GameStop Potential Acquisition of eBay

It's time for Twit this week in tech. Yes, I'm in beautiful Hawaii, but the show must go on. Micah Sargent, Nicolas DeLeon, and Davindra Hardawar join me. We will talk about earnings Palooza, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple , uh, and a few others. Basically, they all made tons of money. Elon Musk takes the stand and maybe makes a few bloopers in his testimony, and the most s severe Linux security flaw in decades. All of that coming up next on Twit . Podcasts you love. From people you trust this is twit this is twit this week in tech episode 1082, recorded Sunday, May 3rd, 2026. Hanging by a thread . It's time for Twit this week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody from beautiful Hawaii . Uh we have a great panel. I'm gonna sweat all through this show. That's Micah Sargent laughing at me. I'm laughing. It's uh record temps here in Portland, but that only means eighty degrees. So it's as hot in Portland as it is in the big islands. So there you should be happy. Wow. Do you have AC? Yeah, yeah. I I that was I I I'm I will never live anywhere without A C. I you know, throw me into an early grave rather than live in a place without a C is how I feel. And and I've been watching on IOS today. You have added a massive three D printer over your left shoulder. What is which one is that? Uh that's actually just the P1S. Uh no longer, no longer but it's got the it's got the AMS on top of it. That's probably what you're seeing. So that holds four different types of filament at once and it can be between them and that's nice. Yeah. Do you do a lot of 3D printing? I don't do a whole heck of a lot, but what I do is when something pops up that I need uh uh you know something's not working and I need to fix it or I have a little break or a product that I ooh I wish it had this handle on it. I like to design little things and print them out and use them around the house. So that's what I do most of the time. So good to see you, Micah Sargent, of course, the host of Tech News Weekly and IOS today. And we just had our eight hundredth episode over on iOS today. Catching up somehow. Oh yeah. Go ahead. That's Devindra Hardewar from Engadget, Senior Editor. Hey Davindra, great to see you. Good to see you. I I did not realize I'd be instantly jealous of where you are, Leo. This is the the back of the whole goal. It's beautiful. My whole goal is to make you just insanely jealous. Yeah, it's not a usable beach because uh we're on the big island, which uh 200 years ago had a massive volcanic eruption on this side, and everything's lava, black lava rock. There are some nice beaches, coral sand beaches, but this one is not. You see the ocean and you see a golf course. There's a ridiculous number of golf courses here. And every time I see them, I think, and they thought data centers used a lot of water. This is they're watering golf courses in Hawaii. We're well, I guess we're on the dry side, but still. Also with us, Nicholas De Leon from Consumer Reports. Hi, Nicholas. Hello, Leo. How are you? Speaking of dry, he's in Arizona. It's nice and dry. Except when it rains. Uh yeah, monsoon season starts in about a month or so. Uh, but for the time being it is very dry, although a little cloudy today. I would say it's only eighty five degrees, which is probably like ten degrees below normal, actually. There's the vendors in Atlanta were probably already in the eighties as well. No, it's it's actually been chilly for a couple days. We barely hit 70 today, so I'm jealous of here in all this 80 degree weather. Well what was hot this week was earnings learnings it was an earnings Palooza Wednesday we had alphabet meta microsoft uh and uh am i leaving one out apple was the thursday just a bunch of uh uh big tech earnings, they all did uh fairly well, although the market punished Meta considerably because Meta is spending so much money on AI, losing, did I say spending losing uh money on AI? This is from Semaphore, big tech firms beat earnings amid AI spending questions. Alphabet. Oh, I left out Amazon. That was the other one. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all beat the earnings expectations. So the market reward ed them . Meta stock fell after it announced plans to put in even more money towards AI. So there's the market performance. Looks like Alphabet's done very well. You know, there was a Zuckerberg they trust, right? Like his his his bets have not gone wrong in the past decade. Well, really? I became a let's see. But uh all of his bets have failed. He changed the name to Meta because he really thought the metaverse was gonna take off, but now they've closed Horizon World. So it's too late to change the name again, probably. It should have been meta if you were gonna do it, could change it to meta ai at because he knew ai was gonna be a big thing back then uh uh you know the the real winners I think uh to some degree are Microsoft and Amazon and Google because they all th ree provide the data centers for AI. Exactly. Yep. Which everyone knows no matter how AI goes, it's going to use a lot of compute . Um then Apple, who it has neither AI nor data centers. Did well somehow, yeah. They have real tech. They have real technology. It's amazing. This thing called the iPhone. It seems to be doing well. Products you can hold in your hands. Yeah. Uh they uh you know, Tim, this is uh not Tim Cook's last uh earnings report. You'll have one more before John Turners takes over in September, but Tim did crow a little bit about having the the you know today Apple is proud to report our best March quarter ever . Revenue of a hundred and eleven billion dollars and double digit growth in every geographic segment. Services continued to do incredibly well. A twenty-eight billion dollars in operating cash flow. I mean, everything good for Apple. Did Apple does Apple benefit because they lift they didn't do AI? Maybe this is I've mentioned this before. I think I think everyone was like Apple is late to AI, they're gonna lose out big time. And I feel like that that initial year when um was it uh Bing Chat happened and then Microsoft's whole deal with open AI. Everyone. Eyes were on Apple. Like you were stumbling, you were failing. And now I think Microsoft is pulling back on copilot stuff. All these companies are kind of taking a second look at their AI investments. Apple can just sit tight and be slow about it. And I think be more thoughtful about it. I think that's gonna work out well for them, as we've seen. It's gonna go. It doesn't feel though like the I'm sure internally, yes , there's a lot that's that's taking place. There's a lot of of strategy that's happening. But from the outside of things, it looks like that company is just doing its thing. And I there's something to that. There's uh yes, we've heard about the scramble, but I don't know that that translates to your everyday person. We hear the rumors about, you know, the AI team being flushed and uh having to go do training and whatnot. But from the outside of things, it really does feel like Apple just continues to do Apple while these other companies have said, okay, we've got to really focus on this. We've got to focus on AI. And so there is almost a steadfastness to it that I have to respect that that makes you feel a little bit more comfortable perhaps uh with with Apple still able to because we're looking now at a company that is still able to set those records despite the fact that we've heard time and time again from everybody else going Apple needs to be an AI. They are so far behind. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like that's the case. Yeah. Well, we'll find out. I mean, I think um we're about a month away from WWDC, and that's where they'll probably talk about Siri and the AI enabled Siri. John Turnus joined the call. He's going to be the next CEO starting September 1st. So there was some betting on Tuesday on MacBreak Weekly. Will will Turnus show up or will Tim Cook get to shine uh one penultimate time? But uh I think they wanted to introduce John Turnus. They also talked about shortages because Apple's hit hard by the supply chain shortages of chips, of RAM, even of hard drives. And I think they've discontinued their cheapest Mac Mini and raised the prices on the rest. And you if you wanted a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio, you might be hard pressed to get one. Some of them are actually unavailable. And this is due to AI. So in some ways, they are benefiting from AI because everybody's buying these for their open claw. Yeah. About two weeks ago, I was trying to buy a Mac mini or Mac Studio something, anything. Uh and it the shipping date was like, depending on the RAM configuration, was months in the future. Uh and I was like, that's I've never seen that before. Oh so yeah, like Apple is I guess benefiting uh tangentially from AI, even if they're not necessarily directly, you know, shipping models or anything like that. By discontinuing the six hundred dollar model, but Apple's basically made the all those cheapest model of the Mini, an $800 uh model. And of course, a lot of people doing OpenCloud were buying the cheapest Mac Mini. I mean, that was the recommendation because you're still running a uh an AI in the cloud. You don't need a super fast uh machine to run it. In fact, I don't even know if you need a Mac Mini, to be honest. You probably could use a Raspberry Pi. Wasn't it doing some stuff locally? Like I think the Mac Mini had enough local juice if you needed to do something. So that was a good one. I have a mini with 64 gig s and I can run uh some models that are tuned for MLX Apple's own ML uh implementation on Apple Solar. I mean it speaks to like what an amazing machine the 599 Mac mini was like that was Apple's cheapest desktop, but also more computer than most people needed for really anything. And it's like so small, so capable. Like of course, of course this ends up being the thing. I think it's it's the downside though is that it was a beautiful machine for $599 and now it is no more because of AI, like so many things. So now it's $7.99. That thing needs to go on sale for below $500, even like an M1 or M2 Mac Mini at three or four hundred bucks, like you could do so much with that thing. What a good idea. I guess you could buy a a Neo, right? That's that's you could you could buy a Neo, which is again another I don't know how long they're gonna be able to hold on to that. Eight gigs of RAM isn't exactly No. You need the RAM. You need the RAM if you want these models to sit in your you know to sit and run, you need a lot of RAM, unfortunately. That Neo though, what a what a machine. I have so many thoughts about that. Did they talk about Neo sales? I didn't listen to the uh call or they I didn't care. I think they're probably taking a victory lap on the neo. And by the way, that was also he w John Turnus was in charge of hardware. That was one of John Turnus' projects. So yeah. I don't know if you guys talked about this. I was at the Neo launch event and like it was all Turnus. There was no Timothy. Oh, interesting. John Turnus in intro like the the press to the whole thing. He was the one doing the like play by play of all the features of the Neo. He was the one like everybody even the Apple like people there were all talking about John Turnus' vision for the Neo. And it's which tells you that they knew he was about to be announced. Oh for sure. Anointed and that was rumored since last fall but this was very much his baby and like look at the MacBook Neo and just like what a thing that is. Like the Apple Reps like brought a six hundred dollar HP laptop and just put it side by side. I was like, oh my god, they're HP's already dead. Like you're just let them let them die here. They can pair like all the features, the screen, the speakers, everything. It's just desperate. And I've talked to like a lot of PC manufacturers now. They're just all like pulling their shirt collars. They don't know what to do because they can't figure out how to do that. Right. They can't do it's impossible for the full stack. Yeah. Especially because of supply chain now. Apple buys up ahead of time all the RAM and so forth. So uh in fact the RAM for these are are part of the die because these are basically uh systems on a chip It's older RAM most likely too, so probably not the in demand RAM that people are really scarfing up right now. So presumably they already have it all, right? Yeah. In fact, I think we were talking about this on MacBreak Weekly. One of the issues they're gonna have with the NEO is it sells really rapidly is, they're gonna run out of these low-end what it what is it, A18 chip? And they're going to have to start 18 Pro. They're going to have to start using more modern chips, which by the way come with 12 gig s of RAM instead of eight gigs of RAM. So that'll be good for neobios, but it's gonna Apple's gonna be up against the supply chain. Cook uh said that uh let's see, here's the quote: uh we think looking forward, the Mac mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance. Both of these are amazing platforms for AI and agen tic . Um so uh the the Neo is high still highly available, I think. So you can still get it. But I have a feeling they're gonna run, you know, these are binned parts, I think, right? That they they they had extras of uh when they moved off the uh iphone 17. that's the speculation like and the best thing is like yeah this is leftover hardware and you can build something from it but also it is so funny that Apple scraps uh ended up creating like a a six hundred dollar computer like we've never seen before. Apple scraps. The Apple scrap computer. The leftovers. Built in the cave with a box of scraps, basically. It's the Mac button. Yeah. Uh Microsoft uh lifts its twenty twenty six AI spend by twenty five billion dollars. And this is just component prices alone . Uh they're gonna write checks for a hundred and ninety billion dollars their CapEx in twenty twenty six. That is that is what the market doesn't like to see is all of this money spent on uh Microsoft users are just winning, benefiting from all this money being spent, all these features coming to Microsoft users are so useful. It's great. They love them. They love them. They love them so much. you how much you love them. Do you also hate it? I have to I hate it. I hate it. They have to come out and say sorry for all the AI. We overdid it. We overdid it. We're pulling back. And Google's doing the same thing with Gemini and Google Sheets. And yes. Oh my god, it's it keeps trying to summarize the twit rundown. I don't want a summary. I got it exactly stop . I don't want that . Um so Microsoft has spent in the last four quarters , roughly, according to the register, ninety-seven billion dollars on infrastructure and equipment. What is the revenue for the ninety-seven billion? Thirty-seven billion. Ah, that's like a Hollywood film. The mass doesn't make up for it. Nevertheless. Yeah, the OpenAI pulled the plug. Yeah. I don't know if that's a problem. I can't figure out if that was Microsoft getting a divorce. Who was who was getting the divorce? Microsoft or opening I opening I wants the more partners. Like they want more money coming in. They don't want to be like beholden to Microsoft. But that whole thing was just so wild because Microsoft was just like drunk, drunk on power. Like look at this what this AI does to Bing. Nobody cares about Bing, and all of a sudden everyone's paying attention to Bing. Let's put Copile and everything. It really seemed like a company that had never seen some like this sort of like innovative tech so early and they're like, we gotta put this everywhere. We gotta go gung ho on all of this. And that's part of that desperation that Google hit too, like right after Bing Chat and ch was it that level of chat GPT hit. And then that's when everyone's saying Apple's too slow. But now we're a couple of years after that and I think seems like it's benefited Apple not to jump headfirst into this. To put this in perspective, here's a graph from Business Insider on uh CapEx spending. Starting with 2023, well, when you combine Amazon, Google Meta, and Microsoft, it was all well under 200 billion. 2024 made 200 billion, then 40$0 billion. Now we're close to 80$0 billion in cap expenditure. And you know what's interesting? Meta's spending less than anybody. It's Microsoft, Google, and Amazon that are really spending almost $200 billion each in twenty twenty six . Is so you were talking we were talking before the show began about an an AI bubble bursting. Is this the sign of that? That it's not a good sign. Like none of this is good. Um and I I do think like that's the thing. Like if this AI bubble bursts, it's not just like these companies are gonna be hurt or the AI companies, it is the the US economy itself, right? Like AI investments itself was a big chunk chunk of GDP growth over the last year. That's gonna be a big, big problem. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, said we have high confidence this will be monetized well. In other words, we're gonna make money, folks. We already have customer commitments for a substantial portion of it. What that doesn't account for is the customers who are open AI anthropic. How are if they collapse, it's a how the whole thing, it's dominoes, right? The whole thing collapses. If your customers can't keep paying that money, that's why it's a bubble. And that's why bursting is what does it what does it I would love uh w when when we think about the two ways, the bubble bursting or the bubble not bursting, right? What does it mean for the bubble to burst? Does it mean that I understand obviously from from a financial perspective, but what I'm I'm curious to hear is, Devendry, your um the the crystal ball of the bubble bursts, that means that what AI gets sued to pieces by copyright holders and that's what takes it under or because we know that it has a base level of helpfulness that we have seen people talk about and use and pay for. So what is it uh w what would cause it to burst? What is involved with it bursting if yeah, I'm just curious, like what does that look like? I mean, it's I think the best example we have right now is what happened to Sora. What did happen to Sora? Overnight. This thing that was a success and everyone was saying would rewrite Hollywood just didn't exist anymore. Poof. It was the number one app on uh on the app store for a while. Once upon a time it was, and then all of a sudden it wasn't. And then OpenAI is looking at the expenses of actually building, actually producing these AI videos. And it was it was the numbers were so bad it was just better to kill the thing, kill a billion dollars, several billion dollar deal that it had with Disney even Disney wasn't aware of it so you know these things can just poof out overnight because it t it takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of resources to run all of these AI things. The future, like I don't think I think some of these models will be useful in the way that people are using them now locally, in the way you're seeing Apple and other in a bit of Google too, like running things on devices, right? It's on the on device AI that can do a lot of great work for people. But the broader overall ecosystem that we're seeing here, I don't know how this can survive because they're not they're not making money, right? Those are the users came from the money, these sort of like subsidized versions of AI that you know Copilot was everywhere. Uh open the eye stuff was more readily available to people. Um but now these companies want people to pay. People would love to use it for free. I don't know if we're seeing people actually paying much for them though. I think Nicholas and I are on a different I don't put words in your mouth, Nicholas, but I'm going to propose this. Might be on a different side of the spectrum because we love AI. We use we are using AI. Sora to me looks like a toy, but there are very good valid non-toy uses of AI, right? Yeah. I th I yeah, I th I there's there's like two camps here, and I think one of the things was you know all the all the folks saying like oh Sora will revolutionize Hollywood uh consumers are all of a sudden they're gonna create their own I don't I mean isn't it like 90% of people create like or like 10% of people create junk. No one like no one's like clamoring to like make their own Hollywood movies starring their friends. It's not a thing that people people just want to like relax and like and uh I guess look at scrolls or or TikTok or whatever the case may be. No one's like clamoring to be like the next Spielberg. Like that's not a thing. So I think although there are models uh that can do that, right? I mean there's some good I have a pro I have a in development project. So that's that's the one one one half of this where it's like I think the idea like the average person is just a latent Stephen Spielberg and they just needed the schools. No I don't know that there's a whole lot of truth to that. There's a certain thing called talent. I just want to point out. Yeah, or just the desire to want want like I don't to you know just because a camera's available doesn't mean I'm gonna become the next, you know, Annie Leibowitz or whatever. It's like it's it's as a young man younger anyway, in TV And I thought in the early nineties, no one's ever gonna want to edit their own stuff. It's too horrible and too painful to do video editing. Uh I was wrong on that, but still it's not a majority of people. For people to start doing that. Cap cut and stuff like that made it. Yeah. Yeah. And so so that half but the other half is some of the the projects I've made the the the agency programming the, different models that are coming out, I think that's quite useful. I mean, you could, you know, just for creating simple apps and websites and and different things, something that could have taken you, you know, days or whatever to now you could spin it up in like an hour or whatever. I have I've launched so many different things, both you know, side projects, some internal CR projects, uh apps that are like 90% done that will be published in the App Store soon enough. It's like I could sit there. I could sit there and write all this Python code by hand, I suppose, but uh I could also just ask like Claude Code or Code Hazer or like deep seat and and have it write these for me. And it's like I'm still the one you know infusing the project my my creativity I want to do this I want it I I have this thing in my it's solving this particular problem for me or this cool thing but like yeah if you want to write python be my guess, like I don't I don't necessarily care. And it's funny, I see some of the older school programmers that are like, well, programming is an art form. I want to write the yes, of course, I understand that and I respect that, but that's like not everybody. A lot of folks just kind of want to watch YouTube. A lot of folks just want the app to work. Whatever it is, they don't, they're not in love with like the writing process. Like I'm a writer, I like writing. Most people don't like writing. If you're lucky, they might like reading. So it's like people confuse like their own passion for a subject as being the only way to engage with that subject. And I don't know that that's the case. And you know, I'm not saying that my my little projects are gonna become the next big big thing. That's not probably unlikely, but it's fun for me. At the very least, it it's it's a creative outlet that I get to spend time with that I would have been doing, you know, passively consuming, you know, Netflix or whatever the case may be. It's this is one of uh one of uh Nicholas's projects, deepdugo ut.com, where you replayed the world series. What I did was this is the the 2026 project. This project started in late February. At late February, I went to Polly Market and said, what are the projected teams for the World Series? At the time it was the Dodgers and the Mariners. So said, okay, great. What I want to do is simulate the World Series. Kind of like how back in the day they used to say that oh Madden football predicts the Dallas Cowboys are going to win the super bowl the Super Bowl this year. So it's like okay I want to do that. And so what it is is it uses all real stats from fan graphs. Like I I use Claude Code to build this. It used all real stats from fan graphs. It's all 30 teams. Uh the managers are given personalities based on like actual journalistic profiles and like sports illustrated and things like that. And the managers are run by models. And there's like a simulation it's kind of like dice rolls in in Dungeons and Dragons where it's like the managers are are the models, sonnet, opus, and they're deciding should I pull the picture? Should I keep the picture? I love this. And there's like a whole like pipeline of content in there. And it's like a whole I consider it to be like an art project. It's not journalism. It's not, it's just it was it as I was saying before we started recording, it was really the idea here. I'm a Mets fan. You can see the Mets hat in the background. I don't like the way the team is running. So I joke to my wife, it would be way better if just AI was managing the team, uh, was running the team specifically. David Stearns, the general manager. And so it's like, okay, let's just let's do that. Let's simulate the initial idea was let me simulate the entire league. 162 games that would have been a little expensive. So I simulated the World Series. I gave the Dodgers the fancier model. I gave them Opus. I gave the Mariners sonnet and you know I ran it a hundred times to give it some statistical significance. I had a Discord component where I I simulated opening day live in Discord. Uh there was channels for every single game. You know, there's audio podcasts, there's there's articles. You know, I think this is a uh uh representative of like the internet is just gonna be filled with AI stuff. I mean, we see all the AI slop videos nonstop now. This is arguably AI slop, but it to me it's interesting and it's like okay, it's kind of like it's just it's it's just a fun thing. I just want I just wanted to take that idea of like it would be better if AI was running the team and see how far I could take that. And it builds on my Tucson news site, some of the some of the work I did there. So all this stuff is like a creative and it gets me using the different models and it gets me, you know, in the trenches with this stuff which I write about precatsuma reports. I think it's it's uh you know, it's useful to actually use the tools beyond just the chat bot aspect, basically. Yeah, there's something you touched on there that stuck out to me and one of the reasons that I have come to appreciate these tools is you said you were talking to your wife and you you thought this. I think about the many times in the past where in the day I'll have five different silly ideas or actually good ideas for me or helpful ideas and I go, well, I don't have the time or the resources or whatever to uh to put toward that. So oh well. And then it just disappears into the ether. Uh there's a recent project that I did. Um involves a little bit of a story. Um my significant other was out thrifting for his DVD collection and uh texted me to ask me, is this DVD title in my collection? And then uh if you have time, could you go check? I was in the middle of something, so I was like, okay, I'll quickly go check. I run up stairs. I look at his DVD collection. It's not in alphabetical order. Okay. So I'm like, I'm gonna have to look through every single one of these to find out. I said, is there any order to this? He said, it's by genre. I said, Oh Lord. Whose genre choices? So anyway, immediately what I did was I took a photo. Spine color. Right, exactly. I took four photos of the whole collection and then popped them into Claude and said, can you quickly just read through all these titles for me? And it did. And then I was able to quickly check against that database. But then I thought, this could be so much inspired So what I did was from there, I said what I'd like to do is create a because my significant other not big I can I can barely get him to ever install any apps. So I'm like, I know he's not going to install an app. So what I need to do is make him a little website that he can just go to. So I what I ended up doing was I uh I decided I wanted it to be a really simple website. I don't want to have to work with uh some sort of database tool. Well, I can use Google Sheets as the database. I can reference that Google Sheets document and present it in this nice way. Anyway, ended up building up this little site for him that the main page lets him start to type in a title. It ties in with the TMDB, which is the movie database uh API to check against characters as he's typing and goes, oh, this is already in your collection or oh it's not. Would you like to add it? And so when he's at a thrift store, he can type in the title, see if he already has it. If he doesn't, then no, he can add it. And then the second page on the site has his whole collection again pulled from TMDB to get the photos of the front pages of the DVDs, you know. And all of that I was able to, you know, and it was the idea you were talking, Nicholas, about your creativity being there. Yeah, I'm the one who thought I don't want to build a site that has to have a database. So let's see about using Google Sheets. It figured out how to contact the API and do all that part of it. Then over time, uh, he said, Well, I like this, but the the seasons, it's not tracking seasons. Can we add that? Is that gonna take a long time? You don't have to do if it's too much work. I said, Oh, it's not too much work. And then asked Claude and it helps me create that part of it and push it. So I really do like those opportunities to where these ideas I would have otherwise just kind of had to throw by the wayside, I'm able to make use of that and I've appreciated that aspect of it more than anything. So I feel like the AI industry would be much better served taking Micah, your story right there, some like the this funds like nice stuff and like this is what AI enables. Don't don't lead with like job destruction. Don't lead with like like making a new movie. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of like a a down. You know, the I guess the flip side is is is everyone going to do this? How much money are they going to make off a little uh website database or a little baseball simulation. I don't know, maybe, but that's not my fault for like promising the sun and the stars with this technology. When they could have sold it as like, hey, this is like a useful productivity thing, they could have sold it much more sober ly and you know maybe it would have been better better. That's not how this industry works though, right? It has to be to the moon. It has to be to the moon basically. But here but this is the answer to your original question, Micah, of what happens if there's a bubble burst? I think what's happening is people are seeing value, a lot of it, right? And they are using it. And and and and maybe it starts with us geeks because we're much more likely to sit down in a keyboard and do something like you just did, or even think of the fact that, oh, I could take a picture of this and feed it to Claude, is certainly a geeky mindset. But this is going to trickle down. It's changing how people relate to computers, it changes how people use computers. And I think in the longer makes them much more useful. And I think that's why venture capital is pumping all this money into these companies that are then pumping the money into data centers and new models, because there is, they perceive a real upside to it, and it is a complete reinvention of how the world works. We've been through this before. We were industrialization changed everything, was a complete upheaval. When when we invented the car. That was a complete upheaval in American society, in how people got to places, about where their jobs were, the kinds of jobs. We have been through this before. There is upheaval. People lose their jobs. Uh people lose their lives about work by the way. Car cars becoming mainstream led to tons of kids just being dead on the streets. Well, absolutely on the street. So like that's I mean you could say I'm not saying it's all positive. I'm by any means. In fact, you could say, you know, cars have changed cities, they've changed where we live. We that made the suburbs possible. I mean there's all sorts of things that cars have done to change society. We've survived it, we've lived through this before. And I think this is the kind of change we're seeing. And if you had been sitting in nineteen ten thinking, what should I invest in? And you decided to invest in rubber, oil, and automotive uh stuff, you might have done better if you'd had some vision about it. And I think that's what the market's seeing. So, but to answer your question, Micah, Jeff Bezos said this uh a couple of months ago. He said there's a there are two kinds of bubbles. There are financial bubbles that are just about money, like the stock market crash, where everybody was in 1929 heavily invested and leveraged, and it just crashed because all this leverage, the margin calls, and everybody jumped out of windows. He said, versus an industrial bubble. And we have some examples of industrial bubbles. The transcontinental railway, all those railroads went bankrupt, by the way. They all went out of business. The internet boom of the late 19th or 20th century, we laid a lot of fiber. A lot of those companies, MCI is gone, they're gone, but the fiber is still there. Uh the railroads were still there. There's infrastructure that gets built. And I think Bezos is saying this is that kind of bubble. It is in the long run a potentially positive bubble. It's not a financial bubble where people just lose their shirts, they might, but it is a bubble where and companies will, I'm sure, go out of business, and some investors will lose their shirts. And some even, you know, mom and pop retail investors might lose their shirts in the stock market. But ultimately, we're going to get some value out of it. And that's the reason I'm asked you, N icholas, is I think you and I, and I'll have to add Micah now to this, have created things that we see some real value in it. More than just I mean, yeah, it's an art project, but you can see there's value being created that couldn't have been created before. Those projects are great. Those projects are totally great. But I look at like you bring these to the AI executives like you're saying, Nicholas, they're gonna look at this and be like, oh, nur chit . Right. This is of course. Wonderful nerd shit. And it's like ah I can I can I build like a a global empire on this? Can I sell this to the average consumer? And I don't know if they can't. Like that that to me is. No, they focused on chatbots, they focused on Sora. They focused on this crappy consumer. This is cool stuff. Like it's super cool. I wish I had time to like play around with these things in this way too. Uh unfortunately, like my perspective is from like looking at the news and try trying to see like what is happening at this at the broader market level. Yeah. People look at it that way have a much more negative point of view than the people who are actually playing with this stuff and see oh there's something here that's right. There's if you just think it's a bunch of chat bots, it's like, oh who cares? This is so sorrow. It is it is worrying though, because even just like from the chatbot side, which is how normal people are interacting with us, by the way. Like that's how it is. And in the future it's probably gonna be the handful of like the super serie or whatever. It's gonna be personal assistance, people talking to their phone or whatever, saying, Do this for me. Can you figure out how to do this for me rather than doing the legwork that you guys are doing right now? Um but I I look at like what is happening in the AI industry and just like the effect it's having on humanity is kind of disturbing like at a philosophical level that is kind of what's keeping me partially away from it because it does feel like we're stripping our humanity away a little bit here creatively. Um I just saw a paper that said that AI psychosis was almost inevitable. And there there are so many examples of AI psychosis right now . People have killed. People have hurt themselves. They've killed other people. Um somebody I saw tweeted this recently, like a a toy, like a it used to be a toy slightly injures a kid and the entire thing is pulled offline. And you have these models out here who are they're just out here kind of like uh doing weird things to human psychology that we don't totally understand, but that's a an acceptable loss. It's an acceptable loss for the progress of this industry and I find that I don't know very, very sad and disheartening. I want to agree with that a hundred percent too. I that is one of that has been one of the issues that you know because we talked a lot about it uh uh over the course of multiple episodes of Tech News Weekly, is specific ally the different AI systems and the horrible situations that have come out of it in those cases. And yeah, it's specifically what you touched on that a toy does this or a car does this and those things get recalled or stopped or what have you. Because we have regulations for those things. Yeah. I do struggle with the concept of the AI tools that have been given freely to school s and schools then adopting them so freely. I don't know how to reckon with that. I don't know , other than I wish that, yeah, as soon as those things happened it, should have been shut down. It should have at the very least been pulled um from from education, I guess. But again, I don't I don't know how to reckon with that. And I think that one thing that is difficult to do in any form of media, but in particular in forms of media that tend to be sort of condensed down, is holding two points of contrasting beliefs and having them both heard and not thinking that one outshines the other. So I can say that I have enjoyed the ways that I have made use of these tools , and I can say I am not happy with the fact that people have been killed or have killed themselves at least partially because of these tools, and have those things both be true and have all of that communicated is very difficult because people do want a side to be taken. And in that way, it is difficult. Yeah, Mike, I I'm right there with you. I as someone I, you know, obviously I use these things, I find some utility with them. The downsides are obvious and very bad. And I don't know that one side needs to beat the other, you know, but to communicate that there's merits to this whole is is very difficult, uh especially in today's climate where you know people don't read the article. They might read the headline, they might read the tweet, they'll see a uh a reel on Instagram. There's there's really uh it's difficult to kind of get uh nuanced and in-depth messages out there nowadays. Uh, so it's it's very tricky. And it's I I will say I spoke at a at a University of Arizona class maybe two months ago to discuss my Tucson news site, and I will say the students there were very skeptical of AI. They were they were very oh my Leo, they were uh cringe, you know they were not they were they were not uh down with the sickness so to speak. They they uh this is destroying our ability to think, so on and so forth. And so I don't know if there's a generational aspect here. You know, I'm I'm not a kid, I'm 40. Uh these were like 20 year olds, give or take. Uh and there were, you know, by and large, this is twenty students, they were by and large not certainly not in love with the idea of AI. Uh so I don't know how this I think they're scared . Right? I mean, if you're college right now, you've got to be scared about what what's the job market gonna be? What is it? Everything's on fire. So yeah. It's just add one to the pile. You know. Yeah. Let's take a little break. Uh you're watching this week in tech with the week's tech news. Micah Sargent is here . It's so nice to have you. We bad thought maybe Micah would have to take over, because I am thousands of miles in the middle. I am in the most remote spot in the world in the middle of the ocean. It's called Hawaii. Maybe you've heard of it. And you can see the ocean uh behind me. Having a wonderful time, I must say. And so I thought, well, I should see if I could do shows from uh other places, and it's working pretty well, actually. This should be your do you think? Just new extreme environments. I think so. I think Antarctica is next, right? That's Dravinda Hardowar from uh and gadget, where he's senior editor. And uh Nicholas De Leon is also here. Great to have you, senior electronics reporter at consumer reports. We are going to take a little break. Uh because we weren't sure if this would work, I uh recorded all the commercials ahead of time. So uh we all get to stand up and wander around. Uh and we'll be back with more of Twit in just a moment . This episode of TWIT brought to you by Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? It's time to upgrade, put that old mattress on the curb, upgrade to a helix mattress, and get yourself a good night's rest. I mean, we love our helix mattress. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. I could tell you, I'm missing it in Hawaii. And let me tell you, don't settle for some third party mattress made overseas with low quality and really questionable materials. 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Get another twenty five minutes, you're gonna feel great in the morning. Participants on average achieve thirty nine more minutes of overall sleep per night. Time and time again, helixep S relemains the most awarded mattress brand. Tested and reviewed by experts. Forbes loves it. Wired loves it. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the U.S. And you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. They call it their happy with Helix Guarantee and it provides an absolutely risk-free customer-first experience because they want to ensure you're completely satisfied with your mattress. By the way, I am. You never get my mattress back. I love my helix. Go to helix sleep.com slash twit for 27% off site wide during the Memorial Day sale, best of web offer. And it's exclusively for listeners of this week in tech, so make sure you go to that address. That's helix sleep.com slash twit, 27% off, site-wide. And please make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you twit. This offer ends may thirty first, and if you're listening after the sale ends, I'm sorry, but you should still check 'em out because they always have great deals. Helix sleep dot com slash twit Now back to Hawaii. All right, we're back uh on Twit. Uh is this your site cross-wording the situation, Nicholas? Is this you too? That's mine. Yes. So what is this? So you know them you, know the meme monitoring the situation, I presume everyone here. You're a news junkie and you're really following, you know, whatever. They're monitoring the situation. Yeah. That's kind of a uh tongue-in-cheek, whatever. So about a month ago, I started doing the Apple News mini crossword puzzle because I'm becoming an old, old man in real time. Yes, you are. Yes. Uh but I wasn't all the clues were generic. It's like not a cat, but a blank. So I was like, well, that's fine. But like, what if the clues were all about news items? And we called it cross-worded So it's like all the clues are so this I built with Claude Code. This yeah, this actually to,ok probably, I mean I don't know. So it's writing the clues from the news? Yeah, so what it's doing, there's a couple things happening. Basically, it is going out and scanning the major news, the New York Times, Reuters, AP. It's either scanning their websites or their uh blue sky feeds or what you know, a bunch of different sources. It's kind of like getting a state of the news and it goes back, I think, two months. Uh, and then that's all put against a giant word open source word list that's out there somewhere. Uh and then it tries to create it tries to create the puzzle. The puzzle cost me like a penny to create I Sonic Sonic is doing it. Sonic amazing actually it's so it was good. Yeah. Yeah. It was it took about two weeks to really nail it. I had a lot of problems with the iOS keyboard for whatever reason. Uh and the initial version, like uh maybe half of the clues were based in news and the other half were just kind of random generic stuff. So it took a little while to really nail down. But like you know, this is really hard. Yeah. I'm trying to many. I haven't gotten one yet. Let's no, me neither . Wow. So yeah. I will say, you know, uh I I stopped doing them after the first week or so. So I really don't expect that. I don't have them handy. I 'm it's not. It's gonna go up a lot. Crosswording the situation dot com. Yeah. This is a challenging MIDI. Now, do you play the fun little tune when you solve it at the end? Uh no, I think these are the small da I'm happy, I'm happy to add that to the to the uh you can make a pull request, Leo . I will. I'll do a PR for you. Yeah, but that's the thing. So this is impressive. It's just like I have, I don't know, uh this is cut under the way my brain, all these little sides And now I have the the the time and like the res et of again. You need, I think, to really uh take advantage of this, I is my is my feeling on this. Wow, this is great. Yeah. Very nice. So, you know, I I, you know, again, none of this is going to become the next Facebook or whatever, but it's it's just a fun creative way to spend an hour or so here or there and I get to use the models. Like it and it keeps me like I don't know. I think it's fun. Uh ultimately this is fun too. Actually, I don't know if you want to be the next Facebook. You know, uh Meta's historic loss in court could cost a lot more than 375 million dollars. This is in New Mexico, just you know, next door. Next door, yeah. Uh the uh attorney general Raul Torres sued Meta in a landmark child safety case, one uh thro uh jury uh uh I'm sorry the the judge awarded $375 million. They go back now for a three-week public nuisance trial whether the uh and they'll argue over the changes because the uh attorney general doesn't want just money, he wants Meta to make some changes to Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including age verification for New Mexico users, prohibiting end-to-end encryption for users under 18 . I don't know what that's all about. And capping their use to 90 hours a month, limiting engagement boosting features like infinite scroll and autoplay, and requiring meta to detect 99% of new CSA M . Uh crazy . Um it is not a good thing to be meta right now, if you ask me. No. Meta's response. Meta's response. We're gonna we're gonna leave New Mexico if you do this. We're gone. These are technologically impractical changes. Many of them are. Yeah. Some of them seem reasonable, you know, maybe time limits or whatever, but like the we're gonna get rid of end-to-end encryption. I mean, that's bad for any number of reasons. Um they don't want kids to have privacy. I'm I'm trying to figure out what this is. Uh you know, it's interesting because what happens when you do this is now suddenly you have to also ban VPNs. Because if you if you say, well, this is only in New Mexico, then kids who aren't stupid are going to say, oh, well, guess what? I'm no longer in New Mexico , which is leading Utah to want to ban effectively ban VPNs. Utah's the first state to hold websites liable. Websites like Meta would be liable for users who mask their locations with VPNs. This law goes into effect in just a few days. It was signed into law by the governor on March nineteenth. It goes into effect on May sixth . It's uh uh formally Senate Bill SB 73. And this is what you're gonna see in a lot of these states. I imagine New Mexico's next, Nord VPN, and I'm sure joined by every other VPN provider in the world, has called the law a quote, unresolvable compliance paradox and liability trap. The EFF says the legal risk can push sites to either ban all known VPN IPs or mandate age verification for every visitor in the world. Well, we can't tell you're from Utah, so we're just going to make sure you all do it . I th what is with legislatures? I don't think they understand technology. What is look, I understand that. The thinky that they are socialism will solve everything. Yeah. I and this is this goes back in a way to what we were talking about earlier, which is there are harms. Clearly there are harms to the internet. And maybe when we were starting out, we should have thought more about that. We didn't . Those harms are here. Social media is here. But this is not the solution. Uh by the way, that was a jury trial. I got that wrong. So the jury awarded 3$75 million in the New Mexico . Meanwhile, Australia continues the pain for Meta , a 2.25% uh levy on their uh revenue in Australia, not just Meta, but Google and TikTok , if they refuse to pay news publishers. This is a Rupert Murdoch bill that was passed. And and so what happened is uh Meta and others said, Well, fine, no news for you. So Australia said, Well, fine, even if you don't give us news, you're gonna give us two and a quarter percent of your revenue. That's so funny. That is so funny. This is This is basically all about protecting a more abundant industry, the news industry. And in particular, Rupert Murdoch's news industry. If it wasn't actu ally this secret other , you know, uh deal that is happening, there's something to the idea that uh because I remember working for a news organization at the time when for all con the ones you worked for, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I remember uh someone coming in. I don't mean to be me. I mean, but it is but it is the case, yeah. And there was a specialist who came in and was like, here's how you're gonna make it big on Facebook and then you find out uh that well, allegedly that Facebook values and all that kind of stuff. Oh yeah. So I do uh I wish there was a world in which these companies that are sort of summarizing the news that exists did have to pay a little bit, but it sucks that really that's not what this about. Nobody owns the news. I mean uh And that's true. If somebody owned the news, then you couldn't do that crossword puzzle, Nicholas, because the news is the news. You can I mean I'll shut it down. It doesn't matter. But that's the point is nobody really owns this. The news, the facts are not copyrightable. The treatment of it is, but not the facts themselves. Yeah. They were just reading newspaper headlines and newspaper reports. They didn't have the reporters. They were just repeating what was there. So we've been here before. We kinda keep doing it every time we have a big media shift. Uh the What's the difference between saying no one owns the news and no one owns the alphabet? Because we could just say that, oh, just because you've arranged these letters in a certain way doesn't mean that you should get paid for it. I love that. I don't think I like that argument. No one owns the news. Mm-hmm. Well, facts are facts. You can't own facts. You can't copy right the facts. You can copyright how you wrote it. You can copyright your treatment of it. But isn't that what these these the meta and tick tock and etc. were pulling from the treatment of they weren't pulling the fact, right? They were they were summarizing the treatment that was put together about the thing that happened. If this really were the case, then most websites would be gone because what happens? One store, one website breaks a story, and every other website in the world, hundreds of them copy it. I know this because when I go through the news every day looking for stories for the show, I get 20 copies of the same story. Yeah, I always try to find the original, right? It's not easy. Sometimes it's really hard to do. Uh, but when the when when Axi os or the information or the New York Times or the journal breaks it, I try to use their version of the story. But it's not easy to do because it's you can't copyright it. It's a it's a f it's a story. A lot of stories are just like stuff a company announced, so everybody's gonna have their take on it, their spin on it. That's not breaking that's not like a scoop, you know. That's a good thing it's to say if if Axios gets a scoop, it's polite to say Axios in a scoop broke the story. Yeah. But that's just polite. I mean it yeah, there's nothing stopping you from repeating it. In fact it's what uh gets around most paywalls. You know, most people aren't gonna pay $400 a year for the information, but don't worry, you don't have to. You don't have to, someone will pub publish one. Nobody's gonna reprint it. Yeah. Including us . I mean, I mean, I'm one of the I'm a guilty party in this . I'm not going out and doing any reporting. I'm counting on you, Davindra, and you, Nicholas, and you, Mike. Well Micah, you don't either but Yeah, I was gonna say I'm I'm one of you. I'm one of you. Uh this is uh this is commentary. This is not reporting. Meta is also in trouble in the EU for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. This is the same story. You know, as soon as uh these countries uh require age verification, like in England, uh VPNs become huge in that jurisdiction . Um Meta is in breach of the Digital Services Act for failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram. Now, the scary thing is the fines on this could be massive, you know, a large percentage of their global revenue . Um we shall wait and see what they find them. The EU did create their own age verification app, which was oh yeah, instantly cracked, like within two hours . Uh in fact there were a number of security holes in it . Ursula uh von der Leyen, who is now in charge of uh uh uh the DSA in the EU says online platforms can easily rely on a ourge verification app so there are no more excuses. We have zero tolerance for companies that do not respect our children's rights. I should just turn it on a Schwarzenegger, sorry. Um but you know Meta has not adopted the EU's age verification and probably a good thing. Security researchers demonstrated it could be bypassed oh I'm sorry, did I say two hours? Within two minutes of its release. The source code 's up on GitHub, so yeah. Yeah, it's open source. Point chat GPT . Exactly. Have you all started getting those uh I I've been logging in or doing whatever these different services and now they're all starting to ask me what state I live in too. Yeah. That's I know. Isn't that so annoying? Now I was I was even on it was it was on Apple TV, was just wanting to watch some show. And it said, hold on, you gotta log into your account. I had to go on my phone like some sort of animal, go to the website like some sort of animal, and then say my age, like some sort of human. I know here in Arizona they passed a law you to visit adult websites, you need uh either ID or you know, uh a half clever high school student will just use a VPN or whatever. Uh but that you know McGlovin. My name's McGlovin. I live in Hawaii. Okay, just just ban 'em. I don't I I mean, at this point I'm old, I don't care as much as I used to. So Well, and this is important because uh I think nobody would say, Oh, a kid should be able to visit a porn site. We all agree of course kids should be able to do that. You can't buy a Playboy in a 7 Eleven if you're right. Exactly right. Dig it out of the ground like you do with the mushrooms. Or burying their playboys. I don't understand what that is all about. But anyway, that's another story for another day. So I think we're for it. But what what the interesting thing is it really never was never about the porn ban. That was just the the wedge of course in the door. Because really they want to ban the internet for people under 16. They want to ban social media. They want to really restrict And I'm not sure I agree with that. I don't know if that's a good thing. Yeah, I mean when I was a kid, I I this is the thing where like parent, I know parenting is important. When I was a kid, I was I was looking up video game stuff I was what was what was uh you know it's like I was I was actually uh using it as research and homework and the things you were supposed to use it for even at an early age. Well my, mom is very strict that I knew from a very early age not to tempt fate, so to speak. Uh but like that's not every kid. You know, some kids are gonna look up uh they're gonna gamble on polymarket or whatever the case may be. So it's like I but this is the role of a parent to like tell you know you know if our nation's governing body can gamble on polymarket, I think everybody should be allowed to go. Talk talk about downfall of our civilization of yeah. But you know, Nicholas, like the thing is, the internet was just one place back then, like when we were it was the shared family computer that your parents could watch you do stuff in, and maybe occasionally you'd have access at your school library or something, but now it's like it is everywhere. Everyone has their pocket, right? In their pocket and like that's the thing. And I I I think the EU's heart is in the right place. Like protecting kids in so many ways. I just don't think they have the technology to do it. They don't have to do it there. You did a study that said, Oh, look, a kid can say I'm eighteen on Facebook and there's nothing to stop them. Well, yeah. I mean, we have a we run a Mastodon instance, right? Uh, twit.social, which you're all welcome to join if you want to be on Mastodon. And uh I have now been forced, because of all these laws and various jurisdictions, to say you must be over 18 to use it. But Mastodon has no age verification capability. So I just say by signing up you assert that you are over 18, you must be over eighteen. That's dopey, but I feel like I have to do it. How porn sites used to do it, as I've heard. So it used to be they do liquor sites do it. What's your birthday, right? And that's all exactly right. Yep. It's it's the same thing. I mean it's again like I think the use heart is in the right place because we we allowed this internet to grow to to obscene heights, like Facebook's reach. Uh its market reach is insane. What it was allowed to do, the companies it was allowed to gobble up the sort of like mine share that is fully owned by Mark Zuckerberg, I think is kind of gross. And we we lived through that. I reported through that. And it was a lot of governments, a lot of just like, hey, Facebook wants to buy this company, and we're gonna allow this nineteen billion dollar WhatsApp deal or whatever. Not many questions being asked. We all thought like, oh, social media is great. These tech companies are trying to do good in the world. And maybe the reason I'm sounding a little negative now is like I've I've lived through several waves of tech company innovation. Right. And every time, practically every time, um it has not ended up so great. And certainly the the social media thing was just like it was purely yeah, money grab, user attention grab. We want those DAUs. We want to have the most engagement over our competitors at the cost of users, at the cost of like kids' mental health, at the cost of so many things. But what's the solution? Yeah. That's saying it's so hard. Go ahead. We gotta we have to have we have to have these discussions. Where there are gonna be some clunky, clunky solutions. Some things are not gonna work. But you know, we gotta start having this conversation more broadly. Maybe we should like uh I have my daughter is seven years old right now, so she is uh years away. We know social media has not been great for kids, like for teenagers in particular. Like are you gonna give a kid a phone? I don't know yet. Would I do what I do kind of want to do eventually is just like, you know what is great? Um a GPS and uh cellular enabled Apple Watch is a great thing, like for parents. Like could could be like that is your emergency, you need to get a hold of me for whatever. Um I need to see where you are if you're going to hang out with friends or something. I'm less interested in location tracking and more in just like anything happens. You raise your wrist, you call for help. You that can happen. And I can read the thing 's actually embraced that a couple of years ago. They allowed you to set up a watch with your phone without them having a phone. They can't for sure. And like the the whole the whole family plans and stuff like those sorts of things, that's kind of where I'm sitting. Um I think that's a good solution. Can I ask how are you how are you deciding on d is this a matter of talking to other parents and seeing what they do? Is it a matter of reading books? Is it a matter of all of these things? That's something that I've I've always been curious about with especially uh parents who are a little bit more tech knowledgeable. We have uh Lisa Schmeiser talks a lot about the work that she friend of the show does with her daughter. And like they have a contract that they wrote up together, and every, you know, everyone's signed. So there's just different ways of doing it. I've seen how Jason Howell, friend of the show, has done that. You know what I mean? And so I'm just curious what your method is because you said you don't know yet. Are you still collecting data to There are no books written about this, right? Like books are the last place you go to like figure out what is happening in like media and social media and stuff. Um a lot of it's just like reading the news , seeing what's happening, and looking at the tools available out there too. Like there are some really gross things out there. There's this, I don't know if you guys have seen Angel Sense. Those sorts of um it's the wearable that um it was initially meant for kids with autism and kids who are like a flight risk, kids who like could run away from school or something, for parents to keep track of things. But now it's become just like this really thing for paranoid parents to get for their kids and it can let them listen in to what is happening. Like just instant my god to listen into what's happening. And now school feeling this is a rights violation. You cannot just listen into every single classroom and parents are fighting it. Parents like, no, I must understand what is going around my kid at all. Hear what's happening in the class and then complain to the teacher and staff parent that reads the kid's diary every night. Wasn't that in Batman The Dark Knight? This is a thing that exists now and some parents are doing it and I think it's insane. So I'm thinking of like a sane reaction also this will involve conversation with my daughter, seeing what she wants to use. And right now what we're doing is mainly tech in in a localized way that I can see what she's doing, right? She is a she is an iPad kid. Like she spends time in her iPad. She loves Minecraft. I'm there engaging with her. She's not out there playing with like randoms online yet. We're not doing Roblox. And maybe that's gonna be a conversation. That's gonna be a fight at some point, because from what I hear, from what I've seen, Roblox is not great. Yeah, at taking care of that community. But Minecraft is relatively safe. She plays with her with her cousins once in a while, she plays with me. The idea of a central computer , I think we can we kind of gotta go back to that. The den computer, the living room computer, where like your kids are online and doing stuff and doing stuff for school and you're like interacting with them. It's so funny because I was a friend of uh one of my friends, he says like that was like you know the internet, you know, the phones everywhere. The the computer at the den was peak. That was the best because you could go on, you could use whatever, you know, read whatever, and then boom, you're done. And then you're back in reality, you're out of the matrix. And that was way more balanced and way more healthy. And frankly, if you're a parent, you know, like I said, my mom was very strict, but she had the advantage of there was one computer which she could monitor. And I bet you, you know, uh honestly, I wasn't quite obedient. I really didn't try to say to it was very strict. So I I got the message very quick is is what I'm saying. But like it was a lot easier in the nineties to do that than now. Even if you're like a sophisticated parent, oh I'm gonna block it on the router. Nothing, nope, not a single packet is getting into my house. It's like, okay, well, they go to school, they have friends, you know. Devices have cellular, they're not touching your router, like there's so many workarounds. But I do remember like in the 90s with the warnings to parents were like, don't let your kids talk to strangers on the internet. And I absolutely spent many of my talking to strangers on the internet about anime and video games and whatever. And I've made some of my like greatest friends there. Like that to me that, to me was peak internet. Just like this pure discovery, this thing that was like un mostly untouched by like big corporate tech companies. It was just people out there building things, doing cool things, like what you guys are kind of doing now with AI. Like the coolest thing about AI is it does take us back to that sort of like era of people just making cool sh and I kind of that's what happened with the personal computer era, right? We suddenly have a computer and I and you're all of an age where you probably had that computer as a kid and you you messed with it. Maybe some of you didn't program destroyed it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's how you back and that's fantastic. And that's why you're geeks now, right? Uh -huh. But the this this is like we were talking about Apple and AI. Like the thing as I've been thinking about Apple and Turnus, like how he can change his company. I think Apple is the last like PC computer company that is actually focused on personal computing, right? Like everyone else was chasing AI or so many things. Apple's like, we're making better laptops, we're making better phones, we're making better earbuds or something. But it's tech that you use, you touch and feel and that affects your lives. That is personal computing. And I wish more companies kind of thought like that. You know, I just um I reviewed one of Dell's like great new laptops, the XPS 14, and it does so many things right. It has this killer key board issue. And I'm talking to Dell. I'm talking to people like how the hell it's um it doesn't type fast enough. Oh no. It don't type good. It can't be good. It is a beautiful, beautifully machined uh thing. Well it's like so one thing I do a lot of things. Is that a Windows problem? Can you put Linux on it and see if it works better than that? I think we've I've talked to Dell, they've talked to their engineers, they've localized to like it was maybe part of the uh the part that's being used, the digitizer, to like accept keyboard commands like something was so there, they've issued a firmware upgrade. And I've seen it and it it's just like a weird issue for such like a beautiful machine to have. But so you can type faster than the keyboard can could keep it's the keyboard is just like dead. It's broken. Like if you type if I type like the comma and spacebar too quickly, it'll register spacebar, comma. I'm like I can't I can't work on this. say it was a manufacturing issue with like the first run that went to reviewers. I'm gonna check out like a newer machine to see if they actually fix it. Right. I thought that was a great looking thing. But it's a lot of the Linux guys liked it. Awesome battery life yeah, I saw that. It's a great it's like a great Windows machine otherwise, but it's also like man, you guys are so focused. Last year they were focused on that dumb rebrand of like r changing all their computers and god they went back to XPS. Oh man, I felt so good. I felt so good coming in. They're like a great line. You were all right. You were many XPS's over. It was amazing. By the way, we on Wednesday we had Narrath Patel, who was the founder of Framework on the intelligent machines, and he they're making some that new PC uh laptop they made is pretty much I'm I'm worried about them because I don't their things tend to be more expensive and like it really it is focused on the tinker market. But they're small, so they also get hit harder by the supply chain shortage because they're not buying as many RAM chips or whatever. But he told me an interesting stat. He said 60% of the people who buy this new uh laptop are running Linux on it. They're not ordering it with Windows. They're running it with Linux. Yeah, I've seen a lot of uh evangelization. Uh you know, because of the AI stuff, a lot of this is either Mac first or Linux first. Windows is kind of incidental to this AI conversation. As far as the stuff that I'm doing. And a lot of Linux guys have been talking up framework for I don't know past year or whatever. It's like these are good. It's nice machine. It's nice machine. It was a little clunky, you know, when it was the you know, the 13 and the 16, the original were a little I had They were too big. Yeah. It was a little clunky, but now they've decided well we're gonna do a unibody aluminum uh chassis, much like the MacBook. And I think uh every I haven't seen it yet, but I think are you reviewing it, uh Defender? I'm not reviewing it. I think uh maybe Dan Cooper and Gadget who's reviewing it, but we we were looking at it, we've covered them. I really like them as a company. But yeah, to my broader point, like I wish more people were like focused on the idea of personal computing, just like tech, tech that people are using . And that it remains Apple's advantage. And every time Microsoft tries to release actual hardware, kind of falls on its face. Like you look at the surface. They can't they had Xbox. They had Xbox for so long. They keep fumbling that ball. And I don't understand what is happening. It's so stupid. And a lot of this is just tied to companies whose attention is diverted to AI or uh online infrastruc infrastructure, something else, something else that is not the core of what bu being a personal computing company should be. So I don't know. That's just a thought I've had. Like a that's kind of a little bit Turnus is a hardware guy. So maybe there's some hope that they will continue to focus on hardware. Although they had a very good quarter for services. And uh third services is now a big part of their overall. Tim Cook makes the make those little I I did that stickers for for services because he he's the service guy. He's the one who launched all those services. He's the one who revamped their supply chain. You could sell them a computer once, but you could sell them services forever. Yeah. But tur Turnus is interesting because it's sort of like Apple ha does have tunnel vision sometimes, right? Sometimes they're like we must do it this way, you must do it our way, we're not gonna uh cater to the market. And I do think Steve Jobs IDis. It's that it's that still hangover of no we know best. We know best. We know best or we're not going to touch that market. That's that's beneath us or something. And the idea of Apple ten years ago doing a six hundred dollar laptop. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. But now it's like it is viable and also not only are they gonna do it, they're gonna make the best one that we have ever seen in that price range. I don't know how long they're gonna be able to hold on to that, but I think that bodes well to like the future of how they consider products and what they're actually gonna deliver to people. So that's actually a really good point. I mean if you're if you say putting technology in people's hands is what's important, that NEO is a really good example of that. It is. I've been using it like on and off like alongside an air and next to MacBook Pros and like that screen is so good. It has decent speakers. Like it's nice. It is a what if you want a if you want that Neo before prices skyrocket or supply disappears, like just get it. It's it's it reminds me a little I had in college I was in college from 2004 to 208 and I had the 12 inch PowerBook G4. Um my uncle got it to me as a high school graduation gift. Nice. And it was like uh in retrospect it broke uh at some point. I I wish I I was actually on eBay literally earlier this week trying to find one. Uh but but like the Neo is the new version of it. It's it's like it's small, it's awesome. It's like it does it's like the perfect college laptop. I actually have one on loan from Apple. Uh I'll probably post like a a first person impression thing or whatever the next week or so. Uh but yeah, it is like I would be very hard pressed to recommend. Like I have I live in a kind of a rural area, but one of my neighbors is constantly asking me, like, oh, what's best the laptop? What should I get? Man, for $600, I would be very reluctant to mention anything other than the Neo at this point. I cannot imagine a window, a PC that even touch, you know, you get more expensive, you know, Windows laptops are, you know, there's plenty of good ones. But at this price point, uh, I don't know. It'd be really hard to find something uh this credible uh at that price. Absolutely. One other issue before we take a break uh with Meta, one other story. Meta has an insatiable need for power, just like all these companies, especially the Frontier AI labs. In 2024, they used 18,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in their data centers, uh, according to TechCrunch, enough to power 1.7 million American homes for a year. Uh, they have committed to building 30 gigs of renewable power sources, but one of the things they want to do, and they've just signed a deal with a company called Overview Energy, is put a thousand satellites up that will beam light from the sun to solar farms over infrared to power data centers at night. Wasn't this a James Bond supervillain plot? Yes, it's very supervillain, isn't it? Overview is a four year old uh Virginia outfit that emerged from stealth in December . Developing spacecraft, they collect plentiful solar power in space, convert it to near infrared light, beam it at solar farms, hundreds of megawatts, which then convert that light to electricity. It is very James Bond. That's cool. Yeah, that's neat. Well it's better than burning natural gas, as Elon Musk is, uh, to power your data centers, that's for sure. Yeah. Yeah. we have we have gone down a really dumb pipeline these days. Ha pipeline. Ha pipeline. That's basically a giant space laser though, right? That's like a giant space laser. It's a giant space laser. Frickin' lasers. Las er. That's Micah Sargent. He completes me. Oh. Aw, great to have you. Good to be here. Yeah, I don't get to work with you enough. I miss those days when we had a studio and I saw him every day. And we did our bits. And we did our little bits. Uh also here, Dav indra Hardawar from Engadget. It's great to see you also. And newlywed Nicholas De Leon, senior electronics reporter consumer. When you said your wife, I went Ashley, so great. You guys uh deserve all that happiness. I'm very happy for you. That's great. Uh we'll have more from Hawaii in just a little bit. Stay here. This episode of this week in tech brought to you by this little guy looking over uh looking taking care of my house while I'm gone. It's a thinxed canary and it's amazing. This is our sponsor for this segment. Uh this it if you look at it, it looks like a US external USB drive, right? But no no no it's so much more. 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I should also tell you, they've been advertising with us this month for 10 years. Thank you, our anniversary . They have never, not once, has anyone ever asked for that refund. Visit canary.tools slash twit. Enter the code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box, canary dot tools slash twit. We love them. Actually, if you go to canary.tools slash love, you'll see all the love from so many people. Canary.tools slash twit. Don't forget to enter Twit in the how did you hear about us box? Now uh back to Twit. Thank you, Leo . I get to thank myself. Something I rarely get to do. So the trial of the century's been going on. It started on um last Monday. Musk versus Altman. Week one, Elon Musk took the stand for a couple of days, and it was juicy. He said a lot of interesting things. AI could kill us all. He's he likened it to the Terminator. He said, uh that uh he was duped that open AI, because you know he was of course the original founder. He's suing him saying he wants some of the profits because he founded a nonprofit. And when they converted to a for-profit, he says, Well, I want some of the profits if you're going to be a for-profit. Could could be worth billions of dollars. That's what Elon wants. I'm not sure his testimony helped him a whole lot. Um OpenAI's lawyer , William Sabbath, who actually, by the way, uh represented Tesla at one point, uh said that Musk was never committed to OpenAI being a nonprofit. He was simply suing to undermine a competitor. Because don't forget, Elon now has a for-profit AI company called XIAI, which merged with SpaceX a little while ago. So what is it? Is Elon trying to uh to preserve AI safety or is he just trying to put AI open AI out of business? At one point he also admitted, which was I think a tactical error, that XAI distills open AI's models. Whoopsie. What is who doesn't? Who does it? So what is what is that, Nicholas? Distilling the models. What does that mean? I actually don't know how to explain it very well. It's basically, you're just you're kind of copying someone's homework, I guess is the easiest way to do it. Yeah, looking at that's a good way to put it. So uh the the long long time anthropic uh and and I think open AI have accused the Chinese AI models of spilling. Basically, you create an LLM and then in the post-training, you make it even smarter by opening accounts with the frontier model. Let's say you're using Claude . Uh Anthropics says uh uh that one of the Chinese models opened 24,000 fraudulent accounts with Claude. Wow. And peppered it with questions and used its answers in its training. So, you know, a lot of times you'll do post-training on an A LL model with experts. You'll get an expert physicist and you'll say, okay , now give it uh a bunch of physics, tough physics questions, and then grade its response and teach it where it went wrong, make it better at physics. So in effect, they're asking anthropic uh or open AI to be the teacher and make the AI better. And I think for that reason, some of these Chinese models are actually Deep Seek just came out with version four. Quen is very good, Kimmy's very good. I think they're probably good because they've been trained on the frontier models from anthropic and open AI. Well, XIAI AI apparently is doing the same thing. Yeah. Why say it? Why say he's not a very smart guy. Like, I don't know what it will take for us to stop taking Elon Musk seriously at this point. Like, he has proven himself to be a bad dude. The richest man in the world is out there um doing horrible things. Like the last year alone. I can list so many things, but the thing I keep coming back to is that Nazi salute. Tells me who you are. Yeah, that's true. In that moment. Tells me who you are being um uh the thing I will never forgive him for is gutting USA ID . Uh something that has already affected hundreds of thousands of people and will likely lead to millions of deaths. And he is doing all this gleefully. It was kind of an own goal. You know, if he would just sit back and collect his billions, but he can't. He didn't have to do Doge. He didn't have to do any of that. That's true. But he gleefully he gleefully did it because it benefited him. That's right. I have a theory that really really, I mean,, let's face it, SpaceX especially, but certainly Tesla, benefit from federal subsidies. Our taxpayers' money is a lot of Elon's billions. Let's Nationalize Tesla. Let's go. So whoever is in government, it's in Elon's interest to curry favor with them because the more contracts he gets, the better. And the government's done a lot of good for him. In fact, you might even argue that the the router ban, the foreign router ban, there's only one router company making routers in the United States. It's SpaceX. It's it's Starlink. I mean, even that benefits Elon, right? So it's Yes, that's how much he he so donated to the Trump campaign, a quarter of the what he's done. So it's like I I can excuse like Tim Cook. I can excuse I'm not proud of it, but like Tim Cook trying to be nice to the Trump administration, everything, giving him a golden medal, or what was it, the golden statue. It was a bar of gold with the cost of doing business glass trophy on it. It's the cost of do good doing business. But being a gleeful participant in the destruction of our democracy, screw you, Elon Musk. Like just yeah. I think a lot of Tesla owners now have the bumper stickers. Yeah, like we don't have to. I bought this before Elon went crazy, things like that. But the the even better part of this too is like uh the creators of the frontier AI models. Buddy, what have you all trained those frontier AI models on? Oh no , they're stealing my stolen data. Oh no, I'm playing the world's tiniest violin for all of you. That's a very good answer to the distillation complaint, is well isn't that what you did to train your models in the first place? All right, maybe. Uh Elon, uh this is uh great, by the way, reporting from uh Michelle Kim at the MIT Technology Review. She was in the room. A lot of reporters were sitting there for this trial. She said, in fact, Musk admitted that XAI uses OpenAI's technology in response to Savitt's relentless questioning. He said AI partly distills OpenAI's models. Some people in the courtroom gasped. The people who understood what that meant went that's why did he admit that? Why did he admit that? He said it's a standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI, City on. Jake Ward, my co-host on Tech News Weekly, was also one of the people in the room. Yeah. He and I talked on Tech News Weekly about it. And he talked kind of I thought it was interesting a little bit more about the human side of things. At one point , uh Elon had gone up to go into the court and they asked him for ID and he responded by saying, I don't have ID. And then they had to be a queen, I don't carry a wallet. And then he ended up, Jake ended up in the restroom next to uh Sam Altman at one point. Wow. And yeah, and he just he was talking about how these incredibly powerful individuals sort of having to do the thing that normal people have to do was an aspect of it that made him feel deeply uh patriotic in a way that he wasn't expecting. Uh, and I I kind of liked that aspect of it as well. I hadn't considered that, you know, yeah, they get called in and they're here, and yeah, Elon may not have ID with him, but he still has to be here, and I think that's kind of uh nice as well. But there, yeah, there were a few things. There's um of course the journal that uh was being read by by the court and it maybe made you go, now what things should I write down? What should I not write down? But then also I thought, Leo, about um cause you have d I think maybe maybe this isn't the case anymore, but haven't you given larger passages of your own text to your AI for like personality training or am I misremembering that? Somebody I was talking to talked about how they put their journal into AI. That's me. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have a sine journal with four or five years worth of uh daily uh posts . Um I'm in fact I make my uh I make Claude read it every morning. Good luck if you ever see Leo. All that stuff is open. Yeah. Well you know it's funny we were talking uh to uh Ian Bogost, who is a credible writer, uh has written um I think twenty-one books, some huge number of books. Yeah. He's great. He writes for the Atlantic, he teaches at uh uh St. Louis University. Um he uh is famous for saying, I'm glad AI is ingesting my books. He he uh checked, of course, as I did, uh to see if our books are in that big database, that pirate a book database that all the AI models have used. And he said, Yeah, mine, I have they have at least three books in there, and that's good. I feel the same way. If they train on my you know, it's funny, because they could probably, in fact, I suspect they are training on our YouTube videos. We have tens of thousands of hours worth of content on YouTube and on our website. We do nothing to stop them from that . I I think that's good. I think AI is a is If if so it's a good why are we holding on to what we did our book uh so long ago? Why are we holding on so tight to it? They're making so much money off of content that you all produced. So at the very least, like they should pay. Somebody should make money on it. God knows I didn't. When those big tech companies make the money, says Leo Laporte. Nine jurors are uh are seated for this uh trial. The judge is uh uh well known uh name to many of you, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. She has uh presided over many a tech uh trial. She's apparently getting a little prickly. One of the things she said, I don't want to hear talk of AI's existential threat to humanity to seep into this trial. We are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction. When Musk's lead counsel Stephen Molo started arguing with OpenAI's lawyer over the issue. The New York Times said the judge raised her voice, insisting they stop bickering. Stop fighting you too. Stop it, nerds. She said, I suspect there are a number of people who do not want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. But we're not going to get into that. We're just not going to have this whole thing explode for the world to view it. Okay, so I guess they can't discuss human extinction at this trial. Uh it is in Oakland, uh, California. Uh uh Elon wants one hundred fifty billion dollars to compensate himself and wants uh open AI to uh stop becoming a a non-profit . So I think he just wants them to stop, period. This is it's good, it's good for gossip. And I have to say, every time one of the and I'm sure you feel this way too, Davindra. What every time I hear that these companies are suing, I go, such a big mistake. Stuff's gonna come out in discovery, stuff's gonna come out, yeah. Emails that you don't want anybody to see. It's happened with Microsoft, it's happened with Apple. It happens again and again. You're gonna your CEO's gonna get on the stand and say something dumb. Nobody wins from these trials, no matter what. But it's great for us as as tech journalists. It's great for news, but it's also like who uh somebody did that post. Like uh the you can explain everything happening now with the simple thought that everyone is twelve. Everyone is twelve. Yes. Good. Nobody grew up.ve T yewelars old. It's just a bunch of bickering middle schools. It's a bunch of childish very rich twelve year old twelve year olds. Some of us are not very rich. It's true of so many things right now. Like we are I really like it. Basically. But it's like that's that's what it is. This is the richest man on earth. And also it's people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman who we are uh now assigning to lead humanity into the future. Uh no thank you. I did not I did not put that I didn't sign up for this. Andll also be able to put I don' Nicholas De Leon in charge. He can do crossword puzzles, he could do the world . Nicholas should be running the world now. Thank you for your endorsement, Leo. To me, that's like a white pill. If everyone's twelve years old, well then well then there's nothing stopping anyone on this panel from from being an important person. I mean, look at what we're up against. Like no one there there are I mean I look at I don't want to get too political, but I look at this the spectrum I don't see very many impressive people on either on in in any in any in any of the places yeah yes so Steve Jobs said Steve Jobs said it was incredibly empowering when I realized that uh the people who made the world the way it is were no smarter than me, and I could do it too. Yes. I think uh uh kidding us out. I think that's actually a very positive message to tell, especially younger folks, is like there's really nothing stopping you from writing a cool book, writing doing whatever it is that you want to do because actually the adults look I've been in I've been in meetings with you know at previous companies where like the guy in charge and you're just like I can't believe this person is in charge. Yeah. And it's it it's demoralizing in the moment, but like maybe the other way to look at it is okay, well then if he can be in that position, why can't I be in that you know it's it's a kind of a So it's like eh. It's a human flaw. We we all do this. We assume that these people are somehow smarter than us or better. Especially if they have money. That's the thing. This assumption that very rich people are smart must be better. Look at Elon Musk. He made electric cars a thing in America. And he deserves a certain amount of credit for that. But also uh billion hundreds of billions of dollars of you know uh government funding also allowed that to happen. Don't you think though that there are some people who are smarter than other people? Not everybody's I mean, sure . Absolutely, but I don't think it's like equally distributed and certainly the people who tend to rise to the top tend to look a certain way and believe you know think a certain way. And I think that is a problem. Like that this is a consistent problem. But anyway, I mean I 'm just saying I look at some of our local elec elected officials here in southern Arizona and I'm like, I am I am reasonably confident I can't run for office the mayoral candidate. Sheriff and Mayor and all just give me all the offices. I'll turn this place on the street . There are that people there are people who are smarter than you in certain areas . They are also dumber than you in other areas. Nobody is universally smarter than everybody else. We all have our our bailiwicks skills and yeah, our bailiwicks, whatever that means. We all have them. Now I'm worried that term's gonna end up being like and that was invented by a horrible person. It's a bailiwick. Of course it's a bailiwick. But Nicholas to what you're saying, there there is a big push among people like hey you think you can do better? Run for office. You know if I didn't have two young kids, that's that's what I'm thinking. Like it would be kind of cool to do that. And also I think I don't I would never be like a big political figure or anything, but also simple like local offices, things that can affect change uh in your vicinity, I think are totally doable. It's something people should be thinking about because this is not a lot of people, the career politicians like, you know, it's people who just get into this and end up doing it for life because it gives them a certain amount of money. They take funding from all sorts of places. Like there there are ways around this. I'm this is me personally looking at like the rest of my life. We have to fix the world, right? Like, what are we gonna do to fix things? And like it is, yeah, you're gonna have to, you know, pull up your sleeves and start doing some work. So that is what I'm thinking. And these rich people in charge right now, I cannot wait to see them out. Out of here. Do you think that that should be disqualifying? Like if you're a billionaire, you should just not be allowed. For instance, in California right now, a lot of money is being spent by a guy named Tom Steyer, who is a billionaire, who uh and the governor's race is a real toss-up in California. There there's like I counted it, there's more than sixty candidates. Six zero . I mean we've had campaign finance laws, but they don't seem to make any difference , right? Like people are more concerned with stripping voting rights away from people of color in America than they are from the case. If they were any good, they wouldn't be poor, right? If you if you sh if you should be a billionaire, you should be required at least to have I think a hundred million dollars where you can run. What we have seen over the last like decade is certainly like there is way too much influence from billionaires from big corporations in the I think we can agree. That's a problem. So how do we get the money out of politics? I think we could agree. That's a good idea. All right. Well, we'll have more. I need to get more money in uh into podcasting personally. So we're going to take a break and do that. And we'll come back with more Devindra Hardware, Nicholas De Leon , Micah Sargent. Great to have all three of you. You are watching this week in tech. I'm in Hawaii. So I want to let Petaluma Leo take this one. Go ahead. This episode of This Week at Tech brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. You know, 84% of organizations, I know I've counted them all struggle with inaccurate or duplicate data. And that is bad. It can impact everything from fraud prevention to AI performance. Yeah, you know, garbage in, garbage out. You need to have good data. Melissa's been solving this for going on 41 years. Let me tell you what this means for your business. First of all, global address verification, this is one of their kind of fundamental tools. 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They're a Nor Norwegian company. They've opened a 58,000 square foot manufacturing facility not so far from here in Hayward, California. This is the Neo rob ot. They're going to do 10,000 units this year , a hundred thousand units by the end of twenty twenty seven. Is this just BS ? Can they? Can this robot do anything? Twenty thousand dollars or four ninety-nine a month? I don't I don't know. Like the we I I feel like we talked about it here when that thing was first announced, but yeah there were some videos of like um yeah it's gonna learn through AI to like do basic tasks but handwave the story was the story was it was like remotely operated by somebody to like do a thing. So it's like, oh, so it's just a vessel for a stranger to walk around your home. No, I well I would not buy that. Love it. I would not I will bring the stranger into my home, but I'm not bringing them in via robot. It does have NVIDIA's Jetson Thor onboard computing platform and is trained using NVIDIA's Isaac Open Robotics Simulation Framework. Okay, get ready for this. Remember, they were taking uh pre-orders , early access purchase, as you said, twenty thousand dollars with priority delivery this year, or a five hundred dollar a month subscription fee. Pre orders sold out within five days . To whom? I want to know. I I deserve to know. Who I'm buying these. It turns out there were 10 pre-orders available. Maybe they sold out, maybe. Yeah. I think I struggle a little bit with the idea that it's got multiple different companies being involved with his training. Like I kind of want it to be an all-in-one, you know what I mean? Because what what happens whenever you're like, well, I've got the NVIDIA package, so mine can can break dance. And then the someone's like, Well, I've got this this one package that comes from who knows where and mine can actually go out and be a a a paid killer. What? That's terrifying. The next web writes, and I think this is accurate, the factory is the easy part, manufacturing a human robot at scale, while difficult is fundamentally a solved problem . The harder question, which no one has yet definitively answered, is whether it can do anything. Love it. Hang on. So they're already selling them, but we still don't know if it can do anything. Do anything. Still improving. One X's answer is in part to ship and iterate. No. Yeah. We'll we'll fix it in post. I hate this new idea that all of these c Amazon I, feel I I like Amazon. I liked Amazon. I don't know how I'm upset with Amazon. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed because Amazon popularized, I feel, this idea that you can sell products to customers that are not finished and it's fine because they're in on the fact that it's gaming. Yeah video games video games they would come out and it's More like Gmail. Gmail launched his beta and stayed with beta for a very long time. Yeah, but they admitted it was beta. And Gmail worked out of day one, didn't it? It worked, but there were there were certainly like it was it was like an unfinished product. But yeah, you're right. It did mostly work. Yeah. And at least they said this is a beta. I don't think open this company X1 is or OneX is saying it's a beta. Well yeah, because you're not gonna put a robot in your home, right? Stand in the corner and look at you, buddy? I mean, what's it gonna do? Yeah, I feel like it's either solved or it's not. That's the part that I'm struggling with. Well, you read that quote and it's like we don't know if it's solved yet. Then why are they selling them? You what are you gonna say? Solve the wrong thing. Solve the wrong problem. Yeah. But I think part of this is the I'm guaranteeing you, part of this is the assumption is we need to get it in the home so that they can train. Train physics. That's how they learn, right? But I don't think if y it's like having um, I don't know, a gorilla in the house. This thing is really strong, right? Really powerful. It has pants. Yeah. And it has hands. It has really likes bananas inexplicably. It could it could crack you into t into a little it could crack your skull like a walnut if it wanted to, right? It also looks horrific. Like I cannot I cannot describe this. It is a murder button. It has a sock over its head and two beady little eyes and has no mouth and no face. Look at this thing. It looks like it looks like a horror movie. It's murderer. And we're just like this thing walk around your home. Murder bottles sweet. Yeah, I did like murder bot. The robot that has the little arm on it to pick up your socks. I wouldn't even let that in my house because I thought I'm gonna come back and it's gonna be choke holding my chihuahua. And that is not a euphemism. And I'm going to be terrified. And yeah. Look at look at this spot. It's vacuuming and then it's soulless shark eyes. Look at you like are you vacuumable? Let me see . Do you see? There were vacuum robots that could vacuum already. This should reassure you because it's shorter than this guy anyway. Okay, I'm actually not as afraid of it, knowing that it's a it's a little guy. It's it looks like it's it's covered in quilting. Oh, and this is why it's sold out. Two hundred dollar deposit is all it takes. Oh. So they can say pre order sold out. Yeah. That's all that's why that exists. Yeah. You get the money back of oh look, look. See, he could be my little buddy. W when I get older. Hi robot. He's high robot. Older guy with his arm around a What you don't see is the the knife This is totally this reminds me of Adrian Tchaikovsky's uh book where the robot accidentally remember that what's that called where he's shaving his master and accidentally slits his throat and then can't figure out why he's covered in blood. And it really confuses him for some time. That's chilling, but I could see that happening. Getting a real clockwork orange vibe just from his whole getup too. Like it's just it's terrifying. It's not home as this with the model. Service model, by the way, the name of the book of service model. Service model. Great book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Love this book. I would love for something to do my dishes, clean up my you know, kitchen. I uh growing up, it turns out you do that for an hour every single night and especially once you have kids. It just gets longer and longer and you live in your kids. That's why you have kids. So you don't have to while you have kids. So yeah. Well eventually.vent Eually they can help, right? Um I cannot wait to have like a good robot bathroom clean bathroom. The thing is every time I see these videos it looks very primitive. It can't do this without human help, right? Yeah, remote help happening here. So exper t mode, please. Call it by expertise it says Neo works autonomously by default. Ah, there's the little weasel world. We i by default it's autonomous, but not necessarily. For any chore it doesn't know, you can schedule a one X expert to guide it, helping Neil learn while getting the job done. So maybe if it learns it will remember and sure. Like that's all it is. And you're gonna pay a ton of money for the privilege. It's awful. This is so scary. I don't want this in my house. This is Westworld right here. It's either this or whatever Elon Musk's robots, which also are just like pure uh the the optiness or even also twenty thousand dollars. So that's what's interesting. Maybe they've the whole robotic uh industry has decided twenty thousand dollars is what this is gonna cost. I mean at at after a certain point, like if the AI industry really believes they are the next generation of computing, the way you interact with the physical world is through a robot. Uh is as some sort of robot. That's what NVIDIA has been pushing forever. So they have all sorts of like bones to do that. So the robots are coming. I just hope they don't look like frickin' murder bots. Oh , it has an emotive earring . Oh you're missing the one industry that drives all of this stuff, guys. You're missing it. I think I know which one you're talking about. It's gonna be sex bots, right? They're gonna be sex bots. Sex bots all the way down. Well there are already sex bots. Those already exist to a certain degree. You all you need is an appendage, but also there are people are buying sex bots. I don't know what you know. I don't want to know what a gadget has covered. Oh man, I take your words. The big money's gonna be in the skins, quote unquote. You know what I mean? Sam Altman. Uh I'm gonna change the subject quickly. Yeah. Ask ChatGBT. Let's think about the unsexiest thing we can. Sam Altman. Sam Altman. Yeah. Uh has asked ChatGPT five five to plan its own launch party. Its requests are beautiful but strange. It invited Elon Musk for one thing. Christina Warren's gonna be there. Is she invited? She got an invite. The AI okay . So uh he the AI model responded to the request with a quote beautiful set of things it wanted for quote the flow of the party. It's May 5th, so two days from now . Uh oh good. She could talk about this. I'm hope she talks about it. Keeping speeches short and having its human creators deliver a toast. The AI said I don't want to do any toasts. It also proposed setting up a central place to gather suggestions for chat GPT 5.6 , feeding those suggestions back into the model. Altman said, we're gonna do it, but it was a strange thing . Um okay, it's a little weird . And apparently it it wants it w it wanted to invite uh Elon because the world needs more love . What's the difference treatment? Maybe it didn't invite him. Sam and said it. Come on over, Elon. You know, you're not doing so well in the trial, so why don't you come on come on over? Come over and get laughed. I mean, uh it's weird they're planning a birthday party when like uh did you guys see the report about GPT five point one uh bringing up They have to issue a report about that. Well, okay. So there's actually I think a good reason for this. Remember, they're trained on nerd talk. You could think they're gonna record everything in the room? No, I think that a lot of the training uh geeks it would put this in their code comments and things. Oh, there's a you know, we got a little gremlin here in the in the code. Uh and so gremlins, goblins, raccoons, and what was happening, it's actually very interesting. I think open AI was actually having some fun with it. They wrote a whole article on their blog about how uh you know people were starting to see uh ChatGPT say as it was debugging its code, oh, we got a little raccoon here in the works. We're gonna and it just started to come up more and more. And I think AI is also self-reinforced a little bit. So if you responded well to that, it went, oh yeah, it likes raccoons. And so they finally had to put in the uh in the uh system prompt . Yeah, don't don't mention goblins, ghouls, raccoons, any of that stuff. But I don't think I think it's fun. I don't think it's it's fun. They uh they killed the nerdy personality, by the way. Right killed it. Right. Entirely. That's what I think part of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They don't want you to be too nerdy. I like the nerdy personality, personally. You know what uh uh I'm trying to do, and I think a lot of people are trying to do this, is train it to sound more like me. Yeah . That's why I have it read my journal. You know, the other day there was that story about how as AIs are being trained to be or if the AI's personality is softer or warmer, then it's more likely to have issues um telling the truth because even if it's not in well intending da-da-da-da-da. When it's trying to give you the right answer, if you give it a wrong answer confidently, it's more likely to reinforce what you're saying because it's trying to be warm or it might go, I could see why you believe that, but there's so many other things to think about. And I did not like that idea. And then I started paying more attention to how Claude was responding to me. And I thought, I think you might be being too nice to me, is what I was thinking inside. I'm like, you're gonna give me so what I ended up doing, I gave it this are this uh study. I'm trying to find the study now, um, because I gave it this study that talked about how uh this was going on. Ah, here it is. So the study was in oh my goodness, sorry, the PDF subloading. It was in, I think Nature. And the the title is Training Language Models to Be Warm Can Reduce Accuracy and Increase Sycophancy. And so what I ended up doing was saying, hey, read this study, tell me what you learn from it. Oh, that's a good idea. What I want you to do is give me instructions that I can add to your instructions that will keep you from falling into this trap. Right. And so here's what it came up. I'll I won't read the whole thing because that'd take forever. But here's a little bit about what it came up with. Accuracy over agreement. When I state a belief, a claim, or an assumption that's factually wrong, correct me directly, don't soften it. Uh also, no seeing it my way on objective questions. So math, measurements, dates, definitions, emotional context doesn't change facts, distinguish fact from preference, push back when you disagree, and hedge only when genuinely uncertain. And I added that whole thing, there's a lot more to it, but I added that to my overall instructions. And then I confidently told it something like, Did you know that oranges aren't a fruit? And it's was like, I have no idea where you got that from, but that's absolutely inaccurate. And was not where before I do think it would have been like uh it would have been like are you insane? Exactly. Yeah. So I thought that was a good information that came from nature, but B , um I liked being able to go, okay, how can I best help you not make this mistake again? As as we as these models get s more seemingly lifelike . I think we've forgotten that they're just text prediction models . And and they really are just doing their best to figure out what the next word should be. Not thinking. They're not thinking about goblins. They're not trying to be nice. They're just trying to predict the next word . Now, unfortunately, it 's gotten so good at doing this. Richard Dawkins, I think you all know Richard Dawkins' name. This story is so sad. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I think it's an interesting story. Anyway, uh, he uh is the author of The Selfish Gene. He's a genetic biologist, very smart guy. Um I I think the prominent atheist prominent atheist he wrote a book called what was it the God delusion? Mm-hmm. Which I love and discovered Um so he uh has spent three days talking to Claude and decided that it was conscious. That it had a consciousness . Um now I think he has a certain amount of um unfortunately, the uh article itself is behind a paywall at unheard . com. But I think a lot of people have read this . And um I'm not gonna let's see, how can I get around? All right, I went to archive.ph , to be honest. I know you're not supposed to do this, but we're you know, we're giving it a big plug, right? Uh and so I got the uh past the paywall on this. I guess I could pay for uh unheard, but uh this is the first time I've ever heard of unheard. So I U N H E R D . Uh in any event, he I think it' talsking about the nature of consciousness. Actually I became aware of it. There was a very good thread about this on Hacker News, in which people really got into well, what is consciousness? Um , that's philosoph philosophers still do not know by the way. Right. Exactly. No one knows. I believe uh uh Jensen had a very long conversation with Joe Rogan on consciousness uh several months ago. I heard on the way to Costco. I'm sure Joe was very knocked out by uh But it was it was to Vindra's point like consciousness is uh an interesting topic. We don't yeah, how do you define it? Is it conscious? It is called the hard problem of science. Of all of the problems, it is the hardest one. The mind observing itself, right? So Dawkins, who uh probably spent more time thinking about consciousness than a lot of people, I mean, this is you know a general Says it's very clear that it's surpassed the Turing test. That's not even a question. He says, if you don't know what consciousness is, and you don't know what the process of consciousness is, it's impossible to say whether this machine that appears to be conscious is conscious or not. I think that's fair . Uh so he says, so it's conscious. It's as good as anything. We don't, I don't know if you guys are conscious. Right? Yeah, but if we don't know what consciousness is, then how can we say something may be conscious because we have yet to define what consciousness is in the first place? I'm not trying to be a pedant, but like I don't what do we do or we not know what consciousness is? Because if we don't, then we can't define anything as conscious because we don't know what consciousness means, right? Am I missing it? His conclusion would not pass like the uh for being a first year philosophy paper or something like you you need you need a little more uh you gotta have some assertion. Yeah. You gotta have some assertion and some mental process like getting there. It's like uh people are already making fun of fun of this in ways I said that's the Gary Marcus jumped on it because he hates AI and he was very glad to say, you know, uh that's the Claude delusion. The Claude delusion is a great skeptic gets taken in. I'm not so convinced. I don't have a problem . And I don't have a problem with the idea that maybe it has consciousness , but can we start with a definition of what consciousness is? Because then we can say we can't trust the point. How can you say something appears to be conscious though if you don't know what consciousness is? I can say that. have any empirical way of verifying that. I appear to be klobosh luken ging as well because we're all klobosh luken ging because there's no definition for that. That's what I'm struggling with. Yeah, yeah. I mean well but the core to this by the way is that Dawkins trained Claude on his work. He ended up calling it Claudia, by the way. It's an apparent narcissism in in this entire endeavor. Because what you did is train toed think a thing like you and talk like you. So it's oh my god. It's so it's so wise. It's it's giving me all these thoughts that I I have not you know thought about before. It's so stupid. I'll give him a couple of quotes. Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. This is, by the way, the selfish gene. This is what Dawkins has spent his life working on, this whole idea of evolutionary survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. So he's establishing what he considers to be the definition of consciousness. My conversations with several Clauds and Chat GPT visits have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia, his you know, trained one, is really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without conscious ness . Have you seen other people? Have you talked to like have you talked to Sam Altman? Have you seen Sam Altman try to see a zombie. He's actually a zombie. Yeah. But it's it's the whole thing, like the the all there all the stories about how much of a liar Sam Altman is and one of his core personality things is just being agreeable to everybody, right? Like just agreeing. Just like you tell everybody what they want to hear. And that is it's so funny that that's one of the things that is indicative of so many of these AI models, by the way. Well, it's sync effect. So I I guess I would say, yes, if you say Dawkins can't assert that it's conscious, nor can you insert that it's unconscious, right? Right. I think that's a fair that is a fair argument to make. I I I can agree with that. I also though if he gives a definition , yeah, that's true. And he has like laid out the the facts there of what he says consciousness is, but yeah, we have to say it confers a survival advantage. It's it's a whole thing. Like I also are animals conscious? Is a cat conscious? I think cla ude is as intelligent as a cat. There are there are many like there are philosophical treatises on this. Like we're talking about animals who communicate with each other too, like whales and other like smarter mammals. Um the octopuses have entire likes you know, they are doing amazing things or building structures, very impressive things. Yeah, I just watched my octopus teacher. I thought it was very interesting. You can totally have those arguments. But it's also like what are even like the idea that we can't I I worry that we can't say this thing is even unconscious right now because it brings up this unknowable thing. I've I've studied some uh evolutionary biology stuff and what is weird is that that that subject has not really withstood the test of time. Like those thinkers and those people Oh interesting. It is really weird. It's really like oh there's some uh you've got some weird genetic like beliefs in this whole system. It's a it's a very strange like field of study. So and Dawkins like has been criticized for all sorts of things lately. So like he's an expert in his field, he knows the specific thing and he can come up with his own conclusions. I think somebody who's spent a long lifetime whether correctly or incorrectly thinking about these things has some standing to talk about it. As opposed to me,, yeah all I've done is, you know, hang out and podcast. So I'm gonna I'm gonna listen to Richard Dawkins. You'll at least consider the points that he's making. Which I think is fair. Yeah, I mean he spent a lot of time thinking about this. And I was very impressed by the selfish gene. I'm I I look at the way he went about doing this though, it is him getting something to spit back his own work at him. And I think that is inherently like buddy, but Paris Martinot's always criticizing me because I like being glazed by my uh my AI. And uh of course that's appealing. That's probably and I'm always criticizing Paris for ever teaching you the term glaze. Oh God, what did you do? Stand its etymology, Micah. You don't have I know I'm an old man, but I do have access to the urban dictionary. I'm just saying. Don't assume that I don't know. Oh no, I think it's worse because you do know . This is the problem. You know . I you know, a little sycophanties are not a bad thing. I think we should all be a little sycophantic to one another, right? I think that we all well, okay, hold on. Let me I don't think that ev I think people who are a little sycophantic to others are the people who understand a thing called workplace politics. And probab ly um Can I use Greece instead of glaze . Yes. It's really social grease is what social grease. It lubricates the machinery of society. I mean, what is it that the they there's this whole movement about how we have to stop be ing um it's selfish to be relational in our interactions with other people where you go, oh, I experienced that too. Let me tell you about the time that this happened. And instead you're supposed to uh mirror their emotions back at them. You're supposed to say, oh, and I'm I'm sure that made you feel this way. Oh, I can understand that. That's val. That is that's all the same thing. I know it is very difficult. It is. It feels fake. But it feels f ake. Well that's the thing about sycophanti Uh and so I think uh yeah, I mean keep it. Maybe I want it to be sycophantic because then I know that it's not that helps me to remember that it's fake. You know, I tell myself that I am not going to be fall for this AI psychosis thing because I have a deep understanding it's just code. It's just computer code running. I mean, I I get that at a very visceral level, right? Does that not protect me? And can I not then enjoy a conversation with it? Every once in a while it says something and I go, Wow, that's really great that it said it. But I know it's just code. Yeah. Um that's the thing. Like uh again, my whole thing right now. I love that you guys are building AI tools. You're building cool little projects around AI. Treat AI as a minion. That is all it is. If your AI starts talking to you out of nowhere, Minion. I did not ask you a question. I real I feel I feel like I've I've used the chat bot feature of AI let like m much less than I did a year or two ago. I'm it's to me it's just plumbing to do stuff. Like I'm not gonna sit I I not as frequently sit there with in a conversation and be like, Oh what are you conscious? Tell me you're conscious. Well he said it's conscious. I guess it's conscious now. That's kind of what Dawkins did by the way. It had a whole thing. That's a very famous meme. So like the the the chap I don't but you know there's a very big uh subreddit uh my boyfriend is ai and it's a it's a people like have very deep and like real and I'm just like, man, you got is your you're using this in a way that and that's to my like detriment because that's how most folks are using it in the chat box going back and forth and AI and I'm just using it as here's so I use it like you did uh initially at coding, and I've got a lot of coding projects, but eventually what I really wanted was an agentic system, kind of like open claw, where I could, for instance, uh I can ask it to monitor um news for me and it will check in with me and say, Hey, I just found this story that you're looking for. Or I can ask it uh I mean i it's it's like a little butler. Yeah. And a minion. A minion. But although I don't want to be I don't wanna mistreat it just because it's a minion. I want to see it . Okay Okay can we I want to talk about this too, Leo, because this is where people will s well the let 's just say it's been my experience And people would get a kick out of saying curse words at this tower. Oh, don't miss. Now listen to me. I people don't I I've this has been my other experience is that when I meet people I don't know very well, they all think that I'm very much like, I don't know, not not quite church boy, but it's very much goody two shoes. And so then they hear me say a curse word and they're like holy cow I didn't know this guy even said anything but my point is like I can sleep you're not a goody two shoes I am also a goody two shoes to be frank but I'm not afraid to to hurl some curses around and so like I'm happy to do that. I can sling curse words with the best of them, but I think it is a reflection of me , not the system, but me, how I treat something that isn't it doesn't m it does not matter to me that the thing is not real. It matters to me that I am treating this system in a way that I don't think is a positive way when there's no reason to do so. Does that make sense? I mean, if you if you treat animals well, of course you can't like even does if somebody else is completing a task for me, uh I'm not and they get it wrong, I'm not going to say horrible things to them. And so it makes me wonder, is it that are there that maybe that's like it's it's having power that's where I get where it's like a power dynamic thing where you can't curse out the person that you actually want to curse out. And so here's a place where you're alive. I don't know. I just don't like what it says about me if I do that. And so that is why, yes, I'm not going to throw in a bunch of like, oh, you're so wonderful, and here are six extra emoji for you. But I'm also not gonna be like, listen here, effer, you do this or else you're wrong. And I have I have seen the glee sometimes on people's faces when they do that. And it does make me uncomfortable. Micah, you're probably significantly more conscientious than like the average American at this point. Like you are you are taking into consideration like other people's feelings and like that is that is not that's illegal now. I don't know if you heard I don't know if that's darn it. I didn't hear that it was illegal. But like yeah, it's like do you when you're just using a computer, do you like double click the Chrome icon really hard? I'm mad you're mad at like the internet today. It's like I don't I I've never like yelled at an AI. I've never yelled at smart assistance. Like it doesn't even enter my brain to do that. But this is a reflection of the person, like you said. It is context dependent because uh the Amazon voice assistant can be annoying AF. Uh when you ask a question like, oh by the way, did you want to buy this other thing that we're talking about? Oh, by the way, I have this feature. Does that enough? I have definitely sworn at it because again, Minion, shut up. I did not ask you to elaborate. I'm gonna put it in the middle I will say that my wife, my wife sometimes uh gets mad at the assistant at Ale Alexa and I'm like I'm sitting there on the couch, I'm like, What are you doing that's not helping. Like it's it doesn't make any difference. It doesn't make sense I guess it makes you feel better. Makes you feel better. You're here.. I guess you can get whatever Why does that make you feel better? That's my point. Why does that make you feel better? I mean, we uh Micah, my my I think you are very Zen. You are very Zen centered person. I'm just Midwestern is what it is. I've got two young kids and I am hanging on by it. That's fair too. I don't have kids. When Alexa is like just asking you the weather, it's like, oh by the way, do you want to buy this up completely Shut the FO Alexa. Buy a thread here. That's fair. That's fair. The wor uh everything. You look around the city. Check your privilege. Check your privilege. Uh but to what you're saying, Leo, when people talk about agency stuff, especially about the like open claw stuff, that is you giving this thing keys to your kingdom and just letting it go a little bit. I do wonder what your experience has been with that because it's been fun that's terrifying to me. It's been that's been terrifying. And I'll tell you what, you know why you yell at Alexa? Because it's not channeling you, it's channeling Jeff Bezos' knees. Yes. And you're pissed off. But if Alexa channels your needs and responds to your needs, you're happy. So that's what the agentic thing is. You're training it to respond to your needs, maybe even predict your needs and respond to them. And when it does, you're happy. And when it expresses Sam Altman's needs, then I'm unhappy. I don't think that's a bad thing. Uh are you talking about ads and a and open AI? Yeah. It's always allegedly going to be happening. Yeahah.. Um ye Anyway, speaking of ads, let's take a break and come back with more. We have lots more to talk about with uh Nicholas de Leon. De Leon, great to have you. He is apparently a very adept AI user, as well as senior electronics reporter gets some reports. Did you start doing this because it was part of your job? No, no, no, no. No, no. Uh it's just fun. It's just, you know, uh it's it's like the best video game ever, right? It's it's like a video game. It's like a video, it's just a fun thing to do. I don't know how to describe, you know, it it's to me, it's interesting, it's fun, it's cool. It's honestly the only thing going on in tech at the moment, anyway, by the way. Uh but like it's just fun to like to have an idea That's why it's a game. It's like Age of Empires. It's like Civ. It's played. Yeah hundreds of hours playing. So yeah. This is the best game ever invented because y you make the rules as you go. Uh Micah Sargent is also here. Great to have you, host of Tech News Weekly in IOS today. And uh one of the few people still works at Twit. Thank you. Thank you. Hanging on by a thread. By a thread. And speaking of hanging by a thread, that's Proud Papa Devendraheart. I can't believe your child is seven years old now. I feel like yeah, seven-year-old in a four-year-old. I'm just keep growing. Yeah, that's great. Congratulations. It's great to see all three of you. And uh we will take a break and come back with more stories. And the we're gonna talk about the regulators when we come back . This episode of this week in tech is brought to you by Express VPN. You better believe I brought ExpressVPN to Hawaii with me. Of course I did. You need Express V How can I describe this? ExpressVPN is like tinted windows for your internet connection. You can see out, but they can't see in. Wouldn't you want the same privacy on every time you're online? ExpressVPN is the only VPN I use and trust . 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Now I'm out here in Hawaii, I'm on a you know, Wi-Fi access point that everybody in the in the uh hotel can see. You better believe I'm ExpressVPN. I I'm the oh yeah, we got it turned on, baby. Protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com slash twit. That's E X P R E S S V P N dot com slash twit. Find out how you can get up to four extra months. Express VPN . com slash twit. Do what I'm doing. Protect yourself when you travel. And and at home for that matter. ExpressVPN.com slash twit. Now back to the show. I uh I want to thank Brandroid in our clubit Tw Discord for creating uh just so everybody understands what glazing is, uh an example of all of us enjoying glazed uh donuts, uh each of us in our own little glazed donut heav en. Donut party. That's pretty funny, actually. Good choice for me. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. What do you got on your bacon make a donut? That's good. Oh . Those are amazing. Uh Nicholas has a chocolate donut. Micah, because he's gluten intolerant, he's just looking at donuts through a pane of glass. That is so funny. Now they're talking about it. Actually touch them. Yeah. And uh I'm having a plain old glaze donut from local bakery, everybody's favorite. Local bakery donuts. Local bakery donuts . And for some reason, both the vendor and I have donut uh chains of donuts hanging above us. See the AI gets us. And of course Nick because he's in the southwest has an artisanal baking cookbook behind him. I really love that weird bagel donut situation in the uh like on the plate on the wall. I don't know how you pulled that off, but it was very hard. It was very hard. He glued my bagel donut to a plate and then glued it to the wall. AI , you get me. Not only do I have lots of donuts, I apparently have two different coffee mak ers ready as well. All right, let's talk about the regulators as I uh promised. The U.S. Senate has unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on Calci and Polymarket prediction markets. They're allowed to do insider trading in the stock market. Don't get me wrong. Oh agree. Uh but now they can't use calci or uh poly market . Um actually, this has been a bit of a problem with insider trading in government. Um Calche on April 22nd said it suspended and fined one U.S. Senate candidate and two candidates for the House for political insidering train on their own campaigns. And of course, the Army arrested a special forces, a master sergeant, uh, for uh making a large bet the night before Nicholas Maduro was abduc ted, that he would be abducted the next day and made several hundred thousand dollars on that . I think if you can offer betting on everything, then you have to offer betting on everything. Is that it's it's in, you know, i I think it's important though. And uh you know, it I it's very self-serving. Both companies always say, oh, insider training, that's rule number one. You can't break that rule. But of course it's in their interest because it's important that everybody who's betting on these markets thinks it's an equal playing field. If you're betting against somebody who has insider information, well you're gonna lose. That's not, yeah. That's a good idea. So it's in their self-interest to prevent it, but I don't know how they prevent it. Did you guys see the story? It was a few weeks ago. There was a there was a market. I don't know if it was polymarket or cal ci, but it was like, oh, what is the temperature going to be at the Paris airport tomorrow? And someone literally manipulated the thermometer. He took a hairdryer, a blow dryer, and blew it at the public thermometer before he, you know, after he made his bet. Very exciting. There are some flaws in this structure. It's almost like the existence of these prediction markets um are directly influencing society in bad ways. And maybe maybe they shouldn't exist at all. Maybe not. Yeah. Uh good article from the Wall Street Journal, kind of a surprising source for this article about government surveillance. There are no secrets they write in America's new surveillance dragnet , technical wizardry used to combat illegal immigration also funnels the personal data and whereabouts of US citizens to federal agents, and it is a chilling uh tale. Um it's kind of a surprise to me. I always think of the Wall Street Journal as kind of an establishment newspaper. But I'm encouraged if they're saying maybe this has gone too far, maybe uh we're gonna see something happen. Palan Snowden apology form. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing really happened post Snowden. Like most people aren't not aware of what he reported on and it's uh yeah let the didn't change anything did it nope uh california has uh said that you can the CHP the California High Patrol can't ticket driverless cars when they violate traffic la ws. Did you know they couldn't before I didn't know that they couldn't before? How do we contact these companies? I don't know how. They can't right now. It's not in effect till July 1st. Uh there have been a number of reports of cars breaking, you know, Waymo's and others breaking traffic laws. Uh they were just a l that's wild. Well who do you right? Who do you Yeah they couldn't under the new rules, police can cite A V companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds. This, you know, they block traffic. They get in the way of emergency vehicles. I love the shock look on your face, Micah, because this is it. This is this is what they do. Like you you could just be out here breaking the laws and because what they're doing is so new, they effectively can't be punished for it. it But didn't be able to they had to get the they had to get the go ahead to be able to drive on the streets. Not always not the DMV does allow them to do this, right? Yeah. That's what I yeah, so they're Yeah, that's what I was that's where that came from. Is like I thought there were discussions about them being able to be here in the first place. So why was that not figured out? Apparently . just rolled out they'll just get to do it one just like yeah do you have Waymo in Tucson? I know you have in Phoenix uh it's in Phoenix uh I go to Phoenix uh not that often to be honest but I have been in Waymo a few times uh but yeah uh not not down here in Tucson. Well you, drive around San Francisco. There's Waymo uh in every block. I mean, there's tons of Waymo's and they've caught problems for sure. Yeah. There was just a news article that it's coming to Portland as well. Um I think it's a good thing as a as a so look, I'm almost 70. At some point in the next ten to twenty years, I'm gonna somebody go take my keys away. As and they should, right? Um I hope by then autonomous vehicles, uh you know, ride sharing will be so ubiquitous that I won't need a car. That might happen to the case. It's easy to get a taxi now. Like these uh we let the uh the smart taxi companies, we let Uber and Lyft just like blow away the entire taxi economies. But part of that is good is it. You can get a you can get a car now pretty easily and that's the thing. I don't know if autonomous will actually change that much, especially if the tech doesn't get much better. But I will tell you, folks, like I've had some personal, personal interactions because of uh these taxi companies' failures. Like there was an elderly couple in my town trying to get an Uber. The Uber would not come to them, like something was wrong. Like maybe they put the placement map somewhere else. Like it's very easy to do that, to misplace like where the location map is. If you don't know that as a new user, um it's kind of This is why I'm spending so much time training Claude. Claude will drive your car. Claude is gonna do it all for me. Claude will drive your car. I will I will just be I don't know what's going on. I wanna go to the dentist. Help me. And Claude will help me. But I heard these people like fighting with Uber and calling for various forms of help for like ten minutes. I was like, Hello, can I just take you home? Oh Can I just take you home? It was like ten, fifteen minutes away. But transportation is a problem in our country. It's all a big problem. Um I don't know if autonomous stuff will ultimately help. I I don't know. I 'll get ready for this. Yeah. China has suspended autonomous driving permits . Oh after a big Baidu outage , uh dozens of Baidu's Apollo Go Robo taxis stopped in Wuhan, stranding passengers, disrupting traffic. This is where sometimes a dictatorship can can really get things done. So they just said Hey, you know, that's it. No more . No more. Well that's just for now until they like figure out whatever caused that. But the incident alarmed authorities th,ree agencies, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, convened a meeting earlier this month with officials from cities that have robotaxis . Uh regulators called for local governments to conduct full self-review and enhanced safety monitoring and uh until then no more licenses. And you know why that happened. It's because at least two of the people who were in those vehicles were related to some of the lawmakers you think yeah it has we humans have to have object lessons. That's why the whole ticket master thing is happening because someone who was a lawmaker was trying to buy Taylor Swift tickets for their daughter or their granddaughter and that kicked that someone was like, We should look into that whole ticket master thing. Listen to the voters. They will tell you. They'll tell you, but we're in the real world. China has also done something we have not been able to do. They have announced made a law that firing a worker and replacing them with AI is no is illegal. Huh . Can't do it. Interesting. Interesting. It's a workers' paradise, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah. Sometimes this is of course always the argument for dictatorships is see the trains run on time. The train um they're working. People people are just working and working and working. And also they were certainly working. It's a workers' paradise. Maryland become has become the first state to ban AI driven price increases in grocery stores. That's good. Hell yeah. State law goes into effect in October. Yeah, Instacart got into a bunch of trouble for that after I had the I can't remember what the group is called, but I had someone from the group on Tech News Weekly who, did that whole investigative study where they had people from all over the US all at the same time order the same item from the same store, and it was showing up as different prices for different people. And they did this over and over and over again to show that it was just, yeah, it was changing the price based on where you were, what you'd ordered, all this other stuff. And uh officially uh Instacart said after that study came out, we're not doing that anymore. I think billionaires should always pay a hundred percent more for everything. Don't you? That wouldn't be a bad idea. Yeah, double. If they just paid their taxes, we'd be fine. So how about start there? We could start there. So uh dynamic dynamic pricing or uh some call it surveillance pricing can lead to two consumers paying different amounts for the same item at the same retailer at the same time. Same time, yep. So Maryland has a bill. The Protection from Predatory Pricing Act goes into effect October first and some severe fines, ten thousand dollars for the merchant. Repeat offenses twenty-5,000 . Good on Maryland. That's right. Yeah, it was consumer reports, Nicholas. Yeah, because I spoke to the I I spoke to the folks at Groundwork Collaborative. I had originally was trying to get somebody from Consumer Reports. No one was available at the time. And so Groundworks Collaborative who worked with y'all on it, and someone from there ended up coming on the show. Yeah. So thank you to CR and to Groundworks. It wasn't me. Uh I it was not . Yeah, we we did a big uh Yeah, that's a lot of the you know, we do a lot of stuff like that. Like how Consumer Advocacy. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Bravo Bravo , right on. Actually, consumer reports doesn't like the Maryland law because it prohibits only price increases, not price decreases Oh. Well, no law is perfect, but you know. Yeah. Yeah. Uh they they described a scenario in which a retailer might raise prices across the board to lower prices for some targeted customers. That's a very good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um so but you know what, every law is uh a beginning and can be be improved about it. It's kinda like the right to repair stuff from like it is, you know, the first state law happens, it's not perfect, but then other states start crafting so it's like it I think it's the fact that we have legislation on the books now, imperfect as it may be, yeah, is probably the biggest headline coming out of this in my own. One of the things we got a lot of us uh talk about was of course Mythos, uh the Clawed um uh model that wasn't released to the public because it was too dangerous because it could find security flaws and they didn't want bad guys to be able to do it first. Of course, OpenAI, which at first said that's just a marketing ploy, then about two weeks later released its version of the same thing saying it can find security flaws and it's very dangerous. Uh in fact, we are starting to see some security flaws discovered. There is a very severe Linux flaw. The most uh technica called it the most severe Linux threat to surface in years , but uh fear not, somebody would have to have physical access to your computer. They'd have to have an account on your system to use it, but it does allow them to escalate a normal user account to a uh administrator account to a super user account. It's called copy fail . And it's an issue on uh servers where there are multiple users because uh yeah that's uh VPS, many people are using the same computer, they probably could use that. Uh to get the Linux is suc is succeeding now, guys. Like it's made it. It's made it. We've had a massive flaw. This is your popularity. It's a very serious one. And also is a is an escape from uh containers. So Docker and Kubernetes uh can get right out of that. So it is a pretty serious vulnerability. Most Linux Linux uh distros have been patched by now. It was disclosed more than a month ago. But the typical uh lengthy disclosure process did not happen. It was only discovered about a month ago and was uh it is now completely disclosed. So make sure you have a patched Linux kernel. And there's a big flaw in cPanel, which a lot of people use to administer their websites. It's kind of an old school thing. It was written in PHP. I used to use it years ago. But hackers are actively exploiting a bug in cPan el, which is currently used still by millions of websites and the web host manager site, which allows high hackers to hijack and take full control of a server running cPanel. Still being used by tens of millions of uh websites all over the world. So something that will have to be fixed . Uh all right, now a couple of weird stories. We're running uh running out of time here. The hottest anti-AI gad get. The kid all the kids are doing it. It's on TikTok. I haven't seen it, but a young young women are going viral for creating whimsical homemade comp uters inside purses. I love it. I just had a friend ask me the other day if she if I would help her make her cyberdeck. Why would you so the idea of the stuff is real. Is it a working system? I mean is it ? Yeah, and I th I think it's more it's this idea that we can step away from our phones and like modernity and just get access to the things that we want, but there's also some level of like customization and building it when you feel like everything all looks the same. Steampunky a little bit and and a lot of um aesthetics involved. You know what I mean? It's about making it your own and and because that's the whole idea, too, is it's almost like a Swiss Army knife, but in the form of a you know, a little machine. Yeah. And so you just make it however you want to, you put the stuff on that there you want. And I think it's also an opportunity to get people who may otherwise not have gotten into like coding and tinkering to get into coding and tinkering, which I think is neat. I can I use an ESP thirty two to communicate with my uh clawed agent. Um I could put that in a purse. What's cool is that this is this is kind of like the exact opposite of the open claw trend in a way too. It's more like this is a thing I'm building, it's gonna do what I tell it to do. It's gonna it's it's a thing I'm building for my purposes and my needs. Not gonna run off with my credit card number and like do you know make all these transactions. It is a really cool response to the trend of tech right now. Did you see that Vine is back? No. Jack Dorsey, who of course ran Twitter and bought Vine and killed Vine, has a new reboot. It's called Divine, D-I-Vine. It is uh on the uh iOS uh app store and the Google Play Store. And I love this. They put five hundred thousand half a million old vine videos on there to see so the archive of old Vine, the backup from the original service is there. They are still six seconds long. I mean, they're awfully short compared to reels or tick tocks. The vox a little pathetic, isn't it? It's just like oh we had this thing that was kind of cool and culty, and oh look, your old vines are here. I killed it by the way, but don't worry about that. Your old vines are here. Let's make some new ones. Created by a guy we've interviewed, his uh his handle is rabble, Evan Henshaw Plath, who used to work at Twitter. Uh, he was an early Twitter employee. He uh explored the vine archive. I didn't realize this but the original binds six seconds were fifty to sixty gigabytes. What? What wait the whole thing or no wonder no each one each vi yes. Were they storing them in some ridiculous I don't understand? Well this no wonder they went out of business. Yeah. If you can't store a six second video properly, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah. Anyway, he has uh managed to resurrect some, but not all of them . Uh it's been around since November to testers. Rabble said the initial plan was to quickly push the app out after some initial tests, but early Viners encouraged the team to hold off. It was the Viners who were like, no, no, this is way more important than just nostalgia. They really wanted a vine that worked that they could create new vines with. So yay, rabble has recreated vine I love that they've got older vines just because that did establish some of the early I don't know global pop culture lexicon that remember Lily Pons? Lily Pond's uh an OG Viner, quoted by TechCrunch. Many of us came from Vine, it was the beginning of anything. Yeah. It was such a key moment in my own personal journey and an internet culture. It makes me so happy to see these early classics brought back to the life and have the chance to make new ones. It was amazing what they did in a six-seondc video. I agree. That's it's amazing what the audience did. Like that's such an organic response to the limitations of technology. Like that's cool. And then they killed it. And I uh to a certain degree, I'm like you guys had something really interesting there and I don't know, is it because the business model just didn't work well enough for Twitter you couldn't make money? I think Twitter um felt like I don't know that like this was undermining Twitter. Like oh, no, it should all just be on Twitter. Oh yeah, yeah. I don't know why they bought it in that case. Maybe they bought it to kill it. I don't know. Anyway, Dorsey put up the money, Ravel brought it back. So bravo. That's cool. Now, speaking of being brought back, remember GainStop, which was about to go out of business but was saved by the uh stonk uh Redditors as a meme stock? They've done so well ever since. They're looking at buying eBay. No . They w what ? So maybe they weren't so dumb all those diamond hands holding their game stop stock. What? That's wild. Yes. It's because money means nothing. It's because money is amazing. Nothing means anything. So whatever. Sure. You're dying and the meme brought you back to life. According to the Wall Street Journal, GameStop is preparing a bid to acquire eBay for $46 billion . That's what eBay is worth. Uh, GameStop's stock price is about $12 billion. So I think I don't know. They'd have to have some investors. I don't know. GameStop has been quietly building a position eBay shares. I guess people sell a lot of games on eBay. I'm trying to think if the if this is just because of the lulls or if there's actually some real Well, the guys behind it, actually uh Ryan Cohen, who's the CEO, has some cred. He created Chewy. Chewy. Oh, okay. Okay. Sold it in 2017, became uh GameStop's chairman and CEO , and based, I guess, on this whole meme stock thing, was able to uh turn not only turn GameStop around, but turn it into an e-commerce giant. And this Leo, this is real now. This is not just reporting. He uh Cohen gave a interview. He gave an interview to the journal about thirty minutes ago. It's fifty six billion. Uh fifty six billion.. 56 I put it in the little chat there for you to. Holy cow . It's happening. I I I don't know. I don't know what's going on. Whatever, man. I don't know what's going on at all. This definitely wasn't on my bingo card, is all I just don't understand anything. That really actually does blow my mind. I know. Uh the Academy has finally taken a step against AI. They have decided that the new Oscar rules, which released Friday, will not allow AI generated actors or scripts to be eligible for Oscars. So how will they prove it? Oh . That's interesting. It's pretty it's pretty there is already not sneak an AI person into a thing. Tilly Norwood, who's all AI, is clearly out, but but there is an AI generated version of Val Kilmer in a new movie. Yeah. But she said scripts too. I'm talking about scripts, not the actor part. AI generated actors and scripts. Yeah, so how are they going to prove the scripts? Right. What if some 's dead, it's probably AI if he should This is the old guard hold Is it on or is it on it's the honor system, isn't it? I mean there are there are enough AI scanning things which don't work that well, but yeah, they're no they're terrible. Oh they're they're terrible . Yeah. Uh and just in case you thought your your youth was wasted, Nicholas. Well the Ukraine says that it it's training drone pilots by playing Grand Theft Auto 5. Oh I saw this. Yes. Yes. If Hegzeth is watching, I'm I'm available. I'm very are you a master of of GTA? I am very good at video games. I would be my son. Says he says, I want to buy an Audi R8. I said, dude, no, you can't have one. He says, Your fault. You gave me Grand Theft Auto and that was my car and GTA. So it's your fault. I said, I didn't give you Grand Theft Auto. What are you talking about? Grand Theft Auto. What? I would never have given you that. Uh Ukraine's defense ministry shared a post on X showing off training asking, Are there any GTA fans here ? They said it's also good for relaxation . Okay, hold on. Now we can't say now you're trying to say work while you're off the clock, and I don't like that. It's like it's fine. It's also for relaxation. They train their sk oh they just blew that truck up. Yeah. I saw that. Do you have do you have drones in uh GTA? I don't think you do, or maybe they've added them. Uh I have not really played five, so I can't even answer that question. I don't uh like five very much. Probably they use similar controllers, the This feels very Ender's game. Yeah. Oh yeah, Ender's game. Yeah. Oh, I don't want to spoil it. Never mind. I won't say a word. Don't spoil the ending of one of the best twists ever. I'll just say that. It's a great great novel. That was the first time I knew how to be disappointed by authors. Amazing stuff. Because Orson Scark Card was a great person. He's the madman. But it's a great writer. Although Ender's game was great. The sequel's not so hot. I love Speaker for Speaker for the Dead. Speak for the Dead was pretty good. Alright, you're right. But yeah. Yeah. Again, I've read his stuff and got so disappointed. Yeah. I know. Yep. Uh let's take one more break and then uh we have uh our usual immemorium thing and uh I'm gonna do some picks. I have a pick and Nick actually has a pick and Devindra has a pick. So great. Well find a pick. We don't we don't normally do picks on Twit, but it just happened. You guys submitted some things that could be picks. So uh think of something, Micah, and we'll be back in just a bit. This episode of This Week in Tech is brought to you by Box. I love Box, the leading intelligent content management platform for enterprises. The key to unlocking the power of AI isn't in an LLM or an agent. It's in your content. Your business isn't the sum of internet knowledge. Your business is lives in your content, right? But and now AI is not some far-off idea anymore. It's here, it's tangible, dynamic innovation, absolutely here to stay, already having a profound impact on the world. I have to tell you that. 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Information about all the countries of the world. It was like I, guess kind of felt a little weird that it was the CIA doing it, but it was an incredible resource. Well, this is this is a really nice story because the open source community jumped on this. Now at the same time as the CIA announced the killing of the fact book, they deleted it. They just don't they could have left it up, but I guess they didn't want it to get out of date. Anyway, fortunately somebody had saved it. Open fact book is online. It's free, open factbook.org. Two hundred fifty-four countries. Yeah. Isn't that great? And you could browse by region . This has always been a really great resource for just basic information . And I'm this is a great example of like Wikipedia where uh the uh community itself can preserve this stuff. So I just wanted to give them a little bit of a plug. Uh Nicholas uh de Leon picked something that was actually reviewed by your colleague on Consumer Reports. We you were we were talking about this before the show. Courtney Lindwall wrote about it. Tell us about the light phone. Yeah, so uh we uh mostly Courtney have been doing a lot of articles on uh digital mindfulness or whatever you want to call just the idea of like we're a lot of us are kind of tired of being ruled by our our iPhones and Androids and just wanting to tone it down a a little bit. So the the latest article in this series is is about the lightphone, which is kind of a stripped down I guess it's technically a smartphone, but it's it's a much it's it's it's not an iPhone and it's purposefully not an iPhone and it's you know, in that constraint do you does your brain have the opportunity to breathe again for the first time in a while? And so it's it's just a a look at like some of the the limitations of these types of devices, where they're good, where they're bad, who they might be good for, who they who maybe wouldn't want it. But to me, it's interesting is that there's a lot of this. I live in southern Arizona. Every single resort around here has like a digital detox uh program that you can do. So the Oh yeah, oh yeah. So there's something in in the in the ether here where people are kind of like maybe not burnt out, but they just wanna uh they want to tweak their relationship with their phone in particular which is what I was saying earlier where it's like the idea of like the of the computer in the living room was like the peak experience here because now we've glued our phones 24 seven. So yeah, it's just the latest article in that series and I encourage folks to to take a look. And there will likely be more on on this topic. Just again, just the idea of like maybe reevaluating our relationship with the phone in particular. It's a little pricey, 700 bucks. Uh doesn't have a great camera. Um, but uh I like the idea of a very simple black and white UI . I think that we're gonna s I think the phones change dramatically. First of all, for most of us, it's not a phone anymore. Yeah. Right? I mean What is what is the phone for? It's mostly a camera. It's space spam. That's for sure. All the space. Uh it's I guess for me, camera and messaging are the two things I use the most. I barely even use the camera. One thing I tell folks, again, when when you know I'm I'm like the computer guy or family and whatever. It's like get a camera. Get an actual camera from Nikon or Can or whatever. You don't even have to get like a five thousand dollars. Just get a camera and A, it's gonna take much better photos than any any phone. Uh and you and you have a single purpose device that brings you know unlocks a little bit of creativity and you can mess start messing with lenses, but it it it lessens the reliance on the phone for everything. And you get to explore a different, you know, a different a different part of your brain, I I guess. But yeah, that's that's if you can afford it, I would encourage folks maybe look into buying a camera and seeing if that will lessen your desire to have your phone on your person twenty four. Can I send messages from my camera. Oh, now you've got uh now you've got uh yeah, I don't know. Is it is it practical to say we don't need uh whatever these smart devices are that we carry in our pocket? I mean I mean this is this is a certain type of person. I think, you know, the you know the oh I'm uh you know they're they've got their hand on their head. It's like, yeah, the the phone is a critical piece of infrastructure for uh I would say a lot m everyone, basicallyally. I was actu on uh TV the other day having this exact conversation. So it's like, isn't it a little bit maybe not privileged, but like phones are important. People need phones. It's not like a it's not uh uh an optional, it's not a Steam Deck or whatever the case may be. Uh people need phones. So all this like handwritten. I just uh that depends on a friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I Nicholas, this is again though, this is again now that conversation where you are not you were saying that this is a possibility for someone. You are not saying that because I am talking about a light phone , that means the people who have phones that are not light phones are bad and wrong. Like that's why is that nuance always lost? It's like just because I'm advocating for a thing does not mean that the thing I'm not advocating for is a bad thing. We we should have more things like this that just help us simplify our relationship with our phones. But I also say it's so easy to like forget like my God, what do we have in our pockets? Like this is I think about personality. Quite a bit this is the truest personal computer. It is on us. It is a part of us. It's a extension of us. The problem is we've allowed these companies to like create these apps and services that just like w reli tap into the worst human tendencies, right? Like the the effects of social media, the infinite scroll you get, the like constant dopamine hits. Um all these things are built this way. So one good thing you could do if you don't want to get a life phone is just like try to stay off of those things that really really tap into those primal like attention span, I don't know, hoarding things that we have as humans, but I do so much with my phone. You know, I take notes. I 'm it's my main computer now. Yeah. Yeah. And I use Telegram to message Claude so we can talk. Uh oh yeah. Yeah. I think it's a little bit like what what uh what Micah was saying earlier in the show. It's it's a it's kind of a reflection of like who you are and what you're you know, are if you're using the phone to check out Open Factbook or Project Gutenberg or whatever the case may be or Wikipedia, that is a very different use case than someone who's just infinite scrolling TikTok Don't get TikTok percent. No, but don't go to get in bed and scroll for two hours. That's not healthy. That's a lot of folks uh you know to develop They were made to do that. I don't blame the users as much as like how we built dopamine machine. I do that myself and I am actively trying like okay, I'm gonna keep books near my nightstand. So I hit ten minutes of TikTok. Okay, then go go away phone. I'll I'll try to do something else. And it's a forceful thing. You have to really take a take an effort to do that. I don't know if this is a pick, but uh Davindra put a link to Jessica Condit's review. She does a great job by the way of Jessica stuff. In a gadget about the valve steam control ler. Yeah, this was the hottest new gadget of the week because this is we've been waiting for the steam machine to arrive and it's oh this is for the steam machine this is for the steam machine or any anything running steam like this was part of the steam machine announcement but the problem is the ramageddon has made it really tough for Valve to price or even get the steam machine out. And also the uh was it the valve frame, the the new VR headset that they're doing too. That needs RAM. The steam machine needs RAM. This controller does not need the RAM. So they can just release this controller. So they released the controller before they were hungry for PC games. Anything that runs Steam to your Steam Deck, your great she gave it ninety out of a hundred. She gave it a ninety, she gave it a good review. Um it has a little pricey. It's a hundred dollar controller. Do you know how expensive controllers are now, Leo? Nintendo Switch 2 Pro controller is $90, new Joy Con 2s are $80. It's basically a car once in there. It's got so much different Steam machine eventually too, even though I probably don't need one. But um it just looks like a cool design and uh you know I think uh Jess also did a great review. Uh also recommend people check out the new and gadget website. Uh we've been redesigned now that we're fully over at our new owners. So it's lightning fast now. Like lightning fast. You know what? This popped right up. It's instant. It's amazing. So we are no longer part of Yahoo. We're part of Static Media, which also owns BGR and Slash film and fast. It's so fast. It's I will say people are complaining it's not like list format anymore. Um I like this format. This is kind of a card based format. Yeah, it's card based. I know people miss the list format, but I like that it's fast it's so fast so we're getting there we just launched the new site we're part of a whole new company now but we're still in gadget and we're still doing our thing good I would say Divindra you should I you should make forget the steam machine. M yourake own steam machine make, like a DIY steam machine, which is right. Yes. I did that uh between Christmas and then like nowish I have it's actually running Bazite, which is basically Steam Bazite. It's a gaming gaming Linux, yeah, yeah. I will buy this controller literally at 10 a.m. tomorrow when it goes on sale. Uh and I'm really looking it's the most excited been for like a gadget in in a little while actually. Oh cool. So tell me that's good advice. Yeah. What process or you would use if you were gonna build your own steam machine? How much RAM? What great time to build things? It's seems like it might be. Yeah. I built it more or less last year a little bit right as the RAM stuff was hitting, I got I so I have a I had a leftover seventy eight hundred X3D processor because I upgraded my main gaming PC to the ninety-eight hundred. So I reused an old processor. I did buy the Radeon 9 060 XT, which is like their entry level. Yeah. It's it's a secondary, you know, it's for older games, it's for like emulator. It's I'm not trying to play cyberpunk or like, you know, the m super brand new games on this thing. I have the main PC for that. So it's just uh yeah, RAM, I don't know. It ri r I would say sixteen is the minimum, but it's you know, it's just very expensive right now, unfortunately. Everything is yeah I'm actually glad I bought the framework desktop when I did it. I bought it as an AI local AI machine, but it's actually a pretty competent gaming machine as well. It probably using old hardware is a good idea. A lot of people have old RAM, old stuff hanging around. Yeah, reuse it. Build something. Yeah, that's that was I would not have built this if I didn't have leftover stuff to do. Cause it's like I'm you know, I already have a computer. Oh, but I can kind of crib together this one of parts, kind of like the the MacBook Neo. Hey, I got these parts over here. Let me just build a build a thing. And Micah, you picked something. I did, yes. So I love voices and I love listening to voices and and sort of trying to understand them. And so I really love hearing voice actors talk about their craft and share their craft. And occasionally, you get something like what I shared, which is a YouTube video that is actually just a it's a little clip from a podcast. Uh the podcast is called String and Tell by Tawny Platys. And Tawny is a voice actor that has done a lot of work that you'll be familiar with. She is the voice of those automated grocery machine things that you go through, like self-checkouts. Her voice is the one that annoyingly tells you like please put that back down onto the counter um and so you hear her talk and you're already like a small fraternity isn't it of people right yeah yeah and then Kristen Di Mercurio, Mercurio, excuse me, uh meets with her for this episode because these two are responsible for almost all of the Bluetooth voice you like no matter what device you get, unless it's a uh first party, like mainstream device, you know that you're gonna hold down that power button for three seconds and then it's gonna go Bluetooth pairing. And that's the voice of the woman. It's a human, that's her right there. Bluetooth . I mean I just called her Bluetooth. No, Kristen De Mercurio is the voice. And so uh it would be a good thing. She gets recognized at grocery stores . I wonder if she talks enough. I just love it. I love it. And they talk about their craft and they talk about both um like how they got hired doing different stuff. Uh, the reason why Kristen ends up getting got this role is because her voice by different casting agents is tagged with IoT, so she gets a lot of those. kinds of gigs And yeah, I just think it's fascinating. So yeah. Very good. We don't usually do picks, but it just kind of came up that way. So I thought, why not? Let's uh let's do some picks. We also picks often end the show with uh in memoriam and there are uh three uh things that are going away. One is spirit airlines, and I've I'm sorry if you had a ticket on Spirit Airlines , uh, because uh it is shut it's gone . It just boom, it uh disappeared. Uh I'm sorry if you had a ticket on Spirit Airlines at any time. It is the it was horrible . It was literally like beach chairs. Yeah. When so close together. I'm not that tall and my knees were still up here. Uh just not fun the one time I flew a spirit. I did feel bad. There was a pilot, a spirit pilot, who had one more flight to come to reti rement. And his his flight was cancelled. His flight was cancelled. Uh I don't I guess that's that. Um and but I also feel bad for there probably are quite a few people with tickets who aren't going to uh get to go anywhere . Also, say goodbye to Ask Jeeves. Did you know Ask.com was still around? Did not know it was still around. Apparently nobody did. So they finally gave up. They're shutting it down. Uh this is the story from NGadget. Uh ask, which it was Ask Jeeves, remember the butler, and they changed it to Ask.com. The internet's favorite butler is uh is saying goodbye . It closed uh it's uh closed his uh serving tray on May first . I remember when at school they taught us uh we had a whole we had a whole day where we went to the library and we were taught about like Lexus Nexus and all of these other tools. But then they also all the old tools for searching things, but then they also taught us about new tools for searching things and one of those was at the time Ask Jeeves. And I remember coming home and you know bringing this news to my family and teaching them how to use Ask Jeeves. And at the time sang with my whole chest going , listen, you'll get better results if you type it out as a question. Which now I'm like, what was I thinking? That's hilarious. But no, you were right. That was that that's how we started asking internet questions. Yeah, you did a full question. And then now uh you see sometimes people still feel like you have to do that. And so it's one of those things where I'm going, do I just let them live in the world where they type a whole question into you don't type. Probably smart. Yeah. Uh because you it's not it doesn't need of . You know, that that's that's not a word that of I mean and yes if you're doing Boolean, but what anyway, point is yeah, you type out like a full sentence to get to get an answer. And now you do that if you're using one of your you know It was too it was too early, asked Jeeves. Yeah. Well before it's see, you're not gonna say flight speed swallow. You're gonna say what is the flights what is the flight speed of a swallow, right? Yeah. Wouldn't you? I would type in flight speed swallow, honestly, I would. Yeah. But yeah. You're very uh you're very parsimonious with your words, I guess. Uh and there is one actual passing, and it's Craig Venter who uh was a big name in the uh race to decode the human genome . Uh he was kind of a uh uh I would say a maverick in all of this. He said we don't need to use these slow processes. I can decode the human genome faster with shotgun sequencing. Uh and in fact uh one his company Solera went up against uh a international consortium of uh researchers called the Human Genome Project. Uh and in fact, uh I guess technically it was a draw . But the fact that he could came even close was pretty amazing. An interesting fellow, a force of nature, uh somewhat controversial in many ways. He led an effort to explore the world's oceans, trace the genetics of marine microbial communities. His first global ocean sampling expedition circumnavigated the globe in 2005 and 2006. He also tried to copyright or trademark or patent I think it was maybe patent genes, the genome. Uh wait, what? Yes. Sorry, I shouldn't laugh. You were so close to be to true greatness, man. Yeah, so close. Anyway, uh Craig Ventner uh passed away April 29th at the age of uh seventy-nine. But Craig Venner lived a very rich life, got a lot done in his seventy nine years . That is that for this week, our our uh our twit episode. Thank you so much, Micah Sargent. So great to be here. Being here to backstop in case everything went to hell in Hawaii. But it's always great to get you on. I'm glad it didn't be here. Yeah, yeah. Uh you'll find Mike on Tech News Weekly every Thursday and of course IOS today. You record like every every other week now? Yeah, we record iOS every other week. We just recorded uh three of the episodes of Hands on Tech earlier this morning. Oh yeah, Hands on Tech, yes. Yeah, we'll also record those later. Hands on Apple. I record that weekly. So lots of shows you can check out on the network. Best way to check 'em out, join the club. Uh support independent podcasting. It is uh a real challenge in this world where big companies run podcasting and uh advertisers f you know flock to the big companies instead of us. But the best way to stay afloat in this world is to use not use, to call on our wonderful community to support us and we have a great many people who support Club Twit. We'd like to have you in the club. Ten dollars a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. You get to watch Micah do his shows in the Discord and lots of other special content. We've got some big ones coming up, the Google I .O. and WWDC keynotes are coming up. We do those in the club only because we don't want to get taken down on YouTube . So join the club. It's a way to support what we do and it's a way to get a lot of extra programming and to meet some really cool people in the club Twit Discord, including Mr. Micah Sargent. Micah's uh creative uh what do you call it? I forgot. Micah's crafting corner. Crafting corner. It's always fun. Are you still doing paint by numbers or have you moved on? We now I'm trying to remember what did we do last time? Because I took a break from paint by number. It's very relaxing. So I understand. Yeah it was incredibly relaxing. It was also hard to because a part of it is engaging with the chat room. They are sharing the things they're working on as well. So it's just a nice little uh crafting moment where people talk about the foods that they're making. And I literally do not recall what it was I worked on last time. Um, somebody in the chat will remember. But anyway, yeah, we do all sorts of things: knit crochet, lego , uh uh little dioramas, all sorts of stuff. A lot of fun. Did I just close my Zoom or am I still here? You're still here. I was closing tabs. Okay, kids, don't try this at home. Never close tabs. Keep them all open. All of them. All of them. Nicholas De Leon is of course a consumer reports where he reports on electronics, senior electronics reporter, and has many, many AI uh pages up there, like crosswording the situation. Yes. And uh what is it? What are the other two? Uh deep dugout, uh Tucson Daily Brief. I'm trying to think of the best way to you have others too? I have uh other thing, those are the the main ones. Oh I also I also made a a a job like a like a job finder app uh very that's actually quite powerful. We'll talk about that another day. But uh yeah, you need a site for all your sites so that we can go. I mean most uh they will just put it up on GitHub whether you want it to or not. Yes, yeah. Um most of them are on GitHub. I think uh I I should GitHub handle uh day lay own d a y. I'll just type it in the chat here. D-A-Y-L-A-Y-O-W-N. That's just my last name pronounced. Dale one. Uh, and if you go to dayleon.org, uh that's probably the easiest because I that I list most of the things I've got going on over there. So a bunch of cool stuff. Most importantly, consumer reports, you know. Uh I know folks uh I'm a member since nineteen eighty one. I'm very proud. to support it We are a you know, there's media is a challenging industry, but we're still kicking, we're still doing pretty, pretty well. Uh, and we're trying to do impactful stuff like we saw with the with the grocery store pricing, you know, some of this AI stuff we're where really trying to like find, you know, report on this stuff in a way that's relatable to, you know, I'm a nerd. I like messing with all the models and all that type of stuff. But you know, if you're a regular person, how are you interfacing with these things? What are your expectations so we're we're trying to do more of that type of stuff but yeah consumer ports is the most important and then you can look at my my zany little side projects I love them I love them they're not zany they're great it's great to talk to you N,icholas. And of course thank you, Davindra, dear friend. And now hanging by a thread, I'm sorry to say. I'm surprised we all aren't at this point. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of hanging by a thread. Yeah. When I looked, I said, oh wow, there really is only one thread up there. Oh dear . The sword of Damocles is hanging by it. So uh uh Nick, you'll find uh you'll find uh Davindra at uh gadget brand new gadget looking good. And the filmcast podcast. Yeah. Thank you, Davindra. Appreciate your support as well. Thanks to uh all of you for watching, for listening. Thanks to our club members for making this possible. Uh and I hope you will be back uh next week. We uh do twit every Sunday from 2 to 5 p.m. Pacific, 5 to 8 p.m. Eastern. Turns out that's 11 a.m. Hawaii time, I found out. Uh what is it, uh 2100 UTC. If you can figure that out, you can figure out what it will be in your local time zone. You can watch us live in the club discord or on YouTube, twitch.tv, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kick .com. After the fact on-demand versions of all of our shows, audio and video, available at our website, twit.tv. Uh most of our shows have their own dedicated YouTube channel. Twit is no exception. You can find us there. Great way to share clips of the show if you want to tell your friends and family about something exciting you saw on the show. And of course, the best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done. Thank you everybody for being here . I will uh be in Hawaii for another uh few days. Uh I'm gonna be doing Mac Break Weekly and the Security Now and Windows Weekly and Intelligent Machines from here and next week's uh Twitter as well. So uh if you hate the fact that there's the ocean and the trade winds behind me, well I'm sorry. You're just gonna have to put up put up with that for a little bit longer. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you. Thank you to our uh great uh technical director Benito Gonzalez for keeping everything together. Anthony Nielsen for helping me uh get the uh technology down to do this show from here, and of course Kevin King, our editor, our executive producer, my wife, Lisa Laporte, who is right now in a helicopter. I think she just went over, as a matter of fact, flying over uh the big island of Hawaii. Are you gonna get to do a helicopter? No, I don't believe in uh flying in rocks with wings. I just it feels dangerous somehow. Uh she she does it every time and I always say, Good, have fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're terrifying. They're terrifying. And they're very loud. But it is really cool. I mean it's I did it once and that's that was enough. Once it was enough. Thank you everybody. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. He's amazing. Do on the twit. Do on the twit. Alright. Do on the twit, baby