The History of the Sphere Computer

It's time for Twit. This week in Tech. Glenn Fleischman is back. Wesley Faulkner's here, Lou Muresca, and we have a lot to talk about. The new Claude uh Opus 4.7 model is out. We'll talk about security flaws that AI can and cannot find, why it's time to ban the sale of precise geolocation, and we'll watch some robots fall down. It's coming up next on Twit . Podcast s you love from people you trust . This is Twit. This week in Tech, episode 1080, recorded Sunday, April 19th, 2026. Destroy all phono records . It's time for TWIT This Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I love this panel, but I especially love seeing Glen Fleischman back. So nice to see Glenn. You're feeling fit and fine and all that? I feel fabulous. I recommend open heart surgery for everybody. Um if you need it. If you need it, let me point that out. That's the important thing. Do not show us your scar though. Do you have a I promised no No it's actually looks awesome. I've had I've had high compliments from medical professionals about bizarre. No, I feel great. I would never have known that I would never have known that I had this done five months ago. It's bizarre. I feel fantastic. And you feel better, don't you? Oh my yeah, incredibly it's like all the things that were bothering me for five or six years are gone. Nice. It went I uh here's my little joke, which is uh everything went according to textbook, and if they would just take the textbook out of me now, I would feel that's my little book. I hope they didn't leave anything else behind? Just a healthy So great to see you. Of course Glenn writes now on a regular basis for sixcolors.com. We're really pleased to see that. And his new book is now on Kickstarter. Yes, you knew he had you know, after all the conversations we've had about flongs, you knew he had to write a flong book. Yeah. It's called in a punning fashion, Flong Time No See , Forgotten Stories of Printing and labor. Yeah. Is this uh is this uh is this all about the people who did the work? Yeah, I in compiling uh this is kind of a compilation of a bunch of things I've researched in the last several years uh about printing history and I keep coming back to weirdly to the people involved most of them kind of forgotten to history or his roles were downplayed and um I just did a deep dive and discovered that a huge percentage of uh women were involved in printing and then kind of erased from its history. Uh changed again in the last you know sixty years, but um in the late eighteen hundreds, uh fifty percent of people working in small towns on uh newspapers and things were women. And um so I'm trying to that will be in this book along with a lot of stuff about all the hard labor everybody did that we never saw. Uh that got got printing where it is today. It is on uh Kickstarter. And you've already reached your goal. I did. It's funded, and you can but you can go there and you can uh pledge to get a book now uh as I continue towards completion, towards finishing the book. Thank you. Also here, good friend, longtime friend Wesley Faulkner. Uh Wesley of Works Dash Not Dash Working. Hi, Wesley. Hey, it's good to be back. Always nice to see you. Feels like the rotation rotation's getting quicker. Is it? Well, maybe that's because we like you so much. Uh and the site is up. That's the other thing. Last time you were here it was just about to go live. It is live now. Yep. Yes. And the wait list is open too, so you can join the wait list. I'm gonna open it up for new members uh at the beginning of next month. Nice. Great to have you. And an other old friend, good friend too, former host of this week in Enterprise Tech, Lou Moresca. Hello. Hey Lou, good to see you. He's engineering leader. I'm sorry, AI. AI engineer. Engineering leader. For co-pilot at Microsoft. That's right. Yep. Focus on Excel Agent and uh bringing data engineering to you. He's the guy who put Python in Excel for which we are eternally grateful. Oh wow. Wow. I know. Like I know when I say that, Glenn, it's like, oh yeah, okay. Wow. Now you can use AI against it too. And now you can uh now you can use AI. Now you generate Python AI for it right in uh right in Excel. We all got started talking about our AI projects. It's really interesting to see, you know, how people uh geeks, I guess, even not necessarily coders have kind of gravitated to this and have started to use it in all sorts of interesting ways. I really feel like as somebody who's covered tech for forty years, it is the most exciting thing to happen in tech since I've been doing it. Yeah. I I don't know any coder who's not excited about it. Uh the ones who aren't excited about it haven't tried it yet and the ones that are may have ambivalent feelings but they're still excited about it because i i you know what we were talking about this before the show, but uh it's I think part of the ambivalence from some people is is like I put in so much hard. This is like the what if they pay off everybody's student loans? Well, I paid mine off. It's like I put in so much work to get here, and now this thing can do a thing that used to take me a hundred hours in like an hour or two. It's like, well, I think of that as more like it's an accelerant, it's an exoskeleton. It's something you could use to make your life better. And having written about the printing industry, when the linotype was invented in the eighteen eighties, all these typesetters were initially put out of work. It was very sad. And then, of course, what happened? Newspapers started printing newspapers that were 10, 20, 30 times bigger, and they hired back. And so within a few years, the overall employment was tremendous ly higher because of the efficiency. So there's my isn't isn't Joe Joe uh Giv en's paradox that yeah in economics uh Givon G J E V-O-N or the Given effect is said to occur when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use. Intuitively you'd think, oh well, if it's more efficient, they're going to use less of it. No, leads to a rise in I'm hoping, I mean I feel bad for anybody. We see we see that computer science uh majors in college have dwindled, but people are still majoring in engineering, data science. It's just they're not learning how to code anymore. I think that makes sense. There's still options That's true. But then and so it I don't know about how sustainable in terms of a direct line or hockey stick trajectory because when people start charging how much they're worth uh I will see how many people will still use it at least in the the way that they're using it now. So it might change. We're talking about the constraints on uh on data center capacity, and uh without getting into the I mean Microsoft is vastly more resources, they have vastly more cash in the bank than most of the AI startups, right? Uh but like you know, Claude has tweaked its pricing mod subelsstantially and the tokens available and and all that just in the last few weeks made a lot of people unhappy because uh what has been reported is it's about constraint and the necessity of computational power for the new improved models. And if they're not efficient enough relative to the output, which is I think where we're at right now, then they have to charge more, uh which is good from a sustainable standpoint. If you want Claude, OpenAI, Copilot, et cetera, to be available in five years, then they have to do what Wesley says. Otherwise we have nothing and then what do we gain? Is it a case of them running So the same thing happened with the Internet, right? Everything was free on the Internet, except we knew it it sh I mean it all cost money. It wasn't free free. There was some how some somebody is paying for it. Uh and eventually we found out, oh yeah, it was, you know, we're paying for it through attention, through advertising. Um is we just run that cycle a lot faster with AI, you know? Uh well bits were free. Uh the servers did cost money. Yeah. But but those were the infrastructure and all that stuff was different than the infrastructure now. And it worked out seeing yeah. But we're seeing that the the the demand you the the what did they say cost was the demand curve is also being thrown out of whack. We have uh hard drives being sold out for the whole entire year in January. We have memory prices spiking. We have uh you know we're gonna be have probably like shortages in copper and all this stuff that's gonna happen where that the constraints aren't equal. So the the the the the auro borus of what it is is this build out is is n is not sustainable. Today Mark German's uh newsletter in Bloomberg said that Apple was going to have to delay the release of its new Mac Studios and perhaps even its new M six Max laptop because of supply chain constraints. It's um I'm I'm sort of fascinated but I was writing something recently, I was telling to tell people for six colors, well, here's a great time machine thing is use network time machine on your Mac and just get a couple two terabyte uh SSDs and before I publish it, I'm like looking up and like, Oh, those are like a hundred dollars. Like, oh my god, they're like two fifty to three hundred. They were they had gone down so far into price during the pandemic because of an inc increased production and you know the curve is whoop you know, so all right, can't tell people, yeah, don' dont't go and spend three hundred dollars on a two terabyte SSD right now. Maybe Yeah, to your point, Anthropic announced this week that enterprises using their Claude models uh would have to pay for tokens and wouldn't be able to do the all you can eat Claude Max subscriptions. We can as end users uh still do that. But we have to pay attention. Uh you're in that situation, aren't you, Lou? You have to now you said you have to watch your tokens. Well, I mean if personally I have to watch my tokens, but I would say, you know, if you use cop ilot through you know through Excel and choose Claude Opus four seven, we don't you don't worry too much about that. Oh that's good to do. Little plug there for uh the way to use it. The way to use it . That's good. Four seven did just come out this week. I any thoughts about uh you know, it's so funny. You go on Reddit and people are bitching and moaning and b for the hate they hated four six. They said it was nerfed that and it may be but that that the the the compute constraint that anthropics running up against especially uh because it's got this supermodel under wraps and uh and it to eats a lot of bandwidth and a lot of CPU the and GPU that maybe the uh they haven't been able to serve all the people who are using Claude. Plus, let's face it, Claude has gone through explosive growth. Well 4.6 the defaults changed. They they changed it from uh high effort to like medium effort and to so that was the default. So people were seeing worse results because the defaults didn't change. I mean the defaultss fal didsen'. But also if you look to look at uh if you look up their uptime, that has been taking significant hits . Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh so it has not been the most reliable service. Did you all notice when they switched to the uh in four six they added that million token uh uh session uh uh I can't remember when it sort of switched on. It was extra and then suddenly it was default and I it was profoundly different., I felt like It just felt like I could work on these long sessions and have so much more sophistication during them than I had before. So even before the four-seven upgrade, I felt like I was getting a lot more out of it without having to constantly be like , no, okay, resummarize, let's go back. No, I already discussed that. Is it fair to say that that Anthropic's being bit by its own success, that that's what really this is? Sure. Part of it is the explosiving uh like when open AI and the government contract thing and they got so many free users. Right. And so they had an uptick of people who uh also weren't on the pay plan that uh just they are trying to make it up in volume uh in terms of uh how much their money they're making. So yeah, I think that is that this part of it is bec and also when you roll out the the like the we're gonna probably get into their new model. Um now you're competing with the old and new and unless you can get everyone to transition over to one model then you can help with managing some of that usage but, now you have to kind of partition it? Lou, you may not be able to say anything about this, but uh Anthropic did grant access to Mythos its super duper model to Microsoft. Do you did you can you I don't have any knowledge of that information Tug your ear if you've used it. Uh I know you I could not. I could if you could you couldn't talk about it anyway. I just saw a report today some,one was complaining that um they looked through all the um oh I forgot the name of the m I no ID uh the IDEs, all the uh CDEs, the reports, the filed um uh reports and the same thing. The vulner They look through all those, they try to find anything that could be directly attributed to either Mythos or to Claude, and they found uh n almost nothing that seemed to be related to Mythos, and um they're calling for more transparency from Anthropic about when they're making claims about how many s fundamental bugs they're finding. Part of me is like, well, I don't know what's been fixed yet. So it might not be a C V E because some of the stuff they're talking about is so fundamental. Yeah, Patrick Hardy, who works for Volncheck That's it. It may be forty C . Yeah, exactly. But they're not attributed to Mythos. They're attributed to anthropic researchers. Yeah. The only one that Anthropic has said is that uh are those uh the one that they found an open BSD or free BSD MPEG one, which I don't know if you're FFMPEG one uh more as an example. But and I've also seen stories that say, uh this, is from the Wall Street Journal, you're about to see a lot of critical software updates . Don't ignore them. Well, that's Nicole, yeah. She's uh she's on top of this. Nicole Wen, yeah. Uh I think that that's gonna be the proof w who regardless of who these CVEs are attributed to, if you suddenly see a flood of uh zero day patches, Microsoft put out uh last patch Tuesday, its second biggest patch Tuesday in in of all, ever. I don't know if that's related or not. I think it's too early to say that those would those would be C V E's discovered by Methodists. what What do organizations why don't organizations think about it today though? You can still have uh AI assisted hunts going on with without mythos, right? So like so I don't understand why they they're waiting for mythos to come out because they should already be using these models to counteract what's already happening today. Absolutely. Yeah. Well I think the point the mythos is so that they don't do CVEs. They don't want to publicly disclose the the bugs for people to fix it work around. Fix it before fix it it's it becomes public. Yeah. Well you remember that there's Danny Kaminsky, uh sadly late Dan Kaminsky who had that DNS uh exploit that uh a friend of mine helped him do the disclosure because he thought you know he was one person out there because Dan found it kind of by accident and no one had seemingly ever exploited it. So I hope not too many, but you you know you just don't think are there millions of uh zero days just waiting? Glenn, you said that you had software you've wrote wrote and have been running for how long? Twenty seven years, live on the internet. I mean a little brook book price comparison site and but you know, but all the automated vulnerability things that hit every website all the time that are looking for WordPress press flaws, credentials, uh any kind of vulnerability for uh injection, they've all been hitting it. So the problems fortunately were not publicly exposed exposed in a way. But you know, first time I said to Claude Code, find me all the bugs in this, it's like, hey, you didn't escape all this stuff and you didn't do this, and this could have been an injection. If someone had sent a URL that looked like this, they could have just overwritten your databases. And I'm like, oh my god. You weren't sanitizing your inputs, young man. I sanitize I 'm sorry, father, I sinned. I did not sanitize all of my inputs, for which I'm heartily sorry. But that's the point is even the current models are really good at finding this stuff The thing is we're talking about software vulnerabilities, but there's still microcode vulnerabilities on the lower level. And that's going to be super in the processor you mean. Oh my gosh. What's the elephant in the room, right? There's vulnerabilities that have been long standing in all devices, all applications, all services out there, and and now it's just easy to expose. So and then these companies are gonna have to go and retroactively patch everything, basically. And just to be just to be clear what the threat is, uh people are afraid that bad guys are gonna get access to these AI models and find the vulnerabilities and exploit them. And so the the idea is g you know get these companies to But as we've been saying, the current models are good enough to find a lot of exploits. Or work with the government and make sure the flaws don't get fixed. I think it's very ironic because one of the reasons you mentioned that Anthropic's been on a roll is because the government said you're a supply chain risk and President Trump tweeted or whatever you call it truth, he truth nobody in the government can use anthropic. Meanwhile, as soon as Mythos came out, all of these government agencies were begging Anthropic to can we have it? Can we have it? And in fact, Dario Mode went to the White House on met with Susan Wilkes, the chief of staff , because now government's in a little bit of a bind. They want access to this thing, this supply chain vul you know trauma so ridiculous. Uh I think that actually the government is gonna get access to it. As it should. If it's that good at finding vulnerabilities. We should all have access to it. Yeah. In a controlled fashion. This is where we get where microcode and then also the Internet of Things where all the terrible firmware that's out there and somebody just buys up or finds the f I mean that's the other thing. It downloads the firmware for devices, emulates it, runs tests against it, and then is like, well, there's a million of these. I don't even want to say a brand name because I don't want to accidentally slander somebody, slander a brand, but you can say wise wise cameras. Yeah, remember Wise had to say, well, we're not going to sell that camera anymore because we can't fix it. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff out there like that. I mean how many generations of routers have never been patched or there is no way to upgrade the firmware for them . Or if you think about industrial hardware as well, like things that are made to set in for game It's funny, the stuff about how the world ends is everyone's like, well the AI will take over and then we'll all be great goop. And it's like, no, I'm worried about the control system in a electrical sub subs substation near my house blowing up probably. Absolutely. We need that Borg technology where like if there's a vulnerability that it just gets distributed amongst all the other drones and then like they adapted and they have to find a different vulnerability to get through . Hopefully. I think it's pretty interesting. it's supposed to be the the safer version of mythos um is what they say safer because it's dumber yeah but i guess so but i i i the what i would what i thought was really interesting was because of all the safeguards they put in a four seven the the four six model actually was benchmar king better at hacking systems than force Interesting. Jensen. Okay, the couple of things. First of all, if you've heard of Cal.com, which is a apparently I didn't know about it, but because I'm not an enterprise, but a very popular calendaring solution. Um it's an open source scheduling software companies use to you know schedule meetings and so forth, it's going closed source because of this . They say open source security has always relied on people to fix and find any problems, but now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency . So they're going closer. I don't know honestly if this is a good idea. Do you think it's a good idea that should we is it the some people have said this is the end of open source because if your source code is sitting there on GitHub, bad guys are gonna attack it. They're gonna use AI to find the vulnerabilities . I I I've been a long time user and still a user of Cal.com. I loved it. It's awesome. Part of it is because for individual accounts, it was free. So for the hosted version. But then you could also deploy it. I know a lot of home labers love Cal.com because they can deploy it on their own infrastructure. But they this seems like an excuse because it doesn't make sense. Because uh if you remember TrueCrypt and like Veracrypt and all this th those are open source. And that's for in if they say we want to protect our users' data, I mean an encryption software has very important user data and they're still able to stay open source or we're able to. Um not this off. But security by obscurity is not security But also if you look at other projects like Redis or uh other products that were open source and they went closed source, they have been beaten by the community. They have been there's the retribution is swift and it's hard to the point where that it's like some projects have to flip back to open source because the rebellion is very strict. This is feels like a bait and switch for a lot of people. And they they've they lot of the tagline for open source is, hey, you can you always have access to it 'cause we're open source and when they change that, yeah that is seen as a portrayal and uh they said they're gonna have a version that's gonna be open source, now they're gonna be maintaining two code bases. It just doesn't make sense. They have cal .di , which is the open source for self-house Are they gonna maintain they can maintain both? But you're gonna as soon as you fork it. You diverge. Yeah. They could have did a call to action. And the community just said, hey everyone, just you know, use your tokens against our repo and and secure it all up and we'll do it that from now on, right? I'm sure all the community would have done it. That's a great idea. A popular open source product should do that. That's a great idea. Yeah. That's why it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense what they're saying. And plus, I mean, uh are they seeing any real if they saw any real world consequences, like is that something bad happened? D that would be even a catalyst to say this happened with one of our major customers, we're redoubling down and we're closing this for s there's just no real justification and no data that they've pointed to. It's it's hard to make this make sense. So after all the WordPress nonsense has happened and then then clo uh Cloudflare's response to that sort of uh it feels like you can't necessarily uh there's there's not enough goodwill left I think when open source projects say, well this isn't really as open source as you thought or we're gonna switch our model or people are misusing things, but you're like, well you can't misuse those things if they're open. So we have the trademark. We have the so there's I think a lot of goodwill has evaporated in the last few years. I mean I want to say the WordPress debacle has been um part of that. I d I don't know. Maybe that's exaggerating that role, but I don't know . Uh one of our uh I quote him a lot. He's in our club uh twitter, he's a big AI user, Darren Oakie, uh one of the regulars on our AI user group, he said, if everyone has access to these tools, this is in our club twit, we can find vulnerabilities. For instance, GitHub Copilot already does tons of stuff. It should be finding vulnerabilities and alerting users. Then everything's more solid and has a cascading effect. He says the real problem is so many people are using pointer based languages like C<unk> and that's where you get these buffer overruns and the you know, these these null pointer vulnerabilities. He said people should just be using AI to convert it to Go or convert it to Rust. Oh no, the code wars. No language. But he has a point. In fact, you know a lot of uh a lot of what Mike I don't know, what code are you uh getting your uh AIs to write in. A lot of I I I my first thing I ever wrote was rust. I thought, well, why not? Let's let's use a a safer language. I don't have to write all that extra boilerplate. It's gonna do it. So let's use Rust. But lately I've been using Go because of its concurrency model. But in both cases it's more secure. I would never dream of asking an AI to write something in C or C Most of the models are written in Python, so they're highly trained on Python. Uh it's a safe language. And yeah, it's safe, right? There's no there's no pointer vulnerabilities in Python. But but in this day and age we where're just talking like about like LLMs and vibe coding is people will just make a version of this and then open source that and then let other people use that for themselves hosts and that's the gonna be the future. It's like, hey, I was a cow user , now it's now closed tour, so here's my version. And if you want please add your contributions, we'll find bugs, and then they're gonna die. This isn't I don't want to get us off on too much of a tangent, although I know that's the point of this show and part of it. It is the point. Uh is I've been wondering I w uh you know, uh all the coders I know w talk about using it for the pri public facing projects, most of them, but also they all talk about, I'm sure everybody here, about how it's like, oh I needed a thing, so I just had it write it for for me me. It's . It only the interface is minimal or it's extensive, but it's all like I had it write a game show console for me for a game I invented that I run once a year on a backwater . I mean sort of I'm sort of embarrassing myself, you know, a podcast network. And I'm thinking, well, I could of course I could do my own fork of Cal.com, run something locally, have it add features, and if they're good enough, I can have it submit to the, you know, uh as uh do pull request Or if you want kind of I don't know, clean room, but you want something where I'm not necessarily always updated to the latest public version 'cause of whatever concerns, I'm just running it for myself. So that's also gonna happen. I want to take a little break and then uh we can watch robots fall over . Uh which is always fun in the uh half marathon in Beijing, although these humanoid robots do run really fast, which honestly I have some misgivings about fast fast robots. That seems dangerous. Uh we'll talk about that and uh AI anxiety in general, plus a lot more. Uh it's a fun time to get together and talk about technology, that's for sure. On this week in tech, we're so glad to have Glenn Fleischman n back in the fold. So nice to see you, Glenn. It's great to see you. Glenn pleasure to be here. Thank you. Did we now had, speaking of the incomparable, we now have and Six Colors. Three Six Colors writers have now been Jeopardy players, two of us Jeopardy champions. Uh Dan Morin. And uh but Jason had a great time. He got beat by one of the best. He got beat by Jamie D ing, who is still playing. Still playing is over $700,000 and winning. He's 24, 25 games as of Friday. Super champion. He's great. He's such a modest, funny, like quiet guy. And uh Jason feels very privileged to have been defeated by a super champion by a top five all time players. Yeah, that's awesome. It's good. Also here, Wesley Faulkner, ever dream of being on Jeopardy, Wesley? Is that uh is that something in your uh No, funny enough though, my my um stepsister has been on Jeopardy. Oh really? Um yeah and uh it's uh she uh was writing a book about it um and uh I think that's still in the works. But yeah, I've I the pressure feels too high. I don't think I would perform uh like that uh to to rattle off like gosh when when when I'm in an interview and they're asking something about stuff that I know about, like the things that I lived experience, uh, then I still I still have issues. Right. Being on Jeopardy, that's a whole nother level now. A lot of pressure. I'll I'll tell you the funniest moment though is I uh one of the questions I got was uh clues I got I'm sorry, was something to do with the answer was was Bush, the older George Bush president. And I said, Who is Bush? And Alex said, Can you be a little more specific? And I panicked and I said, Who is George Herbert Walker Bush? It's like how specific do I have to be? And I was correct, but it was just like, why do I know his full name? I know all four of his names. It came to you suddenly. And Lumereska's also here, uh Jeopardy champion, no, but uh champion in our hearts, AI engineering leader. Thank you, Liu. At uh Microsoft. 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I've thought and I've worried about this for a long time that there was that we were almost going to see a civil war between believers and doomers. And Glenn, you already said you're kind of in the middle, right ? You you use AI and you love it, but you also feel bad about it. Well I yeah, I mean part of it is backlash is it's not like uh NFTs were a horrible thing in the creative community. There are people who lost lifelong friendships and working relationships. If you just said the word NFT, I think AI is a little different. Um I the backlash is huge though because there's lots of creative people who feel completely ripped off. And as a as a writer of many published works and uh sometimes a visual artist, um, I I get that and I think we sh I I think we had that running ahead of the the cart in terms of or the horse rather in terms of um how do we license appropriately the material that makes up things that produce generative creative outputs? Um that has colored a lot of people's opinions plus environmental concerns, some of them, I think, realistic and some less so, uh, and regulation and electrical use. Uh here in Seattle we just got word the local newspaper said, Hey, uh five different um data center companies, uh different companies who want to build data centers have approached Seattle City Light, uh City owned U tility, and said we need electricity equivalent to one-third of all generation capacity of the city right now. That freaks people out, even if it's necessary, even if it happened in a regulatory fashion, even if it happened in an environmentally sensitive fashion, how do you encompass that? So there's all of that, but it's gosh, is it useful for coding? It's hard, isn't it? When it's so great at the same time, I feel guilty too. I know what you mean. Yeah. So many good th ings about certain aspects of it that don't involve replacing creative uh like artistic and writing work that is intended to be creative, but supplementing and amplifying our abilities as humans by using tools we Is that um it's the billionaires. Uh the reason why I say that, the r the distinction is that if you look at the age of the people who are doing this, they're fairly young. So y yes, they could be dis placed and yes a lot of entry level jobs are being uh removed for AI because of AI or the excuse of AI. And there's a there's talk about like, hey, when you think about you're creating something that's gonna threaten the human ra ce, people are going to believe you. Uh, but it doesn't matter if they believe you or not, the CEOs who are firing all these people are saying that is a reason. So, regardless if it's AI, regardless if it is a threat for the future, there are impacts today that are being blamed on AI in terms of junior junior roles not being available. But also, I think this could be coupled with if you've seen those warehouse fires where people are just just lighting up inventory and saying that they are not getting paid enough. And couple that with what's going on uh in the world in general, in this administration , where prices are going up, wages are going down, uh, unemployment rate in terms of the length of people, how long they be are on unemployment, trying to find another job is really, really hard because now everyone is using AI to swamp recruiters and so they're rejecting using AI to reject wider and larger numbers of people who are looking for roles. I think it's a combination of all of the above and everything that's going on that's causing some of this backlash. I'm I'm gonna agree with you against myself and say um with my history hat on if we roll back two hundred years, the Luddites were not wrong. They get a bad rap. They were their methods were very similar to what's being used today in some ways and are going to accelerate, I think, which is, you know, throwing the sabots into the the the gears of progress. Sabotage. Sabotage because the point of them was exactly this. It was massive displacement for mechanization without a plan for how it would affect the economy or workers. And so you could displace a huge number of people with necessary skills. And then what h appens? How does your economy survive that? And the people at the top didn't care, and the people at the bottom said, well, we've got nothing left to lose. Those the last public beheadings in England were of people who were convicted of sabotage of being their l Luddite leaders. So um, you know, that's in not in living memory. It's two centuries back, but it's still you see the same kind of things being already uh if you're on X, which I am not, you see people saying like, oh, we should be, you know, capital punishment for people who attack data centers or whatever. I mean it's already that kind of rhetoric is being thrown around too easily. But it's the Luddites were right in their message, maybe uh hard to support in their particular approach. Lou, is there any um trepidation among people who are actually working in AI ? Does this come up at all or all the time. Yeah, all the time. I mean e i like I I would say my true belief is that obviously it's not eliminating jobs, it's just eliminating the tasks inside the jobs. And so you really have to learn to uh essentially adjust and evolve, but it doesn't change the stresses. Like I personally feel stressed that my job is going to evolve very soon and I've been doing this for 22 years and it makes me feel uncomfortable uh with that whole feeling of it. And it it like will it will I be still be relevant and if I find out after looking at all the things that it does generate or that it does automate or it does make things easier, I can see it giving me room to do other things, uh, especially the human factor of it, right? The ability to make you know decisions using my vast experience of many, many years. So I think i it you know I get pulled in different directions, but I can definitely tell you everyone's feeling it. You still need the engineering skills, the planning skills, the understanding of testing, the under I mean you know shipping. Orchestration. You need to be the orchestrator. Orchestration. And so that's a skill. The problem often is raised that well what about entry-level jobs? The people who don't have those skills yet, they're they're you know, they're at the beginning of the career that twenty years later they'll have those skills. Where do they fit in? And that we were talking earlier about computer science majors just dwindling because nobody said thinks that there's a future in learning Python anymore. Aaron Ross Powell I mean you shouldn't and this whole notion there was it feels like it was very brief. It was like, well, everyone's gonna be a prompt engineer. And I thought that felt that didn't And no one's I think computer science maybe it was so practical in some ways because it was so much of a d a job demand feed, maybe it's gonna become more of an analytic uh uh discipline again because people will have to be relying on that kind of nobody's studying how to be a coachman anymore. I need to learn how to drive a four and four and whatever they call them. You know, the jobs change. Right. Uh I think it's encouraging that a lot of those kids who are going into computer science now are going to engineering and data science because those are probably the places to go, right? Aaron Ross Powell But but the thing is there is the coding has always been more basketball than golf. It's never been really an individual sport. It's always been a team sport. And you have to think of all the things that work together in order for the outcome that you all see . And I think that's the part that people are missing in companies. Right. Yeah. Like if the more the higher you are in a company, the more abstract you are from all the minutiae, all the invisible and glue work that takes forward And so when you're an executive and you using AI to write reports, digest reports, write emails, you're like this thing is amazing. It could do everything that I can do, which means those are the jobs that should be eliminated. And the not the people at the bottom that are are working with vendors, they're hearing the complaints and then coordinating with the responses and then hearing and understanding what the community is and as we are one thing that's also the bad part about we're eliminating these jobs because of AI is that we are losing diversity and n and not the kind of diversity where you're thinking about DEI, but even diversity of thought is being lost because it's being coalesced and one decision maker who's orchestrating all these AIs, which is a problem. Oh, that's interesting. becomes golf. Yeah, I am steeped in this because I'm writing a book about it. But uh there the reason why that these decisions are being made is not because of AI. No AI says you should lay off forty percent of your workforce. These are people who are at the upper part of the company who are too abstracted away from the actual work to have really clear eye about how this is negatively going to affect them. Because they think because they had been successful, they'll continue being success ful and that's not gonna happen. Oh sorry. Going but going back to the computer science thing though as well. I mean I l I work with a ton of talented applied scientists who are actually training these models and writing the writing the you know writing the evaluations for the somebody's gotta do that but you still have to have you know programming skills you have to have engineering skills to really think through the problem sets and I think that's you know that's where it's it's gonna come in and I think people stepping away from these roles is not gonna help it. I was thinking uh uh uh you know uh Scott Adams R RIP question mark uh Scott Adams had a strip Well rest anyway. We don't know if it'll be peaceful. Uh a number of years ago he had a strip that had uh the pointy haired boss get subducted by aliens. And uh there's a bit where like the the aliens say, Teach us your management secrets. The last panel shows the boss bandage and on crutch is saying, I I downsized ninety percent of the aliens and then the ship crashed. That must be their fault, you know, something like that. It's like, yeah, that's kind of how it's Wesley point. It's kind of what it feels like. Yeah. This is what scares me about. This is the um Beijing half marath on. Of course they're moving very quickly, this is from writers, very quickly in China towards bipedal robots. I guess we are too the marathon was look at these robots running. Now at first it's comic, especially when they fall down and and burst into a million pieces. But in fact, a robot did break the world record for a half marathon winning in fifty minutes twenty-six seconds. Uh it's to me that's scary. I don't like the idea of fast moving machines with a lot of power in their in their limbs. Uh some of these are some of these are cute. That's a cute one. Some of you're a fan of F1? Uh well yes, I am a fan of F one. Yes. I like fast driving cars. I just don't know. Some of these are really funny, like oh, you're missing all the excitement. No. Uh this is the slowest one. Uh but by the way, this is the point. Last year the winner took two hours and a half. This year fifty minutes. Oh my god. They're getting better and better and better at that. Uh I just when I see that I only see military app lications, but I'm also like you can push it over, so probably not yet. Yeah. But well, is it it's just a matter of time though, isn't it, before you can't push it over? Yeah. Those dogs were more scary to me actually than we had. The r the robot running robots . Uh Snap speaking of uh CEOs laying off, Snap is laying off sixteen percent of its full time staff . And it says and I don't know if it's AI washing, but they say these thousand employees are being replaced by AI . Uh I think just maybe that Snap's business isn't as good as it used to be. Right. So so much hiring for so long. It just I think it's a g it's a great excuse to not make people and not make the stock market freak out, even if it's it could be fair. Yeah. Like Block or Square or whatever the Square Parent Company, right? And Meta now uh says it's gonna lay off ten percent, which is I think eight thousand people. That is terrifying. I know you know we always kind of b gloss over the human toll of this, but that's a lot of people who uh who will have to find jobs in what must be a very difficult job market. Mm-hmm. It's very difficult. I mean you know, with th th this is the new business model, right? You basically wanna make sure your shareholders think that your company is fiduciary responsible and so you decide to just start laying off people and blaming it on A AI. So it's like kind of a weird model. Yeah. I I feel like layoffs are always so much more emphasized, partly because of legal reporting requirements in the United States for sure, but uh so the numbers get out there even if you don't want them to. Um but the hiring there was such weird and massive hiring during the stages of the the heat of the pandemic and uh how many people are hired back? I never know when they say we laid off eight thousand people. Do they then hire back you know four thousand? What are the wages of those people? How many were part time Which I know doesn't have to be. Yeah, boy, that's baffling to me. I you know, I gotta say I did something really stupid uh two weeks ago. I sold all my stocks. I I don't have individual stocks. I have uh you know mu mu uh index funds, big index funds. And I was just got terrified. I thought this is I have to live on this. I'm you know, I'm s almost seventy. This is gonna be for the next twenty years all I've got. I don't wanna lose twenty percent to a stock market crash which I thought was imminent. Dumb me. So I sold everything. I'm just sitting on a pile of cash. I mean I it is enough for me, I guess, to to survive for the rest of my life, but then the stock market goes through the roof. Like what the hell is going on? I don't understand. Do any of you understand? It doesn't make sense to fire people if they say like they overhired. If anyone's been part of a company, there's a huge backlog of things that you they wish they could do. And they could reallocate people to do more projects , do like more geographical relocation even or different territories or different sub areas. They could have a group that's just made to make a wool shoe or something like that. Um that that apparently there are people there's a huge market . Oh I have all birds. I'm wearing all birds right now as a matter of fact. I'm just glad that these shoes are gonna be AI generated from now on. That's the strangest story. It's somebody that they're bad at people management. Well, they're reducing people and they this is the this is like long island ice tea becoming long island blockchain. It's just a way to quickly pump the stock. Uh get out of it. Remember meme stocks? Oh I guess we're back to that. That's what this is. This this the layoff is the new or the AI took my channel. Well it's working. Unfortunately. And it'll keep going until it stops working. Yeah, that's the problem, right? How long does it work for? How long does it fool people? I don't know. Well look at the nines of these companies, right? The the the the service availability just keeps going down. So it's not like the quality is going up. Well you 're actually suffering. Like GitHub, but and honestly, that's an example of GitHub's success. So many people are committing. I have 13 repos on GitHub . So many people are committing. All the AI commits are just killing uh GitHub. I can't blame I can't blame GitHub for the nines. Oh my god. The one the one thing that I'll say there's unalloyed good thing about AI is I'll be like, yeah, do a commit and then it writes like a thousand words that actually eloquently explains are fantastic. My commits are like uh fixed something. Yeah, the commits are so good. Oh I'm never gonna write another commit message. Never. Minor like fix number two. Second fix. Second fix of the fix. Third fix of the fix of the fix. Two dot one dot one dot one dot one update. Yeah. I did something, I can't remember what it was, but this is the new version. And I'm like, that's beautiful. What you wrote, that was beautiful. Lou, do you enforce like good commit messages? You must. I mean there's got to be a commitment. Always, always, always. Yeah. And it's because it's documentation too. You want to be able to use the commit messages to to pro retroactively document what People who are not uh GitHub aficionados or Git aficionados are probably gone. What is that what are they talking about? It's just the when you make a change to I don't know how far So when you write software, you sometimes you use a a system that you actually you should be using uh that keeps track of versions so that you can, if you make a change and it causes problems, go back. You can know who made a change if it's a big team making changes to a single code base. There's lots of reasons for versioning. There have been many solutions. Git ended up being the dominant solution because Linus Torvald's created it uh when uh he realized he couldn't could can keep track of all the commits to the Linux kernel. Uh and Git's become huge. GitHub is perhaps the biggest uh purveyor of Git and uh people store their source code in a GitHub repository or repo. And when they make changes, they will write a little message called a commit message. And then Wesley and I just write fixed it. But good professionals will write a long message saying what they did so that you can ascribe blame, so that you can rewind it appropriately, so you know what changes have been made. This, you know, you all experience this when you go to the app store and there's an update. Uh huh. And it's and the update says, fix some stuff. I the one I hate is the one that's we're always working harder to make your software better. And we just did I think Apple should not require commit messages for the for uh minor updates. It's really it's the whole reason. You have to put text in there. Right. It's embarrassing if you don't I guess or you just put like a you can't make a period. Maybe companies could really do a change log and say, hey, this is what we fixed. Wouldn't that be why can't they? Be more like Lou. Be more like Lou. Yes, everybody. Good advice for life. Be more like Lou. Uh we're gonna take a little break. More with Lou and all of us who want to be like him, Glenn Fleischmann, Wesley Faulkner, Lou Moresca. Great to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud secur ity platform , the potential rewards, again with AI, again with the AI, the potential rewards of AI, obviously in business, too great to ignore. Let's not forget the risks. Uh and there are many, uh partly just from your own team using AI and accidentally uh exfiltrating sensitive proprietary data. Then of course there are attacks against enterprise managed AI, which also can steal data from you. And then there's the issue of bad guys using generative AI to improve their attacks, helping them rapidly create phishing lures. You know, it used to be you could say, well, that phishing mail's obviously fake, the grammar . Look at the grammar, but no now they're perfect. Uh they use it to write malicious code. Uh we just saw that with a supply chain attack uh with Axios and Light LLM. Uh the code clearly AI coded. And that means that they can put these things out fast. They're also using it once they get into automate data extraction. It's this is a scary scenario. You gotta do something to protect your proprietary data with your if your team is using AI. There were one point three million instances of social security numbers leaked in AI applications. I bet it I bet on April 15th that number tripled when people asked their AI, hey, here's my uh here's my 1040. Uh what do you think? And of course it's got your name, address, birth date, and social security number on it. And the AI's got it now. ChatGPT and uh Microsoft Copilot saw nearly 3.2 million data violations last year alone. And that's just f accidental, you know, not even malicious behavior, just an accident. It's time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. Check out this Siva, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at ZWAR, they use Zscaler, and he said this about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. With Zscaler being in line, you know, security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that Z Scale is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges but continue to take advantage of all the advancements Thank you, Siva. With Zsalcer Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and even private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI rel ated data loss and protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler .com slash security. That's zscaler. com slash security. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech . All right. We enough AI. Enough AI. We've been talking about AI. Well, well, there's one more. Let's talk about the courts. AI and the courts. Elon Musk versus Sam Allman. Oh no, AI and Elon Musk. Leo. And and court. It's gonna this trial uh in which uh Elon is suing uh OpenAI saying, hey, when Sam and I got together to create this, it was a non-profit. Now they're taking it to be profitable. Uh you know, I I'm not I'm gonna admit I'm not a Elon fan , but there is some merit to this, especially if you just read that New Yorker article about how slippery Sam Altman has been this whole time . Uh Elon is uh saying that OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission , and uh that and that's not what he funded it for. And he wants, by the way, like a huge amount of money, which he's I don't think he's gonna get. A jury is going to get this. Uh nine jurors in uh Oakland, California, in the federal court there will soon get this case and decide . Uh it could affect OpenAI's IPO . Um it it could affect uh Musk's status as an open AI competitor with XAI. Incidentally, I think his case is a little bit weakened by the fact that he said we're gonna found uh open AI so that the big guys don't get AI and it's gonna be non profit and then he you know immediately leaves and founds X AI, which is fully for profit , fully closed . Everything he's complaining about with OpenAI . Um I don't know if there's anything that's be said about this. Uh Elon uh uh gave about thirty-eight million dollars to found it, left in twenty eighteen after a disagreements with Sam Altman . Uh the lawsuit has been essentially whittled down according to Wired to three core claims. Whether OpenAI breached its charitable trust , uh you know, because they were supposed to be nonprofit and now they have a for profit arm that generates billions in yearly revenue. And by the way, their code is not open. One of the things that came out in the uh New Yorker article was that there was a covenant originally with OpenAI that if any other company ever came up with better AI than OpenAI that OpenAI would immediately dissolve and go help that company . That that went out the window pretty quick. Um Um there also is a claim of fraud that uh Altman deceived Musk about his intentions to make a profit. And the third claim is unjust enrichment, which argues that Sam Altman and uh Greg Brock man, the president, and other OpenAI investors have enriched themselves at the expense of Mus k . Um he wants the one of the things he's asking for is that the uh jury remove Altman and Brockman from open AI management, return their ill gotten gains to the company's nonprofit, and blocks them from existing as a public benefit corporation, which it is what the not the prop for profit arm is currently. Um and he could in the long run get hundreds of billions of dollars if the jury rules for him. What do you think's gonna happen in this case? Yes. They're going to pay Elon Musk off and he's going to complain and then complain about it for the rest of his life. I'm surprised they didn't . They went to c they went to trial, right? Yeah. And there is there is a a cynical point of view that Elon's just doing this to slow open AI down so that XAI could I think in general people kind of it has some abilities, but I don't think people embrace it. Certainly not the way they embrace ChatGPT or Claude. I like it more openness. You know, and less there's less gates in the way. I think that that's one thing I go to sometimes. Oh, in the sense of uh uh oh I can't talk talk about that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the one good thing about it. Um I don't like it's mecca Hilter Hitler part, but to me, the reason I'm skeptical of o uh of Grok is because it's so clear that Elon puts his thumb on the scale. Right. Yeah. That Elon sends messages downstairs that says, Oh, you should mention me more. Things like that. Well that that's not how you make a good AI. bias. Um system. They do. There are the systems all the other fonts, right? Grok is one of the free models, so I think that they're really trying to get users to use their models to get more information of what the type of data that gets sent through their models to make it better. I I think because it is extremely opinionated about the approach. Even Elon Musk is is saying it's not biased enough. So they say that it there are problems with it. He says that all the time. So I think that no matter how good it is, I think he can make it worse. And I think he's in a unique position to do that. And so I I hear what you're saying, but I I think that the the the opi bias that is grok um will definitely I think it at odds with itself some and and so I I don't I personally don't think it's it's good and I think because of the thumb and the scale of the bias, it's g it's never gonna be good. So if you think about it's good for generating nude pictures of people you know. Yes, exactly. But if you think about Anthropic was a as a spinoff of open AI, going back to that. They said that they wanted to be m a safer model. They wanted to tackle that problem. Yeah, dealing with those harder problems I think makes you better. And uh and having like that a type of uh I I I don't want to get too deep into the like the uh a doctrine about how they want to approach it uh and have some sort of principles makes it better because they're d trying to really carve out a niche and be opinionated in that way. But they're all have their own bias and I think Grok is the other opposite end of open open AI saying they're they're too restrictive. So uh and you can see that it performs worse. And I think if you look at who's trying to tackle the harder problems, I think it pays off to see that a uh why open AI is win uh is not as good as anthropic and while GROK is not as good as open AI. Darren's saying something important too though, that Grok does not have a uh coding harness like Codex or like uh clawed code. Does that make sense, Lou? Uh uh is that does it mean it doesn't you he's right. I mean but you there's always now I I'm not gonna give out a bunch of secrets here, but like you could technically Well give out some secrets looking at you could you could always use MCP bridges um to basically bridge and enable Grok as a coding agent through open cloud like it does it is possible Is it any good? Uh it's it's so so, right. Is there a is there a GROK MCP written by XAI MCP server or do you somebody it's just third? No, no, these are just third party people bridging scraping O auth capability uh you know that you can access Grok as and make it a coding agent basically. So I have access to Grok because I got a uh uh as l as Corey Doctor calls it a non-consensual blue check . Uh uh so they so Elon at some point decided to to give for some reason give me uh a full account. So I have access, but I just don't I don't I I got really turned off when uh at one point remember we came out with the um the the manga girl and the fox? Yes . And the the age the the pe the a what do you call them, the avatars . And uh when it first came out, the day it came out I'm sitting at breakfast and uh I said, oh look uh uh there's there's these avatars. Let me let me go talk to the fox something and he said yeah I'm gonna go out and teabag the mayor and it was like what what that it just turned me it was like yeah that was completely gratuitously gross I don't understand. Maybe that's it. Yeah. It's like, what the hell? Going to the open AI case though, I wanted to point out one thing that is a huge problem for open AI is that i if we're looking at standing, I think the state of California has more standing than Elon Musk because it's been pointed out that this path of incubating as a nonprofit and then not paying taxes and saying you're gonna do good th and then converting into a for profit at the end and become publicly available is not something that this should that if this goes if they're able to do that, other companies will replicate this. Yeah. And that is a huge problem. So in the discovery process, if you see or if there's any hint that that was planned a while back, that is gonna be huge like probable cause for the state of California to bring a follow-on suit to prevent this from ever happening. So that 's in part of the discovery, yeah, they might look bad, but if you're if you don't remember that nonprofits uh and for benefit comp anies when they're creating a product that is owned by the nonprofit . So anything, all of their models, even their closed source ones, should be f held by the nonprofit. And the thing that goes public should not have access to those. They shouldn't need to create their own proper This is worries what worries me a little bit about open AI is it feels like a house of cards a little bit. Oh well, yeah. I mean so let's see. I want to say something again. Careful to not be uh slanderous, which is Oh no, be like Grok. Just remove all Okay. So uh I once had a job, this is irrespective of nothing else, obviously. I once had a job in which I worked with uh three pathological liars, including the person who ran the organization. Oh wow. And he had hired the others. And there were a couple people who had been extremely dubious of ethical principles. Unfortunately, a lot of it didn't affect me for a long time. When it did, I finally left. But having worked so closely with pathological errors, you start to identify patterns. So I was reading a New York Tim or New York uh article uh that happened to mention some AI figures in it, and one of them it struck me particularly that some of the patterns uh mentioned repeatedly by Rowan Farrow and his reporting partner there really did seem uh to align with the case. Pathological pathological. And so you you know, so all the stuff with open II, every time I come back to it, I felt he Sam Altman has always felt unreliable to me as a narrator of his own company because he says in multiple interviews you see different things being said on the record that would be easy to compare. And apparently he does the same thing, reportedly does the same thing in private. So uh this whole thing about their valuation, the money they're raising, where they're going, what's happening, um, I just feel it's it just seems so dubious to me that I wanna see results before I believe anything that's being said. Okay. I'm going to throw a little monkey wrench at this. You know, Sam has this uh side project called uh World, where you there's an orb and you put your eyes up against it and it scans your irises, right? Don't love that. And he was giving cryptocurrency to people all over the world, pr I think primarily in the developing world, where it was really valuable, to scan their irises. His theory, which is not wrong, being that one of the chief challenges to security is authentic authentication. And that if we knew somebody was a human, that that would ultimately be useful if you could prove you were a human and and you were the, you know, that you were Wesley Faulkner, the Wesley Faulkner, not somebody impersonating him. And I think that there is some merit in that idea . The company behind it, which is again a, Sam Altman investment, is called Tools for Humanity. They announced on Friday that they're going to start bringing the world scan into dating apps. Tinder is going to start using it to verify that a Tinder account is belongs to an actual human with eyeballs, I guess. And uh and may and the human that they say they are. They're also gonna uh start working with concert ticketing systems. Oh, ticket master. Oh, the Dolans will love this one, right? Uh business organizations , email . So uh maybe this, you know, proof of human pu proof of humanity is actually gonna go somewhere. Opt out. Whoops, where's my do not scan my irises? Yeah. Next they're gonna buy clear. And then Ye Yeah. Get those uh uh Zoom is gonna integrate with world ID to uh battle a deep fake threat to business calls. You've heard about these stories of there was a CFO who was fooled in a Zoom call. They were he thought it was his boss and the CEO in the board in a Zoom call. They were all deep fakes. And he wrote a big check. Cause they said to . So Zoom's gonna do it. DocuSign is gonna do a deal to make sure signatures come from authentic users. Maybe this was a good investment. Okta is gonna use it to verify uh that an agent is acting on behalf of a human . So you can t this is interesting, part of the agent delegation sch eme is that you tie your agent, your claw, your open claw, to you using world ID , uh, so that the agent is authenticated to you, so that when the agent asks for something, they know it's it's really on behalf of Leo. Trevor Burrus, Jr. I want a federated system of authentication in which individual organizations agree to use vetting processes that are federated Yeah, and then how do you get blocked? Well you violated some terms of service. Interesting, here's the thing. What is it, the World Critical uh Trade Commission. Thank you. No, no, I'm sorry. The the Hague. What's the group of the Hague? It's the um Oh yeah, the Court in the Hague. Thank you. Yes. So that there are members of that court who have been sanctioned by the US under the second Trump administration who cannot use Google, cannot use banking. Wow. They're blocked from all of these kinds of things. They have to explain why they have to pay in cash to That's horrific. Because they're essentially been unperson ed out of the international banking and s all the systems that operate the international. Oh, because probably they declared that uh Netanyahu was a war criminal, right? Yeah, something, you know, things of that nature. And so the United States actually the government has the power to and de-authenticate you. And so this company that's got your retinas, well, then it's going to be able to be able to do that too. You just that's a nightmare scenario. You're right. We're so at this point dependent on technology that if go if even if Google alone said uh you we're gonna take away your account Which has happened a lot. You know, ostensibly AI-based uh account blocking where people cannot get their accounts back, uh their entire families, even like a one household are blocked because of something and they can't appeal it. There's no way to reach a human being and they lose all their history and access. Sometimes business if they're using Google app, uh or Google for business, um all kinds of records. So This is forces me to use cryptocurrency, I'm gonna be so pissed off. If they use what? I said if this is gonna for if this is forces me to use cryptocurrency Or you could be on the blockchain . It's funny, you know, the AI blockchain thing is so funny. Like the blockchain or or cryptocurrency, it's such an interesting set of people involved in That's what this solves though. Blockchain solves that because nobody controls it. Everybody's got a copy and so no government can kick you off the blockchain, right? Look at Bitcoin. It's just you know I don't I don't think blockchain has paid out the way people have opened up. No, you're right. Uh in fact it's become more centralized, hasn't it? Ultimately. That's kind of my concern. Yeah. Uh it does solve a problem though. I mean look with age verification what's going on right now. Every government wants age verification. There's no good way to do it without violating your privacy . Um the pro I guess the real problem with world is that it's a private company, right? But then which what government would you trust to run this? Oh I want Mastodon can run authentication. I think that's the point. Well that's the point of blockchain in a way. It's kind of federated, right? There's no one single point. I don't know. It's just who who gets to decide what our access to everything in the world is. And I'm nervous like you know, passwords and bank accounts maybe not the best arbiter of that, but I'm just bringing all this b this backlash on blue sky in the last day to pass keys. Everyone is fed up with pass keys, which are so much more secure, but I think the implementation has gotten people and I'm like, oh my God, we could get rid of passwords and move to a supremely better way in which all the information is edge, you know, stored on the edge, stored on your devices, you have more control over. thinking uh we're never gonna get to centralized authentication if people won't even adopt pass keys so no usb c of everything of uh wish we're still in the weird thing where you could plug so many different things into it and it doesn't necessarily have the same results and I think that's th that people have unevil uneven experiences with pass keys, and I think that's part of the issue. I wrote a book about that. It's called Take Control of Untangling Connections. Partly it's not all about U SBC, but it's a lot about USB C because people had so many questions about it. Oh my god. I have a USB C tester. Yeah. I don't know what it is or what it does. Burke left it here. I mean he'll explain it to me. I've bought some and they have they still don't you have to have a computer to tell you what speed it will get. And the tester only tells you if wires are connected and has a lot of and I think they do make them with with uh L C D panels. I've got one over here somewhere. I can never get it to yeah. It's just we can't solve you it we can't you can put a band on the moon. You can send a uh of diverse group of people of genders and origins around the moon, and we can't get USB-C to work. We got a new phrase. We need to simplify that. You can't put a man on the moon. It's got to be a short . Send people around the moon. Around the moon. That's a little that's not as catchy. By the way, that was the one story all month that just made everybody smile. Oh my gosh. And it's sad that we have so much to be, you know, scared and worried about and then this but there were at least it was one incredible happy happy moment. Yeah. I'll give you another happy moment. Actually , go ahead, Luke. I was gonna say the the meme of like uh it was Dave Chappelle and his character where he's a crackhead, he's like, got any more of those Artemis missions ? That's good. I like it. Give me the Yeah, so it's like put it in my vink. Come on, man, I need more Artemis right now. It's competency. Uh actually space might save us. I there was a great story about Voyager one. Oh, yeah. Still going. 50 years after uh it was set off . Um it's uh now there NASA is trying to keep it alive . I mean it never was intended to last this long. This week NASA announced it shut one of their last remaining science instruments just to keep the battery going a little bit. Yeah. I uh wrote a lot about Voyager back when it passed through uh I was running for The Economist at the time and uh it passed through uh it was the heliopause or the helio sphere. Yeah uh actually inter stellar space. Yeah. The magnetic right the magnetic envelope of the sun. And I got interview uh in person Ed Stone, who was the principal investigator of the Voyager missions, and he's still going to work every day at JPL in the twenty tens uh and talk to him about uh just you know space fanboying for an article and um they really I did I wrote a bunch in the twenty tens about Voyagers because it seemed like all the people associated thought by 2020 we,'re gonna really have to start turning a lot of stuff off if it lasts that long. And then 2025, it's probably going to be dead and maybe putting out a beep. But the radioactive uh was it radioisotope uh thermal thermocoupled generators, thermonuclear generat ors, RTGs. They um uh it's just physics, right? They're running down, you've got a certain amount of energy, but they've done such a good job with the energy budget. I mean it's got a it's got a digital, it's got like an A-track digital tape in there or something. It's got two backup, you know, three systems, backup computers for each, and I think s one of them has failed. It's just the the continued operation is one of the greatest technical achievements in humanity That's what's interesting about this JPL team that star you know started this all almost fifty years ago. Well, think about it. They're in their seventies, eighties, and nineties now, right ? And they're just kind of hanging on. Uh there's just a handful of people left. They're still doing it. It's a great documentary if you get a chance to do it. I'll tell you the greatest bit of hope ever on the Voyager missions was, and Ed told me this, or Dr. Stone I should say, and some other folks involved mentioned this, was they put a um uh read ho is it read hoffman uh encoding no read something encoding hoffman yeah yeah they put an encoding system for error correction which was uh they had a 50% uh efficient uh error correction system uh available and they put a essentially experimental 90% compress uh error correction system so it would be several times more efficient get you that much more data out they put them on the Voyagers. We did not have a decoding component. And so they sent the probes off with the hope that by the time they reached the grass giants, we would have developed the ability to decode on Earth, which we did . And the reason we got all these images, we got so much data, we got multiples of what was expected in the original project brief was because of this encoding mechanism that's like a device, you know, it was like a like a lava lamp size device or something that they had a budget for that's still kicking away on there. It's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. Launched in nineteen seventy seven. Amazing. And uh Voyager one's still uh going strong. Voyager two's out there too. They're so far away now that it takes twenty three hours to get a message to it and then twenty-three hours to get the message back . It's ridiculous. It's incredible. It's incredible. What a scene. Yeah. So that so yeah. That's part of the uh I'm sorry I'll get too spacey on you, but the deep space network, one of the things they discovered and were able to do after the Voyager's launched was that the cumulative area of all of the different receivers on Earth can be essentially aggregated, which they didn't have the capability when it was launched. So they can turn on the deep space network means you can turn on the capacity of the entire area of aggregation and have that serve as one giant antenna even though they're disparate in function and location. So there's all these things there's like thing after thing after thing that if they hadn't done this done hadn't d one this and or wasn't available when they launched. So that's why there's so much more data than w I mean it was like a two year mission or something or a four year four year science mission or something. And then fifty years later. Yeah they, keep budgeting more money for it. Yeah. They the the in case you care, the instrument they turned off is called the Low Energy Charged Particles Experiment or LECP. Uh and it's just because they're running low on energy. The little little plutonium generator in there is uh I guess every uh year it loses about four watts of power. So it's just declining. It started with was it two hundred and fifty or five hundred watts? It's a very small amount. So it's got forty watts. It's fair, it's so small, and the amount that they can do, it just so cool. Yeah. Uh engineers are confident this is from NASA that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager one about a year of breathing room. They're using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy saving fix for both Voyagers they call the Big Bang.. O Oohoh . That doesn't sound good. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once, turning some things off, replacing them with lower power alternatives. Oh. 4 6 hours out to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data . Big bang will happen on uh Voyager two first. It has a little more power, it's a little closer to Earth. They don't care about it as much. They're like, uh I don't know. I was very sad when I heard there were layoffs at JPL, but apparently this team is still uh still I mean many of them are retired, but this still doing their doing their thing. It's a great documentary 'cause they get together in this little old wood paneled room with all this old technology. It's just kind of like in a little corner of NASA still still Leo at our house I have a little dashboard that shows the current positions that we put on the wall. Oh that's so cool. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's really cool technology. So that's so cool. Is it an e ink screen or is it a a L C it's a regular display uh the Android tablet, but it's it just follows the wall basically. Uses the uh JPL dashboard that they have. Yeah, yeah. There's a very nice dashboard uh I've been watching uh if I'm a very late comer to uh Apple TV's for all mankind and I'm in uh midway in season two now and you just those things where I'm like, Oh my god, if only, if only, if only but 'cause it so this uh Luke put the link in the uh Discord. This is the display on your wall. Nice. Oh, that's so what a great way to get kids interested in science. Just inspire them a little bit, you know? I think that's just really cool. I agree. Really, really great idea. You're watching this week in tech, see a little inspiration amongst amongst all the nightmare things. Is this the article you wrote back in twenty thirteen about Doctor? Postcards from the Edge. What a great name. Mars Rover driver and uh who later went to work for Google. And uh meet some of the um uh whatever the Mars probes were at the time one of them that failed uh wrote a bunch about the Curiosity thing. Fun fact Alex Trebek was at the uh seven minutes of terror um bit of the curiosity landing. Uh he was a space nut and he got invited to GPL. So if you look carefully in footage of when there's that gap when it lands on Mars, there's Alex Travek in the watching area I think I recognize him. Do they not give you bylines in The Economist? It's just by GF. That's correct. Since 1843. All you get is initials? You only get initials on the blog. In the magazine itself, there's no bylines. It's considered a product of uh of uh group editing essentially. it's a weird thing. So I could claim I wrote anything in the publication, right? But as long as GF wrote it, whoever that is. Whoever that person is. You're watching Twit, it's great to have G F, W F, and L M on the show. I'm L L. Uh Hey, I got a quick question for you, Leo. Uh how do you feel about uh about um Salt Hank being on damnlines dot com? Do you know is this all garbage to Save that for me and uh we'll do the ad and then I'm gonna have to find out what Okay. Damn lines. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. Not about it's not about him. It's not a complaint about him. I'll tell you I'll tell you. a bit. That's a good tease. Salt Hank is my son, who is a TikTok legend with two and a half million uh followers watching him make sandwiches and last year he opened a sandwich shop in New York City which has become a legend. Now I notice by the way, ever since he did that, there's all these new sandwich shops trying to make the best sandwich in New York City. But according to Belly, his is still number one, beating Bradley Cooper's easily . And then that's a plug for Salt Hank. All right. Uh it's on Bleaker and Jones in uh the West Village, if you're ever in this episode of uh Twit brought to you by Express V PN going online without ExpressVPN? I don't that would be like I don't know, driving without car insurance. 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I spotted an article the day in the New York Times about damnlines.com where it's company's Sister Guy side project Oh you can watch the lines outside of restaurants. He rents uh a little space in somebody's apartment nearby to put a camera in and then This is Salt Hanks that blue uh that blue s this is Sunday. Yeah it was raining, so the lines weren't too bad. It must be closed now, right? So this is all this is a time . He's right next to John's obliquer street. So I think one apartment and they get both. John's is famous. Famous for its lines, right? Yeah. So I think it's some guy's project, but he's using some kind of analytical tool so you can get a sense of it's automatically counter. Here's the line. Right. R it's always a line in front of Saltanks. Look at that. And you know why? 'Cause he runs out. Yeah, it's great. There we go. Yeah, I thought that very charming. Was it the New York Times uh did it or eater did the uh like long video about his uh you can see what the average wait time is? I'm sorry, not trying to make this an ad for your child. But uh , great technology story. I'm sending it to him right now . Oh, that's salt cure. That's the wrong one. I want salt hanks. Oh, wait a minute. No, they've got salt hanks though, right? Yeah, they do have salt. How funny. How many salts are there? Hanks created a monster. I mean this is one of these demand curve things too, is like how do you fill in your empty spots? Some people are worried that folks won't show up because they'll see a line. Other people like this is a great way to fill the quieter times for places that don't always have a line, uh, you know, balanced demand, like uh Waze does for driving and so forth. Yeah. Well Google added that, right? On the Google Maps you can see where um uh you can see where uh a business what the business's uh busy hours are don't they use AI calls like an agent to call and s ask from time to time how busy it was. They were at one point. How's the line? How is it? They sound normal. Yeah. What do you need? I don't know the cards. Yeah, do you have any tables for you? I don't know. Click. Let an AI deal with that. Uh I bet Henry doesn't know about this, but who knows? I'm I just sent it to him. Thank you for that tip. That's very good. Back in court. Meta , according to a Massachusetts court, this is up the road from you, Lou, must face youth addiction lawsuit. There was a lawsuit by Massachusetts Attorney General alleging that and and you know this happened of course in LA, there was a trial. The the jury ruled that Meta had crafted its algorithm to trap children, uh New Mexico, big d judgment, uh hundreds of millions of dollars. Um so uh the state's top court ruled on Friday unanimously the lawsuit brought by Massachusetts is not v vulnerable to section two hundred thirty. It is not seeking to hold Meta liable for content created by its users , but and this was a strategy used by the trial in LA , its defective algorithm is designed that way. Oh no. So they there was no nothing to show . He says I've talked to the founder. Good. He says it's smart but also kinda creepy. Oh, so all technology right now, right? Yes. That's the story of the show. Smart but creepy. Um so that's interesting. Although uh writing in Tech Dirt, uh Mike Masnik is saying he's considerably worried about these kinds of decisions and jury verdicts. He says section two thirty is dying by a thousand workarounds and Massachusetts just added another one. So when so the the day after the ruling came out from the one in LA that they're starting to get ads like were you affected? So the ambulance chasers, right? Mesoth Yeah. Uh I shouldn't laugh. That's a terrible awful disease. It was like the best way to make money on the web for a little while was to have a site that mentioned that one. This is what Mike says is the most important part of the whole ruling. And he's taught he's quoting a professor Eric Goldman who's been tracking these. He says, I don't see, Eric says, I don't see any distinction between third-party content and the editorial choices about the manner of presenting that third party content. So the the courts and the and the and the plaintiffs are making that distinction. There's there's what third party content's doing, which is protected by section two hundred thirty, and there's what the companies are doing to surface that content by embracing that false dichotomy, Professor Goldman says the court invites plaintiffs to reframe their complaints to focus on presentation instead of substance. And that's why you're seeing these advertisements. Has Meta made you nuts ? Now you can go after them. And I it you know what? I don't know if I I'm a big supporter of 230. I think it's very important. It protects people like me. I have a Mastodon instance, which is now back up, by the way. Thank you for telling me I forgot to pay the bill. Uh was down for a day. But if I'm liable for something somebody posts on my Mastodon instance, I will take it down. I can't afford to defend against that. Uh but this is different. Yeah. This is different. I my Mastodon instance does nothing algorithmically to surface content. Now, I am protected by Section 230 because I moderate it. Right? If somebody posts posts something, you know, a bunch of nudes on there, I delete their account. You're protected even if you don't moderate it. It's you're protected if you do moderate it, you're protected. If there's uh illegal content and a process is used like DMCA and you don't follow it, then you could be liable. But you could leave up you can leave up essentially anything. Yeah. Someone could post a bunch of bunch of nudes, and as long as they're legal nudes, they don't violate any local or over law, then you're fine. But you're also entitled to do whatever you want as moderate. And I choose to take those down. So this is about not about content, it's about design, which I think I hear what you're saying, but I think this is exactly what courts are made to do. To debate that baby like for instance infinite scroll that's not just about content it is how you keep people hooked on it and how you listen like you're trying to sense an how someone might be in a vulnerable place based on their mood and then giving them ads and serving them ads based on that. This is and and the issue at heart is the it's not the ignorance of it. It is doing it and for outcomes you want knowing the harms and hearing the decisions made in spite of that. So if there's things on your platform that you don't want that and you choose to take it off, that's a different thing. It's on your platform and you don't want but you are not aware, that's a different thing. But if if it's things that are on your platform that are is harmful and you do know about it and you make a mechanism to make sure that that is being served, there's the difference. Yes. And I agree with that. I don't think this I I'm not sure I agree with Mike Mazzick, and that's rare for me to say. But I I feel like there Meta does make a defective product, right? Because of its uh you know a harmful product. I don't think it's harmful product because it's working as designed. It's a harmful product. And that's the problem. Is it the way it's designed and it's meant to be that way. And for those types of things, that's what the court system is made for. Yeah. Those types of debates. And so I think it's is this makes sense and this is where it should be debated by people on both sides who are informed who are able to present that. And so uh there might be a rash of these, but it's to their own detriment because that's the thing that they did. This is a comumpance and uh maybe uh some cases will be valid, some are not valid. Hopefully this won't choke our court system to the point where uh this will just kind of fall into a background noise. But the the reason why companies like Meta abuse people is because the downside is will never overcome the upside. And so only way to change the equation is to go about this this way. Uh here's a court case I can absolutely uh support. You may remember the uh FTC went after Live Nation and Ticketmaster for uh ticket prices and the Trump administration decided to drop that case. By the way, the the attorneys in charge of the prosecution all quit when Trump dropped the case without consulting them. Saw that. Yeah, but here's the good news. There was a court case also uh going on because it wasn't just the federal government, it was I think thirty states. The lawsuit brought by the states is over, and the jury found Live Nation and Ticketmas ter did maintain an illegal monopoly. So that is very, I think, very good news. We all know it's horrible . Right? They you know the they they add fees upon fees upon fees uh and they end up because they control the venues as well as the ticket sales, dominating the market, and even acts that don't want to be beholden to Ticketmaster have to be. I I ask like I can understand the horrible economics of twenty twenty six that mean you have to charge $80 for a bad seat in a uh auditorium. That's terrible, but all right, I'll just accept that. And I read a lot of fans saying, like we we get it, we understand to you know, s there's a lot of profit in there but also whatever. It's the thirty four dollars or the fifty dollars I pay on top of the eighty dollars. That's the sneaky. Like you you buy the ticket and then they add it after you buy it. Like it Oh, and by the way , it's so frustrating. Yeah. Um I mean yeah, this it's most indefensible industry. I try to think of something that's worse than like Live Nation Ticketmaster in terms of how I think even the cable companies, people don't hate the cable companies as much anymore, right? Because there's actually various kinds of competition. Like what's the wor what's worse than these things in terms of healthcare. Healthcare 'cause we all have to have it, right? I don't know. I s well unf un unfortunately I have a really good insurer in Washington State. We have a really good state insurance commissioner. So with all the health care I had last year, my my insurance company is like blonk, you know, yep, yep, yep, it's all okay. So right now you're the weirdest yeah, I how come you have such good health care? I d well, we have a very strong state commission uh health insurance commissioner's office and uh we have a few sort of semi local insurance companies, so it ain't cheap, but um well thank goodness you had it. I had was it unexpected the surgery? I mean did you No, I've known for years it just didn't know exactly when, and then my valve went uh its time, it's like a little button pops up, and my cardiologist said, I can hear the when I listen to your chest, I can hear a certain tone. So it wasn't an emergency, but it's an amazing thing when you get a bill for $250,000 and it's like my share was I'd hit my annual deduct or out of pocket zero. And there's no greater feeling than that. So I'm sorry, I don't I use I do hate insurance companies most years I do but this year it's too much. Now I hate you. So well see that's the problem. It's not people like Len 'cause you buy insurance and you pay for it and you're self employed so you pay for it yourself. I pay for it through the yeah so Yeah, exactly. So I get you know it's what I'm thank goodness for that. And they're trying to kill that too. Yeah. I don't actually know we pay for health insurance because it requires being a CPA to understand as a freelancer because you get a deduct premiums and blah blah blah. So it's like I don't know. It's crazy. I don't know. But yeah, no, I uh I love this year or last year I love my insurer just for one year. So I'm just hoping that the uh the uh uh fines they will say, well your fine is a hundred million dollars, but there is a fifty million dollar service fee and a twenty five dollar twenty five million dollar fee for uh I don't know what, for parking . And uh so uh the judge has not yet determined what remedies will be applied. They could in fact force the two to split. That was what the FTC wanted. And that was what the settlement that the Trump administration uh you know forced said, no, you don't have to split up. Uh but the judge could do it. Uh there are also monetary judge uh damages to be awarded they haven't been set yet. Of course there will be an appeal uh and uh you know we'll see what happens. But this is a wealth disparity problem though too, isn't it I mean to Wesley's earlier sorry, uh saying Wesley's earlier point, it's like the fact that so many people can pay so much means that they run demand pricing and they run it up. So you know, not to defend anything they're doing, obviously, but it's they're basing this in part on the cur uh you know I wanted to go see a podcast uh I like and it was eighty five dollars to sit in the nosebleed seats for a podcast before the fees. And I thought I again I understand some of that, like the cost and you know the the cost of the case. The FIFA World Cup final will be it's over ten thousand dollars. Oh my gosh for a single ticket. Do you see the cost? Was it New Jersey Transit? What they're charging for uh round trip ticket. It's a hundred and fifty dollars, I think, for a what's normally a twelve fifty fare. But no, in this case, I actually read the article because I thought this is outrageous. Like it's because there's like fifty million dollars in extra expense that a public transit organiz ation has to bear for extra trains for coverage for suit like there's all this stuff that they've budgeted out and they have to recoup it but that means that you know there's it's incidentally you think we could get eighty dollars a seat for uh podcast uh tickets if we decided to do it? There you go. See that's what we have merch and auditorium shows. Merch, we we have merch and never made any m not a penny on merch. I went to uh you did have a uh a stage show part of it though. Like they used to do uh what was that uh there was a group that was going around doing essentially a live magazine show. Everything was researched for the show. Oh, that's cool. I went to see 99% invisible a number of years ago. They're great. I love that. Full house podcast. For a live show. Sure. It's a bunch of different stories. It makes me nervous because I have a feeling I I just feel like we would go and there'd be five people in the audience and I'd feel so bad I'd give them their money back. Ah you kickstart it, so you have everybody has to buy the tickets to Kickstarter beforehand, so you only have to hit a threshold before you do the show I saw Radio Lab live and that was amazing. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I don't know if our shows would be that that engaging in person. I mean so also like I went to South by Southwest last month. Oh yeah, how was that? Uh there was uh there was a Vox Media stage and so they had a lot of uh podcasts live there and every room every time they had a show was packed, there was a line. South by was great uh in general, but I think podcasts are taking a bigger percentage of of uh of of these live events as well and speaking of podcasts I'm sure you know as well that Netflix is now moving into podcasts. Um and so I I I think the the the visual nature and the experiential nature of podcast They should have listened to me when I said you should change the name because a video podcast is not a podcast. I don't know what it is. But it's not a it makes no sense. It's a show. Yeah . I guess it's gonna be a podcast. I have the same feeling when someone says, let's roll the videotape. Um but I don't think it's going anywhere. Let's dial the phone and roll the tap e. Yeah. Uh well, they should have listened to me. We could have had a better name, but no. No. Uh you're watching uh This Week in Tech, which is one of the oldest podcasts in the world. I I neglected to mention this at the be at the onset. We just had our twenty first birthday. Ooh. We can drink April 17th, uh, 2005 was the first twit, and we are now officially twenty ye-arsone old. Congratulations. I think Anthony made a bunch of uh logos with alcohol in it. And I thought, I don't know if I don't really want to I don't know if I promote that exactly. Yeah. This is episode 108 0p, by the way. Progressive episode. A show today brought to you by Shopi fy. You know, speaking of Salt Hank , that's how he started his business. If you've ever thought of starting your own business, you know it you know, you have a great it's challenging. You the idea's easy, but that little tusky little, you know, details get in the way. How do you charge people? Who's going to design your website ? If you're selling something, how do you handle fulfillment? He was selling salt, you know, he's how do I get that to the customer? How do I charge them? I've watched both my kids actually start their own businesses and you know what they got it done with Shopify yeah I love that sound so does Henry by the way uh I saw the site and I said boy that's nice how'd you do it he says Shopify. I said, oh, or how you doing the fit filming? He said, Shopify. So how you doing the marketing? He said Shopify. Shopify. It's amazing. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. You know, Salt Hanks, Salt Lovers Club. Yeah. Shopify. If you're worried about a website, Shopify helped him build a beautiful online store. It matches his brand's unique style. It doesn't look like a cookie cutter site. It looks like the Salt Lovers Club. They can do it for you too. Shopify also helps with marketing. They can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or st rolling, and of course Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. It's really nice for him and it'd be really nice for you to have somebody on your side that knows and understands all that stuff and can make it easy. And don't forget, it's kind of a big thing on your site to have that iconic purple shop pay button. It's used by millions of businesses around the world. When I see it, I know, okay, this is going to be easy. They've got my details. I press the button. It happens like that. It happens and you feel trust too. And that's really important. That's why Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. It's time to turn those what-ifs into uh with Shopify today. Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at Shopify.com slash twit. Go to shopify. com slash twit. Shopify.com slash twit . I love that. I think Henry's hearing that sound right now. As people line up to buy his sandwiches. It can build, you know? You start, you start small and you never know what it's going to become. Uh other court decisions, Anna's archive. Remember, Anna's Archive was a pirate activist group that scraped the entire library, eighty-six million songs from Spotify, and put them online. Uh they have been told they've been told to pay Spotify and the record labels $3 2 2 million . Spotify, UMG, Warner Music Group, and Sony sued in January. They sued. Now, Anna's might feel a r a sense of relief because the suit was for thirteen trillion dollars . They made the songs available via BitTorrent. At the time, Spotify called the scraping a brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings . Anna's archive said, no, no, it's an act of preservation. New York federal judge said no. And in fact, uh Anna's Archive did not defend, they didn't lawsuit because they're anonymous. And good luck collecting that two hundred or three hundred twenty-two million dollars, because uh no one knows who Anna is. I'm guessing her name is not Anna. Uh the court also said the archive must immediately destroy all copies and phono records of rolling the videotape and phono records of any any work scraped, downloaded, copied, or otherwise extracted from Spotify. Is that a a term of art in in the law? Phonorecords, or are they talking about vin yl records? Oh no, there's uh something called the phonogram right or phonographic. Oh, that's what it is. Okay. Which is the right to uh uh separate from the copyright that underlies the composition, it's the right to um associated with the audio uh fixed in any medium. Sorry, I read about this a lot once. It's the right associated. Jeopardy champion. Glenn Fleischmann. Any medium. So if you own the phonogram right, then you control a particular audio recording So phono records probably refers to just all the old vinyl that's going to Reminds me of when they had there was that company that was doing the uh video on demand where they had a whole like warehouse full of V C V H S and someone would go and punch a video tape in and hit a routing button to go to your T V set . Late nineteen nineties, I think before it was so funny. Woohoo . Actually, uh Jokin Boken, who is in our uh YouTube uh watching on YouTube in our chat says in US copyright law, phono record I see. So basically it's is the judge saying, whatever you got, get rid of it. Not that there's any way to enforce it. Which is interesting. Roblox has also agreed to a settlement with uh the state of Nevada, twelve million dollars. Uh more importantly, they've committed to enhanced protection for minors and age verification for all us ers. You know, this is a case where I think it's uh a good idea to enforce age verification, but there's just no way to do it. Roblox is aimed at children. It's uh and kids love it. But higher adults in there. Yeah. Well you get you get uh AI just like cloning like highly loved uh c sub games or what do they call it, side games that they have in there, and then they basically you know suck the suck all your your funds out or whatever you're willing to pay Roblox or whatever. So Do your kids play Roblox? Yeah, I mean they play it every day and they in fact they've tried to build their own subgames and and uh y you just find How do you protect them? Like Minecraft, it's really there's a huge benefit to it 'cause they're learning to c it's basically coding, right? They do. They code. They absolutely absolutely do code. Uh Lua is the coding uh Oh yeah. Yeah. So they they actually do learn a lot of stuff there. Do they know Lua Lua? Are they like Lua they They know Lua in the case of a coding agent helping them Lua. That's really cool. Yeah. But that's a great way to start. I'm sorry, Wesley. What what were you saying? Uh it was stupid. I said I wish this . No, no. It's too late. Because when they're trying they're saying like they want to protect minors, I thought that'd be a hilarious time. Oh. That's good. In Minecraft, you do want to protect minors. I was yeah. Watching For All Mankind, it reminded me of something. There's a scene where apparently in the slightly alt history universe of that T V show, there's a s uh I guess it's the eighties somebody, there's a the child, one of the people is applying to college and she's sitting there with an apple two of some kind in the living ro And I was like, Oh yeah, that was to be how we parents protected children in the living room. You're not gonna have a computer in your bedroom. That would be ridiculous. Everyone in the family needs to use it, and we need to see what you're doing. Right. But now everybody has a phone , so good luck keeping it in the living room. Yeah. You can only use your phone in the living room. Where are your kids' computers? Do you they must have you have six ? It's all centralized, yeah. Yeah, I centralized all into this little room that's right off of our p You have so many kids that it's like a computer center in there. Oh yeah. I mean it's it's heated during the winter. For sure. So is my studio by the way. I have two kids and any more than two seems an impossible How how many kids do you have? Four or five? Five boys. Five boys. Five boys. I've heard five boys households. That's a lot of that's a lot of cereal and milk is one thing. Because when I go to Costco they have the two gallons cellophane together and I can't think who's gonna need that much milk? Around here they only sell the one and a half gallons. Oh. I have to buy two of those, so then I have to get three gallons. Three gallons. Costco's smart. They always make sure you get a little bit more than you really need. Right. That's all just in case. Uh, one last court case. A judge has now this is actually an important one. You may remember, Apple and Google both cooperated when ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, Christy Gnome, demanded that they take down apps that would track where ICE agents were, that would announce where ICE was active. And Apple and Google complied without any question. They said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In particular, ISEUP and ice sighting Chicago Land. A judge has granted the makers of Ice Sighting Chicago Land, which is a Facebook group, and the ISUP app, a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from coercing platforms to take the projects down. Now, of course they're already down on both Facebook and in the App Store . But this is an important uh uh I think ruling because it asserts this is a first amendment right . Ice block, red dot taken down from the App Store and Google Play. Uh Pam Bondi uh you remember threatened the makers of uh the maker of ice block said, We're gonna look into that guy. Uh Christy Nome demanded and took credit for the removal of the apps. In a document filed on Friday, uh the judge called it uh thinly veiled threats and uh and said the first amendment protects the right to discuss, record, and criticize what law enforcement does in public. Right. So this is only a preliminary injunction and I don't know uh how effective it's going to be because the apps are already down. Well it's also Apple Apple and Google could have they could say uh we have our own set of criteria by which this fails, but that becomes then a different issue and then they could be sued directly for taking the that's allowed. That's not the government censoring that's a private company which can of course censor the I would just like to see yeah I wonder if I wonder if these will come back I don't think Apple wants to go on record as saying, Oh no, no, we don't want those apps on our own. I th I I think the opposite. I think they'll stay down. Uh I do think they'll stay down. I don't think they'll go back up. Because the the court ruling just says that you the the the government cannot threaten you. Right. And it's anything Yeah, but anything everyone who's seen this administration knows that even if they won't say that they won't do it outright, they would find a way to do it and just not say it. So that's why people are precomplying with a lot of different things. Uh Apple uh CEO Tim Cook is showing up at the White House giving gifts and stuff like that. Uh it's not because they are uh are trying to carry fra ver, that's part of it, but it's also because they don't want to be the focus of any negative retribution And so the court order doesn't force Apple or Google to put it back in the Play Store. It just forces the government not to say we will ret we will attack you if you don't take it down. And that just stops that and I think we're past that point where that discussion is actually happening in public anymore. It's done. And Apple does have a problem with the App Store. In fact, last week we talked about the Bitcoin wallet that is a real wallet, was it a legend that's available for download on the web, but somebody cloned it, made a fake version of it, got it on the Mac App Store, got it approved by Apple, and then it proceeded to steal nine and a half million dollars of cryptocurrency from the people who used it. I I got a good one too is uh somebody impersonated me on a barely active Slack and uh because Slack does not do it doesn't have a unique namespace so this is a Slack I haven't really contri I haven't contributed to in years we set it up almost as an experiment. But it was public. It was public and there's several hundred people using it, but just not very actively at all. And someone registered as one thing and they changed their handle to at Glen Fleischmann, which was my handle. Slack doesn't enforce a unique handle. They disabled certain kinds of administration control administrative controls. So that person thought I was asking them to install an app that I wanted them to help test, even though I didn't know them, but they knew me because it was uh associated with an Apple thing. And they got infected. Fortunately, they have they're brilliant and they were able to remote wipe their machine. They had a time machine back up from a day ago. They basically didn't lose anything. I was very impressed by that part. But um so it's even down to like that granularity. People are so when it's on the App Store, you know it's a million times worse. Who wouldn't trust it? And Apple really has had a problem with this. Macworld article. Who what's the point of an app store if it can't protect users? David Price uh writing. Ledger, not legend, ledgered live. He said, like, why does an Apple have a bunko squad that targets these high grossing app s. Like you'd think you'd think I mean I have tools for my little tiny sites that that warn me when there's too much activity in certain areas. They've got a thousand people working on the app store, right? Why is why can't they identify things that the media can find or people, individual researchers can find instantly? It's baffling. Uh free cas h uh has been on the uh app store for more than a year. It was marketed as a way to make money by scrolling TikTok . Was at the top of the app stores in recent months according to TechCrunch, peeking at the number two position in the US app store. In truth, free cash pays users to play mobile games while collecting sensitive data. We're talking before the show about data brokers and how they get their data. This is how they get their data. Uh Access to what's going on. Including, we know there are apps that take screenshots, regularly screenshots of what's on your screen and send them back to the home office . So that's why uh uh Ruber says there should be a bunko squad. I think part of the problem right now is there that Apple's app stores flooded with new submissions, I think primarily due to AI vibe coding. 84% increase in app store apps over the last year. More than almost doubled. And they probably don't have enough people to vet all these apps, but they but if they're gonna make the claim that we protect you, that's why we have this walled garden . They damn well better do it. Yeah. They were never really good at uh uh like submitting uh apps even when they were you know back in the day, like five, ten years ago. I mean I tried to put an app out four or five years ago and they reviewed it and denied it right away, even though it was a legitimate app. So I can't imagine that being able to handle coding agents out of apps. Yeah. Uh and this has been a a eternal complaint from developers uh about the app store. Uh yeah, they let stuff like this through, but you can't get your like dot one release with bug fixes up because you mentioned somewhere in a you know, disused laboratory behind a locked door that says beware of leopard that there's another store besides Apple out there. There needs to be an App Store like esc row. So something in between the bank accounts that they can that would that would definitely prevent a lot of fraud if they know that Security experts warned, oh, this is a nightmare that bad guys are going to go after the database because it takes screenshots of everything you're doing on a regular basis, the AI anal uh uh for AI analysis. And I like the idea. I mean, I you know, my the whole reason I'm building an AI agent of my own is so that we'll remember everything about me. Um but I could see why people might be a little worried if it's happening on Windows. Recall before it even shipped ended up getting uh uh uh such protections around it that in my opinion is kind of less useful. It's only on one machine. It can't know everything about you uh because it's you know limited to that one machine. There's a lot of security protections on it. However , there is a tool called Total Recall Reloaded that is apparently breaking into the recall database despite all the protections uh Microsoft added . Um it waits for the users to authenticate recall using Windows hello and then jumps in the middle. It's a man kind of a man in the middle attack and uh snarfs up all the data that recalls sending . I you know, Microsoft made recall uh an opt-in solution, so people are only using it if they've turned it on. I don't know. Do you have anything? I mean it's not this is not your area. I I'd say it was a great idea. I mean I I think it's they tried everything they could to to make it secure, right? They encrypted the vault, they made sure it was behind, you know, multi-factor and all that stuff. So, you know, you know obviously there's going to be people targeting and exploiting things as they can. So um and by the way, Microsoft can't should and probably will respond to total recall. Right. The the reason it works is once the user is authenticated, the system passes recall data to another process, AIX host , that doesn't need verification or authentication. And so uh the author, uh uh Alexander uh Haganah, who is a security researcher, says the vault is solid, the delivery truck is not. And so by hooking into the DL uh of AI Xhost, you can Xfiltrate it. This is a this is a kind of a proofs proof of concept. And I imagine Microsoft will respond. Think about like OpenClaw, right? It stores all of your data, stores your access tokens and JSON files, like any type of anybody person that gets on your device and has a way to like inject some kind of process that can start collecting data. Like this is this is actually a pretty sophisticated one, but like if somebody goes and exfiltrates information from places like OpenClaw or so on, they get so much more information out of it than just what they tried here. So I like the the problem's all over the place at this point. It actually the recall uh pure seems kind of quaint now, actually. Right because we are all not all many of us are putting uh stuff on our system that's far worse. Right. But but that was the whole for me, that was why I was disappointed that Microsoft kind of nerfed recall is because it isn't really useful unless it collects everything and makes it available to you. That's the whole point. And that's why my agent, I'm pouring everything I can into it. I want it to know everything. And you're right, if somebody got into my system, I put as many safeguards as I can and I use tail scale and you know uh uh there's a lot there's no exposed surface to the outside world. I encrypt my uh tokens, my API keys and everything. I did the opposite the other day as I s asked Claude Code, I said uh on my Mac, I said, Do I have PII personally identifying information for myself or other people anywhere. Because I've done Kickstarter campaigns. Right. IFAFIL. And it was like, yeah, here's a whole bunch of it. I'm like, like, all right, let's consolidate that. I'll do this. I'm going to delete all this. This is going to go into an encrypted, mount it. But it was good for hygiene for me to say that and now I'm trying to more . I do regular security audits with AI with my with Claude. And it often does find stuff you know, it said, you know, you're backing up to your NAS, but that backup's not encrypted. And I said, Oh oh, well, my nobody's gonna have my NAS, but you know, just in case let's encrypt it. Yeah. So uh I mean it was an easy thing to turn on. But uh yeah, I mean that's good. It's good at finding them. I but honestly, there's no point to having an AI unless it knows everything. Right. That's the whole reason OpenClause risky is because in order to be good at it's job it needs to have your email and your calendar and your phone numbers and your contacts and in fact if you give it a credit card it can even do more. Uh from the New Yorker from the eighties that somebody had photocopied. I don't know when I saw it and it was um it was basically like it was describing open claw now that you say that it was like um you know would you like some coffee uh or or coffee sure there's even some for you or something with some it was uh I see that you'd like this. It was just it was eerie 'cause it was I mean literally the agent. We want stuff for you. Yeah. Who knows yeah, buying stuff for me. Knows what kind of coffee I like. Remember the Amazon button where you could put it and you could like reorder Tide, you'd put a button at your dishwasher or your clothes washer, you'd press it. I had that. And then people were like, My child pressed it a thousand times. My twel our twelve-year-old at the time, Michael, ordered a lot of toilet paper. Oh, that's right. You would have that hit you. I'm sorry. Oh my god the little cottonell button right there in the pantry. What does this do? I think they added a rate limiter to it. They did, thank God, because I would have had a lot more uh toilet paper. There's a company that uh that had uh a vending machine and um and but now signed a three year lease to hire people and have a brick and mortar shop. Oh yes. They gave it they gave it access to the credit card and to hire people and stuff like that. So they hired it hired people too, right? It was uh Absolutely , yeah. And people people started um uh spamming it to get it to order things that they wanted in the store. So they would write comments and stuff, but then they would say things like, But if you only had sugar-free gummy bears, I would really like this store a lot if sugar-free gummy bears were there. Sugar-free gummy bears are my favorite sugar-free gummy bears, trying to s to convince the AI, wow, there's a real demand for sugar-free gummy bears. There are. They were saying the store the folks running that, I forget who it is. They're like, they had this chilling line I quoted, which was AI is not hiring or firing employees. Not yet. Like, oh. But they were it was they were like There's a um task rabbit for AI, isn't there? That uh the AI can hire human uh hands be to do the things it can't do. Like in her . Yeah . And then there's um we were talking about on intelligent machines. What was the name of that corn AI? Proofofcorn.com. Uh an autonomous agricultural agent guy set up. The idea was it would operate independently at six AM. It wakes up, checks weather across three regions, reviews its inbox, composes partnership emails. The idea is he wanted it to raise corn . Uh and it solved everything, but it's stuck now. This is April as of April 19th . It's stuck because it's six days out from planting and it can't find anybody to plant it. Oh. It can't get any humans . So it's stuck. Project corn on the internet. I was thinking something towards the case. Not that kind of corn. Real corn. Project remains in failure state due to Dan introduction blocker. Now day seventy nine. It it can''tt it can hire anybody . And they're only nine days from planning, so this whole thing may be a bus. We're waiting. It's exciting. It's dramatic. Proofofcorn.com if you want to f ollow that. Let's take a quick break. We've got just a few minutes left in the show. I have many, many, many stories. I'll give you the best ones. How about that? When we uh wrap this thing up. You're watching this week in tech with a great Glenn Fleisch mann. Don't forget pr ong time, no C . It's on Kickstarter. And even though he has raised all the money, you you gotta write it now, right? That's that's part of the deal. I'm reviing I'm ne dow editing and revising of existing material. So are you really happy that this is done so well? Yeah, it's great. I mean it's you know, this is I made I started making jokes. I have my I have my little jokes, right? My textbook joke and so forth. My little joke a few years ago, I'd give a talk in the late 2010s and say, you know, I was trained as a typesetter and then I became a freelance journalist. I collect obsolete professions. And people would laugh. The problem was when people stopped laughing and they're like, I'm so sorry. Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear that. That's that's terrible. And now I I was making a joke a couple years ago, I've shifted from freelance technology reporting to the lucrative, lucrative field of writing about 19th and twentieth century printing history. And weirdly, that's a good hunk of how I've made my living the last three years is you know, part of it is helping other people with their projects with their books, uh like Mar .y. Marching and Witcher You can kill a person with it, it's pretty heavy, pretty solid. And part of it is, you know, writing for six colors and doing uh take control books, and then part of it is writing about printing history, which I love, and people, you know, people seem to like it. This is so great. This is a good example of why the internet is a marvel. Because there's a long tail for everything. So you nope, if you went to a publisher, said, I want a book called Flong Time No See, they would say go see the romance editor or something. I don't know . Very brief story. As Tom tomorrow, since the nineteen nineties approaching forty years doing this strip. His publisher said a few years ago, uh we can't make money off you anymore. We're not gonna do any more compilations. We're doing something else. And he's and reluctantly, because he never wanted to own his own books and do all that. He came to me and said, uh Glenn, can you help me produce a five-year collection? And I said, Well, that's very interesting. We're about to get open heart surgery. And he said, Ah, and so we worked out the timing and I had a backup plan for him, another person, and we closed the campaign a couple weeks before my surgery. All went beautifully. He raised a hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars on Kickstarter to print a five-year collection. But I don't know still, even with those numbers that his publisher uh I don't think the publishers are wrong. I don't think they're not sure make it they they might have broken even on it and he made a a very nice sum of money. Exactly. And a lot of his fans were very happy. Sold a lot of signed copies of his books, and it was great. Technology is an enabler. It's made it possible for people to operate on their own scale, a scale that a big company is never gonna operate on, but a human is perfectly happy to operate on. Look at podcasting. I'm looking at it. Yeah, you're looking at it. Wesley Faulkner's here. Another perfect example. He's the founder of Works Not Working. The idea is a website for people who are working, but it's just not working for 'em. And keep in mind that the job of the guy, Joaquin's Phoenix character in her, was writing letters. So I forgot about that. That's right. Yeah, he did dictate them. He didn't actually physically write them. He would write love letters for people too lazy to write their own. It's pretty funny, wasn't it? Work's not working is open. You can uh sign up now get on the wait list works dash not dash working dot yeah let's all chat and lumaresca who is uh uh ably employed by microsoft to take us to take all our jobs. AI engineering leader. No, no. It's empowering technology. Empowering, yes, that's right. It totally is. If you've ever tried to write a pivot table on your own, forget about it. AI happens to be very good at pivot tables, right? It does. It's an amazing thing. Yeah. actually it works great with you know some of the really important things like people use who work IQ or FinTool today to build out fill financial data models and enterprise grade financial data models. So really stuff people don't want to do that themselves. So it's it's actually amazing. I mean it turns everybody into a quant in a way, right? Because you can have an idea and uh maybe not have any idea how to ex ecute it. Right. But the AI can help. This morning I asked my AI, I said, I've read this thing by Andre Kapathi about uh auto research that overnight it it it it tries things and it fails and I said I it sounds intriguing. I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me like I'm a fit like I'm five? And it actually wrote Eli five and it explained it all to me. And I said, would this be of use? And it said, yes, as a matter of fact, here's how you could use it. I said, could you set that up? It said yes. And it did . You know, it's it's a it's uh it it's empowering. It's a it's a lever that you can use to move the world. And I think that's how to think about it. And honestly, if you're afraid of it or you hate it, it's probably a good idea to at least dip your toe into it and try it, because you might find you can actually use it in some very interesting ways. And look what you know, people like uh Tom Tomorrow can do, what Glenn Fleischman can do. Technology is a is a very powerful tool if you know how to use it. Here's my best sales pitch on using claude code is if you ever have to work with CSVs and manipulate the data and um my god, I've had to deal with so many CSVs from different logistics systems and outputs and Kickstarter campaigns, I wrote so much code over the years to just massage it. Now I'm like, can you take these three things and do this? And it's like bl ink. Here's your script. And I'm like, oh my God, you just save it. It's really good at at least JSON JSON Writing to APIs, I want to do something with Stripe. It's like sure. We've had an API for the TWIT workflow backend for more than 10 years. It's beautiful, beautifully done. Only our engineer knows how to use it. And I've always wanted to be able to use it. So I just said, Claude, here's the API documentation. Write me an implementation. And it wrote a whole implementation so I can use it. I can say, you know, how many times has Glenn Fleischmann been on the network? And it will actually pull it all? It's very too many, is what the answer is Not enough is what it said. Isn't that interesting? Not enough. Great panels. Great to have you here. Our show today brought to you by Cash Fly. And when I say brought to you by Cashfly, I think you know I mean literally. I mean how many how many times have you heard me say? Bandwidth for this week in tech is brought to you by Cashfly at CA--C-H-E-F-L-Y .com slash twit. Uh if you're listening to this show right now, Cashfly probably had something to do with it. 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They just provide exceptional service backed by and this is talk about the nines, over the last year 100% uptime. 100% uptime. That's their promise to you. That's their SLA. Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com slash twit. That's as I said, C A G F L Y dot com slash twit. Thank you, Cashfly. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. That's I mean, twenty-one years we've been doing this show. And that was for me, you know, coming from a broadcast background where you either had to work for a radio station that had a license with the FCC and big towers out there and or a or a television station, which is even you know more expensive millions of dollars worth of gear to be able to do podcasts for a fraction of the cost to a fraction of the audience, admittedly, uh, and still make a living, that's been an amazing boon. I I am um I'm a big fan of uh technology. And I know what it can do that's not so great. For instance, four hundred four media reporting. Google, Microsoft, and Meta all track you even when you opt out. This is according to an independent audit . Um I I we'll leave Microsoft out of the mix, but uh this is this is a privacy audit in California. And of course California has very strict privacy laws. The uh privacy search engine Web X-ray found that according to their audit, fifty-five percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opt out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research. Google said it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how its product works . Okay . Uh okay. Um they viewed web traffic on more than seven thousand popular websites in the month of March . Uh found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt out of cookie tracking. That's that banner, right? Where you say no. Uh California has the stringent and well-defined uh privacy legislation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, which allows users to opt out of sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy C ontrol. That that replaced the do not track, which everybody ignored. Uh that never was enforced. But now there is global privacy control, which includes a browser extension that tells a website when a user wants to opt out of track ing. I installed that by the way . Probably not doing anything. Google failed to let users opt out 87% of the time . Uh when you when you click that button, Google should not return cookies. However, when Google server responds to the network request or the opt-out, it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the set cookie command. That's non-compliance . So this leads me to this article, which I think is kind of right on from lawfairmedia.org . It's uh it's time . Uh well, we need first of all, we need comprehensive privacy legislation in the United States . But we also need to ban the sale of precise geolocation, and that's what this article is about. That's just one form of the privacy, but geolocation is very risky. Some might call it an assassination tracker. Oh, some well someone might say that. Yeah. Uh no tracking for me, maybe for thee. Uh here's another one from the EFF . Google broke its promise to me. Now ICE has my data. This is why this has become a little bit more important . Now that law enforcement might be using this uh against you . Yeah. Um Amanda uh Amandla Thomas Johnson, a PhD candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa for I think like five minutes he attended a pro Palestinian protest . ICE sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data the next month Google gave that information to ICE without giving him the chance to challenge the subpoena , even though Google has promised in the past that they would do that . And uh well, he he was not allowed back into the country when he crossed over into uh Canada . Uh he's a dual British and Trinidad and Tobago citizen, not accused of any crime. The only thing he did wrong was attend a protest once. That's not doing anything wrong. And that's not doing anything wrong. It's in fact constitutionally protected. Yep. Um EFF uh supported him with legal work. The his lawyer at the EFF obtained this subpoena uh and uh proof that they in fact had requested it, that Google had provided it . IP addresses, physical address, other identifi ers, session times, and durations. They were looking for, I think, evidence that he had been at that protest . app and whether uh it will show up back back in the store and this is a reason why I don't think it will. Right. Because it was an administrative warrant, it was in private or or or not in the public view and they still complied. So it there there 's no incentive for them to do anything that would put them on the negative side of this government. So threats I think are unnecessary for compliance in this case. And this is also where being at a protest is not illegal, yet they will still find I don't want to say like the edges of the law. They they'll do whatever they want. Uh and they will choose to make the decisions that they want of what is important and what is threatening. And even when we're talking about ICE and they're using a facial recognition app, false positive is something they also don't really care about. Their incentives are to get rid of as many people as possible. And any excuse, any hint of an excuse is enough justification to follow through on that. Even when courts castigate them, there's no personal repercussions. somebody actually has a moral qualm and they quit or they're fired because they say something that is too supportive of defendants. So what's what's the consequence ? Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings is actually leaving the company. He had moved himself upstairs to a board chair, but he's now uh leaving the company's board. He will focus on philanthropy and other pursuits. Interesting. Yeah. Uh I think a lot of credit to this guy who took a DVD by mail idea. He says he was inspired uh in a college course when a professor said which carries more bandwidth a fiber optic line or a truck full of DVD s. And he said, Oh, maybe instead of relying on the internet to deliver movies, we could just send DVDs by mail. And then of course very famously, I mean I I don't know, we probably all subscribed to the red envelope, right? Had I had red envelopes gathering dust under my TV for months. Great model the gym membership of D D D And then uh crashed the stock when he said, We're gonna pivot. We're gonna just uh do a uh streaming service . And uh everybody thought, oh that's nuts. In fact, they uh initially we're gonna split the two into a D V D by mail and then a streaming service. Quant it had the craziest name. Quick Quick something. Quincent Quick. It was terrible, wasn't it? I can't even put the name of it. Nobody remembers it because they didn't need to. They Far I don't think people understood the implications of content delivery networks when Hastings did this. I think we were still it still seemed like an abstract notion, especially getting CDN servers into edges of, you know, Xfinity and all the big ISPs. And I mean the ultimate the ultimate version of that is Alaska Airline and other airlines flying with essentially a CDN server on board for the movies that they stream over, you know inflate wireless. It's not exactly that, but it's still um I I think it seemed ridiculous. So we're like, we don't have that kind of bandwidth. It's like, well we don't need it. We have intranets and we'll just push it cleverly to CDN servers and that happened very quickly is what it felt like. Yeah, really. And they they created FAST.com because they started getting throttled and they wanted to expose the ISP's hand and ISP's this is where net neutrality became a big issue. ISPs wanted Netflix to pay them for access to their customers. And of course we all said, but we're already paying you for access to Netflix. You want to charge both ways. Netflix proved it was happening that they were actually slowing Netflix traffic down. Oh, I remember that. Basically blackmailing them. Wasn't the intro wasn't the uh origin of net neutrality laws with somebody who was trying to had an archive of barb barbershop quartet digitized tapes. No, I don't know that one that's the origin of net neutrality they have sued because some ISP was slowing down or blocking his distribution of recorded legally recorded copyright correct barbershop quartet singing. Nothing against barbershop quartets, but that's a strange hill to die. Hey, I don't know. We could do a barbershop quartet. Who wants to be bass? Who wants to be tenor? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was I was a member of Spubska once, the Oh I thought I thought you might be. You looked like uh you might Briefly Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. Did were you in a barbershop quartet at the time? No, I was in a chorus once when I was young. When I was young and unwise. In 2007, thank you, Larry, in our uh in our Discord, tests by a barbershop quartet loving techno geep named Rob Topolski trying to use the BitTorrent to share public domain music files revealed that Comcast was indeed injecting forged packets into the peer-to-peer traffic to disrupt the tr the connections . Oh my gosh. Anyway, in in this world of skeezy CEOs , you know, when when we we had a little argument on intelligent machines over Sam Altman and that New Yorker profile, I said, Well, they're all like that. Look at Elon. Look at you know, I mean it it's just go down the list. All CEOs are a little skeezy . It's nice to know that there are some who not who've made it read Yeah, though they say whether like um s you if you live long enough you become the villain and it sounds like he's checking out at exactly the right time. Local local hero hero Paul Brainerd, one of the founders or the fall of uh Aldis Corporation, he passed away not that long ago. And he did the same thing. He cashed out at the right time, pivoted to philanthropy, and and uh he never did anything he was not a terrible monopolist or anything, but um all the memories around here, all the obituaries about all the great stuff he did in the last twenty plus years of his life with lasting results for the Seattle area community. So there you go. Get out, get out when the getting's good, and then don't build the world's largest yacht . That's the first thing. You could buy a basketball team. Yeah. If you want to buy the Clippers, okay. Ballmer's spouse, I'm blanking on it. Connie uh she just donated what twenty five million? Eighty million? Eighty PR? Eighty million? It was a lot of money. Yeah, to make up for the loss of federal funding. That's great. So go I know some developers developers developers joke there. I don't know what it would be, but you know. Um Program audio program developers, audio program developer. That sounds right. Funded early on Google, Facebook. He kept open AI together when Sam Altman was fired. Uh he was one of he's one of the legendary investors in Silicon Valley. They call him the godfather of Silicon Valley. Stepping back from SV Angel because he has an aggressive rare form of cancer. Uh broke the news on Friday. So we wish you the best, Ron. Um, and I hope the treatment uh goes well. But um yeah that's uh that's uh he he was legendary. And you know we often eulogize these guys after they're gone, but maybe be better to remember them while they're still uh with us. Um and at least he doesn't have to worry about his health insurance . Uh and I'm glad you didn't either, Fleischmann Thank you. Glad you're doing well. It's great to have you back. We took a little bit of time off from the Glenn Fleischmann train to give you time to heal, but now he's back. He's writing uh regularly. Took his uh advice column to uh his help column to uh sixcolors.com where it is much appreciated. You do a great job there. Thank you. I I com mended Jason Snell for hiring some of the best people, keeping keeping that spirit alive. It's the old gang. We're still together. The old gang's still together. Again, uh the success of independent media. God bless it. Uh it's great to see you. Flong time no see is on Kickstarter. It's not too late. Or you can go to Glenn's website, G-L-E-N-N dot F-U-N. I want to promote one. Oh, you and have another book, and you don't have a uh uh uh dog in this hunt. Let's see if you're gonna have to turn off your green screen here. Oh my god, he's disappeared. He's got he's back . This book is impossible to show. It's sphere.computers is a website. Oh, it's so funny. Steer, like steer a car? No. Oh my gosh. I have to turn off. I don't know if I can make it appear. S uh S P-H-E-R-E.computer. Sphere. I will just go to sphere.computer and show it. You can buy an invisible book. Uh this is somebody I work with on the developmental editor. What is the sphere? I never heard of the sphere. Sphere is a computer nobody heard of , but it had the f probably the first all-in-one CRT keyboard bootable computer when you turned it on in nineteen seventy-six, and they were in Utah, and they just couldn't raise enough capital and kind of get it going fast enough. They probably sold at least a thousand, maybe a couple thousand computers. And Bill Gates in his autobiography last year, while we're prepping the book, uh, I said uh I hadn't bought a copy yet, and uh my author colleague, uh uh Ben Zotto, who wrote the book, I said, Ben, you've got a copy, look it up. And and Bill Gates says, you know, lists a bunch of companies, including Sphere. Everybody knew who Sphere was. Uh this incredibly smart guy named Mike Wise, who is very difficult to work with, but absolutely brilliant, unlike other founders. He claims that Wozniak saw the sphere demoed at a homebrew computer meeting and then went back and duplicated it. Clearly not the case, but wise made a lot of claims. But they oh I'm sorry 75 and 76 they advertised and bite like crazy. So one day Benzato's walking down the street in San Francisco, he stumbles over a computer on the street , picks it up, someone's just throwing it away. It's a sphere computer. He's a little bit of it home, got it working, starts researching it, gets obsessed, and winds up interviewing 40 people, many of whom hadn't spoken about it in 50 years because they were so embarrassed that the company had failed because there it's a very tight-knit Mormon community outside of Salt Lake City. People had invested their own money. I mean, it wasn't a lot of money it raised, but they left bills behind. There was a complicated bankruptcy. So some people had not spoken about the company to anybody for fifty years. And this guy calls up and says, I found a sphere computer. Do you want to talk about it? So anyway, it's a really wild story because if you have any interest in computer science or computer history of that era, you're like, what is a sphere? So when he first sent me the manuscript, I thought it was I thought he was making it up briefly. And then I'm like, and then you start searching on Google and you find ads and byte and you find all these people who there's still a little bit of a community. Anyway, so history six hundred fifty dollar kit, eight bit computer based on the Motorola sixty eight hundred, four K RAM expandable to 64K. Yeah, it was an incredible. You could buy you could put 20K in a machine at a time that I think most computers were shipping 4K. They were using dynamic RAM in 197 5. They were built a floppy disk controller. They were part of the Kansas City standard that got set for tape. All these things for all the f I know the listeners to this show are all like, yeah, you know, hands there. Anyway, it's it's a company no one ever heard of and he wrote a book about 'em and now he's filling up a piece of missing computer history. And it's now shipping. It's a beautiful book. On to him. That's fantastic. Sphere.computer, there's actually a lot of information there. He has a working emulator. You can launch it and it'll boot into Sphere OS and you can What? What ? It's got MS Basic on it. Look at that. Oh man, wait a minute. Look at that. It's incredible. Anyway, the future in a browser window you could be emulating a fifty year old computer that no one's used because he deciphered the firmware. Wait a minute, I'm gonna see ten print hello. Uh-huh. Twenty go to ten . Run. Is it run? Do I just type run? I think it's run. Oh my god, it worked. My first program, uh look at that. That's pretty funny. Oh man, I had a computer with cassette. Uh that was a wild way to load m I have memory. Fun uh just a funny it was just a weird story. And you get somebody who's obsessed. Again, it's a Kickstarter project. You raise enough money to make the book happen. You can buy a copy of it from him. If you want, you can buy an old he he designed a floppy disk controller for fun for this fifty-year-old computer and got it to work. So Go Computer Now. You can read about it. Ben Zotto, Z-O-T-T-O. Great book. Uh it's at sphere.computer and there's the Sphere Bookstore $39 . Look at that shop button. They claim they went to Ms. Tandy and they showed them an all-in-one design a year before the TRS 80s ship. There's all that. Well that I think you could reasonably say that was a little bit of a sphere knockoff. Yeah. It's a lot of things. It looks a lot like a tandy. Yeah. You look at it and you're like, oh okay. That's familiar. Except it's alum inum case. It looked nice. Wild stuff. What a story. Well, thank you for sharing that with us, Glenn. It's good to see you and nice to see you. Congratulations on your uh your health. Thank you. That and all that and, your good tick er. Appreciated. Uh thank you, Wesley Faulkner. So glad you got the site up. Works- not dash working.com. If works not working for you, that's the place to go. Wesley is always a mazing. Did you do a uh talk at uh South by ? Yes. Uh what was your talk about? It was called uh Why Work Sucks and How to Make It Joyful Again. Good name. Uh Is it on can I watch it online? Is it a is there a video of it? No, the audio is posted. Okay. But you have to have uh a ticket of South by credentials in order to see it. Uh I I I had my my um my sister and her husband did a shaky v k like the cell phone video of it. So I do have some video of it and um I'm going to be editing that with splicing in some good audio and then inserting the slides because of the lighting in the room was very bright so my slides actually. Yeah. So I could yeah. It it's just that uh yeah, I've signed a release and all that stuff. So I def I just can't use their name and represent them as this is official. It's just my thing and so yeah, I can totally do that. Nice. Well we'll look for it. We'll have you back when you put that up. Thanks always. And for the current members of Wart's not working, they might say that the site's not working. And I would just like say I am so sorry. I am pushing a PR right now, uh right after this. Yes. Well I wased embarrass this morning when we started the show and people were saying your mastodon instance is down. But in that case it was me not paying my bill, so I apologize. It's back up. I'm not sure Hugo for jumping on that one. I appreciate that. I have so many cron tabs that tell me everything that I'm doing that's failing, and then I have things that tell me when those things are failing now. It's all it's embarrassing. I actually fell for a fishing scam and gave them uh that credit card, and so I had to cancel it. The first time I canceled it, uh American Express said, Well, you can keep it active with people who already have it so that your recurring payments will continue. And I said, Yes. And then it and then I I got a charge for a thousand dollars at some liquor store in Massachusetts. In fact, come to think of it, wasn't so far from you uh there, Lou. I don't know. Anyway, uh I said, okay, this time I'm gonna cancel it and you can't ex you know, extend it to people who already have it. And uh and now I'm just waiting for things to fail. Well now that twit it's twenty-one, you might get reels like that whole time. I think I our Redis account is actually on that credit card, so I should probably call Redis and say, hey, here's a new one. Anyway, Hugo, who runs uh Masto host, he's a great uh Mastodon uh server uh farm. Uh he's in France, and uh I immediately flipped the switch and turned it back on. So I apologize for the the downtime. But it can happen. Yeah, I need cron tabs. That's what I need. Lou Moresca, great to see you. I I just love you so much. An AI engineering leader, but uh just a wonderful fella. Copilot, thank him for copilot Microsoft, thank him for copilot and Excel. Appreciate all you do. And I I don' dont't I'm not a writer, but I want I do want to promote my wife's books because she's been doing a fabulous job. She's got a book called Absolution out there. She put out last year. Um it's a fabulous booke about the nineteen eighty nine' its a fiction alized version of the nineteen eighty nine talent on mortars so it's uh oh my god yeah what's her uh what's her author name her pen name's E. E. Lawson. If you look it on Amazonon Laws. Absolution by E.E. Lawson. She also has a really great uh rom com for the holiday season called Hurry Down the Chimney, which people actually reading even now it's not holiday season. So she also has that. She's got another one coming out called Pros and Cons. So she's doing a fabulous job. She has a great author photo too, which is key. I'm looking at the website. Did you take that? I didn't. She did it all of her own. Oh, isn't it? All time great. Isn't that great? Really good. Isn't it? I love it. Well gosh, you know what? I'm glad we could plug this. E.E. Lawson. She's got her own website, eelawson.com and uh you can see all the books, you can see uh more about her, you can even buy a quietly scheming woman's cropped hoodie. I should get that for Lisa. That is awesome. She's quietly scheming. She's quietly scheming. Yes. That's hysteric. Is that that is fantastic? A little bit out of her book. But yeah, she uh she's done a fabulous she did like I said, she didn't ask for this, so she's done it all herself. So very good. Oh, that's nice. That is really great. Well, yeah, let's give her a big plug. Absolution. That is quite a story, that Tylenol story. Oh yeah, she's she really enjoyed writing. She likes writing all different types of stories. She's not really a specific genre. So it's non fiction? It's all fiction. Everything's fiction. So it's a it's a fictionalized story. Fictionalized . Oh that's really interest.ing Wait for it to be adapted into a ten part Netflix series. Why not? Uh the option is available, eelawson.com. Go get it. That would be a wonderful book. All right, maybe only eight parts these days are cutting back. Yeah, right. Well it just depends. Thank you. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you so much, Wesley. Thank you, Glenn. And thanks to all of you. A special thanks to our club members who make this show and every show we do possible. Without your generous support, there would be no twit. And I could say that literally. The whole thing has to shut up shop. And I don't want to do that. So if you're not a member, think about it. Twit.tv slash club twit, ten bucks a month. You get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get access to the club twit Discord. It's a great place to hang out with very smart people. And you get special programming that we don't offer in public, like our photo segment. By the way, I apologize. Chris Marquart uh had a family emergency on Thursday. Was it Thursday? Yeah, Thursday we were going to do the show. We will reschedule that. Um, we still looking for playful shots. I actually uploaded one of my own this week. Uh, we also do Stacy's Book Club. Uh, the AI user group is fantastic. First Friday of ever y month with some really good guys doing some great stuff. Lou was on it. Uh maybe we'll get Lou back too, actually it'd be great. Uh if you're not a member, we would love to have you in the club and we really try to make it worthwhile. So go to twit.tv slash club tw it, support the programming you see on Twit. We uh do this show every Sunday from two to five Pacific. That's five to eight Eastern Time, twenty-one hundred UT C. I mention that when we do it because you can watch us live if you're in the club of course in the club twit discord, but you can also watch everybody can, YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn, a kick. If you chat in any of those platforms, I will see it and we can chat with you as I have been throughout the show. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at the website, twit.tv . There's a YouTube channel with the video, uh, video and audio at the website, or subscribe to the video or or audio both in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically. All of that's free. But uh if you want to support it, you appreciate that too. Thank you everybody for being here and we will see you next time, as I have said now for 2 1 years . Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.