Remembering Om Malik

It's time for Twitter this week in Tech. Jennifer Paterson Tuy is here from the Verge, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI, and Daniel Rabino Editor in Chief of Windows Central. Microsoft's extending the deadline for Windows ten yet another year. The Apple prices are going up and it's not just Apple. Are people gonna blame AI for this? And it looks like Mythos is out of jail. All that coming up next on Twitter , podcasts you love from people you trust . This is Twitter This is Twitter this week in tech. Episode one thousand ninety recorded Sunday june twenty eighth, twenty twenty six . Flock of sequels . It's time for Twitter this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Hello everybody. Great to have you here. Great to have our panel here starting with Dan Patterson, AI guru at blackbird. AI. He's senior director of content at Blackbird AI , which is dedicated to ferreting out disinformation wherever it lies. Your job's getting busier by the moment . Yeah, it's it's been an interesting year to say that this one certainly has. I've got an allergy frog stuck in my throat, so forgive me. Oh, hello allergy frog. Yeah . Also here, Jennifer Paterson, Two, you see her every month, of course on Tech N,ews and you Wee seekly you're probably every day on the verge where she's a senior viewer specializing in smart homes. Hello JPT . Hello Leod. Love you. Any robots fall on you lately? Yeah, I've got these little sort of fluffy ones in my house at the moment and yeah they're very annoying . Are those the ones that purr and gurgle and like that or so at CES this year there was it was Ecovax robot company and Switchbot, the smart home company both released like robot companions that are like they look like teddy bears and one's like a teddy bear and one is like a little puppy puppy dog . And yeah , they well actually it didn't fall on me but it keeps falling over . But it's not one hundred and eighty pounds, which is what happened with the last one so it's nice and so and it's cute but it's really annoying. Is that the Qatar friend? Yes. Qatar . Cute. Seven hundred bucks. Does it wash your dishes? No, it just wanders around and actually, you can turn this off, but one of its features is it'll just wander around and take pictures. So it's like a little spy in your house. Pretty much pretty much and yeah. I still have not figured out what these who these are for. I've been trying , that's sort of been my mission because it's definitely not for me. I had the neighborhood kids come over. Nothing . So yeah, I haven't figured it out. They're smart now about AI. They're not their fault. Also with us from Windows Central. It's great to see Daniel Rabino, editor in chief there. Hello, Daniel. Hello, thanks for having me. You're gonna buy the new steam machine ? No , it's a little too expensive. I appreciate Valve and price. They are in a pickle these days, but they'll they'll survive this. They're not alone. The pickle is everywhere . Apple this week announced that they were going to have to. They of all people were going to have to raise prices due to memory shortages . Tim Cook kind of telegraphed it a day or so earlier in the Wall Street Journal , which Mark German from Bloomberg said, Well, that means you're going to do it right away. And he was right. They did it a couple of days later and tanked ankles ankles tanked Apple stock, which is not quite to my ankles, but it is down a little bit. It prices up as much as two hundred bucks on all of the Apple devices. Jennifer, you said you were lucky you bought your kids' college laptop the price hikes. Yes, I was very excited when the Neo was announced because my son is just about to start his first year and I was like, This is going to be perfect. I says, Well, I will get him. And but I obviously dele Dtedalli. I couldn't dec ide whether to get the touch ID or not. That was I was going back and forth. And then when the rumors started before, you know, I guess these started about a month ago, that this was gonna happen, I was like, I'm just gonna bite the bullet. I can always return it. Now I can always return it and make a profit. Oh, I don't think it works that way, but that's a nice idea. It would be good. This is now six ninety nine cents, which, you know, I mean, that was the whole thing about the Neo. It was like, oh, it's only five ninety nine cents for a Mac and it's only stud aent discount . Yeah. Yeah, a hundred bucks off for the students . So yeah , it's you were lucky. You got it for five hundred bucks. It's now seven hundred bucks. I texted my friends yesterday it was announced and Prime Day was still on whose kids are about to go. I was like, Just go on Amazon now and buy it. I said, Don't worry about whether you actually need it or not, because you can always sell it . But you're going to if you decide this is what you want, you're going to be spending a hundred dollars more very soon. So yeah. And like you said before we started recording, I think that Amazon Prime Day was still going on and they had all they had discounts very much I think it was like ten dollars off, but as soon as the price hike happened it was now, one hundred ten and dollars a lot . So that was the day to one hundred and ten in some cases. Right. So yeah, I mean, people were rushing over to Amazon to get remnant inventory. Imagine the same thing that Costco and Target and all the other places that had Apple hardware and the prices hadn't gone up yet, but they're up now. Yeah. Tim Cook said the price increases were unavoidable. This is Apple's statement. The consumer electronics industry is facing an unprecedented challenge. The rapid expansion of AI data centers has created an extraordinary surge in demand for memory . Oh, and storage, by the way. Yeah Actually, Dan, you were saying that the memory companies have announced that they are booked solid, not just for this year, but for years to come. Yeah, you know, just before the show, I looked up the major suppliers for Apple and And including talking about the steam machine , a number of the gaming consoles, but a lot of the consumer electronic devices are powered by just three companies, right? SK, Micron , and Samsung, Micron just pushed sixteen different companies into five year deals . SK is pushing for five years deals for almost all of their providers, and Samsung has three year deals for all of their providers. This is just for RAM and SSDs are the same type of deals Apple said that the hikes are global , but do not include the iPhone, the Apple Watch, or AirPods, and that's because I think they've, you know, they bought up everything and made them. But they hinted there will be more price adjustments in the future. And I would expect come September when the new iPhones are announced, we'll see expensive devices . Microsoft's been bit by this too, right? The Xbox went up quite a bit. Again, yeah. Again, that was the second time. This was the second time Apple raised prices. They raised prices in March, too . They went up by one hundred bucks . And yeah, the Xbox went from four ninety nine cents and then went up to I think it was six hundred twenty nine. Now it's going up to I think seven hundred ninety nine or seven hundred fifty around there . And same thing , we expect that there could be another price hike in twenty twenty seven . So this is not ending . The earliest we could expect any relief would be twenty twenty eight and that's just maybe , you know, that's like you might start to see prices start to come down a little bit, but this is going to go on for a long time and it's really unfortunate because as we all know, tech evolves quickly. And we're actually in a really exciting period for tech nology with amazing power, chips and everything coming out and no one can afford them now. Yeah . So it's really kind of unfortunate. Why aren't these RAM companies and storage companies increasing capacity. Why aren't they just building plants? This is a chance for them to make even more money. Well, I think it takes I mean, in the reading I did just before the show, and you know, we talked about this. We've been talking about it for a year , but in January , you know, we anticipated an increase in the foundries . But I think it takes a significant amount of time for them to increase capacity and with the amount of money that they're making, there's almost no incentive . They don't want prices to go down . Right. You know, interestingly, you know, to the valve steam machine , high prices , Valve issued a statement, you know, they're not a massive buyer , but they're not small either and they have some clout . They issued a statement saying that we either RAM companies quoted us a price and it was take it or leave it. Either you took that price or they wouldn't talk to us again. Wow. Yeah. And the smaller the company, the worse off is . So like, I mean that's like that's like a mafioso. You take this price or we're not gonna ever talk to you again. Yeah . That's it 's really bad. And yeah, the fabs take to put together . Okay . This is the . And by the way, they're not making any move to do it either. It's not like they're breaking ground on new Fabs . Well, I mean, yeah, Intel is in the US and stuff. And there are a few coming online, but they're not for RAM or are they? I don't know for Intel's making processors . Yeah, right. But like, I know like Intel's fab took cost ten billion dollars. Right. They're very expensive . Yeah. And it took like five years to put together. You're talking the world's most advanced technology, lithography, which is some of these machines, there's only one or two that exist on a planet. And it's really incredible. I've been to the Intel fab in Israel and got a tour of it. And it's just, I mean, it's absolutely incredible. But there's very few companies on a planet that make this technology. And so that's why it's just and to ramp up will take many, many years. And then yeah, there is sort of less incentive, but at the same time , you know, between AI , gaming and computers and phones, there is demand out there and consumers won't be able to buy it at these prices . And so I think there is incentive for them to build out , but it's just not something that they can do overnight. So Apple told Bloomberg, we know this is not welcome news and we are working tirelessly to find solutions. What like , oh, there's some RAM and Tim Cook's cushions what do you what does that mean I feel like they are asking the federal government to lift restrictions on a Chinese chipmaker . They because you can't buy chip s from this Chinese company. They tried to do this a couple of years ago. Congress thwarted them . But I guess they're saying, well, if only , Mr. President, you would allow this . We could bring prices down. Of course, it only would only benefit Apple, and it's not RAM, it's , I don't think, I think it's like star processors. Yeah . Yeah . So I find the most egregious thing here though from, my angle is that they've increased the prices of the Apple TV and the homepods, which for no good reason. Really old devices They've been updated in years and they're very expensive already. So you're now paying so that well the mini the homepod mini's gone up thirty dollars , the homepod has gone up fifty dollars and then the Apple TV's like have just gone through the roof, which I guess because I don't know, they have more memory in them. I mean, the minis, the homepods don't have much door, the Apple TV's you can buy different levels. But yeah, it's crazy because these are really old and there's they say, well, they don't say sorry, the rumor is there that's about to be new ones like in the next four three or four months anyway. So it seems like why do this now? Yeah, and it's just when you're buying like if you're buying a new MacBook Ne ar or a new MacBook Air that's a modern recently updated device, okay, you kind of I mean it's miserable, but you stomach it. But for something that is very old and really not actually I wouldn't say wor th that money. It's a real crop in the pants. one hundred and thirty nine dollars to two hundred dollars. It really, I think it really , I think it's a good thing, but I'm not sure I'd want to spend that much. No, they're great devices. Yeah, I mean, they do work out. Don't mean to imply they're bad devices. They're just old and there's a new one coming soon. Yeah, that's that's the kind of push and pull here. It's like I just would have thought you'd just leave these ones. I mean , but who knows what's going on in Cupertino apparently these have been according to Bloomberg, these actually the new models have been ready to go for a while now. They're just waiting on the new Siri AI to sort of catch up and then will come to the home because to date none of the new series has come. And that puts more pressure on Apple because the Seri AI requires more RAM . Right . You did a review in on Windows Central of the MSI, I love the name claw yeah this is a handheld or should I say a claw held gaming device which you loved Yes but handheld gaming is one of the fastest growing areas right now in gaming that we see. There's a lot of interest. And it all started with Nintendo Switch and then Steam Deck really set the bar. And now we're seeing these windows handhelds and Intel has a brand new chip for this called the G three. Isn't that ironic because Intel which struggled with mobile made the scale processor, which was a huge flop, and basically lost the mob ile market. Yep. Now they're back in, I guess you call this a mobile market. I mean, yeah, it's smaller than a laptop. It's priced like a laptop eighteen hundred dollars It was probably at least five hundred dollars more than it was supposed to cost. Yeah. You know, 'cause we see these things usually topping out at twelve ninety nine cents, which isn't cheap, but this is the top tier handheld on the market. Based on processor screen size, what makes this so good ? The processor is so AMD really set the bar here. They were the ones that making all the chips. They make them for Nintendo, and they make them for the Steam Deck, and they were making for Windows devices. And only MSI stuck with Intel and they were just using laptop chips and now they came out with a custom chip for handhelds. And it is yeah, and it's between thirty five and probably forty five percent faster than AM theD's top chip right now. I mean, it's like wow night and day difference. And so for the first time with handheld gaming, you can play like you can play Steampunk a Nestie Punk Cyberpunk twenty se venty seven , around ninety frames per second on this thing. Like I can play that on my Nintendo Switch two , not probably at thirty five now that's resolute at this frame rate. My eyes are only twenty eight frames a second, so it's okay . And you know, the claw is really, I mean, it's almost a PC. People I know who have been who've taken it home have really they plugged it in and it's been a functional PC. Wow. Yep. Yeah, you can dock it and act as a mini PC . It's got Thunderbolt four on it. It runs Windows, right? So it's a it's the handheld device we've been waiting for at least or I've been waiting for because I said, you can play true AAA top tier games at least sixty frames per second, but now we're heading over one hundred frames per second. Part of that's because of Intel Frame Gen, the XESS, they're ups caling technology . It's really just amazing technology that we have in this thing. But because of RAM and the storage costs, like I said, it's about five hundred dollars more than what it should. twelve ninety nine already wasn't cheap, but seventeen ninety nine isn't, you know , that said, if you go to Best Buy, at least when I checked yesterday, they were already sold out. Now how many do you have in stock? I don't know , but at least on the subreddit, a lot of people are buying it. So boy, there's a market for these things. That's really interesting. Is this replacing the console market ? It's definitely impacting it because you can just with a Thunderbolt four dock connect us up to your TV . Right, and just do an important switch . Yeah, you do four K gaming and all that kind of stuff. You can connect an EGPU to it. Like it's really endless what you can do with this thing because connect an EGPU . Yeah . Wow. And this is the arc graphics that Intel has been. It's interesting. Intel we really like a year ago counted them out down and out . Yeah, they're new chips are the core Ultra series, which is this is based off of with the B three hundred and ninety GPU . They're in the game. They're pulling ahead of AMD, who I think is a little bit more focused on server and desktop right now . They're still doing well there, but when it comes to handhelds, they just lost the crown and it came to laptops Intel still crushing it . So I would not you say get an intel ultra processor over any of the other? Yeah, Truth three is like finally found the middle ground where the first generation was a lot of performance, the second generation was concentrating on efficiency, and now the third one combines both into a really stable platform that's just really efficient and fast. Interesting . Yeah. Why the worm has turned . That's really amazing. I mean, Intel's chips were always did do well when it came to their quarterly earnings. It was the other stuff that they were losing money on . So you know, is it Matan, their new CEO that's turned this around? Yeah , they're really focused on gaming right now. And integrated graphics is the big story because AMD used to beat them left and right when it came to integrated graphics . But now you can buy one of their ultra book laptops and still do sixty frames per second on Triple A games just through integrated graphics, no NVIDIA . So they've come a long way. But it's just so inappropriate for timing because you have the MSI claw, you have the Steam machine , and they're both extraordinary devices , but they're just priced out of people's doesn't make sense anymore for most people. Isn't Microsoft though moving away from intel towards arm processors, the Snapdragon I wouldn't say they're moving away from. They're definitely embracing . But they've always said that they were going to welcome all but not treat anyone specifically, you know, better. Apple, of course, clapped their hands and said, We're done with X eighty six, everybody had arm, that's the end of it . And you know, Microsoft can't do that because of legacy, enterprise , hospitals, government. So but now that NVIDIA is on board with the RTX spark , it actually helps Qualcomm because it's just going to make the ecosystem that strong much more strong. So it's really, again, fascinating to watch NVIDIA and Qualcomm are kind of on the same side now and then you have Intel and AMV and X eighty six on the other side. And they're all honestly doing some crazy really good technology. It's just not happening . And suddenly chips got so good. Is it EUV? What is the technology that changed all this . I think that definitely plays a part on it. You know, they keep going down to the nanometer. I think Apple, you know, honestly caught a lot of people off guard with kicked him in the butt. It's yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so like , you know, when I would talk to Intel about this, they're like, there's nothing inherent about X eighty six that makes it inefficient compared to ARM. Like they said it's not that versus Cis ? No, I mean, it's just that they come from different pedagogies, right? Like eighty six came from desktop . And so it was always optimized for desktop. And then they had to back it down for laptop, where they built the M series for mobile smartphon es and built it up to desktop, right? So they came from different points, but there's nothing inherent about X eighty six that supposedly it can't compete with ARM. And we're starting to see that. I would still say Qualcom is still more efficient than Intel's X eighty six, but I can't deny there's a point of diminishing returns, right? If your X eighty six laptop is getting ten hours a day of real world usage, that doesn't really matter. To, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, so it's like, okay, you know, how many people aren't going to not charge the laptop when they get home? So you know what's really changed though. And this is what's driving the component shortage too is AI and people wanting to or maybe they don't. Actually, Microsoft has kind of learned its lesson. They're backing down a little bit on putting co pilot everywhere. Do people ? Are they looking when they're looking at laptops now? Sounds like they're looking at gaming they,'re looking are at AI also ? No , but you know, for gaming, it's interesting because when you have like Intel XESS their frame gen and upscaling technology, that's AI, right? That's using that kind of technology. And there's a definite kind of correlation between that's why you can use GPU's for both gaming and AI, right? It's matrix transform s, it's mass movement of data and transformation of data. So the GPU can do it for Graams, it could also do it for AI . Yeah . So there's some similarity, but now we also see these what Microsoft calls NPU's , which are a different part of the processor. It's all very confusing. Should we are people reasonably blaming AI for this chip shortage. Is this one of the components creating this AI kind of mass AI hatred among the general populace? Dan? You know, we in fact I was just loading our research on this . We just did a ton of research on AI backlash and the data center backlash. And there are a few components at play here. Yes , the primary backlash is organic, but look, there is a significant amount of Russian and Chinese inauthentication . Yeah , well , you know, it's challenging that the differences between disinformation and misinformation are nuanced , but there's certainly a large amount of activity in the anti data center market. So where a conversation might hit, let's say x felocity, it is then amplified by a number of inauthentic voices and it hits more communities faster and it seems louder than it actually is. So that's very interesting to me because I was as an AI fan, I was starting to worry we just had a big rug pull from the federal government on Anthropic's most capable model. The best model I think most of us agree we've ever seen, fable and mythos . And it concerned me that maybe the federal government, the Trump administration, was putting its finger to the wind and saying, Oh, you know what? People hate AI . So we can do this with impunity . There's definitely that feeling. Polls say people , you know, seventy one percent of people say they don't want a data center near them. eighteen percent of people, only eighteen percent of people trust the AI search results they're getting . And I can go on and on. There's a real fear of AI out there but you're saying it's being amplified somewhat by bad actors . I think part of it too sorry, I was just gonna say that the technology is coming down. Yeah, there's also backlash going on. Yes. Yeah. Because we're old enough to like smartphones. That came from a couple nerds with blackberries , pocket pcs, and it developed kind of organically. And then like Apple came and sort of really set that category off. But a lot of technology starts off with a few early adopters and then integrating it, becoming enthusiasts, and then it eventually gets pushed to the mainstream. The garage model. Yeah , and this feels very much like it's being forced upon us from the other side of that. Yeah. And yeah, like, but there's a reason for the hunters. These frontier models require huge amounts of capital. Right. You have to be able to afford thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. All right, I needed to say go ahead, Jennifer, go ahead and say, I think there's the fear of the unknown too. Like absolutely the difference from, you know, the ground up technology that's tried and true and tested and this AI that the companies that are developing even themselves don't seem to know what it's capable of. And that is sort of we're going to get to that fear . It's something I think people are right ly concerned about but I can your son's going to college. Is he nervous about his job prospects in the AI era four years from now? No, but that's because he's not really focused on four years from now. But he wants to be a pilot which I'm like, well I did the research and it's going to be a while until we have planes that I mean I know planes can fly themselves but it's going to be a really long time until people are comfortable being in planes without pilots so yeah they often do land themselves, but you still want to see a good looking fella in a uniform up front. Exactly . Ooor gal. All right, we're gonna take a little break and come back let's talk about this the AI rug pull and what it's spawned, which is very, I think, very interesting in the tech world. We've got a great panel, Jennifer Patton Toui, is here from the Verge . We have some home automation stuff to talk about with you as well. Daniel Rabino from Windows Central. He's the editor in chief there. And Dan Patterson from Blackbird AI, where he's the senior director of content . And you were listening a couple of weeks ago , Larry Maggot was on when we had the little wake for the end of CBS radio news . What a sad moment that was, Dan. It has been . Well it's part of a, you know, the world is changing. And it's what's interesting is it's changing faster and faster and faster . And I think that's upsetting to some . And then there's some of us and I think a lot of the people who got into technology got into technology because we were changed junkies because we liked we like to have a vision of home. Look, it's all changing. It's like sci fi. And so some of us embrace it . I think the vast majority go. Oh no , our show today brought to you by simply CX . We've reached the point where having AI is no longer a competitive advantage . The advantage comes from what you build with it. That's the focus of simply CX, a podcast from Microsoft, hosted by Nicole McKinley, Microsoft's global customer experience leader. The show explores how organizations are applying emerging technologies in ways that are creating real business impact today. If you're looking for a place to start, check out their recent episode featuring Jess Lauren, founder and CE O of Global Objects . It provides a fascinating look at a technology you may be hearing a lot more about in the coming years photo real digital twins . Nicole and Jess discuss how these high ly realistic digital replicas are being used across industries from entertainment and education to energy and cultural preservation and why trust, accuracy and emotional connection are becoming just as important as the technolog y itself. It's the kind of conversation that helps you see beyond today's AI headlines and get a glimpse of where digital experiences may be headed next. New episodes drop every other Tuesday , find simply CX wherever you get your podcasts and tell them this week in tech. Send you thank you, Simply CX . So how long ago has it been now? Three weeks, four weeks, the White House abruptly pulled anthropics fable model so abruptly that many of us were in the middle . It happened to me I was in the middle of a big job. I was rewriting software we've been using for eleven years. It's the core of our operation. I thought this is a chance. I've finally got a model that can handle this giant complex and all of a sudden it said this model no longer available . And I thought, crap, did I forget to pay my anthropic bill? But no it was true for all of us . I was more upset, I think than a lot of people. Maybe technologists in general, AI users were more upset than the general public. I don't know if the general public was even that aware of it. They were so much more concerned about the green reflecting pool than they were about this. But I saw this as a really scary precedent where without consultation with Congress , without really any research, as far as I can tell, the federal government blocked an American product. This wasn't even foreign blocked an American product from users . Now what was the reasoning here? Was it like this is too powerful? This is too powerful. It could cause chaos and I think Athropic kind of hurt itself because they did promote that heavily it does feel like something a government should be concerned about honestly . I mean I get your point like if the US government stopped Apple selling its iPhones okay for no and you could make the same case that all the iPhone's made in China it'.s a So huge security threat. Yeah. We don't go sorry to interrupt. No. No, it's a unilateral top down . Right, right, right. Whether the public knows or cares is almost irrelevant. It's an American made product where an executive branch issues an order and can shut down a product . I think that's what scared a number of technologists and if not the public , a number in the business of people in the business community. Yeah, well there was and there was an interesting impact, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but I should mention that the follow Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic Flew the G seven seven summit in France, met with the president , and in an Axios interview, shortly thereafter, the president said, You know what, I like these guys Anthropic. They're okay . Meanwhile, Pete Hagseth, the Secretary of War tweeted, Aha, you see what happens. You see what happens? He's the one who called an thropic a supply chain ris k, again a designation usually reserved for foreign actors, not American companies . Well, apparently the United States has now lifted the ban a little bit. Semophore had the Scoopery Albugatti and Ben Smith US releases powerful anthropic model Mythos, which is mythos is basically the same as fable. It's just an unrestricted fable , as far as we can tell , has allowed Anthropic to release it to more than one hundred U. S. institutions. Remember, originally, that's what Anthropic did with fifty companies that said, Okay, this thing is so powerful. We're going to give it to you, Microsoft, for example, to fix any flaws before it gets out to the public and bad guys use it to attack you . So now this is called Project Glasswing.are Antpply it's still on . The Trump administration on Friday just two days ago said Anthropic could release mythos to more than one hundred institutions Friday after noon didn't say anything about fable and it didn't say anything about open to the public either , nor did it mention the original restriction was that no foreign n ationals should be able to use these models . That was the pretext the Commerce Department used . But of course, since Anthropic doesn't know the citizenship status of anybody using its software, they had to bl ock it for everybody . Howard Lutnik, the commerce secretary , said that they had had significant progress in the intense daily talks between Anthropic and the Government . Anthropic has committed to work with the U. S. government on protocols and standards and releases . The other shoe that dropped same day is that OpenAI had decided to rele ase its latest model, which also has a cyber security component to a short list of government approved partners. What has essentially happened is the Trump administration has done a complete about face Trum.p When came into office, he decried President Biden's AI regulations , said we're going to have no regulation. This is how we succeed. The United States is just compete, make the best models you can. We're not going to regulate AI , completely reversed that with the Fable Block and now is saying we want to approve every model before it's released to the public So Jennifer, you make an interesting point. If this is so dangerous , I mean, shouldn't the government protect us from it I mean , the government's protecting our kids from social media, right? There is so much such a fine line between what we think the government should protect us from and what it shouldn't. And it also depends on who you are, whether you think they should or shouldn't. But this does yeah, to my point about the fear , there is a fear amongst regular people about AI , whether it's founded or not, there is a concern that this technology is going to go somewhere scary . I mean, we've all seen the movies and we've seen that these that the tech companies, I mean, just from in my space, when I talk to tech companies about LL M powered smart voice assistants and I'll ask them questions like would it be capable of doing this or this? And they're like, That's a good question. Why don't you try and we'll see. We'll see you don't know. Like you don't know what this is going to do in my house. Yeah . You know, I get that this is a powerful and exciting technology , but before we unleash it on people, it needs we need to know as the technology companies need to know what it's going to do and what it's capable of and be able to control it. And it feels like we're in a moment. And Dan, I mean you're much better positioned to speak to this than I am, but I would love to know like, is that a moment that we need this ever going to change or is technology always going to be a step ahead of us that concern ? Yeah. I think to your point, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Jennifer, but I just want to agree, especially with something you said earlier that there is a top down and a tight clash. We saw this with untested technology, just like you've experienced with consumer products in the home. We saw this with consumer products like social media where, they began as fairly simple news feeds, we saw this algorithm testing on the general public and the expansion of social media into ways that the public is generally or appears to be generally uncomfortable with. And now perhaps we are seeing a very similar effect happen with the advancement of artificial intelligence where these products are incredibly powerful and effect that they have are very similar to what you said about smart home devices, where will this be good? Will this help? I don't know . Here's my here's my issue with this for one is let's assume that like I don't know atomic bombs that AI has all this potential for danger and so that it's not unreasonable for any government to put some restraints on it. The question unlike an atomic bomb, AI is very amorphous, you know? And the question is, well, who is going to judge it and how are they going to judge it ? There's also the issue. This is raised by Dean Ball, who teaches AI policy at Yale Law School is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Society. He or in his hyper dimensional substack says there's also the issue that there's a side effect when you when you do this for one, , if you take a month to approve an AI , this is moving so fast. You may have actually killed that AI . You know, they need to get to market fast and build an audience because the next AI is coming about a month later . So you're throwing a monkey wrench into a very fast moving machine . There's also a much larger issue, which is that you might do this in the US , but China and other countries are not holding back. One of the results of the fable rug pull, and I'm going to call it a rug pull , is that France, with its mistral, China with DeepSeek and ZAI's GLM model released better models. GLM is very, very good GLM five point two . All of a sudden, people are saying, oh, well, you know, if the American government can just stop any model, I guess I'd better not use American made models . There's plenty of other choices . It's also taught companies to not count on American AI . Like, well , just like many other things in the United States, we don't know what's going to happen next . So there's a real risk this. It's a very difficult thing to answer because I agree with you, Jennifer, you know, maybe these things aren't dangerous . I just don't know how we can count on a government, especially this government , which doesn't really seem to think much of science to determine what's dangerous or not. It almost feels as if it's an economic restriction as opposed to a technical restriction . I don't know, what do you think? This is a hard one to solve . Baul writes Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the first few post released months that they're broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become subfrontier , competition emerges and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work. So that's problem number one. You're undermining this entire industry. Now, maybe if you think and as many do, AI it's BS, we don't need AI, we'll be better off without it. You don't see that as a problem I would submit that AI is a very significant technology and its advance is very important to us. And we don't want to let others do what we could do better . Leo, are you making I hear this argument frequently and I don't know where I come down on this argument, but are you are you aligning with the argument that if we don't allow our models to be the frontier models and the cutting edge models , then we ced that to China and other competitors. Yes . Yeah, okay . That's exactly. You're basically undermining an American industry. Right. It's kind of the opposite of what they're doing with the auto industry. They're protecting the auto industry by banning Chinese cars . Well, what would happen if you banned American cars ? You would have a lot of Chinese cars in the United States. That's what we're doing . We're banning American models. There's also a larger question of can you even prove a model's safety ? No one has yet made a model. It's not jailbreakable . So let me ask something else . Much of our conversation is centered around consumer AI or at least B to B in the way that when we talk about AI right now . We think , you know, it evokes companies like Anthropic, Oban AI and others. But earlier in this conversation we also talked about another use of AI in Frame Gen in gaming, right? And AI has machine learning applications. We use artificial intelligence at Blackbird in a number of ways that are not consumer focused at all. So is this conversation about AI simply around somewhat consumer facing and business facing frontier models, or is there a broader conversation to be had ? Well, there is absolutely I mean, look, this is a very intractable problem. To go back to the garage model of technological advance, unlike anything we've seen before , AI requires huge capital investment and you've got to , you know, make all these GPUs and you've got to build all these data centers . There's nobody developed, well, maybe there is, but so far , there's nobody in their garage creating the latest frontier model. It 's like Biz and Ev coding Twitter using Ruby and Rails. Right. It takes billions , some might even say trillions . The Fable model, we don't know how much it costs or how big it was. It's estimated it might be ten trillion parameters , which means it probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars to create And they don't stop by the way. It's like you don't just make it and now it's done. You got to make the next one. It's also that's the weird issue with all this, which is fundamentally as the ar chitecture, even the correct approach because all this is large language models and you just keep throwing more and more power at it . And there's this idea that somehow if we keep doing this, we'll reach AGI , but we haven't defined AGI yet. We don't understand consciousness. We don't understand intelligence at that level. And so there's a lot of questions about , you know, is this even the right approach, right? There's different views of AI , including more semantic analysis, there's visual analysis. There's all these other components . Because Laun and Feifei Lee said, Oh no, you've got to do, you know, you got to do physical world stuff and. And all of that should happen. I'm not saying that shouldn't happen. All of that, and some of that may end up in somebody in a garage coming up with this great new way of doing it. But we haven't reached the end of what. By the way, I don't you don't have to stipulate that we're going to achieve AGI or anything . It's just that as we have continued to make these models bigger, they've gotten better and better and more and more capable . And I think they've changed a lot of things . They've changed how chips are made. Nvidia , who is it just announced that they're releasing a chip that's designed by AI and that as that gets better and better , it will get better and better as it develops better chips. Business processes are changing. People saying the SaaS marketplace for business tools is going to die because all of a sudden everybody's writing their own , business every I know of is implementing an AI strategy of some kind rightly or wrongly . This is fairly important to the economy, and this is another thing Baul points out . You might actually be bringing on this AI bust that everybody's so worried about simply by undermining a mark you might be creating a market panic . So land prices will go down at least. Right. Here's the good news. I think that consumer B to B business and like conflict is very real though. And I think that I mean my generation, my children's generation is the sort of loudest voice right now against AI, like we saw all of the college commencement speeches with people booing the tech CEOs. And my daughter is like violently opposed to anything AI main,ly because she's very creative and she's very opposed to the sort of artist the way it's potentially stealing artistic jobs. And she, you know , there is I think there needs to be a distinction here and I don't know how this comes about, but it's important to I think what's happening in business and technology in terms of how this is helping with processes and helping us develop and create more powerful , more useful tools for technology and business is very different from how it's being unleashed in the regular world , how it's affecting people's regular jobs and what they're doing on a daily basis and how they're interacting on a daily basis. Like use these LLM chatbots that people are now relying on for all their information and you know, some becoming like friends and this is like their main connection to society is those types of things are a different that consumer focused that consumer facing implementations of this AI is feels very not well thought out yet . And that's and we're unleashing it on people who don't understand it and who are like, wow, suddenly I can do all of this stuff and where is it going where is that going to lead us versus companies and businesses that are, you know, implementing this as tools for creating a better workflow? Those are two very different use cases of this technology. I can hear people some of our listeners, I get emails every week. Enough with the AI, who cares? I can hear people saying good. Yeah, I mean, your average consumer has not seen any improvement from this, right? They see AI slop on Twitter . They see a lot of fake news kind of stuff happening . Like when AI solves cancer, and of course that's a you know, broadly speaking, isn't it going to happen, of course, but once it starts solving diseases, right, which is what's the promise , then people I think will start to come around to it. When it starts to actually make your life easier and solves problems for your regular consumer versus oh by the way everybody's going to lose all their jobs in like five, ten years we don't know what we're going to do. Like that's what you know from your average consumer standpoint this is happening to them not with them . They haven't seen any benefits . And all they hear is, you know, oh my god, these models are so strong. They're going to completely undermine everybody's jobs. And you know, we don't need radiologists anymore, right? That famous example which didn't happen by the way. We did not have acknowledges. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so but I think that's the concern. It's like, are we supposed to be believing these people, right? Or should we not believe them? No one knows how to react. So there's a lot of confusion, isn't there? Yeah. Yeah . And these companies benefit from hyping up their models. Like it's so powerful, it's too dangerous. We need the government to like regulate our movie trailer. Yeah . I mean exactly . That's the super intelligence AGI hype, right that we are going to achieve some sort like no, what we've really done is build Adobe Creative Cloud. Like it can replace some tasks and make them a little more efficient, but like it's not going to cure cancer, at least not yet. It's not going to do a lot of the things that it was to your point, Daniel. And your stud, Jennifer, it's it is simply happening to people and there is some utility , but the hype certainly exceeds the capabilities right now. And if you look at arguably that's Photoshop. I would say we'd see we've seen a lot of evidence that really amazing things could happen which we may never get now because of this fear and that you know there we won't we may never know because we're just going to end up shutting this whole thing down . Do you really think we will? Fear. I don't know that. I think your point, Daniel, about how it's a peak and trough. Like people are scared because it's happening to them is very true. Like I mean, this is very a big tangent, but it's interesting. Like, what would you say is one of the most hated companies in this country right now? I would say drug companies have often been at the top list of drug companies. Interesting to say that because that's a similar situation where it takes huge amounts of capital to create new drugs. So there was a really interesting article and I want to say it was in the Wall Street Journal, and it was about the history of Eli Lily, which is the company behind Zipound, one of the GLP drugs, GLP one drug, which I am on, I should say, so I will shut up . Well, and the interesting thing was the CEO is like saying, you know, we have gone from being from getting hate mail because there was a big issue around diabetes around insulin at one point where they had a really low they had a shortage and it was hard for people to get this life saving medicine. And so they were getting hate mail from people. And now he says we get literal love letters from our customers who are like, what you have done has saved you hate pharma until it until it does that really works. Yes. And I feel like that's where we will probably go with AI on an individual basis. Like as individual people find real value from it , you know, that will slowly there'll be a ground swell if that happens, a ground swell of more popular opinion. And then that's called scale. That's been my experience. I've used as part of my job, I've gone heavily into using AI in a lot of ways and it's found incredibly useful and it constantly impresses me by doing things I never would have thought a computer could do . And I'm not saying it's alive or conscious or intelligent. I'm just saying it's very very, effective. It's the same Big Pharma is a really good example because it does take you could invent a new drug in your garage. It happens all the time, but you could never release it because you have to test it . You have to manufacture it at a scale. It is a capital intensive industry . There's negatives to that . Salt, which turns out to be a really good disinfectant, isn't widely promoted because nobody makes any money on it. That's a simple example, but there are many examples of that , you know , so but at the same time, I don't think we want to shut down pharmacological research, we might be scared of it, but we don't want to shut it down. Maybe the solution is to regulate it in some way , but I don't know how to brings which us back to our point. Right. What we started here is the government was trying to stop AI , but in a ham fisted way, which is a very difficult really helping. Yeah . Oh well, we haven't solved anything, but we had a good conversation and that's what I hope for. And we'll watch with interest. I mean, it's all complicated because we have an administration that really is anti intellectual, very anti science. And so it's complicated by all of that as well . So and also it seems to be that any company that kisses up to the presidency sufficiently is going to be favoured , and the big mistake that Anthropic made was saying, No, the military can't use our models for autonomous killing machines or spying on Americans , and that pissed off the administration so much that now we are six months later basically shut down . Yeah. So is this political or is this technology is this a smart technological move? I mean, it's political, right? But it sure looks that way. It doesn't mean that there doesn't need to be some it might be the right thing They might have done the right thing for the wrong reason . I don't think so. Yeah. I want my fable. I want my fable back. We've had, in fact, I interviewed Alex Stamos last week very highly respected security guy who says fable isn't and isn't doing anything that almost any other model couldn't do. That this particular horse has already left the barn. We already have models that can find security flaws. And this is technology. That's the biggest problem with government and technolog ies they always're two years behind what's actually happening . So it's impossible really for them to for government to regulate it. It sounds very star treky, but ultimately I think this has to become a global solution . This has to be something that needs to be managed by all of the countries, not individual countries because it is, like you say, if one country regulates it, it's not going to stop another country. I mean, someone was mentioning this in the chat comparing it to like the atomic bomb. If it's really that dangerous, you know, this needs to be something that has to has a global answer, not in not each country. It's really yeah, I agree. It needs to go through the UN, but then to, you know, here's Leo's point. Like it's going to kill it's going to slow down everything because government is really, really bad when it comes to technology in general. And it's going to be even worse with this, right? Because it's so complicated and so technological. And then you have things like would China, you know, we're so skeptical of China, right? Would they really develop this and abide by any agreements? You know, how do you enforce that, right? At least with nuclear, it's like there's centrifuges, right? There's uranium. There's like there we have peaceful uses of atomic energy and non peaceful. And we've attempted not very successfully but we've attempted to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the same time as we've encouraged the proliferation of atomic energy . That might be a good that might be a good analogy for this that there are safe uses of AI and unsafe uses of AI. I think it's a little clearer what the unsafe use of atomic fusion and fission is. That seems a little clearer. AI, it's a little bit more a little bit more muddy. I don't know . You know, it puts me in an awkward position because I agree a lot of technology is dangerous . Technology, I would say itself is agnostic, but it can be used by humans in a dangerous way. I would hate to see the American government decide which chips American companies could make and which they couldn't. That would a mistake . Do you guys think that there's going to be some sort of AI catastrophe. Like the AI does something where something happens because of AI and cause AI will never do anything bad by itself. There will always be a human actor who either said, Hey, maybe we should let AI control atomic weapons. I don't know. I mean, the whole thing with the terrible situation with the young man who killed himself because his chatbot basically told him how to do it. Yeah, that felt pretty awful. Like felt like that was a terrible outcome. Yeah, but it was done a Google search too. No, but this, but there was, I mean, he really was focus ing. I know we've talked about it on the show, but it was it was escalating the situation . And that was AI doing that. Not there was no human behind that doing that. But you know, Daniel, it might be like frog in a pot , much like climate change where a number of smaller, seemingly innocuous components stack up and we find ourselves in a challenging situation. But Jennifer, to your point , that is a tragic occurrence and we can maybe find analogs in the social media world , in fact, some of the recent rulings about social media and the obligation that social media companies might have in terms of regulating access to it. There was here's the question, do you regulate technology because of the edge cases? Yeah , right to protect the edge cases and by doing so defang it for everybody else . It's like, okay, let's eliminate children's playgrounds because some people hurt themselves on them . You can try to make them safer , that would be a reasonable thing . But you don't it's a dangerous precedent to regulate based on the edge case . We wouldn't have cars if that were the case, right? We wouldn't have modified. The problem here was that it wasn't there were no guardwells, there was no safety in place and I don't think this is created by man. can create safety. This is right, which is funny. My point is like they don't we even the people creating this don't know how powerful it is and that well that is a reason to be scared of safety. For every zipper, there's gonna be some guy who gets his penis stuck in it, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't have zippers . Is all I'm saying ? Right? It's the title of the podcast . No, it's definitely not I guess. Let me take a break before I get myself in any more trouble. I'm not saying it necessarily ever happened to me. I'm just saying it could, okay ? But we shouldn't ban zippers because of it . It does feel like everything about AI is inevitable . Like we just have no choice. Technology is always hasn't it? Like even weapons development, things like that , as soon as we could figure out how to do it, we're gonna do it. We can't stop it. Yeah. I don't know if that's true. . It does feel that way though . Like if it's if man can invent it , woman can't prevent it . I'm sorry, Jennifer. Let's take a break. That's okay. I will be the lone female voice of reason. That's what I'm saying boys and their toys. That's all I'm saying. Actually along that along those lines along those lines though, I think a better analogue here would be guns because like guns are readily available, easy to make . But around the world, around the rest of the rest of the world, it's harder to buy than it is in America. Right. Right . Yeah . Let's take a little break. Jennifer Patton Tuy, senior reviewer for the Virgin. We're gonna talk home automation. Something a little safer. You cannot hurt yourself with in just a little bit . Well, maybe you can, we'll find out. Make any promises Leah Daniel Rivino from editor in chief from Windows Central. Great to have you and of course Dan Patterson of Blackbird. Ai our show today brought to you by Box . This is really talking about AI . This is a really interesting technology. If you're an enterprise trying to transform your organization with AI , you are probably facing a very common challenge . Most AI tools are great at public knowledge, right? When can I get tickets to see Taylor Swift? But they don't know your business, well unless you're selling tickets to Taylor Swift. But if you're not, they don't actually know your business , they don't know your product roadmaps, they don't know your sales materials, they don't know your HR policies or financial models . They don't know about the stuff that actually makes your company run . But AI could be so much better if it did, right? That's where Box comes in. Box is building the intelligent content management platform for the AI era. Box serves as a secure essential context layer for Box's AI agents to access the unique institutional knowledge that makes your company run. And that's that's the key idea and I love it. It's so brilliant. The power of AI isn't the model. It doesn't come from the model. 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For agents both inside and outside box, that includes tools like all the frontier models, chat GBT, co pilot, Gemini, agent force , even custom agents , box becomes the trusted content and file layer via its platform APIs, MCP, and CLI. So it has complete interfaces that your agents can use. And for enterprises, that trust layer is so important. Box is built with security, compliance, governance, and threat protection in mind so that only employees and agents can access the information and they can only access the information they're exactly authorized to use , you keep control . Now, if you're thinking seriously about your company's AI transformation journey, I want you to think beyond the model. It's not just the brain because your business lives in your content . Box helps bring that content securely into the AI era. This is perfectly time. Visit box dot com slash AI to learn more. That's box dot com slash AI. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. Box dot com slash AI. Okay, we're going to move on from AI. Enough AI . Let's talk about the smart home. Now I have to say my little AI buddy, Quicksilver is connected to my home assistant green server and I can tell it to open shades, turn on the lights, I can have it, you know , when I get home, do things. It's very nice to have an AI connected to your home . Yeah, and actually , you know, to your point earlier about the different use cases here is this is so true with technology. It's not that AI bad, it's that some elements of AI could have concern, but some elements of AI have great use cases. And actually the smart home is one of them where I think we've already seen some really interesting innovations that help run your smart home because the key one is cutting through complexity because the smart home is complicated. What you just said is not a sentence that most normal people would understand in Judge Running on my HA green and yeah it's Well, you did though, right? You speak you speak home assistant? I do speak home assistant yes,, and I've used I used Claude to help me. Exactly. Code at my home assistant instance and that was super helpful, incredibly helpful, yes , because yeah, home it actually might be the missing link because all this time we've had this home assistant, it's like the tower of Babel. Nobody can talk to it. It doesn't one thing doesn't talk to another . Maybe AI is the solution, or maybe Matter is Matter. Yes, love that segue. Thank you, Leah . Well, I will say this. I've been lobbying. Everything I use should have an AI interface. We were just talking about Box, how it has MCP servers and SDKs and CLI . It's home assistant has an interface that an agent can use and understand . Everything should have that. Maybe Matter is that layer. I don't know. There's a big Matter conference . Yeah. So a couple of weeks ago, a week ago I was at this conference called Unify. And actually to our previous conversation about how maybe technology companies need to work together to figure out this how to control and responsibly deploy AI in the world. Matter is actually a great example of how competitors are coming together and working together to make a better solution. There is no risk of the end of the world through home automation , but it's definitely been interesting to watch and this was what this conference . That's because home animation isn't as powerful as it ought to be. It should be good enough to end the world if necessary . But it is a good example of like a technology that has so much value but has been so hard for people to use because of competing standards, competing protocols , confusion, complic ated setups , having to have little boxes running AI in your house to get anything to work. And Matter is the is a newish interoperability standard that's basically designed to make all of your smart home devices work with each other rather than being in like siloed ecosystems or walled gardens . And what this conference was was put on by thenect Conivity Standards Alliance who runs MATA, ANZIGB and ALLIRO and a few other open standards. But by the way, there's the problem right there . There wasn't enough just to have one. We had to make more . So you hear this all the time and it's it's not so it's it's a misnomer but I get the joke like it's the XCD XK CD com amic, I saying that right? Sorry. The comic, you know, there's fourteen standards and none of them work with each other. We need one standard to make them all work together. Protocol to make them all work together. And then that protocol comes along and now, yeah, we have fifteen protocols So we've been talking about matter for it feels like years. How many? A couple of years now? So it launched four years ago. Four Three in six months . And but it had been announced in twenty eighteen by Apple, Google, Amazon, and then quite quickly after Samsung. So all of these companies have been working together. They all had their own wall ability standard. Yes. They all had their own standards. And everyone used different protocols, different ways of connecting devices, different radios, different hubs. It was confusing, it was complicated . And it has MATA launched, but it has had a bumpy road. And what this conference was all about was really sort of bringing everyone together. I mean they all talk with each other apparently they this is what they say. They have these meetings, but three or four times a year where all the companies come together but this was their first public effacing event where they were like look at what we've achieved . Here's where matter is. Now it's still not where they prom ised it would be day one , which was you just buy a smart home device , you plug it in, set it up, and it will just work with any smart home platform you want. We're not there yet , but what I saw at this conference was really quite inspiring not to be too sort of toy, but that these companies actually have been working really hard to make this standard better and to fix the problems that we've seen. And most of those problems are that just it's still complicated and it's still confusing . But what came out of this is the launch of Bata one. six . So we're getting I mean and standards, you guys know you've been in this industry for a long time, standards are very hard . It's not easy to move an industry . It's not easy to get rivals to agree on anything. It's not easy to get them to implement something that could potentially mean that their product and their service could be superseded by their competitors. But I think what has what has transpired over the last few years is that it's really clear that the smart home is at an impasse because of how complicated it is. And sorry to bring this back to AI, but AI coming to the smart home has suddenly opened the monetization strategy for these companies, which wasn't there before . But we are now we heard about Amazon losing billions on its echo smart home division over the years and Apple has been very slow in this space. Google has also had kind of a bumpy ride with its nest and speaker Google Home speaker division. They just launched their newest speaker, which is all focused on Gemini AI. yeah, so it's built for so Gemini for the Home is their AI model for home automation and the smart home. And the AI what does AI need? What does AI need more than anything else? It needs good data. And what are you going to get good data with well, interoperability. If everything can talk to everything else, then you can use and build a more reliable smart home system that's potentially going to start doing the sort of the holy grail of the smart home, which is being able to actually manage your home for you. So you're not the one with the raspberry pie on the shelf trying to fiddle and all the different apps and trying to, you know, home assistance very great and powerful, but you can spend a whole month diving into it . So I still haven't connected everything to it. I've had it for a couple of years now . So I mean, and the idea and so one of the other things the Matt one. six came up with this which should have been there at the beginning, something called joint fabric. And basically what this means is when you buy a device from a smart home company and you add it to your smart home platform of choice, say Apple Home or Amazon Alexa, prior each ecosystem would set up their own network in your home called fabric . So you'd have your Apple Home fabric and you'd have your Amazon A fabric . Now with joint fabric, you're just going to have your own smart home network that every ecosystem you would like to control it. So if you want two or three because say you use a Google Pixel and your spouse uses an iPhone , they will now talk to that fabric but they won't own that fabric. And that sounds like a sort of small change, but it's a significant shift for the standard because it means that these companies have all agreed to give up control . So they don't have they really though have they? Well, that's that this is the so everyone says they are on board with this, but the other problem with standards is you get a new spec and then when does the spec actually appear in the product? So this it's wait and see . But it is it was an exciting sort of there was a lot of momentum, I guess. That was what I saw at this conference . I mean, I was talking to the engineers. I was talking to the people developing this rather than, you know, the PR and the management people. But if engineers rule the world, this will work. Yes. But that's a big if. That's right, because engineers want it to work. They're the ones using it. Yeah. So what's the takeaway for a consumer ? Is there should you not buy anything that isn't matter certified at this point . So it's a hard one to say because there are not enough master certified devices, I would say, to be able to do that at this stage. But yes, if you're looking at a device that if you're looking at buying smart home devices , I would highly recommend exploring the Matter versions over . All other things cool. Look for the one that has matter on them . Because and this is the point of my next story that I wanted to touch on . One of the great things about matter it is a local protocol or it's a local standard and it uses local connectivity protocols so thread and wifi and if you buy a cloud dependent device and that company goes out of business, your cloud dependent device no longer works. And we have me like the level lock again. Well , yeah, so the level lock, to be clear, the level level lock has not gone out of business , but it has been had a significant restructuring which causes some concern about the long term business model of the company and also Level Lock is they recently did an upgrade to Matt . So if your if you have a level lock that has a Matter upgrade , if in the future something happened to level servers, your device would still work. And this is where Matter becomes a very important excuse me This is where Matter becomes a key part of the smart home experience is that it is local and you control it. If your company goes out of business , if you weren't watching the video , Jennifer's son just walked through and unplugged the router it looks like I just froze, sorry about that . She froze in horror. Yeah. It wasn't quite like the BBC presenter whose kids rolled in, but it was a moment . Yeah. So the level lock is so level freak out. Did ASA Abloid buy them or did they was it their product to begin with? So Asset Abloid bought them. Level lock was actually made by a couple of iPhone of Apple Engineers. Oh startup? Yeah, startup . And I don't know if anyone if you're familiar with it, but it's a really cool piece of technology. They basically if you've ever seen a smart lock or if you've used a smart lock, they're normally big, kind of techy looking , giant batteries on the back of your door. They're a little cumbersome . Smart locks are great in general. Like I love them as a concept. They're really good, but they are twenty. Look, they are twenty . The level locks basically puts all the technology in the battery goes in the little dead bolt there and all of the smarts are built into the dead bolt mechanism. So it looks like a totally normal dead bolt totally normal lock. It has it's such a neat . I'm glad I didn't know about it or I would have bought it. It's very expensive. That's the other downside. Like three hundred fifty and dollars for that lock that we were looking at there . So there was a startup similar to like August the August lock you might be familiar with . And both of those companies were bought by ASA Ablo i at different times in their process. If you're familiar with ASA Abloi, it's one of the largest multinational access control companies on the planet, like they own They were famous for their excellent deadbolts though, right? They're not a cheesy company . No, no, I mean, it's a very well established Swedish company . And so they also bought they bought Yale and they bought August , and then they wanted to buy Quickset , which is the other large lock maker. And the government said, Ah , that's too many, that's too many locks . And so then they sold their st inake in Yale August and then bought level. So this company's been kind of on a lock bind spree. But what happened this last week, sadly, is basically laid off the majority of the staff at level . And so the concern amongst the staff and for customers of the lock man of the lock is that without any engineering and engineering team there anymore, this is a high this is a very technical very technically advanced lock and will the lock continue to be made? Hopefully it will continue to be supported , but there is a concern that it may just go away, which would be very sad because it's a great piece of technology. And they were just they were working on an ultra wide band version, and I think I've talked about this on the show before, but this is the next innovation that's coming to SmartLocks is complete hands free unlocking. So you using UWB radios that your phone will transmit to your lock as you walk up that you've come home and it will unlock the door for you. I love this, by the way. I don't have one because I bought a Schlag just before they came out. But so Schlag just launched its newest you be locked . I'm sorry. But I love that idea that you just walk up to the door and it's unlocked. I mean, it might be great. It's a really nice. It's the same technology. Yeah. Same technology. If you're coming or going, like if you're walking towards it or walking away so it doesn't block as you're walking away. I mean it's really kind of cool. It's a great technology and it's much better than the current . So if you have a smart lock, you may already have this experience . And there's some like Bluetooth GPS sort of magic that some use, but that's not very reliable because you're using a number of different radios and there can obviously be a number of failure points, whereas this is a local direct radio to phone technology and really I've used I've tried it and I've been very impressed with it. I have the new Schlade Lock actually somewhere right here that I'm going to be testing hopefully this week. Teenage boy . Yeah . I think I've talked about how he doesn't he's never used a key. I don't know how he's going to do it. Yeah I don't carry keys anymore. The only thing I carry a key for is my post office box because of course the U. S. postal service . They're never going away. Never stop using keys. But I don't I used to have a key ring. I don't have a keyring anymore. It's just a weird experience. But I'm going to make a bet here . We got two other high tech guys on the show . Daniel have a smart lock. Yeah . Do you have one, Daniel? A smart lock? Yeah, I have a Ufy. Yeah. He has a Eufy. Okay. How about you, Dan, do you have a smart lock? So I live in Brooklyn and we have less choice about this. Yeah And right, there's a number of security concerns with that. However, apartment complex I live in, yes, we have a smart lock, we have that option. But I think almost everyone opts to use a key and for my apartment, I use a key . However, excuse me , were I to not live here? Yeah, I almost certainly would have a smart lock. Sure. All right, well then I make back. They make life. It's like the video doorbell. It's one of those things that a lot of every portion everybody gets yeah. But I should just mention on the ASA Abloid level thing, ASABLOY has said level lock is staying in business and no worries, don't be concerned. Don't look behind the curtain . The fact that there's no one left at the company . So we'll see, we'll see what happens . But it was a great, a really great piece of tech and I really do hope that the innovations that Levell developed and brought to the market will continue because I for one do not like ugly big smart locks. I want sleek, nice looking smart locks that don't look like a smart lock but still, will automatically open my door for me as I approach. Well, with any luck, they'll fold it into Quickset and it will be in every hardware store and it'll be everywhere and it'll be lower cost and that technology, I mean, they must have bought it because they liked the technology. You hope, you hope. I mean, one of the concerns that ASABLOY's been having is North North American residential sales have taken a big dive because no one's spending any money in this country anymore, it seems , and no one's buying houses because the interest rates are still so high . So yeah, I think they're having some financial problems. So that could have been related to why this had happened, but yeah, they haven't we don't know for sure . So it's all speculation at this point, but fingers crossed the technology continues, but it is really sad that this startups basically all AT employees and the founders were laid off. So we will see what happens in the future here and watch this space. But they did the same to some extent to August. I mean I think most of your listeners and viewers will be familiar with the August smart lock, which was one of the early smart sort of babies darlings . And that was bought by Asa Ablois. And there hasn't been a new Orbis lock in six, seven years. I don't think we're going to ever see another oldest lock. It's not the first company there quite a few companies, former Apple engineers, that seems to be a common thing. The Apple Engineer, you know, get some design skills, some engineering skills and then starts their own company. Tony Fidel very famously was one of the designers on the iPhone who went off to start Nest. You speaking of Nest have a very good podcast . Yeah. If everyone , anyone's not gotten bored to tears by my smart home chats , there's lots more where this came from . We have a new podcast at the Verge called Version History. Well, new that we're in our fourth season, but this season is all Smart Home and we have an episode that went out today all about the history of the Nest Fervo. What a great story. It's a very fun story . A lot of you probably would be surprised by a lot of the background there. And then we also last week we did the Roomba, which was a fun one . And then we've got Phillips Hugh light bulbs coming up. And of course , the clapper . Everyone clapper, clapper, the original home automation device. And we did the Logitech harmony a couple weeks ago too, which another good one. There, so lots of fun stuff. I'm going to have to listen to this. If you want if you want some more smart home lore , please can I ask you an insight ful question? Sure . So Vox is being split up into little tiny pieces . The Vox podcast company got sold is but the Verge got it's very confusing. It's Verge . I like your new owner, by the way. I think the Verge is owned by Pensky now. Are they going to keep version history? Who gets version history? So it's a bit of a misnomer and understandably confusing, but the Vox Media podcast network doesn't actually as far as I understand it, make the podcasts. Oh they are they are like a platform to help market and advertise. See, I couldn't understand because Vergecast without the Verge isn't cast right. So like I know famously Cara Swissher and her podcast is part of this hugely vibrant. But she owns her own podcast as far as I understand it. And like, but they have like a partnership with Fox Media podcast for network for sales primarily, right? Primarily sales, I think infrastructure, that kind of stuff. So our Vergecast and Version History and Decoder, which is the other podcast Verge. Yeah , that is all staying with Verge and no longer part of Fox Med ia podcast network , which is going to a Murdoch Which one, I can't remember Is it Lochlin? I think it's going to I think no is it? I think it's the other one. It's locked on. It's locked so yeah it's not the other one confused by the murder not e not represent ing not yeah but yes so, we're going to Pensky , which was this was just announced last week . Pensky, which owns all the Hollywood magazines, plus and the golden globe. So I'm like, if I get tickets, you get tickets and the golden gloves. It's gonna be very exciting time. Jennifer ask a quick question. What happens to subscriptions? Maybe you don't know, but subscribe. Heard about that. I subscribe. Everything as far as our fearless leader N,ih has explained to us is everything will stay exactly the way it is. Like we are the Verge as a company, which the Verge founded with Fox Media originally. It was the Verge and Verge was like, Oh, we need a company. So they created Vox Media . So and now that Verge, which has always been its own business within Vox Media, is just staying its own business with a different owner Nothing changed. Josh and everybody were regulars on Twit at the time . And I remember when they started my, what was it called my next my next ? This is my next. This is my next, that's what it was. Yeah. And I remember when they left was it in Gadget? I can't even I think it was in Gadget. Yeah. And they started that and they've had great success and I'm really glad that as a result we don't get them on the show anymore because they're far too I was sure and would love to I'd love to get Neili on, but all right. I don't even, you know, I act like they're saying no to me. I'm too embarrassed to ask. Ask. I'm sure he would laugh. It's like , you're big shot now. Same thing with Kara. Karrie used to be on the show all the time. Now you just get me . I'd rather have you if you the three people on right now, the people who are on the show are the people I want to have on the show . But I do admit that sometimes people get , you know, big time and we don't get to have them on anymore. They're just too big for us. This little program. We're glad to have you. Don't worry about your subscriptions and keep subscribing. Yes, I will. I love the Verge. We quote the Verge constantly. And especially Jennifer Peterson Tui and her smart home coverage. We also quote Windows Central all the time, Daniel Rabino, editor in chief their great windows coverage , Microsoft coverage, really . And of course, Dan Patterson of Blackbird AI doing his best to stop the Ruskies in there. So you have to at some point explain the difference between disinformation and misinformation . Yeah . What is misinformation is wrong ? It's disinformation is intentionally misleading contents or narratives. So we call it a narrative because it's not just one deep fake one back content. It's the story around it. Yeah, yeah, right. So but it is intentional . Misinformation could be like, well, my neighbor said it's going to rain tomorrow and everybody is saying it's going to rain tomorrow. Right. Gossip . Or one great example, we've been spending a lot of time looking at the World Cup because at least in Brooklyn, everybody's looking at the world. Like it's huge, it's fantastic. It's a great event. But there have been some narratives around , let's say, empty stadiums, right? Right. Nobody's going to these games. It's not true. It's not true at all. In fact, sold out. Right. Oh my god , I would like to complain vociferously about the World Cup. Can I do that now? England won, what are you worried about? They're going on. So I dropped this in the notes right down the bottom. I tweeted this. I went I was like, Yay, England won. Yay, they playing in Atlanta. I'm just gonna see because I don't know , Marolina. Yeah, just up the road a piece. Maybe I could go watch . Yeah, England, Congo . ten. Yeah . ten thousand dollars for two tickets . Well that wasn't responsible for them. I'm sorry, but five hundred dollars for a tick et was ridiculous. ten thousand dollars is insane. Jason went to a game. He went to like the dumb game or whatever. He said the game nobody wanted, it was still five hundred bucks. But you're looking at the resale price, but that's yeah . Why? And who do I but no, this is all through like the formal channels. Like this is the only this country is the only one in the world that does this. And is it technology's fault? It's who we blame. I know we blame Ticketmaster, but is it because of tech? I feel like this. So here's what happens. It is scalpers, by the way. Yeah. Somebody buys it at face value and then goes to the same site. Sometimes I go to a third party site and says, Yeah, I'm not going to make it. So sell it for me. But by the way, it's going to be four thousand dollars more than I paid for it. That's I think that's still scalping, isn't it? Maybe they maybe their aunt got sick and they can't go maybe . Why are there no laws against this? I went to a Taylor Swift concert in London and I paid sixty pounds . Yeah. I should sixty pounds. Taylor hates the whole thing too. I know on your ridiculous on your blue sky post , the price is nine thousand . There is then a one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars fee on top of it. I know. That's I, mean, it's insane . Why? Why? The answer is we don't antitrust here is the answer. Yeah, we need regulation here because this is this is ridiculous. Who's going is someone actually gonna pay that much for a ticket? I bet it was an eye opener for a lot of people come to this country to see their country play in the World Cup and then not only do they have to pay that for tickets but they have to tip the waiter. This is insane. How does this country survive ? Have you seen the memes online? It's been wonderful, like, it is really fun to see. How much that yeah, and people sort of discovering that America is actually really cool . Yeah, yeah, the guy that guy who's been flying around who I can remember something or other. Yeah. Wonderful. He's like yeah, his eyes wide open . Wow . And I love every four years this happens, but not really not in America . The whole world comes together. I agree . And it's just a great example of how we really can all come together . There's something, you know, it's not the people that are the problem, perhaps, it's the politicians that are the problem. I don't know, but as a as a as, you know, a global society we exist in we exist in people are fine. And the World Cup is a great example . And now America finally woken up . America's finally paying attention because you finally only because may I point out you have an English striker. Oh yeah, who is here is only playing with you because of birthright citizenship. So do you know that story? It's fantastic. So he's English. His parents were English . But they were living in the United States when he was born. No., no His mother is Gunnaean, I believe, or Nigerian , and she was visiting family or friends in New York and she tried to get on the plane to go home to England where she lived. So she's Nigerian but lives in England and she was and this is this is something that does happen. If you're too pregnant, they won't let you get on the plane. Don't want you to go in labor on the flight. So she had to stay in Brooklyn a bit longer and so she had her baby before she went back home. So he was born in New York , went back home with her when they let her fly back, grew up in England, went through all the English soccer training, football training , played for one of the big development teams for, I don't know if it was Arsenal. My football lore is a little fuzzy because I'm living here now . But yeah, he played he was like and he played for the England under twenty one s. He was a big star and then he could also have played for his, I think it's Nigeria that he was his family's from one of the African countries and then he was going to play for England because why wouldn't you play for England? We're the best soccer nation in the world. Football nation. I'll be rooting for the Democratic Republic of the Congo in that Apparently , the American fans got like in his DM's and on social media , I'm like, We want you, we want you. And he was like, okay, and he decided you want to wear a stripy shirt in America . And now you finally have a good soccer team, so that you're welcome. By the way, if you are born on a flight , birthright citizenship to American airlines, what is your I think it depends on where the plane is when you were born . Do they still love there was one did they still do a thing where if you're born on a plane you get free flights on that airline forever? I doubt it very why they don't let you go on the plane. That's right very pregnant. My favorite response to your blue sky skeet about the ticket prices is Wonkish who said Matter fixes this he knew he knew he knows my thing. He knows who knows it's all gonna be fixed by Matter . All right, well sorry for the diversion there. Oh, it's a good diversion. No , and I don't know, though, if I'll be rooting for England, I might be rooting for Congo Rough Tong gives him hope. I hate to say it and I shouldn't because it'll just wish it into existence, but this is exactly the type of game that we're going to lose . I mean, you just know it, the underdog, I know, I know, I shouldn't have said it. I'm sorry don't put that out in the space . We'll have more with our fabulous panel in just a bit. I did see I have to say I was watching the F one last week or no, I guess was the qualfars this week and there were Norwegian fans doing the row in the F one stands, which cracked me up. That's my favorite new move . They row in unison in the stands. That beats the wave by a lot . I just love that. Everything beats the fuva Zabas from five World Cups ago. Do you remember that? I happen to have. Those were terrible . America needs to come up with something, though, signature. African World Cup. You have one? I hate to do this to you, but Bro ok no white. We'll have more my it is we'll have more this weekend , I'm sorry, I shouldn't do that, but I don't get to play the Vuvazilla very often, so I get a chance. It's like Beetlejuice. You mentioned it now it has to happen. Our show today brought to you by Meeter , the company building better networks, company founded by two network engineers who know, who feel your pain. If you're a network engineer, you have my deepest sympathies. You know all the problems and legac y providers with inflexible pricing . Everybody's got this IT resource constraints stretching you SIM. Then you've got these complicated deployments across fragmented tools your mission critical to the business , but you're working with infrastructure that just wasn't built for today's demands. That's why you need to know about Meter. That's why businesses love meter, because Meter was designed to solve your problems. Meter delivers full stack networking infrastructure and that's wired, wireless and cellular , that's built for performance and scalability. These guys realized, you know what, if we're going to make this work, we've got to own the whole stack. We've got to design the hardware , write the firmware, we've got to build the software, we've got to manage the deployments, provide after sales support . Meter does everything. They'll even do ISP procurement . They'll help you with security, routing, switching, wireless, firewall. They can do cellular, yes, power, that's really important, right? DNS security, VPNs they'll help you with SD winds, to help you with multi site workflows all in a single solution. I was talking to them. They said, We love it when we company comes to us happens so often. They acquire another company. They acquire that other company's giant four hundred thousand square foot warehouse which has very spotty wireless in there and then they have to get it into so that it can connect to the home office . It's just it's a nightmare but meter can come in and solve it. Meter's single integrated networking stack scales. It is in some of the most hostile major hospitals . 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You get a single partner, one phone number to call for all your connectivity needs from first sight survey to ongoing support without the complexity of managing multiple providers, juggling tools, Meter's integrated networking stack is designed to take the burden off your IT team and give you deep control and visibility reimagining what it means for businesses to get and stay online . Meter's built for the bandwidth demands of today and tomorrow. We thank them so much for support and twit and we invite you to go to meter. com slash twit and book a demo now MET ER . com slash twit to book a demo . So here's some interesting news about Elon Musk's brand new, very successful on the stock market anyway, company. Star link , SpaceX plans to launch Starlink mobile service in the United States. Would you buy a Starlink based cell phone? I don't think it would be just satellite. Obviously it couldn't be because if you're inside it wouldn't work, so they'd they'd also have to have terrestrial, I think they'd have to have terrestrial wireless as well . Gwen Shotwell told investors during a recent IPO roadshow the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network . The move would require Starlink. This is from ours technicians to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers . And now I use Starlink'.s It my backu internet for these shows . And I think Starlink's great. It's not cheap. I don't know if it would be better self service or not . Analysts caution. Go ahead. Wasn't Wasinias was supposed to be doing his own phone at some point. It was a couple of years ago, right? Yeah. But that sounds familiar, yeah. Yeah. I wonder if it would be tied to that. Yeah .s Seem an odd move to launch a smartphone . Unless it's like an Android based phone, of course, but if it's not , I don't know. I think the analysts say the biggest sticking point is be going to terrestrial radio because you can't just like in here I can't see this guy. I couldn't use a cat phone . So this will be this will be interesting. Of course, remember a lot of what Elon has been saying is just to become a trillionaires to get a good stock price, which it worked . Won't iPhone customers become satellite and starlink customers at some point? Well sort of. So right now most modern iPhones can get satellite connectivity if they lose cellular connectivity through Global star , but global star global star. Right. Global Star just got sold and Apple's stock its stake in Global Star went along with it . So has been some noise that maybe they'll switch to Starlink ? I don't know. And what does TMBL use? Because you can add satellite service. They use Global Star right now. I'm using Global Star right now, ye.ah Yeah So who Global Star was bought by bottom, I forgot. No, boy. It's funny. It wasn't that long ago wasn't it? Oh, Amazon, that's right. So Amazon , I don't know, I don't know. I don't I have a feeling that this Apple's not going to do an Amazon deal. So I have and since they lost their twenty percent stake in it. So yeah, it makes sense. I've heard rumors that they were going to use Starlink for the future. But that doesn't replace your cell service. We're talking about full cell service from Starlink , which presumably you could use on any phone if it's like a regular cell service . Let's talk about winders because Benito wins his bet . He said, Oh no, I'm going to hang on. I'm playing chicken. I'm going to hold on to my windows ten . Microsoft had said last November, okay, one more year . Actually it was October wasn't it? October fourteenth, twenty twenty five when they ended support for Windows ten . You better explain this to me, Daniel So are they extending it another year ? They are. And part of it honestly is the RAM stuff again . It might be different if you could buy a new computer with Windows eleven on it, I guess. Yeah, I mean part of the , I guess you could say problem with Windows eleven is that there are hardware requirements with it based around security . And so a lot of companies would need to buy new laptops or desktops that meet the security standards. And this of course is angered people, but you can't have it both ways because if they don't have this security built in and people upgrade and all this kind of stuff and they're getting attacked, you know, it's a whole issue. So but obviously buying laptops now and PCs has become very cost prohibitive . And so they're extending it by another year. Although I don't know how much that just gives companies an extra year to save money, I guess to buy new computers because we don't expect those prices to necessarily drop , but that seems to be a part of this as well as, you know, they are involved in the K two project right now, which is this effort to address a lot of concerns complaints that people have with Windows eleven. So what do I need to do if like Benito I'm still running Windows ten Come October , do I do what do I need to do? Do I have to do anything to keep it alive? Am I just gonna get updates without doing anything? Yeah, actually, I'm not too sure about that. Previously, you had to just register and just make it. Yeah, you had to pay sort of pay for it with writing points . Or copy or how to use one drive. There were some weird little things. I'm looking at your article, not your article, but I'm looking at the article on Windows Central Insider by Kevin O'Cam who says all you have to do is be sign in with a Microsoft account . Yeah, so it looks like it's just a basic extension without any loopholes to jump , which is good because Markov gets a lot of fl ak for that, obviously. Yeah . You know, we knew that they had technical requirements , but we also knew you could still you didn't have to have TPM two, for instance. No, you could bypass it. There were definitely it's one knows at the end of the day, there's always gonna be a workaround somewhere. Right, right. Well, good news, if you're a Windows ten user , the clock keeps on ticking , I guess. This is where Apple differs from Microsoft, right? Because Apple could just snap their fingers and make everybody jump. Microsoft tries to do it and everybody loses their mind. So it's well Apple definitely friends makes this money in hardware and so they can give you a free operating system because you bought their computer to do it . Microsoft, you know, you didn't necessarily buy a computer for Microsoft to be using Windows. In fact, most people don't. . We were talking earlier about a Mythos. Microsoft has its own model M dash and last I guess was this month Patch Tuesday had the largest number of fixes ever , Microsoft said at least ten of them were generated by MDash , its own security model. And I would suspect that Mythos, which it also had access to had some of those patches also could be attributed to it. That's a huge more than two hundred fixes . That was probably one of the more interesting aspects of AI in terms of software, right? Is this ability to find weaknesses and systems , find bugs, and actually do advanced work . And I think that's but conversely, of course, it could be just as dangerous if it's in the wrong hands because it can also be used in proper networks. Finding the bugs is the first step to exploiting the bugs . Right. That's the risk, right? And that was what people were complaining about with mythos . It would write it would find the bug, patch the bug, and then write a proof of concept to test the patch , but any proof of concept that tests to see if the bug is still there can also be used to exploit the bug. It's the, you know, you're getting the code for exploitation and the fact that it could do that in a single prompt reasonably is a little bit scary. I don't think anthropic over hyped that I think it really is dangerous, but on the other hand, if you can do it with other tools now existent . Right. What's the point in stopping it There's going to be a big update. We were talking about this on Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat on Wednesday , coming july fourteenth , huge number of updates coming to Windows eleven, so you might want to upgrade . Is this to celebrate America's two hundred fiftieth? No, it's not. But yeah, this is part of that K two project I was talking about with you know introducing features, the ability to move to Task Bar, right? Whoa, wait a minute. I know yeah, it seems trivial and you know, I think about one percent of users probably do this. Microsoft took that feature out in Windows eleven. So they didn't really take it out. It's a little more complicated than that. They rewrote the task bar for Windows eleven. It uses a different technology now . It's written differently . And so they recreated it. And so to the end user, it feels like the same start system almost from when it looks ten. Yeah , but they completely rewrote it and they didn't write into that feature to move it because very few people actually do move it. Most people do keep it on the bottom . Probably less than one percent actually want to move it to the s orid toes the top. But those one percent are loud . They're very loud. And you know, you can make a good argument that okay they didn't have it on launch, but you know, maybe they'll do it later, but they never said they were going to do it at all and they were sticking to their guns for a long time , but now new teams in place and they're addressing and delivering a lot of fixes and improvements. For instance, you'll be able to pause windows updates basically indefinitely. What? Yay. Yeah. So that's been another thing that people have, you know, have talked about because it is annoying to get that pop up saying you need to restart your computer now because there's never a good time for it, right ? But people will be able to pause it now. There's also the point of time restore . Basically, this is almost like an older system where it does a snapshot and so if something goes wrong with your system, you can roll it back to the previous We used to have that. That's . Yeah. Yeah, the customer store. Yeah. Yep. They need to take some tips from the smart home here because now when you get a smart home device , when you set it up, it says, Would you like to have automatic updates? And you say, Yes, because you do . It's slightly different with smart home than your computer. You do. Absolutely do. You absolutely do. And then it'll do it and then it sets the update time and it'll say, okay, I will update between three AM and five AM whenever this happens. I know you can kind of do that, but yeah. I don't think most of you are headed to it. Yeah. It's always at the wrong time, like it pops up at the wrong time. Do you want me to do it tonight? Well, I do, but then I'll but yes, just stop and just don't tell me and just do it. Just do it. Just do it. Yes, just do it. Do it when I'm not using the computer. And speaking of and it's also the AI models like the chat GPT and the Claude desktop apps constantly wants to update. Every day, it seems like. Yeah . You know why? For those curious sorry, we have hands on windows. We have a hands on Windows episode to show you how to do all of this if you want to do it yourself. And also all the new features, I believe, if they haven't done it already, that's coming . That actually is ready to be the new normal because A is so fast . And the reason these AI is updated every day is because they're using AI to develop it. And as more and more software is developed by AI and maintained by AI, the updates are going to come fast if furious. Sorry . And I can't get away from AI. You can't AI DS. Well, you could try there's a huge backlash now against these flock cameras . Oh yeah. every community has people saying no flock cameras . I understand why the police want them. So this I get it all started with red light cameras where people were running red lights so they'd have a camera take pictures after the red light came on and people went through it and it stopped that. But then they thought, well, you know, what we could do is put these automated license plate readers in and we could catch all kinds of mfaleactors . Well, the problem is these databases are getting bigger and bigger and it's essentially a way of tracking. And now there's new companies coming along that can be att ached to your flock camera, which the flock camera is an automated license plate reader. It just keeps track of all the license plates going by. You're using public thoroughfares , you know, I mean, you know, I guess that's part of the deal . But now they're also putting Bluetooth sensors on there so that they can capture, you know, as you drive by, they capture your phone's name , your car's name, they capture all the bluetooth because our Bluetooth devices are always broadcasting their names . They're getting more and more sophisticated . And there's this issue of Flock having a nationwide database of license plates and of law enforcement from time to time using it to stalk people, to track people down who have broken a law in their state as they go to other states . So there's a big backlash. There's a big ring cameras too. Ring cameras. Yeah , that was I mean, so Ring had announced a partnership with Flock and then they had their Super Bowl ad which caused an awful lot of consternation, which was just a fine little last doggies. Their pet finding feature, which showed this still image of homes with sort of radar like searching rings coming out from ring cameras and that one look just said that one shot just said surveillance state and they just aren't getting that with everyone. James. If you can find fluffy, you can also find me, right? Yeah. And then like an email leak that basically said that that was her next step was like that was he's always Jamie Simonov has always said that his goal with Ring pretty much since its inception is to , you know, prevent crime safer neighborhoods. Create safer neighborhoods by and he has he is passionate about this and he really does feel like the more cameras equal more security . There are lots of evidence that more cameras does not necessarily equal more security but does equal more surveillance , more of what people knowing what everyone is doing. And then the biggest concern with this was so before Flock they had a partnership with another they have a partnership with Axon as well, which is the company that does with body cameras. Yeah But what happened with the flock issue was because during this instance so before just before the Super Bowl, this was when all the DHS , the deportations were happening. There was all the unrest throughout the country . And the reporting was, and I think it was four hundred and four media that broke the story was that the DHS was using flock cameras, was tapping into flock cameras to find potential illegal immigrants. And flock cameras, flock safety was saying no, they're not. We only have partnerships with individual jurisdictions, local police . We do we do not have partnerships with IC. But IC could come and there was actually recent reporting about this where it was shown that IC did actually access some flock safety cameras through a local authority. So IC comes to your local sheriff's department and says show me your cameras They do. There's a subpoena. Yeah. I don't know that there was even a subpoena. I think it's more like partnerships between police and so people are stupid. They know if the cameras are there, they will be used . And so whilst Flock and Ring and Axon say, you know, we had no partnerships with the federal with federal agencies , that the concern is you have partnerships with the local police and local agencies and then what about the partnerships that they have? Or are they willing to what do they are they going to do with the data that they receive? So Flock and to Ring and Flock and Axon , their partnerships were not about these cameras. Their partnerships were more about back end integrations . But the fear of course is and it comes back to AI , you know, if you can identify something with a camera, you can identify a dog, you can identify a person. And at the same time, Ring launched facial recognition for its cameras . What is the next step? And while Ring may be very clear in all its messaging that we do not use we do not access your cameras without your permission, this one feature did allow the cloud to process your camera data to look for this missing pet with your permission , but that tool now exists and we , you know , can it be could it be misused in the way that the I apparently allegedly was misusing the access to cameras like Flock Safety. So you can connect all those dots even though everyone was saying we're working by the books . It brightly caused a lot of concern. Can I show you what my ring camera told me earlier today? It says you've got the AI distriction have you? Not that one. This one. It says a cat is walking on the wall. A cat is standing on the wall. A person is walking on the porch , a cat is walking on the porch. A cat is sitting on the wall and looking around. A cat is walking on the porch, a cat is walking on the wall. This is all today . Two people are bending and moving at the end. It needs AI to sort of you need to turn on, they do actually have a really good new feature called off the top of my head I forgot the exact phrase for it, but it is only urgent alert. So it uses AI to det ermine whether you actually unusual events is what it's called. So that would get rid of all the cats. An Amazon delivery person is delivering a package at the entrance. Sometimes it'll say a guy in brown short pants is delivering a package . It's really funny. I love it with the bone with quite useful with this stuff. This is where AI is actually useful in the smart home , but better than motion alert, which is what you got before, right? Right. Yeah, all it said, yeah, we would just go somebody nothing's going on out there . So do show this, but you know, you showed this article earlier. Peter Diamondes, who is a former Google guy. He was the founder of XPrise , you know, widely considered a genius says humans behave better when they're being watched . I think we all know that. The problem is is we've been conditioned for the last twenty years that China is a surveillance state. And when you walk around there, and anyone who's been in China, I've been there before. You know, as soon as you go through security and you check it, like they take your photo and it's just cameras everywhere. And we're told that's bad. They're bad people over there doing that. We and now we're doing it, but it's like, well, it's not the government, it's just private corporations who end up making deals in the back to. And the thing is the whole history going back to the Patriot Act is about private companies colluding with the government behind people's backs and giving them information. And oh, we didn't know about the subpoenas. And oh, we just let people, you know, the government tap into people's phones and datas and all this kind of stuff. So there's just no trust here . And sure, these companies may have good intentions and you can sell fear, but that's what this is. It's selling fear to people. But of course, it can be quickly turned into some of the, you know, most draconian historic . Well, it's the panopticon . I grew up London , where we are surveilled every minute of the day . But to be fair , and I hate to be the sort of the there's no crime in London, right? Well, no, but I grew up I grew up during the IRA war and we had , you know, a lot . I mean, there was that was why we got the mass surveillance in London was because they were putting bombs in garbage cans and it was, you know, it 's always the reason . Yeah, you know, fear is the reason and that is what we've got we've got to go back to the love that the World Cup brings . Let's all be happy and kind to each other. But you know there is the surveillance state is a terrifying concept . We don't want the government watching everything we do , but the fact cameras and recording devices can help when there are maybe you know significant concerns or incidences like someone planting bombs, you know, you can track them and you can find them. Things like, you know, there is it's like all technology. It's how you use it. The technology isn't bad, it's how you use it. It's got to be well implemented and there's got to be a very valid reason. I'm, you know, searching for people in neighborhoods is probably not a valid reason. It's not a drag net. There shouldn't be technology used to surveil us just in case. But when there are issues, when there's something happening, being able to tap into the technology is a good thing. I mean , unfortunately it didn't pan out well, but this is what we saw at the same time as the whole ring flock safety case was the Nancy Guthrie case and the Savannah Guthrie's mother who was who went missing and they were able to use doorbell camera footage to try and, you know, to get some idea of what had happened. They never caught the guy though. They never caught the guy know, so it didn't work out, but it could it was better than nothing at that point . So yeah, there's always this more cameras. That's why we need more cameras. Puddle Diamondas, I would point out is a wealthy man and probably can figure out how to hide . But he says in his ex post a trillion sensors in space and the air on the ground will allow us to know anything anywhere at any time. There will be no hiding. Humans behave better when they're being watched. He says it's a good thing. I won't disagree with anything . He said there except that it's a good thing. I don't think it's a good thing. Again, it comes back to, you know, especially with the flock camera. This is why a lot of jurisdictions and people are kind of fighting back. It's not something people agreed to , right? It's something that's again happening to people . These things are just going up, towns are deciding to do it. And then it's only after the fact that people are like, wait, where are these things coming from? And it's just covered under that, well, it's security. It's normal stuff that we do with your tax money . But I think again, that's why there's that pushback is that people don't feel like, you know, it's like, all right, if we want to have that conversation in our town about putting up cameras everywhere, let's, you know, have that discuss ion . Yeah. And it's always weird that we live, you know, people like, oh, we live in a democracy unless you get the Constitutional Republic nerds. But like, we do have democratic mechanisms in this country. And it's like we can put stuff like this to votes, right? We can do referendums. That's all possible . But we don't have that discussion a lot of times. These things just happen to us . And so that's why I think people, you know, it's a double edged sword. You can be like, well, people are safer. But at the same time, you're going to foment this idea of being against technology and fighting back against this stuff, even though you could make reasonable arguments about having these cameras in certain places. So there are two themes emerging in this episode and one is technology top down and the other is regulation I mean everything that you just said, Daniel is correct and we could have discussions. We have democratic mechanisms and we can easily implement regulation that allows technology to flourish while protecting civil liberties. The same thing with artificial intelligence and the same challenges exist top down tech . But we don't use those mechanisms . We choose not to deploy those mechanisms . We're going to take a break. Very smart panel. Love having y'all on Dan Patterson blackbird. AI, Jennifer Pasantewee from the Verge. We're not related We're not. Oh Pattinson Patinson are you related though to that guy from the hunger game? No the vampire . Oh that's Patinson. Oh , that's an end. Another variant . They only probably came from the same people, though, right? It's the same name. Probably, I think it's something to do with baking . These patting is cakes. Patty cake, patty catty cakei, pentat. I just made that up. You're right . He's the son of a beggar. At some point isn't it? He's a Need Needenson and Tana Robino of Windows Central. Great to have all three of you here. Our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter . According to CNBC, nearly half of hiring managers say a candidate's enthusiasm about the job is the most important factor when considering him for a role. 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Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day and now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter dot com slash twit. That's zip recruiter dot com slash twit. Meet your match on Ziprecruiter. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech . Oh, I have so many more stories and only a little bit more time. Let's see, I'm going to have to do some story triage here . We didn't mention that Samsung is going to start charging for API access to smart things. We should mention that earlier. So it was this is what I'm talking about. Your AI needs to have access to that API, but to charge me, I'm not, I don't know if I want to do that. Yeah, this is this was people are not happy about this . It is a they sort of dressed it up and we're going to we're making vast improvements to our API. It'll be so much better. But yeah, it's four ninety nine cents a month for developers to access the API now. But this Samsung goes smart things goes way back in the smart home. It was one of the original smart home hubs and it's always been a real tinker device like great for setting up. It was all mainly based Zwave Zigbee, used a lot of local radios and then when smart things was bought by Samsung , they slowly kind of transitioned it away. And in fact, the most recent Smart Things Hub does not have Z wave radio in anymore . But it does support matter , but Samsung stopped actually making the hardware itself and it has a third party that makes their hubs now. And Samsung has put radios into all of its TVs and appliances and such. So thread, radios and matter, controller radios are in most of its hardware , and it's moving much more towards AI driven features , much less sort of focus on zigzag zigb z waves local protocols so does support thread. Anyway, for some reason this API is now going to cost you five dollars a month to access and if you use home assistant to access to connect your smart things connected devices. If you have a smart things hub that's connected to Zwave or Zigby , that will now cost you five dollars a month, which is not going to go down well with that community. And Paulus Soutchs them from Homeist Asants actually messaged me actually just today and he was saying they have an estimated of fifty thousand smartphone users that use Home Assistant and that's over so he says we always estimate at least four times the number of actual users . So it's more like two hundred thousand people that will be affected by this, individuals that are just running their smart home, not developers. So yeah, that's going to be a lot of very that is a lot of very annoyed smart homes. And it doesn't just have to be Samsung products. I mean, one of the points of smart things was you got connected lot for everything. Yeah. Yeah , exactly. Yeah. So if you've had a hub for many years and you use it to run lots of different devices like Zigbee, Zwave, now thread and matter , yeah, that will I predict that this will push a lot of people off of the hub platform , which to be fair , it might have been their whole purpose . But maybe they don't want it . They have been dragging the legacy Smart Things community into very slowly over the decade or so since when did they buy smart things? Smart things been around about fifteen years I think. And I think they bought it maybe six or seven years ago. So during that time they've slowly been sort of pushing out the old legacy style of smart things and moving it towards their new it's the platform when you buy a Sanskridge that you download the Smart Things app. It's completely unrecognizable from what Smart Things was when it first started . And I think they've it would behave them in many ways to sort of slowly lose that part of their audience and really just focus on their main smart home goals, which are very AI powered . And it's a huge user base. I mean, smart things probably has one of the largest user bases of the smart home platforms to date because you buy a Samsung appliance , you get the Smart Things app . So which is much, I think, a much larger chunk of the smart home pie, but those people aren't necessarily doing what people who had aart Sm Things Hub are doing. Yeah, it seems like there's two categories of smart home users. The ones that want to have it all local . Yeah , and the ones that want to connect to the cloud. And the advantage of the cloud is that you can keep the hardware on its own network and isolated , which is for security reasons a good thing to do . Yeah . If you have a local hub, you have to have it on the same network because or local devices because you have to be able to talk to it . But that's an insecure thing. So I don't know, I don't know. I like the idea of having an HA Green server here and everything's local , but it's a sec urity issue for me because I can't I shouldn't really have it on the same network segment as the rest of my stuff . So there's a mean most people who are really into smart home will tell you you just want everything local. But you do and this is again just to go back to the Matter point. That's what Matt does. It does make everything gives you the potential for everything to be local, not every platform uses it locally . But the potential is there. You do need the cloud for the smart home. There's a lot of benefit of the cloud. You just do not want to be dependent on the cloud. That's where things can go wrong . And Smart Things now has hubs in all of its hardware, as I mentioned, so your TV, your soundbar, your fridge , a couple of other they've got the audio frame thing, like the frame TV, lots of everything that's Smart Things, Samsung now manufacturers has hubs in it, not your washing machine and dry. TV's do. The TV's, the soundbars . They are the Smart Things Hub , but Smart Things is very cloud dependent. Even though it uses matter, it's very cloud dependent. So if that the Smart Things Hub was the original was the original Smart Things Hub which is, now in Gen or four , was the main way you could use smart things locally . And now, you know, using your Z wave and your Zigbee devices and thread , now you don't have , well, you have that option, but you're going to have to pay five dollars a month for it. So I think it will push people away from that hub. And I think ultimately they're going to get out of that space entirely and just want you to be using your fridge as your smart home , which just seems silly. But that's the way the smart home, if you're going to move the smart home mainstream , the hub has always felt like a roadblock. People are like, Why do I need to buy this little white box that costs one hundred and fifty dollars and stick it in my house? But for tinkerers and for people that really understand the technology , because the reason you do that is because you own that device and you've got that control over these local devices , local connectivity protocols . So but for the standard regular Samsung customer who's buying a appliance and they're like, Oh cool, I can get a notification on my phone that my washing machine is done. I can get notification on my Samsung TV that my dryer is done or my fridge door was left open. That's all they're really they're like, Oh, that's cool. They're not really thinking about the larger sort of implications there . Okay , I'm sorry I lost . Every time it's just so frustrating it's so complicated and frustrating it shouldn't be so complicated. Maybe AI will solve this. I can just talk to my AI and say, you figure it, you figure it out. We did figure out who was responsible for the Jaguar Land Rover hack turns out Russian hackers. This is the one that the damage was so severe that the Jaguar had to shut down for a month more than a month . It was so severe that the UK government had to bail out the company with a two billion dollars loan cost the British economy two and a half billion dollars . Russia's at it again, Dan . I tell you Australia has passed and now many other countries are considering passing a ban on social media for under sixteen's . Studies say it's not working. Four out of five , eighty percent of under sixteen's in Australia are still using social media. Shocking that. What a shock . This is an observational study by the University of Newcastle . The legislation has resulted in quote, limited implementation and incomplete compliance and substantial circumvention of social media restrictions . You're just teaching, this is what Harper Reed told us when the law was passed. You're just going to teach these kids to be hackers. Australia's going to have the best hackers in the world. Now Norway's going to do the same thing. The UK just announced it, right? Then immediately Kirstarmer resigned. I don't think they were related . But the UK is going to implement that later in the year, early next year. It's just another example back to our very first topic of how hard it is to regulate technologies like Well, banning YouTube seems like a really dumb thing to do. I can understand maybe Instagram or Facebook , but YouTube , that's like saying you can't watch TV to people under sixteen, right? That's how they 're that's what they watch . But TV was very regulated for a very long time. In the UK it was. Yeah. Speaking of which three channels when I was growing up that was awesome. your family Did pay the license fee? Yeah, you had to. They would come and like knock on your door if you didn't. little trucks? Yeah . Did you the long wave for radio ? BBC is going silent. Oh so sad. This makes me sad. The BBC stopped broadcasting radio four on the one hundred ninety eight kilohertz long wave frequency after a century of transmission . We don't do long ray wave here in the United States, but in the UK it did. Yeah. four, what was that? Was it music? Was it an information? No, it was information. It was the long wave radio was like part of my childhood. My dad used to just listen to the cricket scores on it all the time. Who was like lully me to sleep? It was like my lullaby . But yeah, it was the great thing about it was, you know, I mean, it's like smart and verticals . The Longway Radio had such reach that you could you could get BBC radio for anywhere in the world, I think, almost because wherever you were, you could listen to it and it was a very powerful tool. In fact, it was used during like the French resistance during World War two to use long wave radio use this transmission to help to communicate. Like it has it's got such a fascinating history this radio band . But it's basically fallen foul to technology. And I think the reason they're actually shutting it down is because they can no longer make the tubes. No one makes the tubes that keeps the antena going, something like that . Oh, so it wasn't they wanted to shut it down. It just didn't have a choice. And they wasn't financially viable to keep running it because you couldn't manufacture the tubes that were needed anymore . And no one uses it. Everyone's moved to digital radio or and FM is still, I mean, radio in England is still a very play Did you listen to the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy on BBC? They used to Yeah, they used to it wasn't that old, but I'm not that old, but yes, they're originally the original it was one of the first sort of radio books Douglas Adams. People know the hitchhiker's guide, they think it maybe was a book or a movie but it started as a book BBC radio play on B D four . I know radio is around the war. So it'll be what an internet or will it be will they do broadcast? Radio four is a station like BC ON radio It was broadcast on the long wave so you could listen to it anywhere. And it was a special feed, I think. It wasn't the main radio four. I could be wrong. But yeah, radio four is all talking no music. So it was always it was very low bandwidth. Yeah . So you could you could get it anywhere. I like it. But it's definitely an end of an era. It was an incredibly important piece of technology for a very long time . This may not look like an ancient book. It sure doesn't look like an ancient book to me , but that is the Herculaneum scrolls that were ancient scrolls from the Roman library of Herculine carbonized by a volcanic eruption . This is all that was left , but believe it or not, thanks to AI , we've actually been able to read it using high resolution three D scans of the scroll. You obviously can unroll it, it would fall apart . So they x rayed it and they've been able to use AI to read the I don't know if they got anything good. I don't know if it was a good read, but they've they've been able to scan it and read it. These are these were left over from the AD seventy nine eruption of Mount Vesuvius . They're trying to keep kids off books back then. Yeah, they were that's right, the volcano . Here's a big oopsie. Ford fired a bunch of engineers to replace them with automated systems. Oops, they had to hire them back because the automated systems made so many mistakes . So So mistakenly, says Charles Poon, VP of sounds like it's made up, VP of vehicle hardware engineering, mistakenly we thought that just by introducing artificial intelligence and adjusting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high quality product . How do you make that phone call? Like who drew the short straw and like look, you got to join him back. I know we fired you, but no, I bet you a lot of those engineers like said, yeah, yeah, told you so the people who made that decision probably still have a job, right? Oh yeah, they're going to stay. Yeah . Notion had created a Gmail client , but they're going to cancel it because so many people use bots to handle their email that mail wasn't getting through through AI powered Gmail client onion notion mail will shut down on september twenty second . Notion said as Notion agents have gotten more capable, we've seen more users hand off email flows to agents . Today more than half of Notion email users manage emails without ever opening their inbox . So I guess you didn't really need us after all . So then we're going to shut it down. How do you do that? I want to learn that . Oh, I do. That's what I do. Read my email for me. If you ever get an email from me that sounds a little mechanical . No, I'd actually don't have to write my email. I really wouldn't want to do that I don't think . Meta, you may remember was tracking its employees mouse movements for AI training ? Now they've stopped it, not because it was immoral or wrong or bad, but just because they're afraid of data that the data's gonna be exfiltrated . The model capability initiative, which they rolled out in April captures the mouse movements, clicks, and keystrokes of U. S. based employees with occasional screenshots, feeds them into the meta models for training . But Meta realized that sensitive employee data was inadvertently accessible to everyone else, all meta staff , including private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions . Well, yeah, you harvest everybody's keystrokes, put it in a database . Shocking . Just a reminder, you don't own anything. You don't actually physically hold. Playstation is deleting five hundred and fifty one movies from your account . I never bought any movies in the PlayStation store, but if you bought Rambo First Blood, you know what? You're not gonna miss it. Bridget Jones Diary. Oh, the Deer Hunter, now that's a good movie. How far away are they from removing games though? And I'm sure they've already done that . Yeah, as of september first , due to our content licensing arrangements, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased studio canal content and it will be removed from your video library. So just a reminder You don't really own anything you buy owners. The best part is you don't get any money back. It's just Oh no. Yeah, got no. And if you look at the license agreement , you never really owned it . It was just there. We're going to take one quick break and then some final words including a farewell to one of our favorite people who passed away this week. Before we do that , let me tell you about our sponsor, superhuman go A lot of us would promised that AI would make work easier, but somewhere along the way , maybe you've experienced this. It just started to feel like another thing to manage . Another tab, open, another app to check, another place to copy and paste information, just to get a simple answer. That's why more people are turning to superhuman go . Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing. You don't have to start from zero . Instead of forcing people into another app or another workflow, it works where you already work goes. 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Find out more at superhuman . com that's superhuman dot com We're so glad they decided to support this show . Superhuman. com. We love grammarly. We use it all the time. I think I'm going to have to install go. See what I can do with it. A few final thoughts before we wrap things up on the show today , let me see . We had a whole oops segment planned. All the things AI did wrong this week . Let me see, I have a few more here US auto now, I don't know if this is a good idea. US auto regulators want to eliminate the brake pedal in your robot taxi Why? That's a good question. They say requiring manually operated methods of stopping driverless vehicles is a barrier to innovation . Just go into someone's or that that was had a person in it. I'm sorry. There was the Tesla crash, right? Yeah, there was a huge now either test, but the Robotaxi or Waymo or whatever , yeah, actually there's always a big red stop button, isn't there? Like get me out of here button. Nit rogen. Yeah, me neither, so I don't know. NITSA , is that they have them in Atlanta, don't they? Or you South Carolina? Yeah, I mean Charleston. I don't we have horses in there. I never have them in Charleston. Never. NITSA, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration published a notice of rule making on Friday to modify federal brake safety standards. I have to think Elon had something to do with this . For light vehicles by eliminating the requirement for vehicles equipped with automated driving system and no manual controls to have foot operated service brakes or manually operated parking So there would still be some kind of stop though. It just wouldn't be a break. I get I think I see that. Like they're saying this is a completely different type of vehicle. You don't have a steering wheel. There's no longer a brake there with their feet on the pedals. So as long as there's some way of stopping it , please. Yeah . Yeah. Go to open your app. Yes . Stop, please. Another technology regulation metaphor . Yeah . One million passports have leaked online database of a million passports, not just US passports . People were using, guess why? People were using passports for age verific ation . This is the problem, one of the problems, one of the many problems with age verification . The person who wrote the book Careless People, which was an excellent book, Sarah Wynne William . It was an expose on her years working at Meta and it was wow . Meta is now going after her. She says they're punishing me even though I'm a whistleblower . They're punishing her for disclosing its illegal and indefensible workplace conditions and corporate misconduct to federal regulators She did write a book and probably made some money on it . She says Meta's doing this to strike fear into the heart of anyone else who dares to consider speaking the truth about Meta's unlawful and abusive practice is in the public interest . Beta, of course, went after her in court and is suing her. Finally , we are so sad to have learned of the passing of Omal.i Ik don't know, Jenny of you know Om? Yeah, it was impossible to work. I mean, I did not know him well, but he couldn't work in technology immediately. Amazing. In the OTs and twenty ten's without knowing Om. Yeah. He was on our show , I think fourteen or fifteen times. I was a huge fan. He was a deep philosopher, a great artist. He a master with a LICA camera. He loved his LICA and took amazing pictures , started the tech blog giga Om, many of the people you know who've been on this show besides Om, worked a giga Om, Stacy Higginbotham, Kevin Tofel Yankee Rickers, a lot of the best journalists in tech started at Giga Om. He started that in two thousand one . Semi retired , I think twenty fourteen to become a venture capitalist had investments in a lot of the companies you know let's see twenty fifteen GigaOom shut down with six point four million monthly readers was really one of the great places to get tech information . He was always a welcome visitor to the show. He wants to call me the Yoda of Tech. And I said, No, you're the Yoda of Tech. I'm the Jar Jar of tech he had this deep understanding and you know what's really sad is that his blog, which is OM. CO , some of the best articles he'd ever written were just came out this month, for instance june seventh , his article about Mythos just brilliant writing. His writing was better than ever . He'd had heart trouble for years , passed away this week Wednesday at the age of fifty nine , very, very young . But we are very happy to have known him and we will miss the man. If you go to our site twit. tv and search for Omalik OM A I K, you'll find many shows that he appeared. And I think his last appearance here was around twenty fifteen when his health problems began . I brought up this article I think a few weeks ago that I would recommend everybody read if you want to get a sense of whom Omal is.ach Wei are living in Pinocchio 's world in which he writes about one of his favorite pens, a Montblanc that commemorates Pinocchio , but the article takes a little bit of a turn when he talks about the true meaning of Pinocchio and the fact that we are all living in Pinocchio's world today . It's one of the great . really Really, one of the greats , and we will very much miss him. That is it for this week in tech for this week. I want to thank you, Jennifer Pattison Tui, your wonderful , I will say nice things about you when you pass away. Senior Reviewer No , I'm much older than you. Senior Reviewer Theverge. com she writes about all kinds of things, but especially home automation. What do you what do you tell me some of the doo hickeys you've got around the house today . Oh, well next week I have lots of reviews coming out. I've been reviewing the new Google Home speaker and the new Schlage Sense Pro smart lock that you should have waited to buy. I should have waited . And then those weird robot things that I can't wait to get rid of. And like the switch bot. I can't wait for a review of that. Yeah, I ''causem normally quite nice, but even the kids didn't like this thing. That's what surprises me. I mean, isn't it supposed to be all cute and cuddly? That's the thing is not cuddly. You want to pick it up, but it's hard plastic and it's on wheels and it's taking pictures of your house. And the two, yeah, there's so many things. I love switchbot. Switchbot is a great company. They come up with all sorts of crazy and wonderful ideas, but this one I'm not sold on . And then the robot lawnmower is in my backyard. You were talking about not getting injured well getting in, you don't get injured in home automation, but my robot lawnmowers beg to differ. Do not lie in front of your robot lawn mower. It has lawnmows. It hasn't hurt you has, it? No, well, it hurt my husband, but it was it was technically his fault, so but not badly, I hope. No, no, just, you know, permanent scarring, but oh my god, it nipped him . It was, again, his own fault, but there are days, it's a dangerous job. I'm just telling ya . Oh my gosh . Which one do you have? Right now I'm testing one from Dreamy, one from Huskavana, and one from Motion. Oh, so you have the best mode lawn in your neighborhood . You'd think. You'd think. Is this because you're the only furge viewer who has a a la lawnwn. Have. Yes. This is the real reason . It's so nice to see you. Jennifer also pops up every month with Micah Sargent on Tech News Weekly and we always love having you on the shows. Thank you. Dan Patterson's in Brooklyn, so he neither has a lock nor a lawn but he is a lock. I have a lock. There's a lock. Old fashioned lock locks. Yeah, he has many locks actually. Senior Director of Content Blackbird . Tell me what's going on in Blackbird. Last time you were on, you made an offer people could sign up for your disinformation detectors. Is that still out there? Yeah, yeah, we have a number of tools . Most of them are not consumer facing, but we do have one called Compass that's compass. Blackbird. Which it is made for journalists and I mean everyone else , it will detect deep fakes or claim. Like if you see a post on the social web and you wonder, is this PS or real? Just paste it in a compass and it will tell you not just true or false , but it will tell you the context. We call it a context checker, not a fact checker . And far more than just generative AI links. It'll give you real deep context and let you find and read more about what you're finding. Oh , of course deep in others. I get bit all the time now , especially on X . They have the recent searches that just sums up the world right now. Social media bans and they right. Is Taylor Swift breaking with Trevor Cow? No, they're getting married, I found out . They're getting married. Donald Trump won the election. Like those are the two most important things in the world . Yeah. Type of claimant. But I saw this video I have to find it and I can feed it into the 'cause you do vision, which is fantastic. That's great. I can feed it in , it was a picture of a cat and a tube and the cat would jump down the tube and slide down it and just form to I thought, oh that's got to get one of those. And then Lisa said, You dummy, that's AI. Cats don't slide down tubes. Even nuts . So I guess I have in a way I have compass, it's my wife . But there are times even Lisa might be fooled I could use compass. Blackbird. AI and it's really nice to have that. Thank you for doing it. Well, thanks. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here . And sorry about the frog voice. No, you sound fun. Our discord chat, our club chat says, Leo, you're such a boomer . I saw it. There was a video the cat went down the tube and I saw it. Remember that? Were you even for a moment fooled by that? I am fooled by the stairs though. They're showing in the chat I could imagine a cat doing that. Oh well let me see now. Okay, this is the slide test for everybody to see the slides. Oh yeah, that looks real. Sure. That's AI that's real . That looks quite real to me, but who knows these days? You can't believe you're smart. Exactly. If you're smart, you make it kind of like low quality, fuzzy . Yeah Yeah , well , anyway we've got time to save us. Here's what happens when we get jumps down a two . I think that one's real Cats get do get up to the darnest things, don't they? And then there's Daniel Rabino. He is the editor in chief of the Wonderful Windows Central. It's always a pleasure to see you , Daniel . I'm sorry that you're not into FIFA soccer or F one sports, but I'm glad you're into Microsoft and Windows. Thank God somebody is we're playing here Foxborough, so I could I know you're just up the road a peace and everything . Could you hear the cheers? No, no, but they got the signs on the highway so I love it how they say, what did they say like New York, New Jersey Stadium or something? I mean, it's like it's not even in New York. It's where the giants play, but it's oh right. They did give it massive shootings . It's the same thing with this so the they're using the old four thousand nine years stadium down in Santa Clara, but they say San Francis co, it's not San Francisco. It's fifty miles away . It's like Foxborough It's like every place in Boston. It's like, I mean, Massachusetts, it's basically just Boston, right? Right. It's not Scotland. It's now Scotland officially, right? Right. Oh yeah, right. Yeah . Was it true that the Scots drank er in Boston? Is that true? Not Boston. That's the rumor, but I think it was just from one pub , but it was a good story though. Do you tell me that a cat a cat couldn't ? Cat videos . Okay That is what AI's for. This is the tube, and I swear to God, I think that's real. I think that's real. Don't you think a cat could do that now? I built a data center next to my house for this ? Yeah . Exactly. Do you live next door to a data center? No, I live now Brooklyn. No, you live in . No locks. Okay, let me get this straight. No lawns, no data centers, but the best pizza. Thank you all of you for joining us. Thanks, especially to our Club Twit members who make this show possible. We really appreciate your support. If you're not yet a member, please Twitter TV slash club twit for ad free versions of all the shows, shows in Club Twit now have chapter markers so you can jump past all the cat videos. That's very handy . We also have a wonderful Club Twit Discord, special programming. On Friday, we did our second episode of Off By One with Jeff Atwood, had so much fun . All of that because you support this podcast , it's I think so important to support independent journalism of any stripe you should support all the ones you use and we appreciate your support here at Twit terv slash club twit. We do this weekend tech every Sunday afternoon two to six to five make it two to five Pacific . That would be five to eight PM Eastern, twenty one hundred UTC. You can watch the show live as we do it well in our club Twitter discord, but also YouTube , Twitch, Xot com Facebook, LinkedIn and Kick. After the fact on demand versions of the show available at the website , that's twit. tv. There's also a YouTube channel with a video or you could subscribe to audio or video versions of the show in your favorite podcast clan. I hope you will do that. We thank you so much for stopping by, as I've said for now twenty one years at the end of every show . Thanks for being here . Another twit is in the can. See you next week. Bye. This is amazing . All right. Baby.