's gonna be challenged about this is AI because this there are already trials and there will be many, many more from parents who I and look, my heart goes out to these parents, uh to the the kids. Um nobody's saying that these children aren't hurting. I think there's a lot of reasons that uh young people might be hurting these days. Um but you know everybody who creates an entertainment is trying to make it stick y. Uh if you binge a Netflix, and this was one of the arguments of the defense lawyers, if you binge a Netfli x actually I think it was Adam Massery of Instagram, if you binge a Netflix, you know, they want you to watch that, you know, as uh to to your detriment, to the point where you don't eat. They're trying to make something that's really compelling. Um but is that is that a cause for mental illness? And uh is it are you liable for the damage that it causes. I don't know. I mean I think this is video games. Remember that people were saying the same about World of Warcraft. Well Facebook claims they're not a publisher though. So they're not making any of this stuff. So they're not responsible. Well no I I think there's no question Facebook's liable because if y the only argument is whether that caused harm. It's clear that Facebook is more than a publisher. Any company that has an algorithm that surfaces if you just publ stisuhedff in a chronological. case law Then you're a publisher. Yeah. But they don't need to be able to the first step again, I'm going to use the smoking parallel again. The first steps that happened with the smoking thing was age limiting. You had to be a certain age to be able to buy cigarettes. You know, that that was the progression. So here you know, here we are at the beginning of this. And there, you know, that now the argument will be it's a case of harm, but only for minors. So we'll put an age gate on it. You could make the case that sugary cereals have killed many people. I guess uh I mean I hear I feel for the parents, I feel like they're looking for a scapegoat, is what I feel like. I think there is enough evidence out there that social media has caused harm for especially for younger people because you know they're not they're their brains are not fully developed, that impulse control, that addiction focus is much yeah. Um and you know, there is of course there's an onus on the parents too, but also a lot of parents of this generation h weren't really aware of what was of how powerful this was. So I I I agree it seems like, you know, okay, Netflix, we all want to binge watch, you know, the next season of Stranger Things, but it's it's a different interaction from sitting and watching a TV show, which something you may do with your family, um, to interacting with your friends and people like you and your peers on a social media and seeing the way you're supposed to be, theoretically. And that that caught that's's what causing in in many ways I think the long we've seen a huge spike in depression for adolescent, especially adolescent girls. I mean Instagram was famously, has been very bad for body image for teenage girls, and there have been lots of studies about that. And you know, magazines in the 80s and 90s, those were really bad for body image for teenage girls, but there was something different about having magazines on a stand versus having a small device that you're lying in bed with and like consuming that's continuingly sending you data and making you feel worse. And I think the key thing, and this is because I'm a journalist, um, is uh curation and being and editorializing. So, you know, a magazine or a Netflix show, you've got people creating the content and having some sort of human input. Whereas with social media, the algorithms and you know, just anyone, anyone out there can throw whatever they want up there, it just feels so much less curated, so much less careful. I mean, there are problems with stuff on TV, but we have age limits on TV shows too, right? That's one of the ways that we're supposed to help not damage our children by showing them. I watched Silence the Lambs when I was far too young and I've never recovered. Um I watched jaws at the cinema, yes. Um I just feel like we don't be because we call we sort of dismiss so social media because it is so many different things, right? It's not really just one like Netflix shows you movies and TV shows, but social media shows you everything. And it's overwhelming and I I think the the problem comes down to the algorithms. And this is something that we see throughout the internet, right? We've seen many tech companies be approached, you know, I think YouTube was are they still in the case about the algorithm for YouTube where that was a caused terrorism. I don't know, did that one get dismissed? Um but there's there's a lot of these that comes down to the algorithm, which is where the computer is deciding what you should watch and that's taking the human element out. But McDonald's designs its food to be as addictive as possible. Dunkin' donuts have killed more people than Well no, but I mean are they liable? Should McDonald's be liable because they made their food they made happy meals and they addicted children and and those children suffer from obesity and later uh illnesses as a rel result with a higher mortality ? McDonald's isn't in your face all the time, even though it's sure it is. It's appetizing like crazy. Yeah, but you're not get you're not you don't have access it access to it twenty four seven, especially if you're a fifteen year old girl, right? You're not unless you live round the corner from McDonald's, I suppose. Yeah, your phone's not giving you a burger every five minutes. Yeah between it Well then then you should Jennifer as a parent so I'm Jennifer as a parent y it's this is what really worries me about social media is that the kids can't escape it. It used to be if you got bullied at school, you went out of school and then you went home and you had lived your own life. With social media, it's in your face twenty four seven and it it does seem to cause harm. I I'd be curious on your insight on that. Seam is the problem, by the way. Yeah, it's hard to prove. I mean, and individuals like you know, the people may be predisposed to depression and it creates more of you know, it it can pull you further down into that. Or you may have been completely well adjusted and then you get cyberbullied by people in your school. I mean my daughter's school has like a online burn book on Instagram, you know, which is just horrific. I don't let my daughter anywhere near Instagram. Um but yeah, there's a lot of that was that Netflix show Adolescence, right? That was that was why that grabbed people because that was what that was about. It's also one of the things, you know, outside of the algorithm side is you I I I was reading a story recently where someone was talking to it was a teacher and they were talking about like at recess or when the bell rings, you know, twenty years ago, the the halls would be so loud you could barely hear yourself talk. Everyone's playing, chatting, talking. And now it's quiet because as soon as people get out of the classroom, they look on their phone. So that real, you know, social media is taking away real socialization in real life socialization. I mean, and that's caused that's one of the issues causing a lot of harm. And you know, COVID compounded it because kids were literally not allowed to hang out with their friends for over a year. That could be, I mean, COVID. Uh there's a lot of reasons a kid might be depressed now that I think are legitim ate. Yeah. I think the pro my problem is is you can prove a causal relationship between cigarettes and cancer. That's very clear. It's much more difficult to prove that causal relationship with social media. It's see it's one of those things that feels like it's bad it seems like it's bad we kind of all agree yeah it must be bad but there it's very hard to demonstrate the causal relationship yeah and and I worry because well we'll find out this trial this is why I think Yeah, I mean this is why I think a jury trial is fascinating for this because you actually get input from people at the sharp end. You know, it's not yes. I mean there were long arguments about whether or not tobacco causes cancer and then it was finally proved. When it comes to social media, it's much more fluid, but having a jury trial and having people whose kids and relatives have been involved in this, I think that's going to be a very Well we'll find out. I think we'll find out this week. And uh I think uh both YouTube and Meta are watching with great interest to see what happens. And you can tell, I mean, the fact that Snapchat and TikTok settled out short right before the trial tells you they had some real concerns about their liability. Let's take a little break. We we have more stuff. Is that one of your house? Is that your house talking to you? Someone just ranged. Someone's at the doorbell. Sorry. You know, uh you now have all those uh interesting voices with Alexa Plus. You did not like Alexa Plus, Jenna. Sassy. Sassy voice. I picked sassy Alexa. Lisa loves sassy. She loves it. Like we'll say, uh set a five-minute timer for broccoli. And then it goes, five minute timer for broccoli. Oh, that's gonna be delicious. Or it should be done just right. And' its like, and then Lisa, I know, to me, it's like, really? But Lisa goes, oh, that and she says, thank you, Alexa. And it says, you're very welcome. They have a conversation. Yeah, I yeah, I'm excited about this new sassy because I was getting really fed up with the new Alexa Plus. Yeah, they're sassy. And the sweet and the Yeah. And like I would be like, add peanut butter to the shopping list. Oh, you're gonna be making some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Also as I as I say, as a Brit, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is horrible. I don't know why I's from a guy so much who eats marmite. Okay. Love marmite. But I also love C B J so but that's because I'm American and British. Julia Child said it's the perfect sandwich, the sweet, nutty flavour of the peanut butter combine I mean the the nutty salty flavor of the peanut butter combined the sweet fruity flavor of the jelly on the crisp toast. It's perfect, said Julian. That's the way to go. It is. A little too much umami for me, baby. Let's take a little break when we come back. But you know, I like it that we can argue over that. That's better to argue over than social media. It's less consequential anyway. Uh yeah it'd be very it's gonna be very interesting to see what the results of this trial are. And this resonance Zuckerberg looks so uncomfortable in the stand. Well, you know who else broke a sweat. You know what else looked uncomfortable? The doge boys in their depositions. We'll talk about the doge depositions in just a little bit. Boy, was that revelatory? Uh immediately pulled down, but too bad, once it's on the internet, it lives forever. 404 did a really good write-up of this. They they sat through six hours of Doge testimony, and I would hope Save it. We'll talk about it because I I think it's important, but we will talk about that. Uh great show, great panel already, kicking things off. The getting a little feisty. Jennifer Patterson Touie from The Verge. Ian Thompson, uh great to have you with your new column at Techfinitive, The Letter from America. To but it's really not to Brits, right? I mean it's to everybody. Well yes, but it it's it's a primarily British site, but at the same time I think things need b explaining to the rest of the world because we we're in a very weird place in America. I hope you could explain it to Americans, to be honest. Uh I'd like to know. I'd like to understand . Uh where on the site, where can I find that letter to America? I'm at the Tech Finitive. Um yeah, if you just go to my to um my name on the uh just put I A I N and so that's your pr that's the problem. Yeah. There you go. Ian Thompson's letter from America in the in the style of Alistair Tommy Cook. America is a very strange place at the moment. So yeah, the more we explain that the better. Yeah. Uh because it's losing soft power. I think that picture says it all right there. That's the uh God. It was so humiliating to have him, you know I did love that his son wiped a bogey on the side of the presidential desk and it was just like wow, this is how far we're Trump had the resolute desk removed, steamed and de and uh and uh disinfected uh immediately after. Uh all right, let's take a little break and uh we will come back with those. Oh, and I forgot to mention Richard Campbell also here. Yes. So nice to have him from Run as Radio and uh of course uh the wonderful Windows Weekly every Wednesday on our on this very channel. Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN. Now going online without ExpressVPN and be like, I don't know, leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop. Everyone needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network at that coffee shop at a hotel. Mine is the airport. I always want that free SFO Wi-Fi. And I always go, no. Your online data is not secure. Any hacker in the same network can gain access to and steal your personal data. And by the way, they are and send it to every time I'm at the airport free SFO Wi-Fi, I fire up ExpressVPN and now I feel like I can use it with impunity. ExpressVPN is the one I use, it's the best VPN out there. It's the only one I recommend because they really are committed. They go the extra mile to keep your privacy private. I use it whenever I travel to keep up with my shows, to watch football. It's the best VPN. It's best VPN is super super secure. It'd take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past their ExpressVPN encryption. It works on all devices, phones, laptops, tablets, rated number one by top-tech reviewers, like CNET and The Verge, secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash twit. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-VPN.com slash twit, and find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com slash twit. Speaking of Trump, apparently the uh Trump administration is saying uh we want ten billion dollars for brokering the TikTok de al for brokering it for broker ing Or his Kuaichi bank account. I mean, investors uh in in in the uh U.S. version of TikTok, including Oracle and Sil Silver Lake, agre ed to pay the government ten billion doll ars for making them uh that deal. And you know what? They did pay well below what I I think everybody considers market value for TikTok for the US operations. I mean ten years ago, Leo, I was on the show and I got an awful lot of flack for saying that America has legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. But in the last couple of years That's so old fashioned Wow it's not even campaign anymore. You got a hole in the East Wing. Hey, come on, we'll pour some money into it. Yeah, let's buy your crypto coin. Let's, you know, it's just it's just Would you like an airplane? We can hook you up with an airplane. I wrote a whole article about that. They're gonna have to strip that plane down to the bare bones to make sure there's you know it's gonna cost them billions to make it into Yeah. It's it's not gonna save anybody any money, let's put it that way, to make it into Air Force One. It's a gift. You know, or a bribe, what whatever you want to call it. Um as I say, I'm going for citizenship, so I love our maximum leader, Donald Trump, but at the same time, for goodness sake. Wall Street Journal says the ten billion dollar payment would be nearly unprecedented for the government helping a transaction? Nearly. But many point out that the 14 billion dollars these companies paid for the US version of TikTok was well below what its actual value is. Oh, and by the way, they also have to share profits with Byte Dance , which owns 19.999%. So it's not even out of the hands of Chinese investors, really. Uh all Chinese security company security infrastructure. I seem to get the same thing a lot more often. But they're like like repeated videos. Like it's almost like there's less less good content. Um I'm not a huge TikTok user though, but um maybe that's why I don't get much news stuff. But yeah, I I feel like every time I open the app, I get I'm getting the same things often. Um which yeah, I but other than I mean, there was quite a lot of chatter uh right after the launch like the switch over that there was significant issues and it didn't seem right. But it other than that, I mean the content I see is what I know what I would expect to see. I just keep seeing the same thing over and over again. Uh which is good for me 'cause it means I turn it off. That the 10 minutes will be spent on floor shimes for all um floor what? The president gave Marco Rubio some floor shimes. I think you did the whole cabinet. Oh, the shoes. Yes. Okay. And they were a little big. So embarrassed. They were kinda like clown shoes. The whole cabinet, by the way. Oh the whole cabinet has to wear it. The whole cabinet. Yeah. Clown shoes. I mean, I'm sorry, how low your self-esteem we were talking about social media lowering self-esteem. Having to wear outsize shoes just to do your job, that's a real lowering of self-esteem. It is, you know what? It's a real power move, isn't it? I'm gonna give you some shoes. Make sure you wear those now. It's what Tony Sorbino would do. Buy the same shoes but the right size. Like he's not gonna live that close. Well I mean JD Vance told an interesting story where um Trump asked a Marco Rubio what his shoe size was, and he said it's seven and then made a joke about shoe size relating to Yeah, it is very small, I might add, a seven. That's what it is. Oh the hands thing. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. These guys It's high school. This is not what you expect from your government. I mean uh okay, British politics is bad, but it's not this bad. Keir Starmer, really? Nigel Farage, but Nigel Farage. Boris. With the hair. Oh god. I used to wet with Boris. Did you really? Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, Prime Minister, funny hair? Yeah. He seemed like he was actually a sweet guy, even though he's with a little What do you think? Yeah, I mean I I was a lowly sort of intern. I worked at the Telegraph when he was at the Telegraph. Um so I I only cross paths with him a couple of times. But he's it's very funny. Actually very smart. He seemed very personal. Really smart. Yeah. Um yeah, and that but yeah. But I going into politics will you know, too make you crazy. He was a he's a unique though British politician, isn't he? There's everybody loved him when he was mayor of London, right? Very popular. It's kind of the Rudy Giuliani of of U of the UK. Kind of the same thing. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, no, I mean I do love the anecdote that he he his hair was perfectly done and he went out to a press conference, he was hang on a second, roughened it all up and then went out there. It's a very carefully created image.. It's a look But yeah. He was great as Mars of London in terms of because uh London's getting a lot of stick at the moment as being a crime in a hellhole, despite the fact that we've got a lower murder rate than pretty much every American city. But Boris actually boosted London. And you've got too many people just going, oh, London's it's it's crime, it's terrible, you know, but Boris actually did a lot for the s for the Capitol . Just not a lot for the country. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Not a great prime minister. Uh a great leader. Uh she was uh at uh Twitter when uh Jack decided he wanted to do a little research project on uh kind of open social networks, funded something that ended up becoming Blue Sky. Jay Graeber took the helm. She was CE O. She's now stepping down at uh Blue Sky. She's going to be the chief innovation offic er. But uh there's uh the the one of the investors is going to become temporarily the CEO, Tony Schneider. But they are going to do a CEO sear ch. I do hope they don't ruin Blue Sky. What's your favor ite ex Twitter? Richard is shaking his head at this one. Yeah, like there's a favorite. And so I get strong responses for when I'm talking about podcasts there. The real weird geeky guys are on Mastodon, but they're the only ones who can figure out how to do it. Yeah, we run a Mastodon instance, twit.social, which you're all invited to join. And I love Mastodon. I'm b aig I I'm a big fan of the idea of federation. I'm gonna uh uh admit uh kind of a dirty little secret though, because uh when when um when Elon bought Twitter, I got off of it immediately. Uh because I And then of course the Nazis came in and he brought back a lot of people who really should not have been brought back. But in this age of AI, uh I have to confess I I reading Twitter a lot uh these days. I don't post there or X. I'm not post there. I don't have high hopes for its future now that he has X money . You saw that he gave Shatner uh like 20 bucks of X money, and Shatner turned it into $200,000 in charity donations. Because he he sold uh it apparently if you give somebody on X money, which it's only in private beta right now, but if you give somebody some money and Elon I think Elon gave him forty two dollars, right? The magic number. And uh and if you give somebody some money. Like if he's if you could get somebody to send you a dollar, if you get Will Will Shat to send you a dollar, you would now be in the X Money bet a. So he was auctioning off a dollar at a time, Elon's $42, raised two hundred thousand dollars for charity. So I think that's actually pretty sharp. That's pretty good. Anyway, I it's my dirty little secret is that I do now check uh because it's a it is where all the AI bros go and is one way Aaron Powell I mean in one way it's it's good in that you've got a competitive uh a competitive social media. It used to be just Twitter. Now you've got Blue Sky, you've got Mastodon, you've got to an extent Reddit and a bunch of other sites. Dig. Oh. Oh God, this was hilarious. Please go on. So uh you know, I have a little bit of a you know dog in this hunt because Kevin Rose, I worked with him, of course, uh at Tech TV and he, started Dig sh kind of when he was there and the Dig Nation podcast. Um and and uh in some ways I feel responsible for the death of Dig because I was er encouraging him to make the changes that ended up becoming Dig four point oh, which turned out to make Dig be the most gameable thing in the world. Alexis O'Hane and Steve Hoffman came along and said we could do a better dig and created Reddit. Dig died because it was being game so badly. Reddit They're shutting it down again . Because they say uh it's being gamed by bots. Wow . The same reason it shut down last time. Uhh two monts after their highly anticipated return, uh Dig announced the site's going offline af as a result of a quote unprecedented bot problem . They're going to re-jigger it. They thought that AI would solve this, that AI would keep the bots off, but what they underestimated was as they did last time, was how uh incentived the bots are, and they're using AI too. Um so they're gonna Reddit's facing th the same problem at the moment. I mean it is bot infested. Uh I'm on a couple there's a Reddit thread I'm on called Ask Brits and you know, there's a conversation about Tesla. And we got I don't know about this. Tesla's really popular in the UK. I bought a Model S the other day and it's really, really good. And then directly beneath it. Hi. Tesla is underrated. I bought a model three the other day, and it was just like you had to post up bad bot, clumsy. Bad bot. There's a lot of it. X says it suspended 800 million accounts in twenty twenty four over spam and eight hundred milli on. I remember when Twitter had three hundred fifty million tot al. I think that was when they sold it to ELA. It was three hundred and fifty or four. Eight hundred million, more than dou ble. It suspended several hundred million late last year. This is uh this is what they told UK, the UK, it's according to the Guardian. Um that's a problem if you're getting that many b ots. Uh kind of ruined all of social media that's a b they told Parliament it was continually fighting state backed attempts to hijack the agenda on its network of Yes, I mean X has done a lot to try to stop those bots, and apparently it's done nothing. In fact, the official accusation to the old uh uh Twitter board is that they weren't managing bots that their accounts were that was what his whole Clearly didn't do it. Well, you could say in his defense they banned eight hundred million of 'em. Now still out And they still allowed Stephen Laxley Yellen to get on back get back on there. But I mean look, it's this is a problem with all social media. Bots are everywhere and the needs to be a screening mechanism, but no one's come up with one yet. Remember of course that the X was home to a lot of non consensual uh sexual images and got in a lot of trouble all over the world was banned in some countries. They claim to have fixed that. Now, according to Wired, fake AI content about the Iran war is all over X and and not only is Grok failing to verify the video correctly, it's creating its own images. They're using Grok to do it. X's AI . The video game war. I mean, right. Well it is. Look at the look at the administration. Horrific. Horrendous promo videos using video games and movies . I've never seen anything like it. I don't know. Well I mean remember the the opening stages of Gulf War One S where yeah, well when you saw like smart missiles going right down into the bunker and everyone was like this is absolutely amazing. Now it's AI generated and it's deeply disturbing because you know dem,ocracy depends on information. And if it's when you've got the White House putting out AI generated slop, that's really worrying. Well, even more worrying to me is that uh Pete Heggseth and Department of Defence have shooed out all the real journalists from the Pentagon and The B B C is still there. They've still got a seat there. Because it was you had to sign an agreement saying I'm not going to say anything bad about the Pentagon to sta Uh the foreign they're a foreign press sound that it was only domestic. But the BBC did actually hold him to account good and said, Right, okay. You said six months ago that their nuclear capability had been destroyed and now you're saying it's been destroyed again. Can you expand on that? Um it was perfect British passive aggressive. I did love them dearly for that. Well and Haggsith has excoriated the US media for uh telling people bad things about the war. Like that's their job, dude. Yeah, now again. Now Bren Van Car is threatening to um he's doing his thing where he goes and says things and expects networks to then follow suit without actually doing any regulation. But um he has said that he's going to he's threatening to revoke the licenses of the networks that are portraying the war incorrectly because Trump is not shameful because I went back to an article I'd written what ten years ago where Brendan Carr was kind of like, you know, we need free speech. We need an open platform. And now he's now he's in charge. It's just like, yeah, get out. We want free speech for us, not you. Very much. I think they even did pull a broadcast license. Nobody uses the airwaves anymore. Right. I think these are just empty threats because Trump's mad, so he has to make the noise that Trump wants him to make. Well they're not empty though because they what happens is the networks du do act on them because they because of what's hap that's the real problem. It's like so there's no actual regulation or enforcement happening here. They're just all running scared because their deals aren't gonna go through or you know and and the experience is when you run you run they come get you again yeah and when you say come at me bro they walk away because the Mark Carney example. Yeah. Yeah. I mean uh Hex has said the quiet part out loud earlier this week. He was just like once Ellison takes over the uh of CNN then we'll see some so and it was just like wow, you're actually saying that. You know? It was This is how this is how bold they are. They don't have to deny it. They don't have to hide it. But it does speak to the idea that if you actually want to have some idea what's going on in the US, you don't look at US media. Yeah. Well, I'm good to know that the Bib still has somebody in there. That's yeah. We've been watching BBC and Sky News now because you can get a feed from both on um I think it's like free as well, like Samsung TV plus or like all the what are the f free TV streaming services that um give you all the channels and and the sky 'cause this the beep's been under a lot of scrutiny recently. Yeah, but Rupert Murdoch's Sky, right? Yeah, Sky News has always been I mean Sky News has always been fairly good. I mean I don't know, Ian, do you ever watch the S. No, I mean I I watched Sky News. And I mean the thing is Murdoch hasn't taken as heavy a hand with Sky News as he have with as he has with, for example, The Sun. The Sun, he would call the editor every day and discuss what they were going to put on the front page. Sky News has got some really good journalists, they've got some really good coverage. Okay. Um You know, the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. You could say the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. Yeah. You know the editorial board might have some a slant, but the reporting is very good. The people are very good there. But it's harder and harder to find news that you feel confident in these days. Well, and that's why maybe the real issue with social media is that's where a whole generation gets its news now. I mean they they get their news from TikTok and Instagram and people my age. Although they actually get news, because I remember being that age and never watching the news. My daughter says, you know, we we if she's thirty two, so she's not quite in that generation, but she says we use uh TikTok for search. Said you can't use TikTok for search. She said, Well what ask a question. How long is the Golden Gate Bridge? I said. She said enter it into TikTok. And I found it. So you you actually can't use TikTok for so there's so much content on there. Don't ask it when TNM Square happens. Also, but you do get the answer. Yeah. Speaking of problems with avocado, meta's AI, uh Elon Musk has been firing people at XAI saying it was not built right. To his satisfaction. It's not built right. It's interesting because you know, chat GPT, open AI and uh Anthropics Claude are dominating. In fact, the Chinese uh open AIs like Deep Seek and QN also very, very good. But for some reason Meta and uh X are having trouble with their AIs getting it to do anything. Maybe the standard is so good. Um X has been losing people of the twelve people who founded the company XAI in 2023. Of twelve who founded the company three years ago, only two are left . Uh last month, uh some significant departures, quite a f ew. At an all-hands meeting last month, Musk said, um, these are deliberate exits. Some people are better suited for the early stages and less suited for the later sta ges. Electric says this is uh this is a problem. Uh you know, so X is making money in one company, Elon's making money in one company, SpaceX, losing money massively on XA I the uh and and losing money on X. So what are you what's the solution? You put them all together and you have a SpaceX stock IPO . Catamine is a hell of a drug. Yeah, no kidding. But also it's also a fairly clever move. I mean there were not none of them are public companies. Not now. Right. So you, know you don,'t actually even know the truth, which means it's probably worse than you think. Uh but it's a great way to hide problems. Right. His whole plan is to take Tesla SpaceX XAI, X, Neuralink, the Boring Company, mush them all into a big ball. I don't get Tesla in there because Tesla is public. He can't Tesla's public right. That's right. That's right. But the he's already munged the rest together. He is treating Tesla though as kind of a resource. I mean he's moved AI uh engineers from Tesla to XAI and so forth . But he's mostly borrowed against the the in the NX area. Which is that's the nature of billionaires, right? You only you just borrow money against your stock. So you never have taxes. Right. Uh it's all well in fine to your tank your stock price. Yeah, I mean uh we've seen this also in the rest of the industry where you've got Oracle investing in NVIDIA to get, you know, stuff from them, uh a whole bunch of companies investing NVIDIA to And then NVIDIA investing back 'cause this is Exactly. It's a massive it's You buy our chips with our money that we're gonna give you. Well exact I mean financially it's a Chinese military parade of red flags. You would not touch these things. And yeah, it's gonna be very interesting to see how that works out. Well tomorrow Nvidia has a big, big shoe. We're gonna talk about that in just a little bit. I know you're excited about that and you've been doing some prep work, Ian, and I I know uh Richard Campbell will also have things to say about that. I said this on Windows Weekly. It's like, wow, you weren't happy selling shovels, so now you're gonna go try and get some gold. Real. That's right. Going for the gold. Jennifer Patterson Twee is also here. We will talk about GTC in just a little bit. Uh this week in tech brought to you this week by ModuLate. This is actually a really cool comp any. Uh they started first with video gaming, trying to get the abuse down in video gaming. And now there's now they're expanding. Everyday enterpr ises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic, customer calls, uh agent conversations, fraud attempts. And most of that audio ends up just being treated like text. It's flattened to a transcript. There's no you know tone, intent. The risk even kind of is watered down because it's just words on paper. Modulate exists to change that. They did it in gaming. Their technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. There's also all that voice right going on during these massively multiplayer games. They've been using their specially designed AI models to separate playful banner from intentional harm. And they're doing it at scale with millions of players simultaneously. Today, modulate is also helping enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, understand twenty million minutes of voice every da y. By not as a transcript, but I but listening to interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world is a very special model. It's modulates newest ELM, they call it. And I love the name Velma 2.0 with a little nod. I think to Scooby-Doo. Velma, that's the smart one, right? The one with the glasses. Velma is a voice native behavior this is so cool. It's a voice native behavior aware model that was designed and built to understand real conversations, not just transcripts. It orchestrates a hundred plus specialized models, each focused on a different aspect of voice analysis. 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It produces time-stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation so you can see exactly when the risk is going up, when behavior shifts or the intent changes, you can see it right there. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and so much more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model can really do . You know what? You can actually check it out. Go to modulate's live ungated preview of Velma. It's at preview.modulate.ai. That's preview dot modulate dot AI to see why Velma ranks number one and leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection, and emotion detection. Very cool stuff. Preview.modulate. AI . We are entering very interesting times, I have to say, with the with AI . Very, very interesting times . So what? Well uh the um the UK is changing the as uh the Bank of England is changing the faces on banknotes. No more Churchill on your banknotes? Yeah, but everyone's like, oh, that's so woke. But at the same time, they're taking Alan Turing, famous homosexual war hero, off the fifty quid note. And I was talking with someone on Reddit about this, and it was just like they're putting bad ongers the notes. It's just like I would pay money to see Alan Turing on the back of a badger. And somebody just created a an AI picture of that and posted it up. Is it very good? It's pretty damn good. Yeah. I like the idea of wildlife on uh your bills. I think that's kinda neat. And the and the uh the British bills are very colorful, right? The bank Oh yeah, we have fun with it. They're quite pretty. Here's a uh Although now you have the Donald Trump dollar coin coming. Um and the uh so first sitting president who's actually put his name on the c his face on the currency. I think though, to be fair, that isn't intended as regular currency. That is like, you know, a special I was gonna say who who actually uses dollar coins? Right. I mean I I've got very few sells those it's more like uh you know it's more like a a New Jersey New Jersey Transit uses the uh the coin water. So they they're gonna put badgers on them? Uh they're gonna put a whole bunch of wildlife on them. Um King Charles is still on the fr ont. Uh presumably so. I haven't held a UK banknote for over two years. So Jennifer, sorry, you I've probably got one right here actually. Um I I was just I was just in um Costa Rica and they have animals on their banknotes. I have some. They're beautiful. Um because and they have like a little thing. This is this is a UK, this is a British banknote. So there's how pretty that is. There's there's a QE too. Uh and then this is who's I don't I don't know who that is. That's Jane Austen? I don't know. No. Who is that? That's a man. It's a guy. Look at our beautiful colorless green banknotes, right? Joseph Mallard William Turner. Oh, Joe Turner. Old Joe Turner, sure. But the Costa Rican ones, they have like uh sloths and monkeys, and when you put them together like this, they have like a little um I could should go get it, it's much better than the bending the queen's head, but um the flowers come together to form the flower of the region that you're in. It's like it's really neat kind of little Easter egg things. Um and their there's a their banknotes are like yellow and green and blue and um much more colourful than ours. But yeah, I agree. US money is really boring. It's really but th but let's be yeah fair. Who uses cash anymore? Or or do you? I get cash. I go to the bank and get cash, but mostly it's for tips. Our local Bon Mi place only takes cash. But it's getting more expensive too. That means they're money laundering. You know that, right? No, no, I'm I'm I'm sorry. This guy's been doing it for thirty years. He does the best bar me on the planet. Well it's probably worth it. It's it's it's a Vietnamese guy and he's it's a family owned business, but they only take cash. Because why would you pay two to three percent? Yeah. And it's getting more and more expensive for companies to use for retailers to use so like you s when you s do you see this in LA and California, or we see this in the southeast all the time. You go into a restaurant or a shop, and if you pay by card, any card, even debit card, there's a three percent charge on your bill. So that I think will be a good thing. No, but you you're paying three percent more. You pay it. Yes. They're like if you're gonna pay by card, even debit card, your bills are gonna three percent more. The gas stations do it too. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, no. If you if you buy yeah, buy if you buy petrol then it's mu it's it's significantly cheaper to pay with cash. This is how it used to be though, right? Like the United States. They used to always pass on the credit charge to the person, right? Isn't that how it used to be? Yeah. Just mark everything up three percent. I mean they they may be secretly doing that, yes. But you're supposed to have the s I think I maybe I'm wrong, but I think I remember that you were supposed to have the same price for cash or credit. That you weren't supposed to have separate prices. I'm just surprised that they do it that way rather than just mark it up and say three percent discount for cash. Right. Much more positive. Yeah. I just you know I don't know what cat what gas costs in your foreign lands, but here in California it is six bucks a gallon in petalumina. Oh yeah. Oh ours just went up, but it's nowhere near that. Yeah. Well we we pay more in California because of tax Yeah, and also California requires that the uh petroleum petrol, as you would say, gets refined in the state, which costs more. Well also I mean there's there's less pollutants, but yeah, SF Standard had a thing. They found $6. 50, uh, the most expensive gas on in San Francisco. It was weird because I I posted a picture up uh you know, Big Sur, Route 1. If you've ever driven down there, it's a fantastic driving road, but the there are only two petrol stations and they screw you so hard. Yeah, ten years ago. Yeah. Exactly. So I took a picture of their gas prices and it was five fifty. And now that just looks sweet. Oh, and by the way, on the Discord channel, uh Club Twit, I've just posted a picture of Alan Turing riding a badger. Well, now I've got to join the club. That's for sure. That's worth it. That's worth your your club membership right there. Let me see if I can pull it up here. Badger, badger, badger. I mean that is a beautiful image. It is. He's I was small and the badger is so big. The great badger. And British people of a certain age will recognise the meme badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger. What was that? What was and then it would go mushroom mushroom mushroom. That's but that was universal. That was worldwide. Bad job badge badger. Here is a picture of our uh local gas station regulars five ninety n ine plus is six ninety nine V power is six thirty nine that's a shell station. I took you know someday we'll look back and say, wow, it's only six dollars a gallon a mere single digits? Wow. Well, no, but I mean um Jennifer is a Brit as a fellow Brit, you can understand this. When I first came over here and I was talking to the taxi driver on the way back from the airport about British petrol prices. He was like, Hang on, you're paying eleven dollars a gallon I was about to say it's a lot more expensive in England. Yeah. They hide it though by putting it in liters, which is Yes. It's harder to tell. It's harder to tell which I'm going to figure out that I was like, oh wow, it's a bargain here. And down here in the South it's three fifty right now. And but like a month ago it was two seventy. So we've had a huge like overnight. Yeah. Two weekends ago, it it went up. And of course, wasn't it in California since like 20 years ago? Yeah, we haven't seen 270 in ages. But it all trickles down too because truckers, all the food you have, you eat everything. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know what the price is because I pay with electricity. Yeah, me too. Looked. So tomorrow NVIDIA will uh begin GTC. It's uh annual conference, and Jensen Wong will do the keynote. We will be covering it. Jeff Jarvis, Micah Sargent, and I will be turning on our cameras at eleven a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1900 UTC to I'm sorry, 1800 UTC to show a Jensen's leather jacket. And uh and apparently they're gonna have some, I think they're gonna have some big announcements. I think this is really big maybe the most important GTC keynote ever . Uh video's, of course, in the cutting edge of uh of AI development. One of the things that they're going to announce is Nemo Claw, which is an AI agent like OpenClaw but they say will be more secu re. Um they've been talking about this f I think for a while. I don't think this is a big surprise, but we haven't seen it yet . Well it's not hard to be more secure than open cog is. I know uh they also they also say that will not require CUDA, which is of course uh and uh NVIDIA's uh proprietary language, it requires an NVIDIA GPU, which means I guess you'll be able to run it on non-NVIDIA uh hardware. We'll see. The NVIDIA hardware is actually appreciating in value. I saw a story. You can buy H-100 cards. They're old GPUs, but they cost more than they did three years ago when they came out. So if you invested better than buying two dollar bills, buy NVIDIA GPUs. Um they also, according to the Wall Street Journal, uh plan to reveal a new chip system for inference comput ing that will incorporate a chip designed by Grok, not Grok Elon's Grok with the K, Grok with a Q, uh NVIDIA licensed the design from them uh last ye ar. So um they just announced the new platform, the Vero Rubin platform, a few months ago. So they're they're moving very, very fast . I think it's gonna be very interesting to see what uh Jensen announces. You you're gonna watch that right, uh Ian? You said you were Yeah, no, I I was out with some analysts last night um and they were talking about this and NVIDIA's really gotta take the market by the throat at this point because it's stock is massively overvalued. Yeah. Um NVIDIA is is the straights of Hormuz of AI. But I mean uh one uh on one level it's kind of like uh everyone's waiting for the bubble to pop. You know and, what's gonna happen to NVIDIA when that happens. So I think NVIDIA's getting its defense in first and is th some of these new announcements look really, really good. But I I think uh fundamentally talking to people in video and talking to the analysts behind it, there's gonna be a bubble bursting and then they take over and try and salvage something from from the wreckage. But they're actually in a pretty good position. The open source AI gent in particular is getting a lot of attention because it's like, okay, you're actually opening this up and that's gonna bugger up some of their, you know, commercial There's nothing like Claude. In fact, one of the things uh Anthropic announced this week is uh Opus four point six, their frontier model, now has a million token context window up five times from its two hundred thousand. That means it can in it can ingest much more data . I'm with you. I think we need open platforms. I think they're really important. We don't want a handful of companies to dominate this. Go ahead, Richard. Yeah, you used to have to pay a premium to get the million thing. Like I've I have a bunch of friends who who own who pay for a number of Macs accounts because they're software developers. They're literally running these things against each other. And a bunch of them are paying the premium for the million and now they've opened it up, which to me, you know, Anthropic's so far ahead on the efficiency equation that I think they're finding out, okay, we can make this make economic sense too. I think that must be it. They also announced that they're going to give you uh double the usage at off-peak hours. So they m you know, everybody's been talking about, and maybe they're doing this at a great loss. I don't know. Uh Ed Zitrin and others are talking about how much anthropic is uh losing on every single token they sell. Uh I don't know if that's the case. We just don't know how much it costs. We argue about the max ac It's not exactly all you can eat. You can run out, but I have not. I paid two hundred bucks because I get that much value out of it. I find it's a good friends who if it was a thousand they'd be paying too. Like they are knocking. Well that's what I'm afraid of. I think they're hooking me. And we're back to social media. Social media. I honestly I probably would pay more because I'm I'm so tied into the ecosystem. I briefly when chat GPT-54 came out I thought, oh I gotta try this. This is supposed to be better, codex is supposed to be better, and I gotta try it. And I'm I moved everything over and I felt like I was breaking up with my girlfriend. It was very difficult. But uh sorry. The the the thing that's interesting about the token limit issue is one of the things we're doing very heavily in software is breaking down into small enough pieces to stay under the token limits. Right. Um, because we get better quality a if you overflow, you have problems anyway. But in general, people are well e well even under the quarter million because, you get better quality code when you take a smaller bite. Up pretty quickly. When you get to more than 60, 70 percent, you really want to compact it and and you know save what you've learned. Because every time you clear the context window, yeah, it's like you knocked all its brains out and start, hello, who are you? It starts from scratch. So it's like the guy in Memento, you know, he doesn't remember anything. So uh you kind of want to you save notes, you say, okay, I'm gonna compact the memory now. I'm gonna so remembered what we were doing and then you kind of have to start up again and has to read in and so forth. But uh now I can't I mean I'm look at that bar, it doesn't move. It's like uh it's amazing. Uh it's very hard to fill up a million tokens. The question, Leo, is is what what this worth to you then? How much what's the absolute limit you would pay for? Will you pa y? Don't don't test me. That's all I'm saying. No, but does that square with how much Ant Anthropic spends on it? Is that's that's the arithmetic that we've got to do that costs them. And there is definitely some inficiencies that they're gaining, obviously. Uh if well for instance, NVIDIA said the Vero Rubin platform is I forgot what it was, but it was a signific like ten times m less cost than their H two hundreds. I mean they made a they've they're making massive improvements in efficiency. Uh we just don't know. We don't know if it's a money loser or or what. I mean that's always been the contention is that for two hundred bucks a month you're getting thousands of dollars. But anthropic seems to be the company accelerating away. Like they're racing, they're dropping new things out. Like this was always a conversation early on with like what happens when these companies use their own tools to improve their tools. And that's what they're doing, clearly and that's what we're seeing. And more so than any other they seem to be suddenly accelerating away from everyone. Well I mean it's also kind of a grudge match because Anthropic was founded by people that looked at OpenAI and went, bugger that, we're you know, we'd we're doing our own thing. And they're stealing the march on them at the moment. They really are. I mean, with open AI in particular just dying on its backside amongst users because of the political stances they've taken, Anthropic is saying, looking that and going, yeah, let's get in there. Here's an interesting story. I'm very curious what you think about this. You are of course familiar with Perplexity. They have shopping bots on Perplexity. You can say I want to buy some running shoes, trainers in your parlance. And uh I have to remember we're doing foreign language programming now. And uh and so you want to buy some or maybe you want to buy a jumper, sweaters, as we call them. And uh which you know what? Jumper is a much more civilized way to talk about it than sweater. More Aussie, too. Yeah. Uh so let's say you're shopping for a bicycle. You call it a bicycle, right? So you're shopping for a bicycle in perplexity. It will then show you a bunch of sites. You can even say buy me a bicycle. You could say perplexity. Do the research. Get me the best running shoes money can buy. Your budget is 200 bucks or whatever. And it will buy them. Well, Amazon didn't like that too much. Uh the this is using the uh perplexity browser Comet, uh, which is agentic. Amazon didn't like that too much. They sued last November demanding that they stop making purchases for users online. This week a judge ruled in favor of Amazon. It's a temporary injunction, but they said that Perplexities Comic can no longer buy stuff from Amazon's webs ite. Judge Maxine Chesney. It doesn't undermine Amazon's model of selling you their stuff, right? Well it underlines a couple of things. Uh Amazon also has ads on their site, right? They make a huge amount of money from the ads. Uh but they also, yeah, Amazon recommends, Amazon suggests. And you don't see any of that if you're using a bot. You don't see Amazon's site if you're using a bot. The judge uh said Amazon has provided strong evidence that Perplexity's comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction, but without authorization from Amazon. When did I have to get authorization to use a website? Yeah. As a human, do I have to get authorization? Well I mean is which I'm guess their argument. I say their argument probably is you have to have an account, right, to use to buy something on Amazon. It's on the internet. Well, but I presume that Comet is using my money with my account. And that's where the argument falls down. It's like you've given it authorization. So yeah, they don't have and it the the the irony here is this this is exactly what Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Plus. Exactly. And Rufus, which very few people know about, but Amazon has an AI agent on its site and they want you to use Rufus. Alth ough in a related story, Amazon had an all hands with its engineers who they were said, you can't use Claude, you have to use Cairo, our in-house AI, to do your engineering. They had an all hands saying you cannot use any of our code that you you produce with Cairo without getting a senior engineer to sign off on it because apparently it's been causing some problems. They now have to have that massive outage. They deny first they said it was caused by AI. Now they're saying oh no no it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't AI. But I I've got a bridge AI I could sell you if you believe that. They say please don't use our AI to to solve your technical problems. Um yeah, I mean don't you when you're use when I'm using uh Chrome and I go to Amazon and I'm buying something, I'm using Chrome to buy something on my account with my permission. How is that different? I think the judge got this wrong. Yeah, and this is something that um my our esteemed editor-in-chief, Neilai Patel at the Verge, has been hammering on about AI agents since day one. He calls it the DoorDash problem, which is that basically the whole point of Agentic IAI is to circumvent the y the place that the Amazon or the DoorDash, like the place where you're going to go to buy the thing, or the Uber. Um the you know so that service is no longer gonna get users coming to it, just like news organizations are no longer getting users coming to it because AI is just summarizing their their um information and spitting it out. If you can do everything with AI, what happens to the services that you're using because you are no longer using them yourself and these agentic tools are going there for you? And this is like what Rabbit was trying to do. Um this is what all of yeah this is what all of this is you know, this is sort of the goal of a lot of the current agent agentic AI out there. Um Alexa Plus, I'm sure with Gemini and and there's the they just actually I did drop this link in the show notes, but Gemini just launched this um this week on the new Samsung device you can use uh task automation um with Gemini. So you can get Gemini to do your order your Uber or um they launch with Uber and one other feature. Um but This is on the the new S twenty six Ultra. Yes, it's just there now, but eventually I'm sure we'll see it it go to all of uh the phone Gemini. So what happens to them? How many different AI agents on your uh Samsung phone? You've got you've got Bixby, right? They don't discriminate, Samsung. They're open to everyone. But it is only a temporary injunction, right? Which really is. This is is this a case? Is it repropri is it causing harm? Like then you get injunction. The judge I hope so. Well, because it blows the whole thing up if they do. The judge said the court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim. Amazon said, they kind of admitted what we've been saying that perplexities agents uh first they said, well, it's a security risk because it can act uh uh with uh using private customer accounts But then they admitted it. They said perplexities agents created challenges for the company's advertising business. Because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be we have to figure out if it's an AI before we can build the advertisers. This requires modern business model. The system adaptations are necessary to maintain cocktual contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions. Because it is it is what goes to the core of what's gonna happen. I mean, no one's sad about Amazon but we are sad about our news websites that no longer get any traffic to them, so eventually we'll shut down and we will no longer have originally reported news and AI will just have to make up more stuff um because there won't be any original content out there. Um and we are s you know we are sad like we're seeing different like smaller businesses that manage to do well on the internet, um, you know, getting disintermediated. And that that type of thing is what AI is-I mean, AI is coming for everyone's jobs as we keep being warned. In fact, there's a great piece in The Verge this week about which about people um whose jobs are gonna be lost by AI. But AI is gonna completely change the internet and completely change the business models of every uh website out there. So um I mean Amazon, like I said, no boohoos here for for them, but um I mean it you're right. And same thing happened to restaurants. And uh it's been really hard on restaurants uh you know that without asking the restaurant's per mission, companies like I can't was it Uber Eats or DoorDash are Doordash did that. Yeah. Um you know So I understand if I were a small restaurant owner, or my son, for instance, who is a small restaurant owner in New York, um, they c those guys could kill you. Imagine, you know, if uh all of a sudden you get a order for a hundred uh French dip sandwiches, you know, and you've got a customers waiting in the store, but you've got to fulfill these customers' uh orders and you didn't even sign up for it. Mm-hmm. I mean this is what Amazon did to literally every brick and mortar. That's a good point. You started an Amazon. It's a very, very good point. Yeah. Come to think of it. I didn't I wasn't even thinking about that. Um let's see. All right, let's uh take a break and then uh we will talk uh more about doge and the the amazing doge deposition videos wow w ow uh great panel. is This fun. And we're and we're moving along, Jennifer, because we're gonna get you the Oscars start soon. And we're gonna get you. I've been peeking at the dresses. There's some good ones. Yes, the right now is mid-carpet time. Yeah, you wanna be an hour late any you wanna be an hour late anyway, so when you skip the ads, you basically catch up to live once you've skipped all the ads. It's kinda like an American football game in that respect, you know. So skip over the ads and it's And this is what really makes me mad about social media. Forget all this about making I don't want to see any spoilers 'cause it's coming across and it's on my phone, it's on my watch, it's everywhere. Oh my god, this is yeah. Exactly the same problem last night. The Chinese Grand Prix ran at midnight and I had to turn my phone off just to make sure I didn't get spoilers. I'm iffy about it. Oh, it's so exciting. No, I'm uh you see, I'm sorry. I'm a I've been watching Formula One for 40 years, and in my mind, when you're right when you're driving a Formula One car, it's balls to the floor, go as fast as you can, and now you've got to recharge the battery. Manage this. Yeah, yeah. It's more like Mario Kart. A lot of drivers have said that it's exactly like Mario Kart because if you charge the battery enough, you get a magic mushroom and you go much. Know when to let the banana go. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is. It's much more complicated. But you know what? This is a generation of drivers. They're all like 20 that grew up on Mario Kart. They've played, you know, this is this this is a video game to them. Yeah. I mean, I think this is why we're gonna lose Max Verstappen by the end of the season because he's just not enjoying it at all. Yeah, ' itcause's not winning uh all this is one of the reasons I like it. Three plus G's in these turns. Like you you change your weight to the j to the driveway, like it's really a deep and you've got a uh you've got a thirty pound helmet on your head as well, which is being forced to the sides. So they have the hands device. So they it's they need those things. But you know, the the reality is we haven't been going faster for a long time because you can't keep the driver safe. Yeah. Like we've hit the limit a long time ago. They could be 300 mile an hour cars. Just everybody would die. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, well that's it's much safer than it used to be. Much safer. Well yeah, I mean it's it's kind of like the Group B rally series in the eighties where they basically said, you know, let's Do you like Apple's uh new uh I uh the thing I know added a lot of ads. All of a sudden there's ads on F one which I don't like at all. I paid a lot more money though for the F one T V subscription. So I guess that's the Well I mean F one TV I think was about ninety bucks a year last year and I'm fine with that. If it means no adverts and I can get the British commentators, I'm I'm down with that. Yeah, we still the good news is we still get the F1 TV commentators, you still get Crofty if you want Crofty. Uh Crofty's losing a bit, but I do like Martin Brundle. No one can do a far slap like Martin Brundle. I like the Scottish guy, David Cluthard. He has Oh yeah, on the on the main feed. DC is fantastic. DC you know, and he's he's very sarky. Uh it when you get um Nico Rosberg doing commentating, I highly recommend it. Yeah. Because he is snarky as all hell and I I do like his commentary. I'm sorry. We got started talking about Sorry, yeah. Never start us on F1. Ian and I will go on and on and on. All right. We're gonna we're gonna take a break, come back. Let's talk about Doge when we come back. Uh Jennifer Pattison Tue, who has Costa Rican money. Did you have a good time in Costa Rica? I'm so jealous. Oh, it was amazing. We recommended tips. It was my it was our twentieth wedding anniversary and we had gone there. Congratulations. We had thank you. We had gone there for our honeymoon. So we came back and we brought our kids with us. So and to the exact same place. And it was the Osa Peninsula. It's like the remotest part of Costa Rica you can you can get to, really. So it's funny because I know many people go there, but everybody has a different reason for going. You have the Atlantic, you have the Pacific, you have the jungle. It's all different things. Yeah. This is the the rainforest like so we were deep in the jungle, so it was like Bumas and monkeys and toucans and coates and everything. We saw all the wildlife. Um in the house, actually. You know, we we were in a house, like an Airbnb, but it had no walls. Okay, I don't like that. Okay. We did that once in Mexico. We got what they call a palapa. And when I saw that the whatever monkeys had nibbled the soap, I said, We're moving. Not staying here. But to be fair, our our our firstborn was like a uh six months old so I d I didn't want them to nibble our six month old so yeah yeah I I can understand. But it was it was like it was like being in that wild. They were coming in the house. Yeah and the ra the racco the raccoons came in the house. Um which which they warned us this and um I said to my husband, Well, there's like one part of the house that's like a big almost like a safe with a big heavy door, so they c they put all the like electric in there. And I it's like, we should put the food in there and the trash. And so he diligently one night packed everything into there and then forgot to shut the door. Oh no. Raccoons are not so dumb, are they? One raccoon came and then five more. It's like he went and got his of the rest of his family. Nice. They forgot to close the door. And the raccoons in Costa Rica are not like the ones in the US, which interesting side note are apparently becoming domesticized domesticated, which is very interesting. But the ones in Costa Rica are huge and this one stood up on its back, on its hind legs, and because I went down to shoe them away and it stood up at its hind legs and it was as tall as me. What? What? No, no, it was an actual raccoon. But it did I know what you mean about it. It almost looked like a cross between the coates and the ra that big? Yeah. On its hind legs. Yeah. I was like, Oh, that's terrifying. Did it try to wash you? No, I mean I'm as a as a fellow Brit, I find uh trash panders absolutely terrifying 'cause they have no fear whatsoever. You know, it's just like if you see them on the street, they're just like stand up on the hind legs and go, Yeah, you want some? You know, I mean I mean urban raccoons bulk up to fight dogs and they're quite assertive. Yeah. I live in bear country. You simply do not need anything edible outside, like. they will go through it all Well I should have known this Palapa in Mexico, the bed didn't have feet, it was hanging from the ceiling. And I that should have been a giveaway. That there was something that might crawl up a bed leg, and so we're just gonna hang it from the ceiling. The bear thing does terrify me because I went camping up in um up in the Sierras and my wife woke me up in the middle of the night just because there were bears prowling around our tent. And yeah, we done the thing, we put the food in a bear box and the rest of it. But she's just like, isn't it amazing? It's like there are two thin layers of nylon between me and huge sharp pointy teeth. Oh yeah. Not something I'm enjoying. Yeah, and they'll and they like toothpaste too. Don't bring the toothpaste in your tent. Like it's a bign't heard. I mean they uh the the the thing the the guide told us was if it's brown, lay down, if it's black, attack and it's just like I know I'm going to die thinking, Well it's kind of brown. Is it a blue dress? Is it a black dress? I don't know. My husband was a fishing guide in Alaska for four summers and he once was cleaning fish on the end of a dock and um a one a huge big brown bear who had hurt paw came onto the dock. It was like, oh good. You look like a big fish. Would you like a fish? Thankfully. Yeah. Thankfully he had a radio on him, but the bear was going right for him. He really wanted. Yeah, so it's it th they're pretty scary creatures. They're great to view from a distance. A very safe distance. Rich Rich is quite the fisherman. Well I mean I mean I had a Yeah and live with it my whole life, so I'm d I'm not that anxious about it. But you don't mess with brown bears Uh an old schoolmate of mine uh worked on Svalbard uh in the Arctic Circle for a couple of years. And it's not a exactly you're you're not allowed out of the town unless you've got a gun on you because they will you know polar bears are just like ooh crunchy you know Well and it's also a big deal if you do shoot a polar bear, like that's your mistake. Like we did the expedition out of Svalbard, and it's like checked very carefully there was no bear around because they're endangered. And if you shoot one, now you have a a lot of paperwork to do. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Uh we're taking a little break, come back. I'm not sure I want to be massive. Just a different Monday. They yank whales out of the water. Yeah.. Wow Yes. David Attenborough had a marvelous series on on on the life in ice thing. Where yeah, they're literally hanging around the whale the whales will come up to breathe, and then just pour in, rip 'em out. Yeah, we've got food. Yeah. Snack time. The only time polar bears are fun to look at is when they're so stuffed full of whale they can't even move. Now they're on the money. Uh we are uh talking to uh the commonwealth version of this week in Tech, Richard Campbell from Madeira Park, British Columbia in uh Thompson. He's visiting San Francisco, but he really is a Irishman. Well uh Irishman? Scots, please. Scots. I thought you said Ireland. I know, I always thought you were Scots. No, no, I I'm half Scott and half Yorkshire, which makes me the tightest person on the planet. Jennifer will understand that. There's only one type cheaper than the Yorkshireman, and that's a Scott. Yes. This is the how this is how copper wire was invented. Two Yorkshiremen fighting over a penny. Ah wow. And uh Jennifer Pattison Touie from The Verge. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today, brought to you by Monarch. 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And then you can share a link or a QR code with your group and everyone can say, yeah, that was mine, that was mine, and settle the bill effortlessly. This is a nice feature. They just added this. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all-in-one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code TWIT at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off at monarch.com code TWIT. There was no question in my mind. Monarch is worth every penny. I love Monarch. So of course the big story this week was a whistleblow er that says one of the Doge engineers in the social security database copied records from five hundred million people. That's more than there are in the United States, so I guess it's 500 million records, maybe. Uh he possessed two databases from the Social Security Administration, NUMADENT and the Master Death file . The whistleblower said the person asked for help transferring the databases from a thumb drive to his personal comp uter so he could quote sanitize the data before using it at a company he was going to. He is currently employed. This is uh exactly what we were worried about to be honest when these kids, these twenty someth ings, got brought into govern ment. Um the Social Security Security Inspector's General Office is investigating this. It is a credi ble story. Um and the guy who took 500 million records for li I guess living and dead Americans, that's why there's so many of them, includes social security numbers, places and dates of birth, citizenship, race, ethnicity, parents' nam es. And we know who it is because it's been revealed, and we know he went to a company that works with the social secur ity. He had essentially unrestricted God level security access to the social security administration systems. These are databases that until now have been treated as highly secure, highly private. The government expects us to give them all the information every year when we file our tax returns. In return, we expect them to keep it priv ate. Yeah, how's that working out? Yeah, I mean it's just like you let a bunch of I I mean we'll talk about this later, but you look at the people that were behind this and you know it's just like they would instantly take this because it's fantastic data. Why wouldn't you? Um but yeah, I mean the fact also that they ask for help about this shows Hey hey can you help me? Yeah. I I can't figure out how to get this out into my personal laptop. Yeah. I just it boggles the mind. It really does. Most of this data was in M three sixty five government. Oh thing these kids did was they got the admin accounts. Yeah, they got got accounts. Yeah, they got the admin access, which means they literally had drive level access to everything. They may or not how to act utilize the data or anyt Chief Technology Officer at L idos because Lidos works with the social they have a one and a half billion dollar five-year deal working with the Social Security Administration. Um he's denying everything, of course. Of course. I feel like the problem is, you know, uh I I every week I get another letter from another company saying that my social security number and every other thing I've given them has has been exposed. It's like whose social security number is not in the wrong hands these days. It's like we we need to have a complete sort of reset on how we've we handle or what what data actually becomes is essential to recognize and identify us. I saw another article this m this week about something like an absurd number of tax returns have been filed using fraudulent data. So people and it's quite common I hear to like log in to do your taxes if you use an online service and it'll be like, oh, you've already filed. Oh no. Yeah. Yeah. So like we've we've lost the Well then that was what Doge was supposed to fix, right? Doge was supposed to fix fraud. The the the sad truth of it is, you know, Elon said it was gonna save the government two m t two trillion dollars. It saved very little money. It costs more money than it saved, yeah. And that's actually the the cause for this lawsuit by the um modern language association, the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical So Association, they're suing the National Endowment for the Humanities because their grants were cut by Doge. Hundreds of millions of dollars of grants were cut by Doge. And in this lawsuit, uh the Doge kids were brought in uh to testify. Now uh the MLA posted that on YouTube and a judge immediately said, uh yeah, no, that's a deposition. You that's confidential. You can't post it. Uh but of course once it's on YouTube, yeah. It's four oh four did a fantastic job on this. Yeah. And uh I feel for I Joe Cox I'm known for a while and but they actually had somebody sit through six hours of this testimony and go through with it and the guy some of these guys there's a Germans have a word for everything, okay? And there's a German word and forgive me for this, but it's Bachfelschemisch, which is a face made for punching. And my goodness. I looked at that and it was just like this guy was like, no, we just fed it into Jat B T chat GPT and it told us whether it was D E I or not, so we just deleted it. And it's like that's people's lives. There was the EO explicitly laid out the details. I don't remember it off the top of my head. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah. Yeah. He says I don't know what DEI is, but I know it when I see it. Right. They were basically they were if it the if if a uh a grant was uh uh uh application mention ed a black person, a tribal person, a Native American, uh uh L B G T Q, it was in there, they would just cancel the grant. Period. That was it. Yeah. It was a basically a word sear ch. Yeah, he didn't know what it means. He was just searching for the string. Uh exactly. I don't know what it means. I just know what I'm told. Even the word diverse was in that. So like even when DEI Diversity, equity, inclusion. Even like we need a diverse set of evidence. Stuff like that even got so it wasn't even connected to anything racial or anything like that. I was I was talking about this with my next door neighbor. Um because there's a younger guy than Justin Fox who was also deposed, and she's a teacher. And she was just like, I know those kids at school. They think they know it all and they know bugger all. And they are kids. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And I'm not surprised they stole the data because why wouldn't you? You know, it's like you've got access to that database. Ye ah. That's who you blame. What's the German word? Uh you've got it up on the screen now. It's uh I I can't pronounce it because it's German and I can speak a little French but not German, but Bach Feitschutlinch. So it's basically it's compound word meaning to punch someone Backfife means punch or slap on the cheek or face and uh geseigt means face. So yeah. Slappable face. There's a reason there are no great German love poets, put it that way. It isn't exactly a romantic language. Um uh let's see what else uh we're talking about uh things uh government is doing that we don't like. How about this? Uh Texas has banned lab-gwnro salmon because Texans have, quote, a God-given right to know what's on their pl ate. And for millions of Texans, it better come from a pasture, not a lab . So uh it's it's it's poisoned by pollutants, it's got heavy m heavy metals in there, but no lab grown stuff is just, you know. Well, that's a reason to ban it. Okay. But I think you could. Oh no, the lab grown stuff doesn't have that. No, exactly. If you if you cat if you catch a salmon in the river They take cells and they grow them, right? Yeah. Uh and they're suing Texas because Texas bans cell cultivated meat. The company's founder says lab grown salmon eliminates the mercury microplastics and antibiotic uh contamination found typically found in seafo od. Does it have you has anybody tasted lab gro wn meat? Uh yeah, I've done I've done lab grown meat. It's honestly it tastes pretty much the same. You know? I mean it's it even bleeds 'cause they put beetroot beetroot juice in there. But I mean stop doing that. That's disgusting. Because you know, we we our resources, I mean sal mon they're still fairly I mean after one really they were close to extinction a few decades ago, but they brought them back. But then things like beef, you know, the that resources that they use to is for get data centers. Yeah. And the the quote at the end of this article that and I from my least favourite governor of all time um is um that we're we're fighting back against the global elite's plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a pe petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals. I'm like, what the what what what is authoritarian goals? By the way, you people might think since we were talking about Texas, you're talking uh about Governor Abbott. It's actually Ron DeSantis. Yeah, I'm um I I live very close to Florida. My parents lived in Florida. Um and there's a band in Florida and Texas. Yeah. Ron DeSantis is one of the yeah. Anyway, I won't get too political. This makes no sense to say this is the global elite's plan. Why why would why would the global elite want to force people to eat lab grown meat? What is the point here? Is it or it's to to get rid of farming? Is that the No. The same people who brought you COVID vaccines to global elite. We have a global food crisis and if we can create another way to to develop nutritious without killing an animal food, without killing an animal, without ingesting toxins and plastics ourselves. Yeah. And they're not talking about saying like we can't, you can't eat real salmon, but you know, having alternatives is that's the thing. Why ban it? Yeah. Well no, it's it's already labelled. Yeah, it says it's Leo, you're up in Pasaluma, which is big chicken farming country. And if you go downwind of a chicken farm, my god and yeah, same thing with the beef feed loot feedlots. I would welcome that lab grown meat. We call it here the Sonoma Aroma. Really? Oh my God. Uh Here's another one that makes me mad. So apparently uh there is now uh and I bet you would know about this, Jennifer. Uh you can get plug-in solar panels. They're they're very you don't have to install them on your roof. You could put them on your on your deck, on your uh a garage, and they plug in and then they power your house. They're it's popular in Germany. More than 1.2 million of the systems are registered with the Oh, Utah, good for you, Utah. Utah has the first law supporting plug-in solar. But But of course, utilities don't want you generating your own electric ity. And so uh the it's illegal. State lawmakers are now in thirty stat es talking about making plug-in solar legal. Have you played with this at all, Jennifer? Do you know anything about it? Yeah, well, it's actually very common in Europe. Um in fact, my well, last time I visited England, I was at my aunt's house and they had literally found a solar panel in a dump and resurrected it and plugged it into their house and were powering some lights on their porch because these can't necessarily power your entire home. These are small arrays that you could just power like your refrigerator if the the in the power's gone down. Um or you could power a small apartment maybe and so the roof balcony solar is kind of what was the original kind of um trend in in Europe is that, you know, if you have a small apartment and you just want to power a few things, you can just hang solar off your balcony. And it's a way of bringing solar to people that live in apartments as well because you can't, you know, right, for for so long solar is really limited to someone if you own your own home and you've got to spare 20 grand to install them. And they're re it's a complicated process. Um my uh my colleague uh Thomas Ricker at the Verge, who's in um Denmark, nope, the Netherlands, Amsterdam. He lives in Amsterdam and he tests a lot of this type of plug-in solar or portable solar and and it's it's a great it's a great thing to be able to have a backup source that is not the grid without having to invest a huge amount of money. I mean I've got solar panels. I think Leo, you have solar panels, don't you? I do, yeah. Yeah. And they you know it's a it's great if you can have it and we're seeing it. But they're hugely expensive. I think we see tens of thousands of dollars on them. And they're and the utilities are pushing against this for safety reasons, they say, but obviously a significant re issue for them is they don't want people generating their own power. Although there are some utilities who we're seeing sort of the flip side because we are seeing a real surgence of um VPNs, so virtual power networks. So where utilities can actually tap into people with who have that who are generating their own energy and storing it in batteries in order to help stabilize the grid. So I think we're kind of at a we're at a tipping point with the grid in America. And I can imagine, whilst we've seen resistance to this type of technology today, I would have thought, you know, within the next five to ten years, as more and more electric uh utility companies start to realize the value and benefit of being able to kind of jet spread the generation of energy and not just have to rely on large power plants. Not that small little solar panels like this are going to help, but just solar panels in general in people's homes, batteries in people's homes. And we actually see we've seen an uptick of people installing batteries without solar panels just so that they have um a resource like instead of a generator Yeah, they can time shift. So I I think I think we're gonna start this is gonna start to be a big trend. I think there's an upside to the gas crisis, the oil crisis, that might be it. If if energy price becomes uh f for fossil fuels gets so high. Yeah. Renewable scale. But it it's it's uh I mean companies are worried because it's always hot. So you could and and so anyway they raise a lot of safety concerns. Backfeding's an issue, but backfeeding is also testable. Well it's and they point out there have been millions of systems installed in Germany and there have been no safety instance re And the UL is doing they're doing a certification for these systems and I think that's sort of going through tweaks. But eventually it it should be a I mean I think there's a lot of fear mongering and maybe scare mongering right now, but ultimately there's this solution could be applied to and it's great to be able I mean, instead of having a AC unit sticking out your window, you know, you can hang some solar panels and power your fan in the house. Yeah, I mean part of the problem is that in uh the in California anyway, um these are private the our power companies are private industries, and they really their business really is building power plants and then selling the PG and E uh just the the scum of the sorry. I I shouldn't be so many times in the last two years it's well we've just got another fee this month. But I mean they're really worried about this because as Jennifer pointed out, if you've got local power things uh local power systems sorted out, that kind of takes their entire moda modus operandi away. Uh I've just started cert training with the fire department here. And they're saying get solar. Because you know, when the electricity goes out, you're on your own and you need an independent power supply. And you know, if the electricity goes out across the state after a major earthquake, there's gonna be no gas pumps working, so if you've got an electric car, get yourself solar. California require solar panels on residential now? Like you think on new residential, yeah. You have to get a permit to not put solar panels. Oh, that's great. I love hearing with new builds, then yeah. So and if you want to buy if you're if you if you're interested in this, I mean you could technically do this where even if you're not in a state that allows it because it doesn't require any permitting. You just have to make sure that no one's going to buy one. But you can buy them. So Ecoflow actually sells a DIY balcony solar system that you can go and buy right now. I really like this. I might I have a balcony. It's called Stream Series and We had uh There it is. Yeah. I I have to correct it because we did we had I think sixty solar panels on our old house and two Tesla batteries, but we moved and we don't have any now and we don't have any batteries now and I feel naked to be honest with you. I actually just got a whole system installed that I'm gonna test so I'm gonna start coveringflows. the The e EcocoFowl smart panel and ecoflow batteries. I'm still testing. We're putting that in here too. You are? Oh, you are. Okay. Well, the whole point with that, with the smart panel is you get to pick what breakers essentially go on battery. So there's no back feeding risk because when the battery's feeding it, that breaker's not on the ring panel anymore. So the panel feeds the battery and then the battery feeds the breakers. So that eliminates the backflow. Yeah, well they switch between them. Okay. So though the point being like when when power goes out here, not that unusual. I'm lazy living in the wilderness. Uh there's some things you just don't want to power, right? You don't want to power baseboard heat. Use the fireplace. Like that's not necessary But your refrigerators, you definitely want to keep that one going, right? Keep some lights going, like that kind of stuff. That's where all the bear meat is. Yeah. Let the stove let the stove go. You're gonna cook on the on the on the cast iron. Right. But yeah, and it's this is a review from last year that Thomas Ricker did, but it's ecoflow. Um so so you can get them now. So that's you can buy the the balcony ones, yeah. You're just only technically legally allowed to use them in Utah, but um but yeah, because the permitting and all of that with solar is one of the biggest, you know, pains along with the price. Not a small problem. Well and and that was we had uh we bought it f uh from Solar City, which is now a Tesla uh company and you actually we had a power purchase agreement. It was kind of a crazy thing. It's amortized over twenty years and the whole thing. And when we moved it was a big pain. We had a kind of the new owners had to take over But the idea here of just being able to plug it into an outlet rather than having a plugs into a regular outlet. Literally just into an outlet instead of hook hooking it So you don't need an inverter or anything. Or that's what the that's in the in the panel. And then you could plug it into one of Ecoflow's backup battery powered things too. So you could then have you know, you could power anything from that the they have their big portable batteries with lots of outlets and plugs in. And so if you plug the solar into that, you can charge the battery, and then from the battery, you could charge anything in your in your house. So it'd be great for um, you know, for air areas where you have frequent power outages. I mean, I live in the south where we have hurricanes, um, which was one of the reasons we wanted to try testing this system because I'm now technically my own little microgrid. So if when I generate enough power, um I can run and I get a little alert on the Ecoflow app, it says, Oh, you're off grid. And it's like, woohoo! I love that feeling. Isn't that great? Yeah, when we had that so the Tesla power walls, it was great every once in a while. We'd be or we'd be feeding power back into the grid, which is also cool. They don't let you do that anymore. Well, I mean you can, but they don't give you any money for it. They'll pay you for it anyway. No. So that's why batteries are much more attractive now, 'cause the more when you generate more energy, just save it for yourself and use it later. ourselves just to you know, because the power goes out occasionally, but if there's a a a bad situation, then it's nice to have that power in house. Yeah. Yeah. Australia's got the highest uh percentage, especially southeastern Australia, of residential solar. And there's a lot of sun. It's a lot of sun. It's an endless supply. So now you you have to have uh the ability for the power company to disable your solar because they're overwhelming the grid. You have too much. Oh good grief. I'm surprised that Arizona hasn't gone in big on this because they have the sunshine. Yeah they know Arizona and New Mexico, they could be huge solar states, but instead they' re building data centers in a water poor area, it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, just imagine if our government was into renewables, right? Just imagine. It's happening anyway because the economics of it are so good. Rem remember that uh Trump stopped that big uh wind installation uh off the coast of uh Massachusetts. It's it's now done. The judge said you can't stop it. It's now done. Um and and Bill Gates just got permission to build his uh terra power. Nuclear. This is these are the new you're an expert on this, Richard. These are these new sodium carbonists. Nuclear sodium is not new. Okay. Um so normally we make nuclear power with using water as both the working fluid and the moderator. Light water reactors are the majority of reactors in this world. And there's reason for that. Then mo moderation means we slow the neutrons down. You use what they call a thermal neutron instead of a fast neutron. Because the new neutrons interact with the water and it changes. The nice thing when you're in the thermal neutron spectrum is you don't need as many to interact with the radioactive material. So it's a little easier to manage, although it has certain side effects. And and you're heating the water for steam to generate electricity as well. That's how it's secondary. Yeah, becomes the w that's the part of it's the working fluid. It's what moves the heat to the heat exchangers to make the energy. Uh, when you play with when you're working with sodium, sodium is transparent to neutrons. So you are working in the fast spectrum. Now, there's an upside and a downside to this. The upside of the fast spectrum is high velocity, high energy neutrons uh are more likely to break uranium up rather than to make it into higher actinides. You know, you m the primary source of plutonium for nuclear bombs is light water reactors. Lightwater reactors because the neutrons move slower, sometimes the neutron sticks to the uranium and then decays in an alpha particle to become a uh does beta decay to become neptunium. And then when it does it again, it becomes plutonium. Hu h. Uh when you're in the fast spectrum, you're far less likely to do that. It tends to break the atoms into pieces. You're doing transmutation, you're making cesium and iodine and a bunch of other things. Um so that's cool. And plus, s molten sodium can handle a lot more heat. In order to get enough energy out of water, we have to pressurize the reactor, right? You wanted the water to get up to about 300 degrees, which doesn't want to do. Uh, so you have to keep it in the pressure vessel. When you do this with sodium, you don't have to pressurize. Sodium happily runs along about 600 degrees. Uh, so you you can handle a lot more energy. What's the downside, you ask? Well, sodium reacts with absolutely everything, mostly water, which turns to be everywhere. So you have to purge the vessel in all pipes of any moisture of any kind. Pretty much all hydrogen has to be purged out of it. Chemistry that we had a little piece of sodium we took out and exposed to the air and it burst into flame. Yeah. Okay. And we're using this to cool the plant? Well, you're using that as the working fluid. It's not a fluid up. It gets hot, you pump that away. How do they scram this though if it doesn't slow the scram it pretty much the same way with absorb with absorbing rods, bar on rods. So that part's similar. Uh it does run at a higher temperature. The the downside is your neutron concentration is really, really high, so it is tricky to manage. Yeah. Slowing them down, shutting them down and speeding them up, all that is fairly tough. But that's part of the tarot power design. So they're actually using lithium beryllium salts as the heat transfer fluid. So this is uh a way instead of it's not sodium to steam. Well they it's still got its problems. Berlium's wildly poisonous. Oh but the but the the upside to using the salt approach for doing the heat transfer is they can store it. And so rather than having to constantly vary the the performance of the reactor, how much you're power jetting based on power needs, you run it at full bore all the time. And when you don't need as much power, you just store that as excess heat in the beryllium salts. And that's very clever. Like they're talking about it's a 300 megawatt reactor, but they can do like four hours at 500 megawatts because they have all this excess heat stored. Um the real challenge with molts with with working with sodium reactors is when you do need to shut them down, which you do occasionally, you have to get all the sodium out of the reactor vessel or it reacts, maybe it explodes like it's dangerous, and fires. So there's only really one sodium reactor working in the world right now, and it's in Russia. Because they're not that worried about the fires. They're okay with that. It was okay. We could have the big deal. Russia engineering. And to be clear, if you read the article, I mean they've gotten permission, so they they built the energy generation island first. So this was the beryllium salts and the generators and all that stuff. They didn't have permission to build the reactor at all. They just got permission to build the reactor now, but they do not have permission to get any fuel. They can't turn it on yet. No, well they're not even allowed to buy the fuel and they need Halo fuel, which is like the source of the fuel's going to be a problem. They're going to need literally to specially make that fuel. And anything involving radioactives is hugely difficult. So they I mean it's backed by gates so they can afford to wait. Like they're not exactly on a budget per se. Um the upside, if they can make this thing work, is it is a fuel burner. They'll want to buy used light water reactor fuel. Oh, yeah. Consume it in this reactor. Neat. So that that is a feature if they can make this thing work. Uh and obviously we build more of them. Uh because it does tend to consume actinides more so than light water reactors do. Aaron Powell And is are these the modular smaller nuclear power plants I keep hearing? So far they've talked about in the 300 megawatt class, which is a sort of large modular reactor, uh SMRs were kind of a way to be allowed to talk about nuclear reactors when you're not allowed to talk about nuclear reactors. And so, you know, even in the case in Canada, where we were headed down the path of using the G Atachi SMR at the Darling to B site. They've now backed away from that. Because once you get all the permitting done and you're ready to build a reactor, it's like you might as well build a big one. A, you know how to run them already. B, they make a lot more power and they're kind of simpler. You know, the current legal rules for nuclear reactors require a separate control room for each reactor. Well, that's fine if you only have two reactors, but what if you have sixteen? That's a lot of control rooms. I mean I I interviewed there's a startup called Deep Fission. I interviewed them about 'cause their idea is to drill a mile down into the planet below the aquifer, fill uh put a small pressure oil a small nuclear reactor down there, use gravity to pressurize it. And yeah, the control room problem is a massive one. It's yeah. And New Scale, who's another SMR company out of Idaho, they actually got the permits to be able to do a combined uh re uh uh they they convinced the the U the uh energy agency to actually allow them to combined uh control rooms but, then they lost their they they lost their buyer. So now they're struggling to they they've now got to deal with Romania. Like they're trying to make this go forward. But the regulatory body was built around large reactors. And it's extremely hard for small reactors to make sense in this current regulatory environment. Let's take a little break when we come back. Uh Travis Kalinek is back. Oh boy. Turns up like herpes, yes. And he's been very busy. So you know, stay tuned. Uh we are talking about all kinds of stuff this week on Twit. Thanks to uh Richard Campbell. Great to have you from Run as Radio and Windows Weekly. Uh Jennifer Pattison Tui of the Verge, senior reviewer there. And Mr. Ian Thompson, his letter from America appears in Techfinitive at Techfinitive.com. Our show today brought to you by Spaceshi p. I'm not I'm not talking about UFOs. I'm talking about Spaceship, which is my favorite domain registrar, but more than that. If you've heard us talk about spaceship before, there's a reason. It keeps coming back. Spaceship is rethinking how people register and manage domains, and it's a huge success. It's fresh approach has led to more than six point five million domains being under management in record time. I mean f from zero to six point five million in nothing. Uh and this kind of growth comes f very simply from giving people what they want. Spaceship offers transparent, low pricing on domain registrations. When I was looking for a domain for a Paris Martineau's news site, we found it for you know I think 60 bucks and then 30 bucks, and I found it for half the price at spaceship. But it also makes it very easy to set up a website, to set up a VPS, to set up email. And the pricing is so good. But y you know, it's it's it's so good that you're gonna want to move from your existing registrar. They make transfers and renewals very easy and very affordable. There's more clarity over what you're paying for over time. So it is a great value, that's for sure. But the platform is also especially built for flexibility. You can easily and instantly connect your spaceship registered domain to spaceship products, the web hosting, professional email, uh virtual machines. 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It's spaceship and they have a nice little ai named Alf that will help you do all the hard stuff spaceship.com slash tw it it was all over X Travis Kalinick is back, man. And it turns out he never left. Travis Kalinick, you know the name. He's the guy who created Uber and then was forced out by the board for a toxic workplace and I don't know. Yes. uh affection for him. What he did immediately after was he started Ghost Kitchen Company. That was weird, called Cloud Kitchens. And then he had a real estate called City Storage System s. But he's renamed it all to Atoms and published a webs ite with a manif esto. Um the thesis, it's Adams.co. And if you go to Adams.co slash vision, you can see the manifesto. He starts by saying, I left Uber in 2017, heartbroken . Um it was only days after the death of my mother and near death of my father in a boating accident when investors decided to come out from the shadows and exploit this vulnerable moment to wrestle control of my company away from me. I bled, but I did not perish. I got back up and fought my way back into the arena. And a lot of people said he's been secretly creating this empire. He says, and actually I thought this was the most interesting part of this. I don't really know if Adams.co is going anywhere or if his vision has any sense to it. But he said, You have to understand my idea al hasways been to digitize the physical world. He says that was my life's work. So Uber was to add software in effect to ride sharing, right? . Then he said our first computer was a food computer, which digitized manufacturing real estate and logistics for food. He says the whole thing, the whole world is food. Everything comes from growing it, mining it, and transporting it. And so he wants to do all three of those with AI and That's the real business. At Adams, we make gainfully employed robots, specialized robots with productive jobs that bring abundance to their owners and society at lar ge. Are you interested in invest ing? Phrase gainfully employed robots, which means not gainfully employed humans. You know, I mean it's That's what he says it's gonna be a golden age where you won't have to work. Uh yeah, but then you also don't get paid. The next age will be upon us when the means of growing, mining, manufacturing and moving physical things becomes fully divorced from human labor. Which does raise the question, well who's gonna buy these things you're growing, mining, manufacturing, and moving if nobody has a job? Oh please. He says the cost of unit cost per unit of intelligence is going down in price by ninety percent per year. That's probably true with AI. I don't know. Total capabilities and general intelligence have increased nearly a thousand fold over the last three years. Possibly true. Hardware, software, and manufacturing productivity will continue to compound each other to ever increasing speeds of progress. We're only a millionth of the way there, Ian. Don't worry. But the inevitable destination is the singularity. Uh oh, superhuman intelligence and efficiency. Until then I don't know what's gonna happen after that, but until then, abundance will be creating more jobs, not less. So there . Yeah, right. But it is exactly what Ian Banks universe was, right? Where there was kind of everything was handled, everything was managed. Well, yes, but he he he kind of skips over the seven thousand years before that, where there were sort of mass problems and if you read his notes on the on the development of the culture. You know, it it's just this was a necessity thing. But it got there eventually, yeah. Yeah, but I mean it's many generations have to die, but you know, that'll be fine. Well, just as as the Palantir CEO said, you know, it's just like, yeah, you're all gonna lose your jobs, but it trust me, it'll be better, really. It'll be great. That is that is the last that is test trail though. That is what they're that's what they think though. Probably yeah they're saving the trillions. Who cares about the trillions of the future we care about, not the present. Kalanik says uh his last three words are I never left. Um I it sure looks like uh it's a pitch to investors. Remember Uber never made money. I don't know if that's he w raised more money than anybody until AI came along, right? Right. Oh yeah. Quote on all that is when you raise 60 billion dollars, there's no way to make good choices. You have too much money to make too much money. Yeah. You can't possibly make good choices. Uh somebody pointed out, I think it was Robert Scoble that the what happened at Uber was the whole plot was really to uh have self-driving vehicles. It n it never made economic sense if humans were involved. So but when when he was forced out, the company got rid of the autonomous vehicle portion of the business. And so it never was going to make money. The interesting thing is the guy I'm sorry. Uh Uber remains the only self driving vehicle company that's actually killed somebody. You know, they they they they actually went in the you know, somebody got run over, they they died, and you know yeah, you're right. The Uber Epono uh economic business model doesn't make sense without self driving cars and it's interesting to see who they've teamed up with but I personally wouldn't trust Kalanik further than I could throw him and I have poor upper body strength so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think MAM hasO a fatality as well. Oh really? So let's make it let's fair. Let's spread it out. Um I I do think the theory here behind robotics in being specialized robots rather than single rather than a all purpose robot like a humanoid makes an awful lot of sense. Not sure whether specifically his, you know, uh this business is is gonna make sense. But I've spent a lot of time with robots um and in sp individual like single purpose robots and even humanoid robots. And there is there's a place for robotics that in our lives and in our workforces and in our homes and single purpose, individual, specialized robots that can do one or two things really well, I think is the ul is really the future of robotics in our in our society rather than the sort of flashy Jetson um uh Iron Man dream of of a robot that can do everything. Yes. I just I just don't see that actually and I've said this before on the show I know and I know there's people in the in the Discord that vehemently disagree with me and think we're like a day away from humanoid robots. But I think it's a lot further away than we think and I think you have more experience with robotic household things than anyone. Yeah, and remember I had to be a robot fell on you for crying. Yes. Almost killed you. Almost got me. So and then that's the biggest thing. I think that's the biggest fear and concern and reason why we won't have humanoid robots is they are dangerous and whereas single purpose or one or dual purpose specialized robots make a lot more sense. Well if you answer something. Kelly says he's an investor in Pronto, which is a self-driving truck startup, but it focuses on mining sites where there are no people, right? And in fact, uh Pronto is run by the guy Kalinick recruited from Google, Anthony Lewandowski. He got in trouble with Google for taking uh inform uh it was claimed taking information from Google and bringing it over to Uber. Uh and apparently he's working with Ka uh Lewandowski again. Um Yeah, that was a really interesting case. It was just like, oh, I'm leaving Google. I'm starting, I think it was Otto, uh self-driving truck software. And oh, we've just got bought out by by Uber for a massive amount of money for a product which doesn't have any, you know, anything in it. I mean, I don't honestly Google sued Uber for stealing that information. Lewandowski was actually convicted of stealing trade secrets. I forgot this part. He didn't go to jail because he got pardoned by the president. So also read the court document, some of the testimony there, the discovery on that. This is a a really interesting person, possibly not in a good way. I don't want to say con job, but similar to you know the startup? Yes. Startup with very big ambitions, right? Very global, kind of futuristic ambitions. But like mining is one of those jobs where like maybe humans shouldn't be doing that anyway. Shouldn't be mining. Right. And I kind of I thought that was kind of an interesting insight that you know everything's either grown or mined and then manufactured. And that the you know there are really four things that you need to solve. John Cusack said all that and say anything. But the John TSAC mon monologue and then transporting them. Cusac saying where? Say anything. The mining thing i is very interesting because in Australia they've already automated a lot of the lorries that are working in mining compounds because it's a really simple use case. There are very limited roads that these trucks can go through um because the mine is built down and they build the road in there so you can map it out really easily. So yeah, mining will probably pay, but he's late to the party. But I dunno, um when I read that piece and it was just like give me more money now. It does feel like a kind of a magical pitch deck, you know. But it's okay. I don't have enough money to invest, so I'm safe . A Tennessee grandmother, this is a horrific uh case of misidentification. Tennessee grandmother was jailed. A facial recognition error linked her to fraud. She's from Tennessee, but Fargo, North Dakota Pol ice, not that close to Tennessee if my um if my geography uh is correct, identified her uh using face recognition . They said, oh yeah, she walked into a bank in Fargo, North Dako ta and uh committed fra ud. They came to Tennessee, they arrested her, put her in jail for six months in Far go. She's a mother of three, grandmother of five. She said I've never been to North Dako ta. She'd never been on an airplane until she was flown to North Dakota for charges. US Marshals erased her. The only evidence, apparently, was this face recogn ition. She remained uh started in a Tennessee jail four months without bail while awaiting extradition, then charged with four counts of unauthorized use of personally identified and information and four counts of the ft. According to Fargo police records obtained by WDAY News, detectives investigating this case in May and April of last year reviewed surveillance video, used face recognition. The face recognition said, Oh, yeah, it's this woman in Tennesse e. The detective told the court, we got to get her. By the time she got an attorney and went to trial, they proved that she was still in Tennessee at the time, twelve hundred miles away at the time of this bank fraud . Which a simple check of her bank records and location records been would have it would take so long to figure out that she I mean they should have made these steps before arresting the it's called an investigation and don't just rely on this technology Right? Like she hadn't been charged. She hadn't court. She hadn't anything to just hold her for uh month. She had home, have you been? I mean it gets worse. Sorry. Go ahead. Tell us the rest of the story, Ian. No, no, this is it. She lost it all. But it gets worse because when they found out their error, they released her from jail on Christmas Eve with no money, no way of getting in contact with people, and it was only down to the kindness of a local uh local person that she actually got somewhere to spend Christmas that was warm uh I mean Fargo, I've never been but I know it's damn cold easy. They they stick her out of the jail in Fargo in the winter. Bye-bye. I guess we I guess we got the wrong person. See you later. They don't take her back to Tennessee. I assume she is going to get a lot of money in the future. While she was jailed and unable to pay bills, she lost her home, her cat, her So this is where AI really can go wrong. But yeah, this is computers full stop. Remember when it's like oh the computer said it so it must be true. Right. Right. Somehow the science fiction layer we've added to computing is brought back this level of stupidity. Yeah. Well yeah, but I mean what kind of policeman actually goes out and says, well the AI said it it's fine, you know, we're not gonna bother doing any kind of investigation and jail for four months while we figure how to extradite her. Yeah. And there's no comeback to them because, you know, Fargo taxpayers will pay the eventual lawsuit, which I hope she wins and gets an enormo enormous amount of money out of. Here's the good news. Alex Carp, the CEO of Palantir. Oh geez. Says that ARC you and me both riches. Yeah. I haven't heard good news from that guy ever. He it was this is an interview on CNBC. He said AI technology disrupts humanities trained largely democratic voters and makes their economic power less and increases the economic power of vocationally trained working class, often male working class voters. So AI is gonna be bad if you're educated female and a Democ rat. But it's gonna be good . I don't even understand the logic. That's just extraordinarily convul can you know. I don't even think the logic. U h I guess the logic. The fact that he said it out loud was really, really I mean, I know it it's a Peter's heal company, so it's obviously gonna be a bit bit weird. But the fact that he actually said this is what we're working towards is just like are you aware of public relations? You know, I mean sort of constructive way of saying it democratizes knowledge. Like you could have gone that down path. We argued that was what the internet was going to do in the first place. Yeah. And of course Palantir's all over the government, the register had this a very important story uh about how the Department of Agriculture used Palantir's lethal AI weaponry to find seat assignments for employees at the department. Nice. Yeah, no, they're into the UK as well. They've just signed major contracts with Britain's national healthcare Sir uh Health Service and in part organized by the disgraced Peter Mandelson. But I mean they are getting their clause into government. Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Christopher Alvarez, says other software companies can probably sort out seating plans, but only Palantir could do the job right. Probably assigns Democratic women office is way far away, I would guess. But I would also argue, like l let's be clear, we're not fans of this guy. But not a stupid man. No. He's very smart. Who was he actually talking to when he said those absurd things? Ah yeah. Right. I think he's looking at the thing. Somebody who doesn't want Democratic women in power. It's just like I'm looking forward to the phone calls I get for, you know, what I can do from that. He knows he knows who signs those checks. Yeah. MIT Technology Review. How Pokemon Go is giving delivery robots an inch perfect view of the world. We kind of knew this, right? When Niantic, which was a Google company at the time, created Pokemon Go, the wonderful game my wife still plays avidly since July of twenty sixteen. So there was a game before Pokemon Go that built this data set. Ingress. Ingress. Yeah. And I was an ingress player back in the day. Yeah, because it was you had to be a lot smarter. You couldn't be a democratic woman and play ingress. So uh no Ingress was Ingress was hard, but it had the same idea which, is that you walk around in the real world and use actual geographic waypoints. Everything that could possibly be tagged as a landmark to get more nodes in my neighborhood. Thanks to Ingress and Pokemon Go, they have thirty billion billion waypoints all over the world. Unbelievable. Images of urban landmarks outsourced to Pokemon Go players and they are selling that information to delivery robots . Genius. Because there was no money in Ingress. There's no money in Pokemon Go. I mean Ingress, they started to try and charge for things and people just stopped playing, including me. So the company's latest product is a model. They're out of the Pokemon business. Remember they sold that to the uh uh Saudi Arabian uh sovereign wealth fund. Their new company's Niantic Spatial. They say their latest product is a model that can pinpoint your location on a map within a few centimeters based on a handful of snapshots of the buildings or other landmarks in the are a. It knows immediately. Oh, I know where you are. I could be used by more than just delivery robots. Yeah. Yeah, things like this. It's like it's great when we have technology companies creating something that's useful, but now when we have a government that is becoming increasingly authoritarian there and you know, based on the previous article as well, like all the pieces and parts are so easily brought together to like just know where everyone is at any point and who they are based on facial recognition that may confuse grandmother from Tennessee with someone from North Dakota. It's like stories go together. They mesh, don't they? They all go together somehow. I don't know. I didn't plan it that way. Let me take one last break and then 'cause Oscars are gonna start any minute now. And then uh and we will have some funny final stories to cheer you up, okay? Cheer you up. Jennifer Pattison Thule, who's just can't wait to see who won the best picture award. How many of the ten pictures did you see? Um I th managed four, I think. It's hard. Maybe five. Lisa and I used to have this thing of we're gonna see everyone because everyone's heading. But now there's ten, it gets a little harder.. Yeah I think enough people were doing that that they just added more because it's good for business. Yeah. I have not seen sinners though, which I know I should have, and that's probably the one that's gonna win. So it's a brilliant. My whole family's seen it except for me. It's such a wonderful film. It combines vampires and great music and it's just a really interesting. It's such a different genre busting film. It's a beautiful film. It's it's beautiful. Uh and uh I think the uh star is gonna win a best actor 'cause he plays two ro les. Plays his brothers. That's the way to get it. Yeah. Like Oscar's are nothing if not predictable. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Um anyway, we'll be back in just a moment with Ian, Jenni fer, and Richard on a very fun uh this week in tech. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. Our show today, uh brought to you by Threat Locker. We had a great time, didn't we, Richard? Back in uh Orlando last week. Uh for the Threat Locker Zero Trust World, so much fun. Um they are a very impressive company. And I learned a lot. They had a so a bunch of uh great seminars, uh hands-on workshops and stuff. They do Zero Trust. Their Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've actually made some big announcements in the Zero Trust world, protecting endpoints, networks, and the cloud. This is new. By extending Zero Trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker makes sure the devic es are validated through a secure broker before connecting to platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub. Your nightmare is somebody takes a thumb drive and plugs it into your M365 database, right? And not just exfiltrates information, but infiltrates malware, ransomw are. Or they send you a phishing email or uh you you see an ad on a website that actually is malware. Even if that happens, even if a user is sticking a USB thumb drive into your database or a successfully fished attackers cannot this is this is so so cool about zero trust. They cannot access resources unless they have possession of the user's trusted device and the trust is built in with ThreatLocker. ThreatLocker works in every industry, PCs and Macs and the cloud now. It provides 24-7 US-based support, the best support ever. We met a lot of the support people. They're gre at. 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Pierce Spot ranked him number one in application control. They got GetApp's Best Functionality and Features Award in 2025. With ThreatLocker and their ring fencing, you can confidently ensure that users have access to a consistent, safe network connection. I think sometimes you think zero trust means zero access. No, it means that users can do what they need to do without r isk. You can have the offices, remote users, internal ser vers, critical services, all maintain smooth operations without the need, and this is key to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions, which you know give you a uh uh you know a point out there in the real world that the bad guys can hammer on. Your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without, and this is important, complex infrastructure changes. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost effectively with ThreatLocker. I was so impressed. Visit threatlocker.com slash twit. Get a free thirty day trial. Learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. It's threatlocker.com slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. It was really great to be out there. And I hope we can do that again. Uh Zero Trust World in Orlando. Are you ready for flying cars, Jennifer? Ooh, I was just in Orlando and I'm doing lots of flying. What? Were you? I was. I went to Universal. Disney World. Yeah, Epic, Epic Universal. Oh, did you do the Harry Potter you're flying on a broom through Hogwarts ride? Um that one That's fun. I haven't I haven't done that. That's the Hagwarts one, right? Hagwood Motorcyc No, I did the um it was it was the Ministry of Magic. So it's the new one. It was it was very fun. Oh my goodness, so that park is a disaster. Is it oh 'cause it was crowded. Just the all the rides were down. So Oh everything was broken. It was the night of the clocks going forward. And you think I read this on Reddit 'cause while I was standing in line. I was on Reddit like what do I do to get around Epic faster? Reddit is like the solution for everything. Um and apparently they were saying that this is a big issue in parks because everything's run on computers and when the clocks go forward, it somehow manag everedy year, twice a year, manages to mess them up. But there are lots of flying in um Epic um and no flying cars though. But uh I would love a flying car. That's like my dream. So I'm excited about this. The federal government has announced a new pilot program designed to get new kinds of ultralight vehicles and E V talls, which is electric vertical I mean they're basically drones though, right? They're big drones, yeah. Yeah. Well, but there are is there there's a pilot right now st ill. Yeah. But soon. But when you go when you're in the ultra light class you need very little training. Disturbingly little training. Good. There's an untrained person sitting in there pretending to be a pilot. My son is training to be a pilot right now and yeah, it's it's the future. Yeah, real pilot training is no fooling, but the ultralight class because largely ultralights are a single person, you're only likely to kill yourself in them. So the FA is like ah, go ahead. But there are companies like cooler. But yeah, you know, Archer has an electric taxi, four passengers, sixty to ninety minute trips. Yeah. Uh it'll be in Texas, Florida, and New York . So that'll be a service, right? Yeah. Well, like right now, if you're rich you could take a helicopter to the airport from Manhattan, right? Mm-hm m. I think Yeah but I mean come on we've all driven on American roads and we've seen how American drivers operate. And I'm sorry, the the idea of letting your standard non pilot trained person do this, the software better be damn good because otherwise you're gonna have these things falling out of the sky. Yeah, it doesn't just affect the person in the plane, it's whoever's below the service but going rooftop to rooftop like that what was always proposed in New York, except that helicopters are extremely loud and they're expensive and fragile. Right. And so these are more redust robust, more redundant machines. Like you could have a certain you know the availability uh going rooftop to rooftop. Uh here is from the FAA, here's the video. It's gonna look just like this. The Jetsons! Oh I'm sorry, when you lead up with the Jetsons you instantly lost the argument. So they're written all of this new technology, these evitals that are gonna take P Evitals, all right, that's how you say it, huh? That's no nobody says it that way. Okay. Yeah. Is that Scott Bassent? I think it is. Uh innovate in America. We're gonna innovate with Evitals. Okay. I did see a flying robot vacuum uh CES that can like has little drones that licked. Well what good is a flying vacuum? To get it up to the stairs. Yeah. The stairs. I am going to fall over. I'm sorry, that was Sean Duffy. I dominated the world, but I had a curb in my way. They all look the same to me. Hey, here's a big story. Now, the you mentioned the Academy Awards are gonna still on network television, but will not be by 2030. They'll be on YouTube. This year, YouTube surpassed Disney, not this year, last year, twenty twenty-five, Disney Paramount and Warner in ad revenue. It is now the number one media platform. Forty billion dollars in ad revenue . Remember what it was ad free? Yeah. Those days have long gone. It's more than Disney, NBC Paramount, and Warner Brothers Discovery together. Together. Because all of those people are also on YouTube. Yeah. Well, that's true. But I think yeah it's pretty clear. I mean, as you pointed out, YouTube TV is 85 bucks a month now. It's it's it's cable. Yeah. Exactly. So all those people are still also on YouTube . Yeah. I knew YouTube had it though when so my husband is the absolute least tech forward person ever. Hates actually hates technology and only got an iPhone like eight years ago. Um and he now watches more YouTube than regular TV. That's like that's because it has all the niche the regular TVs. Yeah. If you want Alaska fishing guide videos. Exactly. You go to YouTube. You go watch them on YouTube. And he he follows like these um motorbike camping motorbike influencers like who go all over the world and do amazing trips and he's living vicariously watching them and He wants to poop in a bucket just like them, right? He wants to be he wants to live in the middle of nowhere with no technology. Except for YouTube. As long as I get YouTube on it. That's the secret, that's the secret reason we've got uh we've got secrets. But you hit on the key thing about YouTube is every long tail culture you could imagine exactly is in there somewhere. Exactly everybody's YouTube experience. Including us. And I mean that's remarkable. I mean during lockdown I I started watching uh a channel called The Outdoor Boys, and it's a bloke in Alaska who basically goes out, as Jennifer said, you know, goes out into the w wilderness and builds his own campfires and the rest of it. And yeah, it's it is cable now because you've got a list of subscribe uh channels you'll subscribe to and you just check on those and see what comes up. Uh, the Ignoble Priz es, which I have always loved every year, is moving out of the U.S. They're moving to Switzerland because they don't think it's safe in the US. This is from the Reg. They used to do it at Harvard, MIT in Boston. The next one's going to be in Zurich. Mark Abrahams, the founder and ceremonies MC, said during the past year it's become unsafe for our guests to visit the country. We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners or the international journalists who covered the event to travel to the USA this year. It's going to be an issue with the the World Cup. It's going to be an issue with the Olympics, which are a few years off. I mean it's a huge issue for hacker Summer camp as well. I mean, even GDC, which was last week, the game developers conference, a lot of companies didn't go because it was in the US. You you put it in grandmother in jail for for months for no particular reason. And same thing, just let her go one day. You scare a lot of people. No, I mean it was interesting. I was at RSA last year and I was speaking to Software, which is essentially essentially now a Canadian company, and they told their staff, you don't have to go, but we would like you to. You know, if we're giving you that get out because crossing the borders these days is is tricky. Um and as I say, DEF CON, Black Hat, B Sides is coming up next weekend. A lot of European hackers are staying away because just in case you know, it's like yeah, I mean it's like Hutchins who saved, you know, who who killed off uh an entire virus system was picked up in uh DEF CON because of something he'd done as a teenage. On the way out. By the way, Marcus Hutchins was one of the keynoters at the uh Zero Trust World. But we had to leave before he uh he spoke so we didn't get to see his talk. But it's he's a great chap. Yeah. I I mean I I I have a photo of him. We were doing a data sharing th 'cause with the DEF CON badges that year you had to share with a certain number of people and I got a picture of of us sharing data. And he's a lovely chap. He's gone a bit influencer of late, but it's a real problem because that a lot of the top talent isn't coming to the US anymore because they're worried about border controls. And all it takes is one RC border patrol officer to get you in a whole world of trouble. Yeah. With no recourse. Yeah, exact ly. Uh not all not all is well in Switzerland, though. They did uh this is also from the register, the they did an e-voting pilot. Unfortunately, uh two thousand forty eight ballots, an interesting number, cannot be counted because they couldn't be decrypted. Oops. Oops. Uh you know they were very secure. So secure. Uh three USB sticks were used all with the correct code, but none of them worked. So I you know Yeah, w what with the Proton Mail scandal in Switzerland at the moment? Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean it's it it's kind of iffy. And also the Swiss are really uptight. They make the Germans look relaxed. Um I went to a a press conference in Switzerland and the bloke announced he he came in ten minutes late, um was just like I'm very sorry, I was I was busy doing something and one of the journalists said, Oh, polishing your Nazi gold were you? This guy was instaban. Yeah, you don't say that. Yeah. Even if it's true. Uh well, and as I often do with an in-memorium, you know, it's one of the things we've been doing this for so long, uh, that many of the people who are young when we started are now passing away. And uh at the age of ninety-two, the uh Turing Award winning computer scientist who invented Quicksort Tony Hoare, C I R Hoare has passed. But he wast ninety-wo. Um, but we should probably uh mention that because it was a good life and well lived. Yes. You know, I mean he did some really fundamental work. Yeah. He said uh there are two ways of constructing a software design. One is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. Very inspired. Uh he will be missed, but we are grateful to him for Quicksort, which is And he got the the Turing Award which was is the tech equivalent of the Oscars. That's right. Speaking of the guy who takes to blame for the null, he says that was the worst mistake I ever made. The the null? Yeah, the null was the most expensive mistake he made. The idea that a that a that a Boolean is not thus true or false, but could also be a dunno. A null and coding around nulls, man, is hard. Like it's just like the sheer amount of code to cope with a null. And uh and Tony Hory years ago just said, worst mistake I ever made was introducing the no. Isn't that it's kind of like um Tim Berners-Lee was he interviewed and he's like, What's the biggest thing about the World Wide Web that you didn't get? He goes, I have no idea why cats are so popular. You've obviously never had one. He introduced null references in Algol, and uh it's referred to as the billion dollar mistake. At least that's what he called it. Yep. Um because of course he thinks a big man to own up to. Yeah. Sorry about the billion. He says because it was so easy to implement. Lot of people got jobs though, probably. A lot of people are employed because of that probab.ly That's true. That's true. All right. Hey, thank you, Richard Campbell. We'll see you on Wednesday. Really appreciate your uh spending time with us on this Sunday. It's real close to uh uh St. Patty's Day, so got a little Irish. Oh, a little Irish something for Windows Weekly. Well, I'm gonna make myself a corned beef so we can have corned beef and cabbage. Excellent. How about that? Lovely food. Yes. I mean in San Francisco they had the parade yesterday and it was amateur hour in the pubs. And I I just I I put out on blue skill, I just like please tip your bartender because they're having a hell of a time of it. Crazy. Crazy. Uh Richard, we'll see you Wednesday with uh something a little something Irish. Of course you catch Richard on runnersradio.com where he also finds dot net rocks. And if you like Richard's uh uh talks about all things scientific, like his nuclear talk, he does these deep dive geek talks on uh.NET Rocks. Is there a way to search for them? Just look for geek? Search for geek. And uh you'll find him. Thank you, Richard. Wonderful to see you. Take care. Jennifer Pattison Touie, senior tech reviewer at the verge. Always a pleasure to have you on. We'll catch you on Tech News Weekly every month with Micah Sargent . Yeah, always fun to be here. Even with the Oscars. Yeah. Go you go now, you can skip the ads. So that's a good thing. I know. See all the all the dresses has uh it has started, right? I believe it started fifteen minutes ago. So but don't watch don't don't start at the middle. You wanna see the opening number and all of that. So Yeah. Thank you, Jennifer. Run out of here. Go, go, go. Are your kids watching it? Do you does your family watch it or is it just you? No. No, my my family is thrilled that I haven't forced them to watch it yet. It's really into the east. None of them are interested. Like a national holiday. It was it was appointment viewing. Everyone had to go. Yeah, everyone had to watch it. And now, yeah. We're the few, the proud people in our generation. I know. I know, it's sad. Very sad. But I still love it. Me too. Cling. Me too. Cling to it. Can't wait to watch it. And of course, uh wonderful see you, Ian Thompson. I'm glad you'd write in that column at Tech Finitive, uh, Letter from America and you'll catch his uh freelance writing all over the internet and he's on blue sky. If you can figure out how to spell his name, IA That's the problem. No Yeah, I know. Uh my parents and I have had words, put it that way. Always great to see you. I'm sorry, you know, we used to have a studio and Ian and his wife would come up and they'd you can go to his the little English shop we had in town and buy more marmite and you know, but not anymore. Oh, they have such great Scotch eggs. The best place to get Scotch eggs ever found in California. Is that a high bar? I mean Well th there is that. It's a bar. There is a place in San Francisco that they've just opened a British pub. They're charging fifteen bucks for a Scotch egg. What? What is it dance? What? Yes. Egg, sausage and breadcrumbs. Well exactly. You know, if I want to get screwed, I want a kiss, not a credit card receipt. But you know, it's just like What do they call 'em? Bacon buddies, bacon buns? Oh no, bacon butties the if it wasn't for the fact that American bacon is so bad, then you know bad, bad, bad. Have you found a back bacon sauce yet, Jennifer? Oh what, sorry? A back bacon sauce. No. I've not found the bacon in this country. It's impossible. Sausages either. Really hard. Good sausages. Very hard. Oh, nice. We have dedicated bitches for such a task. I I do think I'm just gonna mention this. I don't know if it'll satisfy, but we get our bacon from a a little Polish company called Nuski's N-E-U-S-K-E-S, and they have triple cut, triple thick butcher cut bacon at a ridiculous streaky. Yeah, this doesn't look good. I I let me let me show you new skis. I just found a recipe for bacon buddies. New skis is the place to get your bacon. I bet I I found a place in Berkeley that does proper back bacon, but they charge a dollar a slice. And it's just like oh for goodness sake. I love bacon, but not that much. I think Newski's I think Newski's is more than that. I just bought uh eighty four ounces for a hundred and thirty dollars. How much is that ? That's a lot. Yeah, I mean I've I've cheated and I've got a mate. I've got a mate who works as a butcher. They you know they will actually cut you the proper piece of pork so you can let it cure. It's not really bacon, is it? It's it's something else. It's basically pork with a f um a mild fat round. Um whereas American bac uh streaky bacon is just a minuscule amount of meat and lots of awful lot of fat. Yeah. Americans call it ham. Americans call it ham. It's more like a ham. Yeah. Or Canadian bacon. Canadian. Canadian bacon's a little closer. Yeah. Loin. Yeah. They're both lo Dan said no one does hash brands like America. That was a real you know eye opener or pancakes. Or waffles. Well the Belgians do waffles pretty well. All right. Now you're making me hungry. No, I have I have ribs on the grill on the smoker. I think I did this last time. So It's perfect. The show's just long enough to smoke a big skin. I have I have a smart smoker. Right now I'm testing the brisket smart smoker. Um is that's it's brisk it. Oh. I have a trader and I do I I haven't been able to since we've had been under construction, but I want to get back to my briskets. I love making a good brisket. But yeah, you get up at three in the morning to start it. It's a good thing. But the great thing about the smart one is you don't have you just it does it has uses algorithms to adjust the cook as you go. So I just put the ribs on, press go and come back six hours later and it's perfect. Brisket. Oh, now I'm wondering maybe an AI barbecue. And it's really not that expensive. I wanted uh the four hundred dollars. Oh, which compared to a trainer. Traeger's really expensive. Yeah. It's the the AI powered Wi-Fi grill. Oh, maybe a brisket is in my future. Yeah, it's it's pretty good. I've been testing it for a while. I did a video on it a little while ago too. Oh good. I'll go look at the review. Yeah. But I'm hoping you mix your own sauce, right? Did what, sorry? I hope you mix your own sauce. I know you live in the South where it's a religion, but Yes. And you have a paintbrush that you slop it on. Slop it on. I yeah. I I am not a purist barbecue person because to me barbecue means cooking burgers in the backyard, which is what English people do. And getting rained on while you do it, yes. But I'm learning. I've never made a good brisket though. That's very hard to do. So I like to go go to the local um barbecue shops here which are pretty awesome. So you're in a you're in a parking lot. I'm in a good spot for the barbecue. Yeah. Yeah. It is remarkable that in the Bay Area you cannot get good barbecue. It just it barbecue and pizza are two things that the Bay Area does not do well. I'm so jealous of Everett and Jones and Breakley. Ye ah. Yeah, I've been the That's the one where they they're behind bars and they slide the food out and they put a piece of white bread on it and they slide it out under the bars. Yeah, I've been there. Thank you everybody. We do tweet every go eat, go watch the Oscars, whatever you want to do, have a drink. Uh we do uh this show every Sunday from two to five P.M. Pacific, five to eight Eastern. That's 2100 UTC. You can watch us live YouTube, Twitch, Ki uh, TikTok, no, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. Or if you're a club member, I hope you are, in the club Twit Discord. Uh that's not the reason to join the club. The reason to join the club is ad-free versions of all the shows, special programming. We did our AI user group on Friday. It was fantastic. Great interview with Cindy Cohn, who is the executivec Dtorire of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She has a new book. We did that on Thursday. These are all club specials. Joining the club supports everything we do here, and it's a great way to spend 10 bucks a month and get something, I think, pretty important. So if you enjoy the education, the entertainment, uh, and the company that you get from Twit, please, twit.tv slash club twit, we'd love to have you in the club. After the fact on demand versions of our shows available at the website, twit.tv. There's a YouTube channel. Actually there's a YouTube channel for every show we do. You can just go to YouTube.com slash twit to get a link to all of the different ones. And then of course it is a podcast, so you can subscribe, audio or video or both in your favorite podcast player. Do leave us a five-star review, let the world know. When you've been around twenty years, you're no longer the flavor of the month. So uh it helps. We've been we've been smoking this show for a long time. It's a long, slow cook. Thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Jennifer, Richard, and Ian. Have a great evening. Another twit is in the can. This is amazing