Reflecting on digital history

It's time for Twit This Week in Tech. Yanko Records is here. Lisa Schmeiser, Dan Patterson. We're gonna talk about the 49 megabyte web page. It's the norm these days. Elon Musk, you got some splaining to do and NVIDIA's new Yesafi filter. All that coming up next on Tw it. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems, a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the Out Systems platform. And with good reason, build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use out systems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agenic Future with AI solutions, deeply integrated into your architecture. OutSystems. Build your agenic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/slash twit. That's outsystems.com slash twit. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tw it This is TWIT, This Week in Tech, episode 1076, recorded Sunday, March 22nd, 2026. I'm monitoring the situ ation. It's time for twit. Time to talk about the week's tech news on this week in tech. Hello, everybody. I'm Leo Laporte. And we have a great panel as always. Say hello to Lisa Schmeiser from no jitter.com. Hello, Lisa. Hi, it's good to be back. You always come uh at the same time every year when Girl Scout cookies appear. Mm-hmm. It's that 'cause you're a scout leader and you just know that you have I don't get it. Do you plan it? Uh so Girl Scouts of Northern California, we have closed our cookie sales for the year. Oh. I do tend to pop on the show a couple times a year, but if it's Q one it's cookie season. I didn't know they'd closed it. I just I saw him last week at the grocery store. I guess. You saw him on that was there last weekend, yeah. Aw. Can you buy him online? You know, I believe you probably still could. Uh I will drop in a link later for the Girl Scout Cookie Finder. And I do but I do want to point out that for Girl Scouts as a national organization, different regional councils have different sale dates. So if you Google for Girl Scout cookies for sale, I am sure you'll find something and everybody is set up to ship across the country now. So they also have different names depending on your geography. It depends on the baker you go with because each council has one of two bakers, either little brownie bakers or ABC bakers, and the bakers themselves hold the copyrights on the names of the cookies, not the work not the Girl Scout organization. So a peanut butter sandwich i if you get it from ABC Bakers is a do C Dough if you get it from Little Brownie and it's the difference between car Carmel Delights and Samoas depending on who your baker is. And Girl Scouts of Northern California, we changed our baker so that's why you can no longer buy Samoas in um from San Jose up to Delmar County. They're they're the same cookie and they're just delicious. So they really are good. This is Benito I'm recipes are similar. I usually don't interrupt during this portion of the show, but so do the cookies taste different if they come from the different bakers? It depends on the cookies. That so first of all, great question. And um we did do a taste test when we when we switched and depending on the cookie, I'm happy to report that the thin mint recipe stays the same and the truffles recipe stays the same. But if it's a peanut butter variant, your tastes are gonna vary depending on what you really like in that peanut butter sandwich cookie. So shocking. Well Lisa's not the only person here, but when it comes to Girl Scout cookies, she is the pre expert. That's Dan Patterson. Hello, Dan from uh Blackbird.ai. Senior director of content there. Good to see you. You two. How's everything in uh on beautiful Henry Street in Brooklyn? Uh cannot complain. It is finally, you know, we had snow in the ground for three months. It was like a normal winter, but but here it just felt like a frigid long winter and now it's pushing seventy and you know I uh planted some wildflowers with my kid in the backyard earlier today. Nice. Have fun . I wonder if I plant a thin mint if I get a thin mint tree. That would get me got me going. Also here, Yanko Records, uh longtime writer for first giga ohm. We see him on variety, and of course this newsletter is lowpass.cc. Hey. Hi, Jan ko. Good to see you in San Francisco where the weather has been extraordinarily warm as in most of the southwest . Lisa. Yeah. Yeah. Hi. So actually, you know, since you're here, Dan, you worked for a while for CBS News. I know you you have a long radio uh history, as as do I. Not no one has one as long as I do. In uh December it'll be my fiftieth year as a broadcaster. That's all I started as a child. But uh I was really sad to see the news, and it's I guess it's not really a tech story, but that CBS was gonna kill its rad io news division. That's the folks that do the top of the hour newscast . Yeah, it's sad. Um I right, I too came from radio. I started in FM and then did AM Talk Radio uh as a producer for a long time and then worked at ABC News Radio and at CBS I was with the network, but did hits with CBS radio and had many friends there. Um and I mean this would be a tech story, it in many ways is a tech story because radio was the defining and revolutionary tech of its era. Um December nineteen twenty-seven. Wow. Bill Paley. Uh that this is how he started the CBS radio network. Of course uh became uh a must listen during World War II with Edward R. Mur row on the on the rooftop of London during the Blitz. This is Lond on.h and uh seven hundred stations who you were using that top of the hour news service will lose it May twenty-second. Yeah. The question to me for me is is this purely economic or is it part of the changing landscape of media? You cover media, Yanko. Do you have an opinion on that? I mean it's a good question and as a third factor playing into that is also all the changes at CBS. Uh the politically driven changes. The political changes, exactly. So people might also wonder like why are they cutting down on news divisions at this exact moment where we kind of all need a lot of news. Um but there is obviously something to the economic changes to the medium too. And um people just listening to more podcasts, uh whenever you get into your car, Spotify comes on automatically and so forth. And so there is viewership, I think, or listenership, I think, is declining for some of these stations. But it is really uh a sad moment, and it also comes at a time when you know public radio has been defunded. And so some of those stations are giving up on original reporting and uh all of this happening at the same time, while maybe understandable, is definitely not good. People still listen to radio. The last stat I saw was that eighty eight percent of Americans listen to a radio at some point during the week. So that's a vast majority. Lisa, you have younger younger people in the house. Do they ever say, Hey mom, turn on the radio when you get in the car? Um not to listen to news per se. Yeah. Well maybe that's part of the problem is this news. I d to be fair certainly is. I would have to say that our household is may not be typical because we do have media people in the household. So yeah, we'll turn on the we will turn on the radio for the news. That's simply I put on tune-in. And then I listen to CNN or MSNBC. Also, because I am I am pathologically cheap, I do I have not and will and do not pay for extra tech in the car if I don't have to. So the radio is the default for us. Although a lot of cars now, especially electric vehicles, come with radios. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you just basically the presumption is that you are gonna attach your phone and and do it that way. The thing I kind of can't wrap my brain around is it seems like radio as an industry should have been really well positioned to dominate in podcasts because you've already got this apparatus in place for reporting and recording. You already understand the audio medium in a way that like two people with microphones who recap movies may not. Um so I've never been able to figure out why it is that um big media and news organizations that have already done this. Wha wh why why are they dominating the podcasts more? Um why don't I know the names of two to three C have a theory podcasts? All right, I'd like to hear what you think, Dan, before I Yeah. same time and I was hired by the talk radio news service to help the at the and and not just the I I know talk radio is often associated with conservatives, but this was the broad spectrum, you know, the Air America days through, you know, I ran Radio Rose. So it was everybody, every spectrum, and from big networks down to local affiliates. Um and these are the same challenges at major news networks that you addressed, Lisa. And you're right. While I was in major news, it was kind of unfathomable to me, like why aren't we producing for this medium? And I think the one answer I have is there are two answers. One is cultural and the second is economic. Both were locked into when I say cultural, I mean there is a way we do the news, there is a way we do the radio, and this is the way we do the radio, this is the way news networks are run. From the local affiliate to the network. And economic, many there's just a an ROI. Many at the time podcasts now make a lot of money, uh, but at the time, you know, from 2008 through 2015, 16, you know, these were you would sink a lot of resources in, and you would see networks uh like NPR invest resources into radio, uh, but the ROI just wasn't there. Um and then in the last maybe in the the 2020 s uh the headwind s that I experienced were s were egg kind of a a new manifestation of that. Like, well, we could do a podcast, but who listens to podcasts? Yeah, I remember when uh I was course I was on KFI in two thousand four doing my weekend radio show. And uh I had found out about podcasting and I said, Hey, actually before there was podcasting, I said, Hey, do you mind if I put the radio show on the internet? You know, as a download. And they said, Yeah. Because they didn't think anybody that didn't was it wasn't going to hit their their their ratings. Uh because for at that time radio was all about live, right? It was all about live local listening. Yeah. And so they thought, well, you know, you could put the show later on the internet, nobody's gonna care about that. And when podcasting came along, they had the same attitude. It wasn't for maybe another decade that radio stations broadcasters started saying, oh, this podcasting is not a flash in the pan. It could actually be eating our lunch. But the what I think what really happened to radio look, if there is any listenership to radio at this point, it is probably not mus ic. It's probably not news. It's probably sports, right? More than anything. You still might listen to a baseball game on the radio. Oh yeah. Didn't Bay Area didn't we lose a station that was broadcasting live baseball play by play or minor No 'cause I cause now I don't follow. So I don't could be. Wouldn't know. No. The other side the other uh angle on this is of course this is private equity. This is uh Larry Ellison and his son David Ellison uh and there's uh what is it Sky Dance uh bought media bought paramount uh at with extreme debt. If Larry Ellison hadn't said I I will pledge my personal fortune to back up this debt, uh, they really wouldn't be able to have made make that deal. And then the the the Warner deal that's coming or rather the um Yeah, the Warner Warner Discovery deal that's coming. For this is an eleven billion dollar company buying a hundred and eleven billion dollar business. You could see the debt is extreme. And so what's the first thing private equity does is they sell parts off. They try to save money. Yeah. And so it makes sense that this is this is part of the acquisition. And this is what's happened to radio in general, is as private equity has moved in and the number of owners, the ownership has dwindled, there's only a handful of radio companies left, all of them heavily leveraged , uh you're gonna see this kind of decimation of the business. This is what happened this is what happened to Red Lobster. This is what happens when private equity comes in. They kill businesses. Joanne's fabrics. Joanne's fabrics. You know, I I will add I go on and on and on. With without getting into the politics or without getting into the corporate muck. Well we can I say let's say this with politics. Somebody is putting their thumb on the scale through the FCC, through David Carr at the FC C. That's part of it, for sure. That's how Ellison and Skydance got Warner Discovery, because Netflix said Netflix is Exactly. So that's part of it. It's not the whole story. Yeah. to note one opportunity here though and I I prefaced it without getting into the politics or the corporate muck. I and I know many people have strong feelings about Barry Weiss, but she has a tremendous opportunity here as well to do the thing, Lisa, that you mentioned, which is innovate. And I know that she has caught a lot of flack. I I am not pro or against Barry, but she has an opportunity now to innovate where others maybe at network news have not or could not because of some of these other challenges. Will she? I don't know, but I think that there is an opportunity in front of her to create innovation and produce podcasts and multimedia and encourage a new form of network news or a new and uh usher in a new era of news. Dan, I think you make a really great point about culture and how that can actually impede the longer term survival of a news or media organization. Cause this also reminds me of the um contraction pains that newspapers have gone through. And I remember through the early aughts reading about um well in San Francisco well in San Francisco there were wave after wave of layoffs and reductions at the chronicle and at the same time we had a another site called SFIST where you had and and full disclosure I did write for SFIS here and there but the people there were building an on-the-ground news organization and paying attention to things and getting really high engagement and I used to wonder why doesn't why doesn't someone just try try to acquire the the Gothamist sites? Why doesn't somebody say, hey, they clearly know how to build an audience online where newspaper sites are not, they're clearly building on a news organization, get them under one roof. And I this reminds me of that same thing where you're like, oh it would be so easy, except inside the Chronicle newsroom. I did have a friend who went from from SFS to the Chronicle and she's like, You would not believe how hostile they are to the internet. You wouldn't believe it. Oh, for sure. Even when I worked for uh Ziff Davis on the site, which was an MSNBC joint production. The TV people hated the web people. I mean, this is Zif Davis and MSNBC, but the TV people hated the web people and the web people hated the TV people and neither one got the culture, then it was just a complete mismatch. So that's ironic. I mean that was in twenty separation existed everywhere, right? That's the crazy thing. Like if you were going to other organizations I've worked for where then uh people are put suddenly like, oh, you gotta talk to the web people and I thought I thought we are the web people. I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I spend our publication is online, but I spend a lot of time thinking about okay, is there a way I can reach my B2B enterprise technologist audience over TikTok or another channel where I can build up a younger audience more effectively because I feel like I need to know where and how people are getting their information in order to reach them and inform them. And I I c again this comes back to why not I don't understand how you can be so wedded to the way you always did things to the detriment of the medium that you love. That's that's just a thing that I I keep trying to wrap my brain around. So that's well. So people understand the the landscape here. CBS radio was sold to one of the other big radio companies, Etercom. Yeah. A while ago. The only thing that Paramount kept was CBS radio news. So this is basically Paramount cutting all of its radio operations. And by the way, Barry Weiss did write the memo. It came from their CBS News Editor in Chief. I think Dan it is an interesting opportunity for Barry Weiss. I'm not convinced that she will grasp it, but uh because she has but no broadcast background at all. She came from print. She has no news background. She's never run a newsroom. She writes op eds. But you know, I mean I said that as to I I know that people have strong feelings about Barry and I certainly have gossip chains in my text messages that go on and on about this. Um the politics or the the corporate stuff, there's an opportunity here. And there that's all. There's an opportunity here to make change. That's that's all I'm saying. But I audio is uh just as good as as big as it ever was there. More than a million podcasts, podcasts uh ad sales is in the tens of billions of dollars. Now it's gone through the roof. We're not getting any of it, but the but the Joe Rogan's got it all. But uh and uh but anyway it is a good time to be a podcaster. And you know, every time these things happen, I get phone calls from other broadcasters saying, So tell me how you get in this podcast thing. What is this? How does it work? And I and I say don't do it for money. That's all I so anyway, I don't wanna I don't wanna belabor it. I just thought it was i it's a sign of the times, isn't it, in so many ways. And uh and it's a sad thing, like just one counterpoint. Sure. I actually feel like maybe the opportunity for news organizations is to not always innovate and stick to the stuff that they're good at. Stick to news. Oh fair stick to the news. Like allow yourself to be long. Don't try to like make it a TikTok thing or whatever. You report it. Don't make sixty minutes into ninety seconds. Keep it sixty minutes, please. But you know what they look at? They look at the research that says people under twenty-five get all their news from TikTok and they say, Well, uh, you know, f you know, that was that's really the thing that radio scares radios that their audience is fifty four years old and over. Mm-hmm. Maybe sixty five and older. And so Oh look at the ads. The ad sleeves there. They see their audience dying basically. I mean literally. So they're really nervous about the whole thing. And that makes me sad. But I am happy. It really isn't about audio. It's not about conversations. It's not about news even. It's about whether it comes through the air via an antenna or it goes through your internet conne ction. And that's just the delivery medium. That's not the important thing. The important thing is the content, the people doing the content, the listeners who want good content . That's what's great. Radio is always that way, even before podcasting. That's why I loved podcasting, because it preserved that sense of one-to-one conversation between the broadcaster and the listener. I'm talking into your ear right now. There's a podcast a friend of mine used to run called Friends in Your Ears. Yeah. That's kind of gross, but there is a lot of tech news. We're gonna get to it. I am on a mission. Uh uh after talking with my boss, the wonderful uh Lisa Laporte, who uh shares not only my name in my home but also runs this business, uh she says, You gotta make this show shorter. You're just you're killing people here. I'm gonna try to be a little bit more cognizant of your time and we're going to keep this thing moving. So we're going to take a break right now. I am thrilled to have this wonderful panel with me, Dan Patterson, uh from Blackbird.ai. Not only an AI expert, a radio expert, he's a content guru. All of the above. Licia Schmeiser, who will weigh in on the news that Microsoft is sorry about Windows, and they're gonna fix it. I'm sure you'll have something to say about that from no jitter dot com. And uh media guy Yanko Records from his uh of course the newsletter Lopass.cc. And yes, we'll talk about Project Hail Mary. Have you seen it yet, Yanko ? Um, sorry what? Project Hail Mary? Have you seen it? Uh no, I've anybody seen it? I've seen it. Not yet. Is it good? But Benito said when you start talking about it, I'm gonna tell me so I can cover my ears. And I said, Well you read the book, you know what happens. He said yeah, but I don't I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how they do it. Well I'll I I will let you know ahead of time if you don't want any spoilers. It 's it's really good. I'll tell you that much. Uh uh, you're watching this week in tech, our show this week, brought to you by Meter. I'm really excited. Uh, Tuesday, I'm going to go to the RSA conference, big security conference in San Francisco. Meter's going to be there. And I'm really looking forward to seeing their hardw are. 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Built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. I look forward to seeing you meter at RSAC on Tuesda y. Thanks to Meter for sponsoring. Go to meter.com slash twit to book a demo now. That's M E T E R dot com slash twit to book a demo. M eter. Uh let's see. Let's talk about courts. So last week we told you that Perplex ity was being block ed from using its agentic shopping tool at Amazon. Amazon students said, no, you can't use Perplexity to shop on Amazon. And a judge said, they're right. Well, a judge has now reversed that. The U.S. Appeals C ourt put the injunction on hold. So now you can use perplexity to shop on We want you to use our AI agent, not somebody else's. But this is kind of a fight for the future of how the internet works, right ? So Leo, um full disclosure, no jitter is now part of the industry dive newsroom, so I spend a lot of time doing second reads and edits on our verticals for retail and for customer experience, CX. There's two things going on here. One is that if you have AI shopping agents that are independent of retailers, then the retailers lose control over the customer experience. I e the customer Right. I mean let's be honest. That's what they want. What they don't want is your dollar for their product. Which would you think they want to lock you into well they lo they want to lock you into the ecosystem and make sure that once you start spending money well they also want your shopping habits and they want that data because it helps them figure out new lines but also remember that Amazon does make a lot of money based on sticking sponsored results in there and their records. So if you have a third party shopping agent that reduces the efficacy of all those Aaron Powell But what's to stop the uh courts from stopping us from using ad blockers? Because that's the same thing, right ? And this right. And I mean Lisa, what you're driving at is this kind of disintermediates that customer relationship. Yeah. And it creates a new moat, right? So I could it in theory, m my agent could stop serving Amazon products and start serving Best Buy products or Walmart products. Because it will depend on the relationship that agents have with different retailers. The customer says I just want to find those running shoes at the best prices. I'm not sure. Well what's been really interesting about how companies are approaching the whole AI shopping experience is you have a lot of retailers who are like, we would like to use AI to make sure that the customer gets a great recommendation and a great experience and we have proactive high touch outreach, right? But um But what it all comes down to is everybody seems to want to just kind of pick up the customer and put them where they want them. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to do comparison shopping. They'd like to be able to remove a customer's ability to um I mean this this also ties into dynamic pricing too because if you can use AI to do price comparisons, it's that much harder to lock somebody into an ecosystem where oh well this is the price I have to pay be and and on the back end of the list you can afford it. I understand why Amazon wanted this court order. Yeah. Absolutely. No, it's a business. It doesn't it doesn't care about the shopping experience. It cares about the data and the money. Um But it's like Amazon saying you you can use because real it was really Perplexity's browser that they wanted to block. It's like Amazon saying, well, you can use Chrome, but you can't use uh Safari because Safari blocks my cookies. Right? Uh not none of your business Amaz, on. None of your business. I'll defend the customers, right? Just take a look at the larger shopping experience, which is that you have a lot of companies that are really invested in trying to put the shopper onto a specific path and keep them there because it's good for their bottom line. And the less agency the shopper has, the better. That that is the approach. Yeah. So are you defending Amazon or No, I'm just giving them the same. And they're trying to protect their revenue stream, which is not the sale. No. And um no, the the customer experience has nothing to do with what Amazon's doing here. It's as if though I'm walking down Main Street and there's two bookstores next to each other and I go in one bookstore and I say, Well, let me look at your price. And they say,, well you can't go to the nether next door and see the price there. You have to either buy it here or you can't have it. Yeah. I mean, and I want to stress that like the exact opposite, which is when people walk into independent bookstores and then price check against Amazon, read a few pages and say, I'll just buy this at Amazon. Like I think that's I I feel for this I feel for the small bookstores. I do too. Um That happens all the time. In fact that's exactly Amazon pulling up the moat. There' its a uh it's an it's a it's a uh rabbinical uh precept the sh they call it the shopkeepers dilemma or something, where it is actually almost a sin to go into a store, get the information about what you want to buy, and then go to another store and buy it . Right? That said, there have been browser plugins that you can use for years that will price hunt and help you think. Yeah, or camel, camel, camel, right? Yes, yes. Or if you are on something like Racutend, which gives you the discounts for shopping at certain places, it will also tell you, oh, you can buy this for so much cheaper at this other place. It's all paid places. Yeah. And I say, Lisa, they're taking all of your information. And every time I say that, she shows me the check. She says, Yeah, and I got this $38 check from I mean, at least you're getting paid for your information being taken. Most of the time it's just for free. That's bad. Um but from like the CX and the retail perspecti ve, what What everybody is fighting for now is the ability to lock a customer into a guaranteed repeat interaction. Um to eliminate competition by just, oh, it doesn't exist and some of them will do it pretty successfully and some of them will have a very hard time trying to trying to keep people No no don't look over there stay here. Um there This is Benito So there's also a thing here of dynamic pricing that Amazon does, right? So like they might not be able to do that with AI agents. Exactly. And and and dynamic pricing is a whole nother thing. I mean, you you've gone to grocery stores and noticed that a lot of places are now going to the uh electronic displays for pricing instead of swore when they did that that they weren't doing it so that they could change the price. Oh come on. No, it just saves us because we don't have to have that person with the sticker machine going around. Yeah, that's why they did it. But that doesn't that that's why they did it. That doesn't mean they're seeing the dynamic price thing. You come in the door, the cameras register you and Which categories? What are you willing to pay? And uh That's why you get an eight foot long receipt at Target, right? How can you use data to lock a customer into protracted repeat engagement and maximize your profit while while you can't opinion on this are you a comparison I was just thinking of the guy who used to go around and changed the prices, now goes around and unlocks those glass cabinets that are everywhere for every single product. So they didn't really save anything here, but they just like moved everything around. I was in a drugstore yesterday and there was there was nothing left that you could everything's locked up now, isn't it? Oh it's so miserable. I hate it. First they came for the razor blades and I didn't complain because I didn't shave. Oh my god. Then they came to nas Dan do you have uh do you have a th thought ? Um you know what's interesting? The the only major tech company that doesn't have AI built into the browser still is Apple. Oh Safari, yeah. Yeah, I used Space Prime. Yeah, yeah. And Firefox has a switch, so you can't I said by major tech companies, Leo. Oh yeah, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, those are the cheap shots. Oh cheap shot. I would get back teen for that burn, but it's probably behind a lock haven't it? I do I I loved Mozilla. I mean I still do I still use a Firefox fork called Zen. I love it. Um but yeah. I think Lisa's absolutely right. I mean this is just about the customer relationship. The the one thing that has been constant from the podcast era to the social media era and now the AI era is the value of dat a. Or increased in value. The value of our personal data. Of our personal data. Yeah . To which I segue to Cash Patel's ad mission that the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency are buying data about us from the data brok ers. Thank you very much . We knew this was gonna happen, but uh I didn't you know, this is almost shows cash patel's naivete. Oh, this is this is what shows it. Well, there's a few things. There's a few things. He is a podcaster after all. You can't expect much. He's testifying uh on Wednesday to Congress, and uh it's the first time the FBI has admitted yeah, we buy uh people's data from data brok ers, location data, and more . Uh we aren't required. We aren't required to have a warrant to do that. There's no there's no you don't visit a judge for that. Uh Ron Wyden, who's always been uh pretty good on these digital things, asked uh if the FBI would commit to not buying American location data, Patel said we use all tools to do our mission. He said we do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution . I don't think the Constitution knew about data brokers cash, but there was this thing called the Fourth Amendment you might have heard of. No, and the law of it. Come on. Um so now the you know, the they said the quiet part out loud. I yeah, it would be um go ahead, Yanko. I I was gonna say he was probably gonna say it really wide eyed with the deer in the headlight expecting that he likes to have reason Yeah Of course we buy it. Of course we do I would be genuinely surprised if I mean that to be uh no honestly, that sounds like every testimony I've ever heard from an FBI director or anyone else, I would be surprised if they weren't already buying data. I think they always administration. No, no, they always have. And uh, you know, we know about pen pen uh register warrants that allow them to get location data for like a buck fifty from the cellular companies and all this. There's there's always business free flow of information. So uh it's people like me, frankly, who have for years said, Oh, don't worry about your privacy. It's not like the you know the feds are spying on you or anything. Surprise. Uh delivery download I I mean I think that that really there should be much more education on what you put on your mobile device and how you can use services. This is not a plug or a log roll, but services like Delete Me and others that will do the special data removal removal. Are they a sponsor? Yes. Um I mean it's a great service. I and I think that that educating consumers about what you put on your device and how it impacts And what you can do about it is equally important because Hail Mary on Thursday, there was a big ad from the state of California about your privacy, saying, you know, showing how you're being spied on and all this stuff, and then go to privacy.ca.gov and learn what we're doing to protect you. And they made a lot of hey, when they announced that we're going to have a registry that you can remove yourself from data brokers, but I went there and first of all it doesn't take effect until this fall. Second, it's only forty nine when I checked it was forty nine data brokers. There are more than five hundred. It's a drop in the bucket. It's to me, this is almost, yeah, California's doing something. It's like Marcia Blackburn's uh federal privacy bill, which really all it did was uh nullify state privacy laws with a we ak birth bait virtually nothing federal law. So it was really an anti-privacy law. I feel like lawmakers are trying to pull the wool over our eyes that they don't they understand law enforcement's going to them, cash patel's going, hey, it'd be a shame if we couldn't buy this data. And they're going, oh yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. And um and there there's no movement towards privacy protection. I I don't think it's cash patel. I think you have lobbyists for the data brokers who are like taking without data moving through an information economy nothing can get done. You wouldn't want to be the reason the economy slows down, would you? Uh they hire the same people experienced transunion and equifax hire to say, you know, our entire economy relies upon credit you credit uh uh brokers who we've gotta collect this information. We don't in this country we really have not um created a culture where people understand that as of right now you are generating a lot of data that people make a lot of money on and you're not seeing a cut. I mentioned earlier It is it is basically you are providing a lot of free assets or resources for other people to get very board. That's so smart. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, you know what? It turns out the internet's not f ree. This whole time we were sold this notion that oh look at all the free look at Gmail and all this free stuff you get on the internet, it was never free. Wasn't the the adage if it's free you're the product like that the I mean I It's always been SCP-1930 I think it may hurt that perhaps back in the 90s you had a lot of journalists who would uncritically echo the information wants to be free. And what that morphed into was oh information Because you're like, we'll connect everybody and you'll be so informed. And I was a wide eyed optimist. Yeah. Yeah. And uh I mentioned earlier that uh if you if you want um if Amazon wants a law against uh comparison shopping, they might also want a law preventing you from using an ad blocker. Great blog post uh this week called the 49 megabyte web page . This guy went to the New York Tim es uh to glimpse at four headlines was greeted with four hundred twenty-two network requests, forty-nine megabytes of data. Took two minutes. This is one page. Two minutes before the page settled. We've all gone through this. He says, and you wonder why every sane tech person has an ad blocker installed on all the systems of their loved ones. Uh, we've gotten to this crazy world where it's expec ted that they s that they're collecting all this information, that they're showing us all these ad s. Um and it's it's not even surprising anymore . So forty-nine megabytes is a little surprising. This is uh Shubham Bose's uh bl og. Mm-hmm. And uh well done on uh picking that one up. Speaking of which, it might be a good time to do an ad right now. Thing is, our ads don't follow you around. Because it's a podcast and an RSS feed, I don't know anything about you. I can't collect any information. Our advertisers buy ads on our shows because they say, well, we're pretty sure you have a tech savvy audien ce. And that's the audience we want to reach. I think that's a better kind of relationshi p. It's a it I' thinks a fairer relationship. So I have uh I am and then we also offer a club. If you don't want ads, you can pay us a little money and that way uh we don't have to show you ads. I think that this is upfr ont. We're not following you around. Unless people listen on YouTube or Twitch or Well this or that. Or Spotify. And by the way, this is why you know, uh Joe Rogan moved to Spotify with an exclusive with offered millions of dollars. Uh this is why Spotify was was for a while trying to eat the podcast world because advertisers love it because Spotify knows who listens. They have your credit card number. They know how much you listen they, know when you rewound they know, when you stop, they know all of that stu ff. But we as a podcaster with an RSS feed, we don't. We are on Spotify, we are on YouTube, we're on Apple, we're on all those platforms. And even Apple has announced they're gonna do video now, but only through companies that sell ad s. Right ? Put two and two together. You see what the whole point of this is. Apple's going to get an ad revenue of that uh ad share share of that ad reven ue in return and advertisers get the information about who you are and who's listening. So we don't do that. U h and it's one of the reasons it's harder for us to sell ads to be hon est. This is a different world. We're kind of old fashioned in that reg ard. It's a great panel, and I appreciate all of you. Lisa Schmeiser, always a pleasure having you on No Jitter.com. She's the E I C and the person in charge at NoJitter.com. Also at NoJitter on all your platforms, right? Yes . And it's about telecommunications? We cover enterprise communication and collaboration, and we do focus on the levels from from the very basics, such as network configuration and the technologies that allow you to rapidly move video and audio signals plus other data all the way up through the um end users unified communication experience. So we'll cover Zoom or Teams or WebEx or and we're also taking a look at um contact centers and the cust and and technologies that are part of the quote unquote tech customer journey since that involves how companies choose to communicate with people who work outside their company. Nice. And before this you worked at Windows IT Pro, so I'm going to take advantage of that. Okay. Uh on our next story, because Microsoft said something pretty pretty funny this week. Mm-hmm. And so I've kind of need somebody who knows a little bit about Windows. Thank you for being here. Yanko Records is also here. His newsletter Lopass dot CC. Doing well, right, Yanko? Yeah, it is doing well. It's uh I'm running up to three years actually next mont h. Yeah, you were one of the first people who said, you know what? I uh I want to own my own stuff, my own content. Seventeen thous subandscribers. That's that's pretty good. Nice job. Roughly around that number. It you know, it goes up and down. But yeah. CC and Yanko covers AR as well. We have a story for you. Actually, a story you broke. So we'll we'll get to we'll get to that in uh just a little bit. And Dan Patterson, who works at Blackbird.ai, he's senior director of content. We've mentioned it before. Blackbird does a great job of helping people see thro ugh the misinformation . Yeah, thanks. I'm giving you a chance to plug. Yeah. We haven't talked about AI yet, Leo. I think part of it is that we have an AI show now in f Intelligent Machines on Wednesday, and so I don't channel all as many AI shows Twit that's all we were talking about. Yeah. Well we we use uh AI, but we also We help organizations, commercial but also non-commercial and executives or leaders. Uh we protect them from narrative-based uh disinformation attacks. Um That's an interesting thing. Is that becoming an issue with uh businesses now? Yeah, for sure. Um I mean you and I might think of this colloquially um well we might think of it as as deep fakes or even doxing, brigading, but at scale and and targeted uh at um a an individual or teams, um executives for sure, uh leaders, whether you're an executive at a commercial or or non-commercial entity. Um And you know, many of these uh a lot of what we see on the web is manipulated and a lot of these attacks, you know, you can think of it as just people saying bad things. But there's there are actionable threats and there's a lot of really harmful information that is spread by bad actors at large scale. So we use AI uh to analyze and monitor uh trends, and we use human analysts to not just interpret the data, but to work directly with organizations and help them uh make smart decisions . This is increasingly it's so easy now to to create an army of bots. Uh what what did uh tw what did X announce they had they had uh killed 800 million accounts, bought accounts last year. 800 milli on? I remember when Twitter had 350 million members. Period. Yeah. You know, uh unbelievable. I think uh actually that well, we're talking about Elon as well because that was of course the whole thing he before he bought Twitter. He said, you know, they got a bot problem. Yeah. And it's nothing, it's only gotten better. Little did he know what was in that kitchen sink. Thank you. This episode of This Week at Tech brought to you by Shopify. 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And of course, Shopify is your commerce expert with worlds-clas expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. And let's not forget that iconic purple Shop Pay button that's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at Shopify.com slash twit. Go to Shopify.com slash twit. That's shopify.com slash tw it. Uh so we we do a show called Windows Weekly. Uh and of late I think people have been kind of upset with our one of our hosts, Paul Tharack, 'cause he seems kinda grumpy. He's a little grumpy. You know, I mean he's he's has a lifetime covering windows, but he never seems happy anymore . Uh Microsoft announced this we ek that uh they are gonna make major improvements to Windows 11. Quote, we're evolving how Windows is built behind the scenes to raise the quality bar. We're Pavan Davaluri, who's the new executive vice president of Windows and Devices at Microsoft, we are foc onusing making Windows 11 more responsive and consistent so performance feels smooth and reliable. Yeah. Over the course of the year we're improving system performance and app responsiveness. File explorer. And Windows service pack two. Well, you know what? In it back in its day, service pack two for XP, that was good. That was really good, right? Yeah. Come a long way since Windows 7. Sorry to interrupt you. Part of the problem also is copilot. Microsoft's been shoving their AI in every corner, and they say they're gonna back off on that as well. You don't buy it? No, I I'm just they're even did you not want copilot in literally everything you do. Everything.. Yeah Google's kinda doing the same thing in Workspace, man. It's everywhere. There's a there's a Gemini button in everything. It's trying to do it. No, it's w it's when they began um auto mashing it into maps that I got super mad because all I want is a really simple map app that tells me how to get from point A to point B and when to switch lanes and what time to go and I do not need Gemini for any of that. I had a structured workflow that worked just fine. Pavan Davalori even mentioned Linux. He said we're gonna make Windows subsystem for Linux bet ter. Please don't move to Linux. Please. One of the things people consistently complain about, uh because we all have widescreen monitors, is Microsoft in Windows eleven took away the ability to take the task bar, which sits on the bottom and put it on the left or right where you have a lot more space. Pavan says, we're gonna bring that back to o. Good, good. I hope that makes people happy. Quote repositioning the task bar is one of the top asks we've heard from you. We're introducing the ability to re reposition it. They should say reintroduce, by the way, Pavon, because you took it out to reposition it to the tops or sides of your screen, making it easier to personalize your workspace. sitting there using Windows and then says, I'm gonna reboot now, you don't mind, do ya? I don't I don't mean to beat up on Windows. Uh uh Paul does a very good job of that all by himself. But that's why we love Paul, because he's honest, right? Mm-hmm. He's not a cheerleader . And he's such a deep subject matter expert. Like I would, I would definitely, when Paul talks, listen to what he's saying and why he's saying it. Yeah. Uh there's a code name. It's called Windows K2, which is the same name as Mount Everest's peak . Maybe because this is a tall mountain to climb from Microsoft. I don't know. Also, there's not a lot of oxygen up there. Yeah, K two is is number two behind Everest, I think. Oh, K two is the second tallest. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Sorry. Thank you. Yeah. Have you been up there? You sound like you you know. No, but I've read a lot of John Crack Hour. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Into the water. Yeah, Into Thin Air. Thin Air. Oh, that book is so great and so harrowing. I love it so much. He's my favorite narrative nonfiction writer. Oh, he's the best. I love him. Ninety six, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I remember watching. That was actually um to get back to um the shifting media paradigms, uh it was actually one of the first developing stories where it was easier to get dispatches over the web than in the more conventional media outlets. Um people were gonna be like, well I'll see what timer newsweek has to say. And meanwhile there were websites going, Oh my goodness, guess what just happened? So it was That was the beginning of that ninety six. That was yeah when it all started. Yeah. So yeah. Um now if you know uh somebody passes away. Mm-hmm. So Leo, I want to note that I want to note that with Microsoft, something they have been trying really hard to do for about 10 years is decenter um the operating system and the desktop as the hub where you work. Uh and in a lot of ways, lockdown was great for this because they were able to pivot really quickly with teams and because of their huge enterprise footprint where they already had a built-in customer base with Microsoft 365, it was super easy for them to push Teams out to everybody and make that your default collaborative workspace. But even pre-lockdown, as far back as 2016, they were really pushing the idea that you needed to get away from an operating system, a desktop, and apps over to a centralized workspace and a shift in how you looked at computing so it was more task-focused rather than apps focused. So instead of saying, I'm going to open up this Excel spreadshe et, put in a hundred numbers and then see what that means for sales projections. What you'd say instead is, oh, I'm going to oh it's time for me to do the sales projection workflow. And if that touches on parts of email or Excel, then hooray, that's what happens. Um the biggest obstacle they've had is the is is that the typical user and the typical customer does not move as quickly as a tech company does. It's really easy to eat the dog food inside a company, but if you're a regular company with an IT budget, you are probably using work workflows and systems that are 10 or more years old and they're fine and you don't have money for an upgrade. And you don't want to upgrade. You don't want to retrain. You don't want to see the bugs. It's a huge capital expenditure. And you have to be able to jump. If you're a school district or local government, you have to really justify it. Um, which is why Microsoft has found itself in a position where it's trying to push people to one model, but a huge percentage of its customer base is like, we need you to support the thing that we bought back in the before times and with Windows eleven the return. It's tied 'em down, hasn't it? That's really been well their problem. Backward compatibility is a curse. Um No. That's but the difference with Apple and and and Microsoft is that Apple has been willing to go. No, Apple Apple's like oh oh do you not like that you can no longer charge your phone using this cable? Well that's too bad. Here's how you buy the cable. Sorry about that. Yeah, no, and Windows hasn't and and Microsoft hasn't done that. And what they tried to do with Windows 11 instead is be like, we're gonna try and gently use you into this. And people are like, you are not. And also you cramming copilot is the exact opposite of gentle. So please please stop. Yeah. And it's I'm gonna guess Lisa, you're the only person on this panel who still uses Windows though. You would actually guess wrong I've moved to a Mac environment. Dan Windows? Yeah. No, no. I uh I mean I have and you know it was I was pretty Xbox for a long time. Xbox is not Windows. Wait a minute. No, let's not get it. Yeah, no, no, no. I have an Xbox. That counts. Yeah. I mean I have a test that's not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, the next box might be Windows. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Um but that's not till for two more years. Uh just out of curiosity, Yanko, you using Windows? I just try to remember when I used Windows the last time and it might have been XP or something. I don't know. Windows XP was fantastic. Oh my gosh. I was a Windows 7 fan. I think Windows 7 was last the one. Oh my gosh, take us back to the timeline where Windows XP was the last Windows. Yeah. I didn't like the uh UI so much. It was a little Fisher pricey for me. Big buttons and colors and stuff. That's why I like seven, which is basically XE XP with a nice interface on top of it. So it's just me how I'm the only Windows user here, I guess. Benito, you use Windows? I play video g ames. Yeah. Ah, it's gamers . That's right. Although that's changing rapidly thanks to Steam and Proton. Now runs many, man y great Windows games as well, if not better than Windows does. And so things are shifting a little bit in that world. I used to have a Windows laptop just for accessing Salesforce because it was so much easier. There you go. There you Well that's yeah, honestly it's don't Oh the the apps don't get me started on how bad the ma the the the mobile apps are getting like they they really need to do a uh and and start start over with people not watching video uh she's drawing a finger across her throat when she makes that sound just so you sorry. Yeah. use Use your your use your imagination. Speaking of changes, uh well this is kind of a strange story because this earlier this week Meta said we're gonna you know that uh virtual reality world that uh you guys have been hanging out in your MetaQuest? We're gonna shut that down. Uh we're gonna have a mobile version, but we're not gonna have a MetaQuest version. But uh very quickly, Yanko had the story. They changed their mind. What happened, Yanko? It was basically a day later they came out and we're like, oh how bad. We're actually gonna keep it around. Uh we're just not gonna update it anymore, essentially. We're not be able to you will not be able to uh create new worlds and we will we also not make any new worlds in vr anymore but people can still use these existing horizon worlds um for the foreseeable future, which is the same thing. So what you're saying is Horizon Worlds has leg s? It has legs, yes, very nicely done. Yeah. It's a it's an interesting and complicated story, right? Because it's one of those things where people are like, Oh yeah, but VR has been dead and nobody's using it. And there's some sense of truth to it in Horizon Worlds and VR has never really been a big hit. I actually used it for a while quite a bit. I did you? I like playing a couple of games. Arena Arena Quest. Is that the No I'm actually not remembering the name? That's it maybe uh Did you but you had to put on the nerd helmet to do it, the the meta quest? But it was I mean it was fun. And I w even without in those pre leg times actually that was it was a lot of a lot of fun. Once you I played once you're having fun. I had a MetaQuest. I've actually stupidly bought the fifteen hundred dollar MetaQuest Pro. That was insane. It was quickly marked down by about fifty or a hundred percent and uh then I gave it away. But uh I I played a few games and there was fun. I really liked the one where you listen to music and is it Beat Saber? Yeah, I really enjoyed that. But I mean so the the the the bigger trends here is that VR is still around. People are still using VR, but the uh audience really has shifted over the last year or two. Where before it was a mix of like a little bit of everything, there was people who were doing fitness, like older people actually getting into this and people playing Beat Saber. And like just one or two years ago it really started to shift where now it's all like teenagers and younger, even kids using it. And they're all playing these like crazy messy free-to-play games, Gorilla Tech and so forth, which are like when you're my age, I just have to throw my arms up. It'll be interesting. I'm sorry to interrupt you, Yanko. It'll be interesting to see and speaking of steam, how the steam frame, uh their their ARM based uh VR headset that comes out this summer, how that kind of shifts the market, or at least d no pun intended, reframes it onto uh gaming. Did Apple make a mistake not put not focusing on gaming with the Vision Pro? I I think so. I me an I don't know. Because it's a three thousand five hundred dollar device, right? So look, those those teenagers cannot buy that. And the the the adults or the group their parents are probably not gonna hand it down to them. Which is what happened to the all of those metaquest headsets. MetaQuest is pretty affordable if you don't do the pro version. for 300 bucks, which is actually really good. Some oftentimes it's it's even you can pick one up for 250 and for that it's like really hard to beat essentially. But like going back to this horizon world thing, uh so they say, oh, we're gonna shut it down. Then they changed their tune on it because there was enough people in it really protesting and being upset about it because they had created stuff for it. There were there's comedy clubs in there, there's like music shows in there, there's all these different games in there, people meet there for alcoholics anonymous and those kinds of things. Really? They are AA meetings in medical stuff. Wow interesting. So all of that going away, great use for that. Yeah. Come to think of it. You've got anonymity, you don't have to leave the house, but you can get support anywhere, anytime. I think that's actually kinda cool. And then Meta gets to grow its list of alcoholics. No No, they don't. I hope not. I would hope not. Uh that is strange marketing right there. There's still people playing Second Life, right? Second Life has gotten weird. But there I mean uh but that uh so there's enough, I guess well not enough for them to keep it up to date. They're not gonna work on it. And it also like there's some stuff that wasn't actually part of the official announcement or it was kind of hinted at, but Mana has been moving to their own engine essentially for some of these things. Like on mobile and on VR, they won't use they were using Unity, right? They were using Unity. Right now, if you to uh get into Horizon Worlds in VR, most of that stuff is still Unity based. And so they were gonna transition to this new engine, both on mobile and in VR, and essentially, I assume they just ran the numbers and were like, well, really not enough people are using it in VR. It's going to be very expensive to bring this new engine to VR. So let's just only focus on mobile with this new engine and let's shut uh shut everything down. That's that's not running on it. And then when people protested whether they were like, well actually it's not that expensive for us to keep the Unity worlds up and running, so let's do that. But the new stuff is gonna be on mobile essentially. Interesting. I mean if you're doing it for mobile, you might as well just do a MetaQuest version of it. I would imagine it's not I mean they the mobile strategy I do not understand to be quite is it VR? How do you do it in mobile? You just use your phone. So when you do the horizon app on your phone, you can now play games in it, and some of these horizon worlds social games They're investing in now are mobile only. And I'm still kinda unsure who's going to download the horizon app to play mobile games because there's so many other places you can play mobile games and get mobile games. It kind of feels like um like meta like there's still corporations that have a co like a contract in place for the metaverse so they can't shut it down. Yeah. It's like Ford is using it to bars or something like that. Well, do people people don't pay to do Horizon Worlds, right? It's free, right? It must cost them so much money. You know, it must cost them so much money is free. Uh I think you can know or you could buy certain things and they started to introduce the monetization stuff, yeah, goods like in-game stuff, yeah, like everywhere. Um, but also they don't really have a replacement yet. Obviously, so they obviously cut back on the VR efforts. They like fire 10,000 people, but part of reality labs. They're um concentrating more of their efforts on mobile and obviously they're spending a ton of money on AI. So they're cutting back, but they're still also not completely giving up on it. They're still working on future headsets, like two different lines. You know what would save it? Actually it would save Second Life too. If they use the new NVIDIA DLSS sexy filter. That would make so much more fun. So GTC, the uh and we covered this on Monday uh uh Jensen Wong's keynote at the uh uh NVIDIA conference on Monday. And uh among many things they announced , one of which made the stock market jump when he said, We're gonna uh actually make a trillion dollars selling our chips next year. Up from half a trillion. Uh but the thing that they announced that got the most attention, because gamers hated it, was something called DLSS 5, which takes existing game content and sexies it up. It adds the lighting, it adds some smoother textures and that makes it more real I think it makes it more realistic. I don't I d I I think it's actually pretty cool, but gamers uh don't like AI, I guess. And there was a kind of a general sense of revuls ion There's also some problems. I think the Virge wrote about it where in some of the sports games that use act you have one up right there that use actual characters based on likenesses of real athletes. When you add VR to it, that doesn't really understand who's who they're just gonna turn into this other good looking dude not a real dude who has now a lot more detail but doesn't look at all like the person who is associated with the number on his shirt, right? So that's a little problematic. I think honestly uh the the the skeets about this are are absolutely hysterical um oh with the with the before and after contrasts oh my god. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That was a good meme. I think it looks pretty good. Uh I'll be honest with you. Let me see if I can uh The Yassify filter. The Yassify. Look, I'm a gamer, but I like the the gaming takes have all been uh pretty basic and boring. Like it they pairs. Gamers gamers just have this kind of knee jerk yeah revulsion to anything with AI. I got bad news for you. It's gonna happen no matter what you think. Okay, I gotta speak up for the gamers here. It's I said this you know I said this of I I said this last week on intelligent machines, but it's about changing the art direction of the game. Like this changes the art direction of the game. Period . I think this changes the consensual reality, huh? Don't you think this looks more like me uh than me? I mean, I think that that's uh that DLSS version of me is pretty highly So Leo, I have a Leo, I have a qu Leo, I have a question for you on on that. You know, the yesified version or the Hello version is we already have this body of work that shows um the negative uh self esteem or the mental health effects when people spend way too much time scrolling through on Instagram or TikTok and they're seeing these these AI tweaked people that don't look like real life. Don't you think something like this, if you if you're also seeing in your games, uh don't you worry about how that might affect people's experience? People know, I mean we've we've uh for a long time there was this thought that cartoons would make kids violence. But kids know the difference. That's a cartoon. Yeah. And I th and even movies don't make people violent, even violent movies. I think people will know it's a game. I'm not expected to look as handsome as Leo Laporte. I think I can buy I can buy Benito's argument. Uh at least at least some right. Okay. If you're changing uh a a specific art direction or artistic intention, I can understand that argument. But I don't think that is every use case in gaming. I think that are that is particular use cases. And especially when you apply this to older games, I think this or games that don't have the budget of uh a AAA studio, I think this can provide uh one path. It's gonna be an option in the game too. If you don't like it, you go in your video settings and you just turn off. It does have some potential risks. Here's a uh DSLL DLSS uh SpongeBob. And that's damn creepy. I don't think that's really what DLSS will do. I can't help it. I think it is with the with the participation of the game publishers, right? It's not like you can I think it uh if you have a NVIDIA video card, you can turn it on on any game. Oh, I thought that publishers had to consent to this. Well maybe they do, but that would be our an artificial constraint because it's built into the card. You could do it without their permission if you're smart if NVIDIA is. Well you've raised an interesting question about consent then, haven't you? Because who gets to consent to this stuff? Well maybe NVIDIA is smart enough to say. Yeah. I mean one could then the counter counter argument is yes, the publisher may say do it because we like that everything looks so shiny now, but the artists who actually worked on the game might still be really upset. But could you make the same arguments about ray tracing? Like yes. I mean that fundamentally changes how your game looks. It fundamentally changes how it looks. It's a setting and you can turn it on and off depending on your performance. But all that stuff is programmed in by the game design ers. That's true, but it's also a button I can click to turn it on or they intended that. They intended that. It's AI, you know, uh uh I I have machines that do AI upscaling. My in NVIDIA TV, my shield, has a AI upscaling uh feature. And it actually does a very good job taking HT content and making it 4K, and it looks great. And I, you know, NVIDIA, it's probably the same technology, just a later generation or earlier generation of DLSS. Um, I don't know. I think we're gonna I think the initial reaction will fade and we're gonna get used to this uh kind of thing. And there's also the whole thing. Take a break here listening to this week in tech with uh Dan Patterson, Lisa Schmeiser, and Yanko Redkers. A great panel. Good to have you. We'll have more in just a bit . Elon's gonna be paying some money, maybe some big bucks. Uh, this version, this episode, this segment of this week in tech is brought to you by OutSystems, the number one AI development platform. Out systems helps businesses bridge the enterprise gap to their agentic future, where the constraints of the past give way to unlimited capacity and scale. Out systems enables them to build AI agents that can actually do work, such as take actions, make decisions, and integrate with data rather than just answer questions. OutSystems provides the only AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise-proven. It's unified because you can build, run, and govern apps and agents all in one platform. It's agile because you can innovate at the speed of AI, importantly, without compromising quality or control. And it's enterprise proven, trusted by enterprises for mission-critical AI applications and durable innovation. Out systems. 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I take you back now to uh early twenty twenty two when Elon Musk tweeted out I'm gonna buy Twitter because it's just a mess and it's full of bots and it sucks. And uh he even I think said funding secured and uh he no that was another tweet. He Elon was big at tweeting at the time. Um the SEC even looked into his tweets cause at some point it he was so critical of Twitter it looked like he had initially said he was gonna pay forty four billion dollars for Twitter and it looked like maybe he was trying to drive the price down by driving the stock price down. The SEC took a look at it, stock manipulation, and declined to do anything about it. Well , uh a class action lawsuit from shareholders did do something about it on Friday. A jury jury in California determined that Elon Musk had misled investors via public statements that depressed the price of the company's stock ahead of his purchase of the serv ice. I mean, it was pr to me, it seemed pretty obvious that that's what was going on. Uh a number of investors started a suit certified as a class action saying we've been defraud ed. Uh the jury and that Musk made them intentionally those tweets as part of a larger scheme. The jury rejected arguments about the larger scheme, but did find him liable. Damage is not yet determined, that will happen later, but the plaintiffs are seeking as much as two point six billion doll ars which I gu ess Elon could afford is worth much more than that. But even when you' re worth a hundred billion, a few billion starts to add up. Is this justi ce? Dan? I'm curious. Maybe I just haven't Googled this deeply enough. I'm curious about the uh who which shareholders joined this. Uh Steve Garrett, Nancy Price, John Garrett, and Brian Belgrave sued him in October of 2022, the month before he actually closed the deal. I mean, is it justice? I think you said it yourself. Like it it seemed his tactics, it it seemed like he was trying to do something very particular. So I think that if you if you you should know who you get into bed Ah good point. So he tweeted in May of twenty twenty two saying I'm gonna put the Twitter deal on hold, penning details, supporting calculations as spam and fake accounts do indeed represent less than five percent of users. Twitter had asserted that. He said, I don't buy it. I think it's a lot more than five per cent. Now that he's the owner, we know it's a lot more than five percent. U h he also said in a May sixteenth conferen uh a comment at a conference that he believed that twenty percent of Twitter users were fake accounts when uh the then Twitter uh CEO Parag Agrawa said uh there's no way for a third party to even know this. We don't make that information visible to third parties. Elon tweeted a poop emoji. This might be the first time a jury has found a poop emoji misleading. Uh Elon loves the poop emoji by the way. Wasn't this the same case where they had a hard time finding a jury because so many people were like, I hate that guy. Maybe they didn't. It's very little it's been a little while, but I also remember vaguely remember that him making the point about the bots was like really back of the napkin mask where he's like, Well, I tweeted something and then I read all the retweets and comments and they're all bots and really that only proves that all your followers are bots, you know. Are you the typical thing? Uh so uh Twitter ultimately sol d uh for f for uh a lot more than uh probably it was worth, forty four billion dollars, uh after uh Elon was forced by uh Delaware court to buy it uh at the price that he had uh quoted. He didn't want to. He was trying to get out of it. The jury deliberated for four days, so that means it wasn't like an instant like, oh yeah, this guy's guilty. Uh it took him four days, but they did unanimously found find that the tweets from May thirteenth and May 17th were materially false or mislead ing. But they didn't hold them liable for the press conferen ce or the comments at the conference from May 16 th. And they said even though the plaintiff's part of the lawsuit was that there was a scheme going on, they didn't they didn't agree with that. But they are going to award damages per share of Twitter stock for each day of the class period, which goes from May thirteenth, twenty twenty two to October third, twenty twenty two . Uh so it could be could add up to quite a b ig de al. And the irony of all of that is that his if there was a scheme, it clearly didn't work because he had to pay the original price. And now trying to get out of it for some stupid Elon had taken the stand uh during the tri al saying I really did have concerns over the bots and I didn't intend to drive the stock price down. I was So Right. kind of undermined his argument a little bit. Good point. He was he was trying to get out of the deal at the time. Yeah . Um in other ne ws Samsung is ending sales of its two two thousand nine hundred dollar trifold phone. This uh on the heels of news that Samsung is is really suffering in its phone business. That it's that it's losing money hand over fist, which is a surprise since it is the number one Android handset, I belie ve. Yeah, that is a surpr ise. Uh I think that the trifold sold well. Uh buyers were paying above retail on the on the on eBay and other secondhand market s. Um there's ours Technica speculates it might have more to do, Ryan Whitwar m Ryan Whitwam, sorry, writing and arts technically it might have more to do with the cost of the components with RAM prices uh doubling and so forth. Which could also explain why they're losing money on phones in general, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Ye ah. And and storage and processors. It's all it's all gone through that. All gone up. And I have to think you're right . That at this point, the Iran war, the resulting oil cris is is going to hit a lot of companies really hard. And helium, right? Yeah. A helium plant was destroyed. This is a besides it's not just for balloons anymore. No, it's it's used in in semiconductor manufacture. And medical devices, I might add. Uh and that's going to really hit the helium supply. So we we're economically we're in a world of hurt, I think. Except for Party City. Yeah. Party City's. No, Party City Party City got hit by the vulture capitalists. It's Oh, it's gone, huh? Yeah. Yeah. We used to have one. We don't have to do private equity road again. That's where I got all my balloons. Yeah. You have to go to a dollar store now because I think they still do them there. Um or a grocery store. That's sad. I that yeah, we used to get those big uh Mylar, you know, 70th birthday balloons, things like that. Yeah. Can't get them anymore, I gu ess. Um speaking of the war, uh there has been some concern with the slashing of CISA, our national security uh organization. They had a leader who left after a year of turmoil, and uh they have a temporary leader now, and many, many CESA security experts were fired. That with the war in Iran, there's some concern about Iran hacking activ ity . So far, there's only been one kinda I don't know, kind of minor if maybe it's not so minor if you're one of the two hundred thousand devices that were erased. A medical equipment provider called Stryker was hit by a hacking group Handala claiming to be pro-I ran, they say they erase data from two hundred thousand devices, including servers and mobile phones, used by their em striker employees . I mean if that's all that's not I mean as bad it is. I mean this is we we're working with an incomplete data set. And as the conflict intensifies and perhaps prolongs uh asymmetric attacks will likely increase. Um that I mean that's just geopolitics and it's it is one tool that uh somebody who was uh an actor that's on the defense is like especially what do you mean by asymmetric in that case? I I mean the U.S. has greater kinetic capabilities. Um and we have greater economic capabilities, meaning we can just fund things for longer. Uh there will be some attrition, but we can fund things we can fund our kinetic kinetic activities longer. So uh an actor on the defense will will use tactics. I mean, this is a time tested in every war ever this year. This is what happened in Vietnam. So um y we saw guerrilla of warfare in Vietnam and cyber attacks are the new form of that. And Iran is one of the most th you know, they are not up there with the US or Israel in terms of their cyber capabilities, but I would put them, you know, they're certainly as good as North Korea and many and much better than most of the other peers. Uh they they're very cyber capable and they learned a lot from Stuck Snags. So again, I I wouldn't expect we see massive cyber attacks targeting critical infrastructure right now, but perhaps the likelihood would increase as the duration of the conflict extends . And adding to that is comes physical attacks on infrastructure, right? I think just this morning Iran said when there was this whole back and forth about that strait of Remoose. Uh and Trump said he wants to blow up power plants. Now Iran mentioned a bunch of targets that they would retaliate on. And interestingly, uh IT infrastructure was part of that. And there was like early on in the war, there was the attack on the Amazon uh cloud data center in was it in Dubai? I don't remember exactly one of them. There was two of them exactly. One in Bahrain, I think, and one in uh UAE. And all those countries are or a lot of those countries are trying to become havens for AI companies, right? They're investing heavily into AI. You'd be nuts to build a data center in the Middle East right now. I'm is it just me? I've I'm made very ner I have not been sleeping well. I'm very nervous about all this. I know it's far away from us in the United States. It's not though, because the Strait of Hormuz controls. services because the price of diesel is going to shoot up, to whether or not we will be able to have genuinely global networking and and data movement, because when cloud centers go down, that's gonna hit people in different places. And if you have hackers coming in and targeting medical service companies, that's that's just that's the beginning of an iceberg. What about utilities? What about hospitals? Um complex Oh Jesus, yeah. Tactical is the same thing. I don't think there's any such thing as a tactical nuclear weapon when the the effects are shown to be global in nature anyway. Like that's when we have launch on warning status with all of our nukes. Oh God. Yeah. Um but I I mean like I would be surprised if we I well, I won't be surprised. I I don't know. I mean this talk of tactical is you're right, Lisa. It tactical becomes strategic very quickly, especially with nuclear conflict. Um I just and there's the hu huge humanitarian cost. Now I did say that tremendous. We're in the US, but many of our listeners are all we have listeners all over the world. I'm always glad when I see uh Galia in our uh club twit discord, she lives in Tel Aviv, and I'm terrified for her. I have we have many listeners in the Middle East right now. Uh the humanitarian cost uh in Iran alone is I just um it's gonna be good news for uh the box office on uh Project Hell Mary, however, because Escapism? As you know, when times are tough, people go to the movies. Japan has decided as of October 1st to allow what they call proactive cyber defense. That's called hacking back. Yeah. Yeah. Uh this is something we've always has chewed. Um from time to time, I think our uh FBI and others have for instance, put out malware that removes malware. But it's always a very risky thing, and there's always this nervousness that this will escalate as well. You know, we we know nukes escalate that that's a bad thing to use a nuclear weapon. We know that very well, and as a result, no one's used a nuclear weapon since World War I I. And we were the only ones who've ever used a nuclear weapon. But uh I think sometimes I think that cyber attacks could escalate to that level of risk as well. You attack their infrastructure, they attack our infrastructure. And I don't know if w uh we're very, very vulner able. This is happening all the time. You know, there was there were very well documented cyber attacks on gas infrastructure in two thousand uh twenty one, twenty two. Uh look, everybody is hacking everybody all the time. But uh uh Leo, to your point, we had a policy that was Stuck Snack was an interesting event for a number of reasons. It it certainly was an interesting cyber event, but it also shifted our policy. And you're right, Leah. Under the Obama administration. By the Oma during the Obama administration, to attack the scatter device scatter devices that were used in the Iranian centrifuges to control the speed. To basically break them, to turn them up so fast that they'd break so that they could not create uh you know enrich uranium to as a precursor to making an atomic weapon. And it was very effective, except it was this really interesting, by the way, the hack, because those SCADA devices were air gapped. So they had to figure out some way to get them on there that was very clever. Uh except it leaked out and was widely used in attacks by hackers against us. Yeah. And it also shifted our policy from defensive to maybe it's okay to do a little offensive. Well Japan has now decided that it the time is right to allow offensive ops because online the nation faces, quote, the most complicated national security environment since World War I I, the uh Chief Cabinet uh Secretary, Minoru Keih ara, explained the threat from cyber attacks are having a huge impact on people's lives and economic activities. This is quite an important threat to national Japanese national security. So they're going to enact the proactive cyber defense actions . Allowing if authorized, and it looks like it will be j Japanese police and the security forces to attack a disable infrastruc ture. Only we're only going to attack the infrastructure that's used to run cyber attac ks. But I guess that could include skata devic es. Uh I d this is just one more uh step in a kind of a weird escalational spiral that frankly terrif ies me. Especially when you look at Cuba, uh uh uh where the power's been out now all we ek. The whole island. Imagine what would happen if we l ost Well, you wouldn't have a twit podcast if we lost power for a week. That wouldn't be the worst of it, I know, but uh everything we do uh our entire lives rely on uh electricity. Not enough American. Think of all the medically fragile people who would die. Think of all the people who are in ventilators, think of all the babies in ICU, think of all of the people who depend on medical equipment to live. Aaron Powell Not to mention the fact that uh our food supply, we really only have five days worth of food without food deliveries . And if that falls apart, uh mass starvation ensues. I hope you have a victory gar den. I bet you're growing tomatoes, Lisa. I just feel like you must be growing tomatoes. I d I do we we I was actually going through going, well, we could probably barter a lot of citrus, but in California No, we have that. We have an apple tree. I I I do garden, but not enough to support everybody who lives here. Um, it's hard to do that. You wouldn't need that much uh space to do that. No. Um I saw something on social media today, and I can't credit who it was from, where they were like, look, we can't micro garden our way out of 2026, but this is a great opportunity for us to start having conversations about what the food systems in the US look like and how people can live in high density places and still have a little bit more food autonomy than they have. So I mean this is this is the other thing too is it's one thing to be like, oh I grew everything on my own backyard. And there were books about that through the two thousands. Do you remember? Um like Animal Vegetable Mirror. Meaning to do that. Well, like the thing that they point out is you have to have an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount of space. Yeah. I mean there's a there's I wanted to do a um there's a reason humanity stopped there's a reason humanity stopped doing that. I have a friend. But the but what we can do is we can take a look at some of the models we've seen, like in Europe where they do have community gardens and people have their little sheds that they hang out. And they have fish. The fish fertilize the vegetables and fruit and then you can eat the fish. So I was a microbiology undergraduate and my undergraduate research was actually in recirculating aquaculture where um the engine it was a huge cross-departmental collaboration and my job was honestly just to assay bacteria because that's what you do when you're 21. And the whole point was it was supposed to be a self-contained recirculating facility for growing tilapia and um then the nitrogen can be used for fertilizer and things like that. Those are incredibly complex and finicky system s. Like it's not just a matter of sticking some fish in a tub and putting in a a pump and and calling it good. There's a lot of chemistry involved. I mean and modern agriculture is really data driven. A lot of I mean a lot of these tractors are tied into satellite services that tell you when to do everything you need to do in the fields and exactly how much uh fertilizer to put down and when and how to water and things like that. And farmers know what they're doing and asking us all to upscale to that level in a hurry is probably not going to be as successful as we would like it to be. Yeah. You know? But yeah, I think everyone should try growing tomatoes. Go to the store, get a five gallon bucket from home Depot, look it up on the internet, you can grow tomatoes in like a little patch of sunshine on your front porch or your back porch. I think it's there's nothing better than homegrown tomatoes. Oh my god, they're amazing. Yeah. Is it too late? Is it too late to plant 'em? Or is this right to time? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yakko, do you live in an apartment? Do you have somewhere you could plant it? I do. I actually live in a house here. We uh do a little bit of gardening, yeah. Oh good. Uh I'm not very good at it either because in part because our backyard is sort of shady. Yeah. Uh and then it gets warm suddenly and I forgot to water and all those things. But the plan B is just go to your local farmers market. Yeah. I think. So if you wanna uh you know reduce the use of fossil fuels, not getting your apples from South America is a good start. Mm-hm m. Yeah. It look there's there I think there's a lot to be said for eat local. Um it also tastes better. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. And I would argue that would it be nice to have strawberries in November sometimes? Sure it would, but they're gonna taste terrible and like just wait. I mean I can say this from a position of California privilege. Um sorry about that, Dan. Canning and uh and making of jams and uh and all of that stuff, right? And salting our beef. We're gonna all need to learn how to salt me at. And do you have a potato cellar? I'm just saying, if not, start digging. If you oh my gosh, you guys should look at potato sack, because I I kid you not, we grew 50 pounds of potatoes one year. One of those things was life-changing. Oh my god. Oh my god. Love that movie. I cannot wait for Project Argus. I have to go soon. We have learned you can grow potatoes in space. Yes. We just learned that. It wasn't it was a fictional um trope . But in fact they were able to grow s uh potatoes on uh the International Space Station. So there . Uh let's take a break. Uh we have more to talk about, and we have a wonderful panel to do it with Lisa Schmeiser from Nojitter.com Yanko Records Lopass. cc and of course Dan Patterson Blackbird.ai. Another radio refuge e. Our show today brought to you by Ma Julit . This is really cool. This is a really interesting use of AI. Everyday enterprises generate millions of minutes of voice traffic, right? Customer calls, uh, agent conversations, and sad to say, fraud attempts. Most of that audio is still being treated just like text, basically, flattened into transcripts, which strips tone, intent. Frankly, it strips out the risk. But modulate exists to change that. First, proven in gaming. Modulate's technology supported major players like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. And where there's all that chatter going on, Modulate was used to separate, you know, just playful banner from intentional harm at scale. And it works. Today, Modulate helps enterprises, including Fortune five hundred companies, understand twenty million minutes of voice every day by interpreting what was said and what it actually means in the real world. This capability is powered by modulate's newest ELM. It's called Velma 2.0. It's a Velma is a voice native behavioral aware model built to understand real conversationists is not just a transcriptionist. It orchestrates 100 plus specialized models, each focused on a distinct aspect of voice analysis. This is such a triumph of AI to deliver accurate, explainable insights in real time. It works so well. Velma's ranked number one across four key audio benchmarks, beating all the large general foundation models in accuracy, cost, and speed. Velma's number one in conversation understanding, number one in transcription accuracy and cost, number one in deep fake detection, number one in emotion detection . It's really not a surprise. Velma's built on 21 billion minutes of audio. Velma is a hundred times faster, cheaper, and more accurate than LLMs at understanding speech, and this includes the top frontier models like Google's Gemini, OpenAI, and XAI. Most LLMs are a black box, not Velma. Velma doesn't just assess a conversation as a whole, but breaks it down for greater accuracy and transparency by producing time stamped scores and events tied to moments in the conversation, meaning you can see exactly when risk rises, when behavior shifts, or intent changes. With Velma, you can improve your customer experiences, reduce risks like fraud and harassment, detect rogue agents, and more. Go beyond transcripts. See what a voice native AI model can really do. Go to modulates live ungated preview of Velma at preview.modulate.ai. You'll be blown away. That's preview.modulate.ai to see why Velma ranks number one on leading benchmarks for conversation understanding, deep fake detection, and emotion detection. Velma, check it out at preview.modulate.ai. Really, really good . Speaking of Sears and voice fraud, it all ties together in the end. Sears uh exposed AI chatbot phone calls and text chats. They were saving them to a wide open database on the web. And of course, when you talk to a customer service chat bot, you may be giving personal information, contact information, phone numbers. Uh now Sears department stores as we were talking about earlier are gone. But they still have brands and they still have an appliance repair business uh still going on. And in fact, they're even so uh up to date, they have an AI chatbot and a phone assistant named Samantha. Unfortunately. Oh, and it's named after women. Samantha. Hello, Sam. Yeah. Uh always always a woman that's helping you in in the U. It's always well because you know why and this is true fighter pilots too. We listen to female voices, we ignore men. Yeah. Right? Actually what's really interesting. I'm I don't remember the I don't remember Did you not hear me, Dan? Are you not listening? I don't remember the vendor off the top of my head, but I re we recently got pitched by a company that was telling us about the different specialized AI agents it was building for different lines of work. And what I noticed when they did the pitch was for um HR and for marketing, they were the they had given the the agents female names and for IT troubleshooting and procurement. Yeah, no they were. Um more troublingly the IT troubleshooting was like named Vikram and Oh no I was like you rebooted the comp I was like, this seems I can't believe they named it Bikram. I was like, this seems vaguely problematic. Yes. And when you call up to get recipe advice it's always a nice Italian voice, eh? No, no, no. Mario Ants. I actually assigned a reporter to to look into to and talk to people about hey, how is a how are how is Agentic AI enforcing and introducing systemic bias into workplace interactions because if this is what vendors are putting forward like how is this shaping the way people perceive you know people named Vikram in real life um I'm sure all of you are IT geniuses. Or um you know the way they're saying this seems to be a female role or a male role. Yeah. Uh Jeremiah Fall Fowler, security researcher, uh found three publicly explained databases from Sears containing massive troves of chat logs, audio files, and text transcriptions from Sears Home Services customers. U h three point seven million chat logs, one point four million audio files, all public. Fowler said I found a CSV file um that contained fifty four thousand three hundred and fifty nine complete chat log s uh with Samant ha. Nobody with no no Vikram uh chats though, no um anyway. Do you want a C CSV file that tells you 50,000 times to turn it off and on again. So no, you don't need that. You don't really need that one. Let's talk about uh prediction markets, because this is a really interesting uh growth market. We've all talked heard about calci calci calci now. Um what's the what's the other one? Uh polymarket. Polymarket. Yeah. These are basically gambl ing. Right? It's obvious. You're but they call it a prediction market, so it's not illegal in many states. Uh or any states, because I guess it's kind of a loophole. Wait a minute, Nevada just outlawed Arizona just filed criminal charges over at Calchi over illegal gambling. Nevada, which is the home of course of all those casinos, has been uh Nevertheless, there's billions of dollars being traded back and forth. And the problem with these prediction markets is you can bet on anything. And we've seen this. Insiders from you know the Pentagon who knew something about uh the Venezuela extraction of Mad uro would place a bet right before it happened saying yeah, I think Maduro's gonna be captured in the next two weeks. And then it happened and the person made three hundred thousand dollars. It's uh the other thing about these prediction markets is they're basically anonymous. You can use crypto and so forth. Uh good news, Major League Baseball, which I guess I guess uh fan duel uh and draftkings was already taken by football. Major League Baseball struck a deal with Polymarket, the offici al event prediction platform . Major League Baseball is already, you know, I mean remember Pete Rose was kept out of the Hall of Fame for betting on a baseball game. Those rules are kind of long gone. And they've prosecuted or at least come down pretty hard on players who were clearly throwing Throwing games. Yeah, throwing games, throwing in in the dirt or or you know, predictions on particular pitches, right? Major League Baseball uh th there actually last year was a case of uh two players facing federal charges for manipulating their on-field performance. So what's the best way to ensure the integrity of the game? Do a deal with polymarket. Right. 'Cause then you could do prop bets on anything. Look, there's a lot of reasons to dislike Pete Rose, but it's it's really the league really has to t to confront that hypocrisy. It's fair. It's just unbelievable. I just but I guess there's so much money . Well, I'm wondering how long until we're gonna see some legislation around this. Um Well and you know, the sad thing is all most of the time that legislation comes from lobbyists with the casino operations who say if you're gonna get as much as possible to our casinos. It's really feels like I I mean there there are conversations especially in the media world about how this is an interesting and new emerging technology and there are reasons to consider it but uh this really to me feels like the like 2020, 2001, 2002 era of crypto, where there was a rush to the space and we saw massive companies doing massive deals with crypto companies. Uh before regulation came in and we found out there was oh surprise, there was a ton of fraud going on. So polymarket. No, you it's it's it's I think you're right. Crypto's a really great anal analysis for that where people like to Well people like to make it sound like they know what they're talking about too and they've gamified the experience and all you have to do is give someone the quick dopamine hit and like oh So what is the what is a particularly mascul ine thing that we men do? Uh we are standing monitoring the situation. Right. With our arms folded, just watching it go down. We're monitoring the situation. Well, Poly Market has created the situation room in Washington, D.C., where you can monitor the situation. It's got big screens with the world, you know, uh the war, everything. You can bet on anything. It's not a sports bar. Live X feeds, flight radar, Bloomberg terminals. Where you can sip your bourbon and smoke a cigar. And monitor the situation. Men's spaces. Men's activities are. You can tell. Look, there's a cigar, there's some whiskey. Uh it's opening uh March twentieth uh on K Street, j just up the street. Uh K Street. On K Street? That's roll the that's roll the yeah. That's isn't that where uh all the lobbyists are? This is like the most 2026 thing ever, isn't it? It just yeah. If I could get this napkin for Christina Warren, she collects this kind of memorabilia. Meet me at the polymarket situation room news bar this is just DC's version watching a construction site. You know how men can't stop can't can't ever stop what the construction site. But this is not just construction. You can monitor the world situation, everything going on, and you can make and 'cause it's polymarket, you can make a bet on any of this. Will his hair catch on fire when he's lighting the Olympic torch? Six to one od ds. There are other places I would like to spend my time. I'm monitoring the situation. What a world we live in. Also prediction markets are like the wrong name for this. It should be prophecy markets. Because like Yeah. Like when you watch like like the election, like the elections and the la the last week's elections, like they were all wrong. They they it's it was all what the people who were betting wanted to happen, not were thinking. Wishful thinking. Well there was that story where that journalist got threatened when they when they they were reporting on um what bombing in in the Middle East they were gonna they were gonna kill him because he had people they're like I bet this and you said that and and you need well first they first they reached out and tried to do the more flies with honey thing with hey there's an inaccuracy in your story if you could report this instead that would be great thank you and like a good journalist this guy was like oh did I get something wrong and then he's like no and then he was like why am I getting so many messages from people whose social media handles are all about online betting. And then he realized that what was happening was these guys had bet against what he reported and they wanted him to change his story. What he change his story so they could recoup their losses. And they began threatening him when he wouldn't do it. Wow. Ye ah. No, it was uh it's a genuinely disturbing thing because it's it's another way where you know you're gonna have under-resourced reporters who whose names are uh attached to reporting the facts who are gonna get threatened by institutional betters and uh what kind of backup do they have? What kind of protection will they And it's easy to find your address with data sold by data brokers. Cash. This is reported. It's bugging me. And of course Cash goes, Yeah, is he uh is he a liberal? Well don't these guys also don't don't these markets also advertise on podcasts? Isn't it all just one giant Oh yeah, not on mine. Yeah, no. Not on mine. Uh in fact, we've turned down not a insignificant amount of money from crypto investments and and and good for you prediction markets and all this stuff. Well done, Leah. But this is the reason why they don't allow sports teams in Vegas before, right? It's because like the the mob would threaten the players.. Exactly Nothing bigger now than the Knights and the Raiders. Vegas is sports city USA now . Although if you ask every time I go to Vegas, I'll ask a a driver, you know, hey, how are you feeling about the Oakland A's? They're like, we don't want 'em. I was just gonna say, except for the A's. Yes, to a person that's for A's, no, no. They're like, no one asked for this. Poor Oakland A's Oakland wanted them. Nobody wants them. We have the ballers. They just don't want their owner. What what do they call the ballers? Yeah, it's the Oakland Beast. The Oakland Ballers are fantastic. The games are playing at the Coliseum? No, no, no, no, no. They played a completely different venue, one that's a little bit closer to uh Emeryville, actually. And it's it's triple A or is it single A? Is it is it good? It's fun. Um we used to have a uh no A minor Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it wa it was. It was so much fun because there it's like handyman and high school teachers. Now these guys are pro, but they're like Well they're pros. They want to be pros. It's an independent local. They're locals. They got Kevin Mitchell to the former San Francisco Giant to manage them. The Pioneer League. They're part of what's called the Pioneer League. They play at Ramondi Park. It's so much fun. Like one of my favorite things from last summer is I went during the day that they teamed up with the Oakland Zoo. And awesome. Oh my gosh. No, they were giving out like possum hats. They had Oakland they had Oakland Zedosen's there to give you animal facts. Um the Oakland bees mascot is actually a possum as well. So it was just this great synergy of two really classic o you know pro community oak they have to do this stuff because otherwise they wouldn't sell tickets. So the Crushers they would have they have like a barca lounger right behind home plate. Yeah. That you could win the right to sit there during the whole game and watch the game, which sounds deadly. Uh they it was you know they would always they would have amusements in between every inning, right? I'm sure the possums do the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like with the one where you bring ten kids out and you have 'em put their forehead on a baseball bat and run around in a circle on the p home plate until they get really dizzy and see if they can run to first base. Oh I love those barrel laughs. Yeah. No, like one of my goals for this year is to get up to a Humboldt Craps game. I love independent as well. Like But the Oakland Ballers are they were such a good time last year. Um like I I also go to the Oakland Roots games because I'm I'm for all of the small non NFL and and um no, I would say if you're in sports used to be if you are in the East Bay, do yourself a favor and get to an Oakland Ballers game this season. It's gonna be amazing. That''ss that it used to be farmhands, you know, and stuff. That's what baseball used to be. Yeah. Um yeah. So it's too bad it got so corporatized and yeah but anyway so expensive. We're all about the Oakland B's now. Las Vegas hates the Oakland A's. Um Betting is happening. Oh, I get it. Yes, yes, now I get it. Uh that took a while. The whole world started going downhill. I can tell you the exact date. March twenty-first, two thousand six was when it all started going to hell. That was the day Twitter launched, twenty years ago yesterday. Oh, no kidding. The first tweet, Jack Dorsey. The first tweet and it was but wasn't called Twitter with an E, it was Twitter without the E. That was the that was the fashion, because you had Tumblr flicker, flicker. And remember, and you can only interact with f sending a text to four oh four oh four. F that's right, 'cause it was originally it was the only way. And that was it was hundred forty characters, right? Yeah, yeah. That's why, yeah. I remember I was on uh Odeo, which is a podcasting platform started by Biz and Ev and and some of the others who co-founded Twitter. As we're and we logged in one day and they said we're shutting down Odeo to start this new site called TWTTR. So uh a bunch of podcasting nerds signed up. That's right. Yeah. Right around now, two thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Actually they did a good thing. They uh biz paid back the audio investors, gave them their money. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, which was Audio was really great too. I mean it was made podcast like it took I I think it was kind of killed by iTunes four point nine, which But Audio was a great directory. It had Ajax, which was big at the time. You could drag and drop stuff. They also had this interesting idea of people leaving each other personal voice messages to become parts of their RSS feeds or something, right? Yeah, that's right. I don't know if anybody ever did it but I thought, oh that's kinda cool. Oh that's such a blast from the past, right. That's yeah. I I think I d filed a couple of reports back then using that. That's yeah. I mean art like RSS. Yeah. I have my plaque. Wait a minute, let me get my plaque. I have a plaque here. Hey, what do you guys use for RSS readers, by the way? I'm using Feedly right now. But there's one that just launched this past week. I'm trying to look at a Elon took over Tw itter. And uh remember he took away all the blue checks. So I got this plaque. It said in in honor of Leo Laporte, who had a verified a Twitter account before they were available for purchase, November 2022. Ye ah. It's got like but now I have a blue check ' Elcauseon gave it back. I a get a f I get what they what Cory Doctorow calls a non consensual blue check. I have a consensual non use of Twitter policy. Yeah, I well I don't want people to think I paid for it or anything. Anyway, 20 years ago yesterday, uh Twitter. It all started . Actually, that's uh in South by Southwest in 2007 when uh Fursoquare launched, Twitter launched the U.S. Foursquare blew up at South by it was so cool back then. Yeah. Oh South by was this week. Yeah. That's when internet was uh was new and exciting and fun. You can use all those all the platforms to cross post onto all the other platforms. Oh my goodness. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And then use every night. Yeah. Oh yeah, Yahoo pipes. Oh man so much irrelevant nonsense with Yahoo pipes. Oh the the young people are going, Who are these old people talking? Old stuff. You're watching this week in tech with uh with old people, not so old as me, but uh we're not as young as you either. We're glad you're here. Uh Dan and uh Lisa and Yanko. Uh and I'm very glad you're here. You club twit members, we thank you so much uh for making Twit possible. Uh we started the club during COVID when we realized uh, you know, we were gonna have to really go to our listeners and help get them to help us uh stay afloat. And you've done it. And I really appreciate it. If you're not a club member and you like what you hear, if you want us to keep doing shows, if you like the club shows that we do, a whole bunch of them in the our club twit Discord, if you want ad-free versions of our shows. Twit.tv slash club twit. Ten bucks a month gets you all of that and more. But mostly gets you that nice warm fuzzy feeling that you're uh supporting quality programming that doesn't spy on you, that doesn't talk down to you , that delivers good content with as much integrity as we can mus ter. I think that's pretty important and it's frankly a endangered species these days. Twit.tv slash club twit to show your support. Thank you. Thank you in advance . Give away! So embarrassing. They're growing up. Won't be long before the thought of a family holiday is just but with Hilton stayations all over the UK, we don't need to go far to feel close. Welcome. And with connecting rooms confirmed when we book, we'll have plenty of space to make the most of every moment. Everyone in the photo. When time away means time together, it matters where you stay. Book now at Hilton.com. Hilton for this da y. So I did go see uh Project Hail Mary uh on Thursday. I went to see it in a format. It's available on IMAX. I'm kind of against IMAX because it becomes all about the screen, you know, and the movie kind of loses comes in second place. I've seen enough movies now on IMAX that I'm thinking I like I saw everything ever yeah, uh one battle after another rather uh an IMAX. And I thought it was better in a normal on a normal size screen. Because it was so big, you know. But I saw it in this new uh screen X format, which is a little weird. It's movie theaters trying to find some way to get you to come in, something that they can do that you can't. So our local movie theater has you, know the, barca loungers and the y food that they bring to you and all that. But they also have taken the sidewalls of the theater and turned them into screens and they have laser projectors on the sidewalls. And some movies, including Project Hail Mary, are made so that in some scenes that extends around the walls. So it's like in almost like watching in virtual reality, you know? Um and it's a gimmick, but actually worked pretty well in Project Hail Mary. It was mostly the space scenes, so they could and you could tell they'd made the movie makers made content for those sidewalls. And it's foveated just like the Vision Pro, because you're you know it's your peripheral vision, so it doesn't really need to be in focus, but you just get a feeling like it's ex the space expanding around you. But and and and Benito said, T don't know spoilers. And I said, Benito, you read the book. How can I spoil it? He said, No, I don't want to have any movie spoilers. I will tell you this. This isn't a spoil er. Great mov ie. They lived up to the book. If you loved the book, which I did, you will still love the mov ie. They were pretty true to the book. As always, there's a few differences . They added a little more action to make it an action movie, but I think in gener al, it's really good. I remember talking to Andy Weir, the author, the guy who did the Martian, and now Project Hell Mary, when uh the book came out and he had already signed movie rights and he told me, yeah, Ryan Gosling's gonna star. And I kind of went , and then he mentioned that the the the direction, the team of directors, it's uh it's two directors, uh uh uh Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were uh known for uh the Lego uh movie, which I thought, well, okay. So I was a little uh nervous. Andy said, no, no, no, you're this is gonna be great. He was very much involved in the production of the movie. He has a producer credit, and I think he was sitting there the whole time because they were there's a great scri pt. They did a good job and it's a it's a it's a feel good movie. As Salon said, it's movie medic ine. And in these troubled times, it's nice to see something that makes you feel good. So that's my revie w. So for the IMAX thing, Leo, for most films that are shot on IMAX, you'll probably want to shoot it on IMAX. You want to watch watch it on IMAX. And Project Hill and Mary, the thing with the thing with it is that it changes aspect ratios and that's what the wall thing is. Yeah, I hate that. It doesn't have to be on the walls. It could just be like a longer a longer landscape. I mean that's that's sort of IMAX when it sometimes fills the screen and sometimes doesn't like when it goes back and forth. They did that with that's the filmmaker's choice. That's not IMAX doing that. Yeah. One battle after another was full IMAX the whole movie, but it's just it's too overwhelming. It becomes about the screen to me. And I really just want to see the story. Um I don't actually honestly think I needed Screen X either, but that I was able to get good seats for it, so I don't think anybody wanted to see it in that format. So I was able to go uh see it. I I watched a really good uh YouTube with an astrophysicist who said it's the science is very good in it. There's some they take some liberties. They have to to make the story work. But uh I think in general it's quite good. There is I won't say anything because I want to protect you, Benito, after you see the mov ie. There's one thing You can say I'll just mute you. Well for myself. No, I don't want to spoil it for anybody. I'll wait. There's one thing where they make a statement about the ability the perceptive abilities of a character in the mov ie that they don't follow thro ugh on. That's really uh kind of opaque. But other than that, it's fine. It was I it that didn't bother me that much. I think it was very good. I think Project Hail Mary is superb and you're gonna enjoy it. It's a feel-good movie. Take the kids. There's no swearing because uh the star of the movie is uh a school teacher not Ryan Gosling the character he plays Ryland Grace is a school teacher I forgot yeah yeah it's in the book too he's just I don't know if you've ever met any actual teachers in real life. They don't say swear like scissors. That's a very funny part of the book, actually. Because at the beginning of the book he can't remember who he is, and he says fudge. And he goes, Why am I saying fudge? Anyway, it made me want to reread the uh the book. Uh casting is excellent, and actually Ryan Gosling is perfect as Ryland Grace because as we know from the movie from the book, Ryland Grace is a wimpy coward. Perfect . They did the Spider-Verse movies, that's right, Lord Miller, and they actually are very good uh director s. I am I am anti-animation, Alex. You're right. I don't like I don't like comic book movies and I don't like animated movies. Um but I did like Project Hail Mary and I think you will too. The only thing I didn't like it's an Amazon production and they say it in big letters and there's a smile. It's like Oi Jeff Bezos Gotta finance millennia somehow. They ha yeah. Somehow. Very nice. Uh we were talking about South by Southwest. Normally I do an in-memorium. Nobody, nobody, as far as I know, nobody died this week, so I will do the in memoriam on uh Amy Webb's annual trend report. She uh has been doing this with their future uh institute uh for many years she said she had a funeral at South by where she announced that things are moving way too fast to do an annual trend report. Her future today strategy group was gonna stop. That was the last one. She does this great thing. She says, we are gathered here today to celebrate and remember the Life of the Trend Report. Fifteen hundred people to see her. She's famous for her South by uh talks. And then it's very somber. Then the University of Texas marching band comes in and they pepped everybody up. So good good on you. Actually, I guess Chuck Norris did pass this week, but he's not a tech leader in any way, but we can acknowledge that. And and uh Xander from uh uh Buffy Buffy. I guess that's sort of nerd adja cent. Should mention that. And finally speaking of nerds, I like to do a pick every week. This is a cassette pla yer with USB-C and Blueto oth. So if you still have your old cassette collection, your mixtapes from when you were uh ninete en. This is this sounds pretty cool. This is from Maxwell. Not Maxel . Well Maxwell used to be like, yeah. It's the where they had the hair going back. Yeah. Yep. This is Maxel's new cassette player. Uh it has a USB-C port, so it's rechargeable. It has an audio jack, so you can use wired headphones and Bluetooth five point four so you can play it through your Sonos speak ers. Just what we it looks like a Walkman. Cassettes. I might actually buy that. I don't cassettes, but I might actually buy that I have a whole box of cassettes in the basement. Can I borrow some cassettes, Yanko? My fear is that they're all like the tape is too degraded at this point. Yeah, they're gonna fall apart the minute you put it in the cassette player. Cassettes coming back as the weirdest uh legacy tech that comes to come back. Next it's eight tracks and then we'll know that we are going to romance of the mixtape. Yeah. That's the romance of the highly personal tangible artifacts like CDs CDs are so much better. But getting into forty five minutes and then having a perfect transition when it switches or when it you have to turn it over. That was such an art. So one one of the things that I've among the teens, anthropologically speaking, like they will use Spotify playlists as sort of temporary social watering holes where they'll collaborate on a playlist together to send each other messages or be mean to each other or be nice to each other or to like process or like cause because my daughter was recently making one with friends after a particularly harrowing test where they were all like, this is how I felt about that French test. Um but for them, Spotify is this really transient liquid environment and they are all super into the romance of fixed music media. Yeah. Like vinyl. Well, vinyl is something that you collect for the aesthetics. For them, mixed tapes are a way for you to demonstrate your personal flair in an artifact. I agree. But see, like the same way that's the same, they don't do it with sets. So they do do it on cassettes. Very quickly, you know, Spotify rate. It's an ephemeral. It can come and go. A cassette you have to listen. You can try to fast You can hand it to people. It's not just texting a link. There's but CDs. So you know how like C D is so you but you they don't have C D burners though and it doesn't have that nostalgic pre-internet thing. They don't cassette players either cool. They don't cassette players either. Well they do now, thanks to Maxel. Yeah. Now just can they get some cassettes? The other thing, bringing us full circle from the beginning of the show.' Wshen the last time you recorded a song off the rad io trying to avoid the DJ talking? And 1994. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That's the true mixta pe. Great movie, High Fidelity with John Kusak. It's all about mixtapes making the perfect mixtape. Oh, that was a great movie. Yeah. Great movie. If you want to learn about the ancient art of mixtapes. Bianco, it sounds like you made a few mixtapes in your time. I made quite a few mixtapes. Did you woo your spouse with a mixtape? Uh you know, that was a little too late at this point because uh But then it was why we did it, isn't it? To to get girls. Mm-hm m. I mean we pretended to have other reasons too. Conversation with the music you chose, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's right. A conversation with the music you chose and to extend your personality. Right. As Burke says in our uh chat room, uh the true mixtape is about who it's for, who you're making it for. You don't make it for yourself. You're making it as a message to somebody. And then you get to do all the art maybe somebody you get to do all the art and the seal it yourself and all that st uff. Now I want to make some mixtapes. Yeah . Thank you so much. You guys are great. Dan Patterson, uh blackbird.ai, things going well? Yeah, things are good. Your health is good. My daughter had strepped last week and so I've got I did notice you sound fine. A little scratchy here. Yeah, and then other stuff is. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Uh no, it's wonderful to be here and wonderful to see you. Young folks. I was nervous. I'm really glad everything's going well. Yeah. You'll find him senior director of content at blackbird.ai. Take a look at Raven. That's the new thing, right? With a Yeah, we just uh uh released an API. Oh so I can use my uh my Claude to Oh yeah we, have I mean Raven good API feels like yeah, we have NCPs and yeah. That's the hotness, the new hotness. Yeah. Yeah, we will talk to your claude. Your claude and my claude can talk. Yes. I've been having so much fun getting my agent all uh all hooked up installed on your new Mac Mini. Yeah. It's an old Mac Mini, but yeah. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. Schmeiser. Thank you for your Girl Scout cookies and your longtime friendship, editor-in-chief at no jitter dot com. Anything you would like to plug at all, please do. Just say please come please come read us. That will be it's the thing we're doing some great work taking a look at work um automating workflows at this point and what ai does well and where there are still opportunities to excel and how this will impact everything from the way we work together to the way that we interact with corporations. Oh, you have a lot of AI stuff now. We do. Oh, this is good. Yeah. We're we're also needing to focus a lot more on how the raw material of AI, i.e. data, is really gonna end up shaping the ways in which it's used and um the emerging problems that we're seeing with uh enterprise level data. Oh, it's a big one. I know. Yeah. Man, data discovery was already a pr was a problem well before this and it's only become more amplified over time. Well and with AI, garbage in, garbage out, right? It's all about the quality of the data. See you wanna say mixtapes are classic and retro, garbage in, garbage out is that's very worth absolutely foundational. Thank you so much, Lisa. Yanko Records, thank you. Everybody should subscribe. Lowpast dot cc. Yanko is one of the you know, he's still doing journalism. Wow. That's amazing, man. That's older than mixtapes. In a way, yes. It's great to see you. Uh subscribe. It covers AR, VR, streaming media every Thursday. Lowpass dot CC. Thank. you And three year anniversary coming up. So Really? Fantastic . That's that's that's so great. It's eight dollars a month. It's great. It's well worth it. And you have a lot of free posts too, so people don't have free posts yes yeah so sign up for free and then if you like it maybe you might thanks to all of you for joining us we do twit every Sunday two to five p.m Pacific five to eight Eastern twenty one hundred UTC can. wat Youch us live as we do it. Of course, if you're in the club, you can be in the Discord with us, watch on the Discord, or uh, and anybody can do this, watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kick. Six different platforms. Uh but that's only for the live show.