OpenAI Altman Versus Musk Trial

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat is here. Actually, he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell is here. Actually, he's in Toronto. I'm here. This is Hawaii. And we're gonna talk about Microsoft's earnings one week later, but we've got all the details. Also, it was earnings Palooza, how all the other big tech companies did. We've got some AI news, Xbox news, and yes, whiskey. Windows Weekly is next. This episode is brought to you by OutSystems , a leading AI development platform for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are creating custom apps and AI agents on the OutSystems platform. And with good reason, build, run, and govern apps and agents on one unified platform. Innovate at the speed of AI without compromising quality or control. Trusted by thousands of enterprises worldwide for mission critical apps, teams of any size and technical depth can use out systems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and effectively without compromising reliability and security. With OutSystems, you can accelerate ideas from concept to completion . It's the leading AI development platform that is unified, agile, and enterprise proven, allowing you to build your agentic future with AI solutions deeply integrated into your architecture. Outsystems. Build your agentic future. Learn more at Outsystems.com slash twit. That's outsystems.com slash twit . Podcasts you love. From people you trust . This is twit this is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrat and Richard Campbell, episode 9 82, recorded May 6th, 2026. Don't lick the manta rays . It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from a Microsoft and let me introduce our panel for today's show. Same as it ever was. From Mexico City, Mr. Paul Thorat of Thorat.com. Hello, Pauly. Hello, Leo. And the back of Lisa's head. There's the view of the lake. Look at that. I could do a view of the sea if you could, but the problem is I'm if we weren't for that giant . It's right behind cousin it. Right. Um yeah, we're in uh we're in beautiful uh Hawaii in the big island of Hawaii. Yeah, it's really lovely. It's a beautiful day. Uh tonight we're going up to the up country. They uh this is cattle country. In fact, the second largest ranch in America is here, Parker Ranch. Used to be the biggest, but the Texans decided they wanted the biggest. And uh uh so it's been there for a long time, like 150 years. It's uh it's still in the same family, and uh we're gonna go up there and we're gonna go to a ranch and go to a cowboy barbecue. Nice . Apparently the cowboys here were trained by the Spanish. Before there were cowboys in the US, there were of course vaqueros. Mm-hmm. And so they learned horseback riding and cow cattle uh herding and and roping from the Spanish. So they have a Spanish flavor to their cowboying. I'm very excited. It's gonna be fun. Yeah. Sounds excellent. Last night we visited the manto rays. I was telling you before the show. They they swim right up to you. They brush your nose. They got the the guide said you could lick them, but don't . It's a good sign. No look in the mantay. No , it would not would not be like in the manta ray. They're harmless. It looks like they're dangerous. They look like stingers. No, no, that's the not issue. It's it's it's it's gonna be fishy tasting. You know, look wait no nobody wants that. See, I don't know. I wish I I I can't can't feel you in on the actual flavor of Meta. So I wish I could. Anyway, we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about Windows and Microsoft. Yep. Um I'm just gonna sit back, relax, enjoy the weather while you uh take over. I thought I was gonna be doing that too because I was going over the notes and I was like, Man , there isn't really that much. This might be a short show. And I was pretty I was okay with it. And then I was like, Oh, wait. Except this I usually 'cause you know, when you think about the calendar, we do this on a Thursday Wednesday. So I go back to the previous Thursday usually for the news, you know, that's in the notes, and that's what I did, and the earnings were on Wednesday. R.ight Along with the earnings from Alphabet, Amazon. And they were literally coming in as we were recording last week. Yep. And I was like, oh no . All right. So top line, uh Microsoft's uh they're doing pretty good, you know. Uh basically thirty-two billion dollars of net income profit on revenues of about eighty-three billion uh in the quarter ending March 31 . Uh capital expenditures, which is what they're spending on AI for the most part, the AI dentist data center stuff, actually went down um quarter over quarter, but Microsoft said they were gonna that was gonna happen because of seasonality, blah, blah blah, whatever. Uh, but it did go up. Uh it's not where is this figure? I have it somewhere, but it did go up. I want to say 45% year over year, like hugely. Um we'll go we'll go through some of that stuff. Um the part of Microsoft that is Windows and Xbox is now the smallest part of Microsoft by far. The the three business units used to all be pretty roughly even, you know, eleven to thirteen billion a quarter, and they were consistent. And since the cloud stuff really started taking off and then now AI, you're seeing those parts of the company just explode past the more personal um competing part of the company. And as we'll get to in a bit, uh it's actually gonna get a lot worse soon. Um so that part of the business, thirteen point two billion in revenues. Um intelligent cloud, Azure essentially is thirty four point seven billion. Um up, thirty percent, by the way, year over year. Uh more personal computing was almost flat. Uh uh well actually declined one percent. So you can see where that's going. And then uh productivity and online services, Microsoft three sixty five, et cetera, but also Windows commercial, by the way, which is part of the imbalance here. Uh $35 billion in revenues up 17% year by year. So there you go. Cool. Except there you don't go, because there's a lot to say. Um so yeah. Um uh as I do, uh the next day uh after earnings I always write like a long analysis piece. Lately it's been really AI heavy, as you would expect, and I do get to that, but they made a point in the post earnings conference call of mentioning their consumer businesses quite a bit, which they don't do ever. And part of it Yeah. I mean it's just not but I don't think this is what analysts want to hear. And I and I know that because the seven analysts who asked questions at the end of the call, none of them asked about any of this. But this is the part I care about, so that's what I'm going to talk about mostly. Um and also just uh yeah I think everyone knows this, but with Xbox and Windows specifically , there's a sort of reset occurring in both businesses where they're trying to meet the needs of cons you know their customers for the first time in quite a while. And um so they're you know they're both making an explicit effort to kind of um improve those businesses right in both cases uh and I believe it was Sacha Nadella in both cases there was some like nice uh really positive sounding factoid, well, fact, I guess, uh, at the beginning of the discussion, which sort of offsets all the bad news that is the reality of these businesses. But for Windows, that factoid was one point six billion monthly active Windows, they said devices, but PCs. Um not mentioning the fact that that is a high of all time . Um it's never been that high. They they've thrown out one point four, one point five billion at different times. It had been going down. I don't know where these numbers come from. There's uh you know, it's kind of hard to explain what that means, but okay, whatever. Um he talked about all the foundational the work the work they're doing we're gonna go through some of that in just a bit actually um but prioritizing quality well you know it's kind of begs the question what were you prioritizing before you know like uh you know but whatever no one asks those questions. And then as far as the actual numbers, I gotta find we what do we got here? Yeah, so uh it's if you look at the past previous past four quarters, right? Um you would see gains in revenues from PC makers for Windows. And this is not strictly consumer, but pretty much consumer, right? Because the the Windows licensing revenue that goes into the commercial side of the business is over in Microsoft three sixty five now. Um and those numbers were okay. I mean, given the state of the market, one percent, eighteen percent, three percent, and three percent were the previous sequential quarter s. Um the 18% one is obviously a bit of an outlier, but that's because of the end of year buying spree that occurred on the part of PC makers, right? Knowing that component prices were only going to go up and that they should get these things in the channel. So there was a little bump there. And and you know Microsoft will tell you that part of that uh was due to Windows 10 end of life as well. But we're past that. And uh this year that part of the business, which does include surface as well, which I you have to sort of think excuse things in a bad way. Um put nothing into surface. Yeah. Um so revenues decreased uh two percent year over year in the quarter. So , you know, uh excluding the eighteen percent outlier, it you know, up one percent, up three percent, down two percent, it doesn't sound that bad. The problem is Is this quarter, the quarter we're in now, is going to be a bloodbath. And the first time this came up, I think it was Amy Hood now at this point who's doing this kind of thing, she was saying that they expected Windows revenues from PC mak ers to decline in the high teens. Wow. So well the high teens and then they later explicitly said it was eighteen percent was their expectation. So this thing's gonna nosedive eighteen percent. So it was down to this quarter , it's going to decline 18% . And that is not great. Nope. They even explained where those declines would come from, evenly split between an unfavorable year-over-year comparison with the end of life of Windows 10. Um the second factor was the uh inventory level declines, right? Because PC makers are no longer buying you know bulk licenses to get that stuff going. And then uh the third one, this is the worst one. They call it a lower PC market. Like and what that means is people are not gonna buy PCs because they're gonna be really expensive, right? Yeah. Or are are now really expensive, right? They are really expensive right now. Yeah, if assuming they could even find them. So Well, yeah, they it's hard to buy them, but also like you can wait. Because you don't expect these prices to last. Yeah. Yeah. And and look, this was already look, uh obviously everyone knows this. It's a mature business. I know PCs and Windows sometimes are the butt of jokes, but the reality is these devices are much more secure than are uh reliable rather than they've ever been and can last longer than they ever have. And you know no one is replacing a PC every two or three years. I mean these things get spread up. No, four and five now. Yeah. So and maybe longer. Yeah, no, regular consumers I think go much longer than that. But yep. You know, mo most system ins I'm talking to are getting five-year warranties for a reason. They're gonna turn them in five years. Right. And yeah, I and look, the reality of the world is that as things have moved to mobile, even for older people like us, I mean, um, the PC becomes more of a secondary device. It's the thing you turn to when when I wanna do what I would call real work or I'm gonna need a big screen. Need the big screen. Right. And and sometimes it for older people especially, I do this all the time. Like I wanna do something important, like book an airline flight. Like I could do that on my phone, but I am not a child. So I will do that on a computer. Like that's how I think, you know, and and I think I think we have to do real work. Yeah. If I right if I was a child, uh maybe I would do it that way. I don't know. You mean someone who can see their phone. Yeah. That's a huge problem, by the way. Yes. Yeah. How many times you do this? You're like, what is that? Oh yeah. No glasses off. Like Yeah, it's on , off, on like uh sense that works today. Yeah. But you know, for the broader market, I mean most people are probably younger than I am, so I mean the there's but they're still not using you know they're not using computers as much as say we did at that point in our lives. Like computers are no longer the center of this. Well, and and for most people, a computer is a laptop anyway. Like desktop is just a rare category now. Right. Right. They mentioned Microsoft Edge, which kind of blows my mind. Um Edge does not contribute directly to revenues in any way, shape, or form. No. Um there are indirect revenues that come out of Edge related to the advertising stuff and and which explains all the forced usage of edge Windows 11 and all this stuff they want to get you in front of you know MSN and uh all the Microsoft advertising. We want your digital effluent. Yeah. But uh Sach Nadella said our edge browser has taken share for 20 consecutive quarters. Now, for a person like me, that's a record scratch moment. Because I'm like, what? Did it? And I like that you said that because literally what I wrote in my little write-up here was really how take and share from what browser from what they're like let's roll the tape so you go to stat counter and you look at stat counter over you can look at it on uh total usage across mobile and desktop. You can look just at desktop. Well , Microsoft's web browser obviously has higher share on desktop because it's pre-installed and Windows is huge. So all right, we'll give them we'll just give them that. I'll just what does it look like? And it does not look like they gained share for twenty consecutive quarters. I don't know where this comes from. So I don't know how you cook that number. Edge's market share has been higher than it is now in the previous five years. Uh it's not that it's going down , it's going up and down, you know, and the highest high uh was a couple of years ago, I think. I don't remember exactly, but it's never exceeded 14% market share, despite the or used to share, really, despite the fact that it is bundled on the most popular desktop part of your system by far. Well, it's the old joke, right? Edges used primarily to download Chrome. Yeah. And the reason that's not a joke is because that is what it's used. That's for uh sadly, right. So in that same time frame, um oh I I should say I went back five years because twenty consecutive quarters is five years, right? So um uh Chrome has had over sixty-five percent share of the market the entire time . Um if you go back further, there was a period where it actually did fall to 61, 62%, but edge, like I said, has never exceeded 14% of the market. Right now it's 12.75%, or at least it was at the time I wrote it. Um and that makes it third or fourth? Uh no, actually uh is it s I think it might be second. Let me just second. I could just click on the link and find out rather than guess . Uh let me look. I think it is second. Uh yes, and then Safari is third. Yeah. And then five. Okay. So that's always the question is Safari versus Edge. Yeah, so Edge Trump is clearly owns it. Right. When I'm looking at it now, the the the number has changed. Now it's eleven point five one percent, but uh uh Safari is six point one seven and uh Chrome is seventy one point or seventy two percent, really. So Chrome has actually gone up since I wrote this. So that's makes this I don.'t know. It's possible uh Microsoft is looking at numbers they don't have access to. I tried to do this like maybe just on Windows. You know, okay. Maybe anyway, I couldn't find any supporting evidence for this, so moving on. Um Bing, same thing. We're gonna throw it a nice n we're gonna throw it a nice little factoid for Bing. You know, that that that search engine we all love to use. Um Bing listen. Both guys really like like it and they don't how me mean you are too. I I yeah. Um I'm okay with it. Uh Bing monthly active users reached one billion for the first time, Sacha and Adela said. I'm like, o, hkayold hold on a sec ond. That's the search defined Chrome to download it. I I'm actually wondering if they're defining users in a different way than I would define users. Like for example, I would say a user is a human being. And I th I think what they're saying is that AI is driving traffic to Bing, and by AI I mean co pilot typically or Microsoft products of some kind. And that they they're counting that as usage, like a user. Right. Like and like you might describe an agent. I wonder if internally they call it unintentional usage. But I don't know. That's a good that's a good term because let me see I think I wrote something to that. Let me see if I can find it. Uh well what the way I wrote it is um the right question to ask is who uses Bing purposely ? You know the answer to that question into a browser. Right. It actually goes there. Like or or it's in edge and they know it's an edge and they still keep using it and they can't explain why, but they do. Um statistically no one is using uh Bing. So when you look at like edge as a distant number two in the browser market, where it has 11, 12, 14, whatever percent, whatever you want to call that. Um, Bing's share of search is far smaller. Um you know, uh, and you can do some math, it's hard to get come up with exact numbers for users and peop number of people who use things or whatever. But it is fair to say the the the the supportable bit here is looking at the same five year time period. Bing usage has grown from two point five percent to about five percent, which is double. Yay. It's double. Yeah. Hundred percent growth. Um but it's also just five percent. You know, like it is still five percent. After all this time. And I think most of that usage is in fact driven by unintentional usage and or Yeah. If every time you click on copilot, it's going to involve a bang search, that's a great way to add that number up. I I did some math in here to try to figure out like if if there's any way on earth they could have a billion users. And they there is none. There are there's none. I and I'm not gonna go through all that. Not as you define users. Like next you're gonna tell me users are P Not as I define math and not as I define yeah. I mean it's just like it's crazy. Uh and uh and this is a minor point, but um Bing and Edge are important to Microsoft uh because they drive uh ads sales and Microsoft. Now we're gonna have to define a net ella uh currency or an uh NADs. So y every look if you you're we're in technical field here, right? So we know a lot about certain things. We don't know anything about certain things. And sometimes you see a term, an acronym or something, and you're like, what the what is this? I like I also like when um especially a technology company uh uses a tech term, like an acronym, but does not explain it once. So in this case, I looked, I looked it up. I was just trying to see they ever explain this? They don't. Search Advertising Revenue, X TAC, T A C, increased 12% in the quarter. What is tack? TAC is what I call Spotify math. If you ignore the fact that there's a cost of doing business, we're doing great. It's literally minus the cost of paying affili ates that direct traffic to the engine. Right. I so okay. So what's the revenue when you include, or you know, I guess it would be profit, like they're not talking about that, right? Um, and uh that number has been sort of going down. I mean, it was 21%, 21%, 16%, it was 10% last quarter, now it's 12%. So it's quarter over quarter, it's up, but year over year, which is how we actually measure these things. Um, it's gone down. And this quarter, the current quarter, it is going to fall into the high single digits for growth, meaning up to nine percent. So it's gonna fall yet again. So yeah, a billion users, but oh also a bunch of bad news. Like okay. And I don't think that billion number is real, but okay Xbox. Obviously, Xbox is doing fantastically. We all know that. I don't have to explain anything about the oh wait. Um and they've got a new leader. She's just figuring things out. Like, I'm not I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not pointing fingers. Um I I like her. I I gotta say the more the more I see. I mean there's there's some little areas, but we'll get to this. Um because we're gonna talk about her more at the end of the show. But not this past quarter, which is the one we're talking about, but the previous quarter, which was the last calendar quarter of 2025, which was the holiday quarter. I I never looked this up, I meant to, but they actually suffered a decline in revenues of Xbox content and services for what I believe was, if not the first time in history, than one of the few times. I don't remember this ever happening. It that happened again in the quarter we're now discussing, right? So the first quarter, calendar quarter of this year, their fiscal third quarter 2026. So that revenue declined five percent. And this one I'm not, I should have looked this up. Uh, they blamed a prior year comparable that benefited from strong first-party content performance. In other words, Microsoft released some game that did particularly well in that quarter and this year we didn't have something like that and so it went down. Okay . Um Xbox hardware revenues fell again, again, again, again. Jesus, like thirty-three percent. So the previous four sequential quarters, I'd like to go back, I should go back and figure out how far back this goes, but hardware revenues in Xbox declined by 32, 29, 32, and 6% over the past four quarters in reverse order, right? Um, this business is not doing great. Um but don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain because new record s for monthly active users in the quarter and for game streaming hours . Okay . It's like it's like saying the Nazis had an awesome party in the Reichstag before right before the Berlin Yep. Uh the rest of it's going bad though. Um so yeah, I know. Um anyway, uh this quarter, the quarter we're in, uh Xbox content and services will decline in the low teens, which I take to mean eleven to fifteen percent. Thus that will those revenues will fall three quarters in a row. That has absolutely never happened. Um, that's incredi ble. Um, and the blame here is because of the prior year comparable thing again, but also hey, we just lowered game pass prices. See, we're listening. Right. We're not gonna make as much lower revenues too. Well, I I mean they had to know that was gonna happen. Um and then Xbox hardware, they didn't even guess. They were like it's gonna decline. It's like what does that mean it's gonna decline like 50%? What do we talking about? That's insane. Like they didn't even try they didn't say anything vague. They just said it's going to decline. Yeah, we know it's going to decline, but okay . Um so uh and then AI. I I mostly stuck to the consumer stuff, but we got to talk about AI, obviously. Um Microsoft is now saying I had guests before based on what they were doing and they had never said this for the year yet, but la the this past week they did. They're gonna spend in calendar twenty twenty six a hundred and ninety billion dollars on capital uh expenditures related to the AI . More than forty billion a quarter. Yep. Remember the number last year they were talking was twenty billion a quarter and they exceeded that. But you know, now they're talking, yeah, they doubled. I don't think they've spent forty billion yet. It's always been thirty something. Yeah. So this quarter uh was like I said, almost thirty two billion. Pr last quarter was thirty seven point five. The quarter we're in now is going to be over forty billion. Wow. And then of course the next one will be two, because that's how that math adds up. They didn't say that, but that's math. Um they also had one specific what I would call hard number, like actual number. I mean, assuming you know, well well, ignoring the fact that most of these people probably got discounts and whatever. There's a lot we don't know. Um Microsoft 365 co-pilot now has 20 million paid seats. So 20 million is a good number. Um how many M365 use? I've done the math. So and and my math is out of date uh because they didn't give us a new number for total Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers, but they did the previous quarter. And when and that number at that time they had uh they're claimed uh twenty million paid users out of four hundred and fifty million paid seats. So three point five percent of the of that customer base was paying additional money every month for co-pilot. Now okay it's probably not actually twenty bucks a month, by the way, but there's no way to know that. This assuming nothing has changed, meaning four hundred and fifty million Microsoft three sixty five paid seats, that figure has gone from 3.5% to 4.4%. So yes, we have 100% growth, but when your numbers are relatively tiny, right? Yeah, from one to two, a hundred percent is easy. Yep. And I will just point out again, because I'm my mind is wired this way and I'm terrible, that four point four percent is lower than Bing's market share and is lower than Microsoft Edge usage share, really. But um like way lower. So I also this is an awesome one where this guy asked specifically the so every question was about AI and spending and return on investment. When are we getting our money back? And and it was like the change bank thing, you know, it's like you know, we're gonna make money through volume. Um, so Amy Hood is super pumped, you know, she's like super positive, everything's great. Anyway, this the first qu I think was the first question the guy asked, you know, well how did how does this spending actually get paid for? And then this is Satcha's answer. He goes, You want to start, Amy ? It's like he ended it off . It's beautiful. It's a beautiful moment. Um I don't, it's not worth going through all of these questions on air. I wrote about every one of them in this article that's quite lengthy. It's just the same thing over and over again. You know, it's literally and people would start at the question saying, Well, uh, I know you talked about this, but you know, the it's like, but could you do it again, please? 'Cause I'm not hearing a name that makes you know sense. Uh or a number. I'm sorry, a number or an answer or whatever. Um, and I I don't know. He also the one thing I will point out that I thought was kind of interesting. If you think back to um as long ago as last week, Microsoft and OpenAI re-engineered their partnership yet again. There was a big announcement about that. The next day um OpenAI and Amazon announced an exchange And you know, I think from the outside world's perspective, it it feels like uh Microsoft is probably right to get rid of what is probably a financial and uh resource boat anchor or whatever in some ways, but it's also heavily reliant on c uh uh open AI and chat GPT for uh the GPT models for their own first party services. And they can't afford to let them go completely. And it sort of feels like from on the outside that maybe OpenAI got the better part of the deal. But I I have to say Sacha Nadella did a pretty good way uh a job of kind of defending it and and you know why this makes sense for Microsoft still. And I'll just read part of this because I thought this is I I think this is relevant. He said, you know, we have a frontier model, meaning open AI's, you know, GPT five point, whatever it's on now, with all the IP rates, royalty free. We have access to that all the way through twenty thirty two and we fully plan to exploit it. That's good. I mean that's yeah. You know, that's and then that's what it means. No, I mean that's yeah he talks about how they're a customer and they're not really paying them but sort of paying them and and whatever and that and okay, fair enough. But I think that's the that's the thing. The we're in twenty twenty six.' Were talking six years and AGI is gonna happen or not uh before then, right? Um uh they they have access to if it's not the top because it's on schedule, is that what you're saying? AGI is like right I'm not clear that it exists. But or will exist. Anyway, uh Apple uh announced earnings. No, um so no, I don't I I don't know what to say about that. I I don't I don't know what to say.. Ye Yeahah. You're s you're setting business deadlines based on the technology nobody knows how to build. So remember when defined meaningfully. Yeah. When when w one of the big things with this came up last week, right? Uh Microsoft was buying Activision Blizzard, they were going through the whole antitrust process. And people like me and others, I mean, others did this, were trying to do the math. Like, how does this make sense to have Call of Duty be in Game Pass? And the end ultimate answer is it does not. And so years later, they scale back and they announce what they announced recently, which is we're re-jiggering Game Pass again. We're gonna lower prices, but we're taking Call of Duty out. And that's the only thing that makes sense financially. Yep. Yeah. Why how did I from the outside know this five years ago or three years, whatever the number of years ago. So I didn't have time to look at this. This is a report from a third party, but Microsoft has a commitment to be like carbon neutral by twenty thirty. And you have to think with all this AI build up the uh I uh uh unless you intend to use the power of the sun somehow to power these AI denisetters, I don't understand how you're gonna do that. And they might actually drop that pledge. And I'm sorry, but you felt to know you were never doing it. Like you had to know . We're gonna uh pause at this juncture uh for a commercial message, but we'll be right back with more. More earnings learnings, actually, because it was earnings Palooza, as you point out. Go ahead. Last Wednesday was a design. Usually I I get out of the show and I'm like, all right, I got the day. I'm just gonna be great. Relax. Have a taco. It was Apple, Microsoft, Amaz well, Apple's the next day. Amazon, uh I think AMD well AMD was more recent. Qualcomm, you know, like it was all at once. Yeah, they all want to drop at once. Meta. Yeah. barren The only the only one that suffered in the stock market though was meta. Everybody thought they're spending too much money on AI, which is kind of ironic. Interesting shift in the tone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's spending a lot of money. I don't know what too much means. Absolutely. Let's take a break. And when we come back, more earnings learnings. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by ThreatLockercker. ThreatLo's Zero Trust platform now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've always done endpoints, but now they also protect networks and the cloud. That's so good. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, threat locker ensures that devices are validated through a secure broker before connecting to your most vital platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft 365, Asana, Google Workspace, and GitHub. 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Visit ThreatLocker.com slash twit to get a free thirty day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com slash twit. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us too when you use that address, by the way. Threatlocker.com slash twit. Now back to the show. All right, back to the show we go. And uh you Paul, you've you're just a glutton for punishment. More earnings. More large That's me. I'm not going to spend too much time on these companies, but I'll just a couple of high level things. Uh Apple, you know, uh almost 30 billion in uh net income, which someone pointed out to me by the way, under Microsoft's net income. Right. Microsoft actually had a higher profit. Now in most you know, timelines that would make sense because Microsoft sells software and services. Apple's hardware, you know, mostly. Higher margins, they should make a smaller profit, but they've been making higher profits. I I didn't look this up, but But they used to just sell software since they've gotten into the infrastructure business. Which for a lot of industries is wildly healthy, but that's no so ftware business. It's an infrastructure business. Yep. So that's interesting. I for whatever it's worth, I the only thing I did look at was the year ago quitter. And a year ago Microsoft also made a higher profit than Apple. So I maybe it's a something about seasonality. I you know, it's hard to say, but whatever. Um but don't worry about Apple. They're doing great. Um they'd be fine. Yeah, they're doing 1 11 billion in uh uh revenues, I know. Um double digit gains, net re net income and revenue. Um the iPhone is uh just about fifty percent of their revenues, which by the way is is going down. I mean it used to be like seven. Yeah. So I mean that's actually good. Um so there's that. Um but what's picking up the Slack? Is it the is it uh watch the mass no it's actually so uh watches did well with services now are services the second biggest business. The thing they received they always tried to build. Right. Well, and that's a Tim Cook uh thing. You know, he gets a little credit for saying uh we gotta increase our poo average revenue per user. Yeah, we don't we don't monetize our users enough. It somet'hings no Apple executive should ever say. But okay, fair enough. Um and he did do it. And it's smart. So I I can't it is smart. It's smart. And and by the way, you get to diversify somehow. All of Apple's other businesses are really dependent on the iPhone to some degree because I I think if you look at indirect uh benefit of the iPhone ecosystem, whatever it is, I mean revenue, it's probably close to like 80% of the revenues or whatever. But uh but yeah, the service th thirty- biloneli on in revenues from Apple services, you gotta remember this is stuff like Apple Music, uh iCloud Plus, blah, blah blah. You know, compare that to Microsoft's top-level business units, that's the same number almost as Intel So Apple services, I mean we can all make fun of that if you want, but like that's a lot of money. It's real money. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. Like that I definitely only thirty billion? That's a f is that a Fortune one hundred company by itself? I mean it's Easily. You're exactly right. Easily a Fortune 100 by itself. Yep. Um Google, uh very similar numbers, uh 62.6 billion in net income. So their their margins are way bet ter. Uh revenues of a hundred but 110 billion, we'll call it. Um the profit is up 45 percent, the revenues are up 22 percent. This thing's going gangbusters. Um, advertising is, I know I put this in here somewhere. Everything this number's actually revenues from advertising are now over 81% of Google's overall revenues. That's gone up. That used to also be around seventy percent. So that's kind of interesting. Um, Google cloud, you know, uh distant number three, I guess, in this kind of market. But still twenty billion in revenue. So again, like two thirds of Apple services business, but up still a Fortune company. Still hum ongous, exactly. Yeah. So uh they uh these numbers are kinda hard to know, but um it now has over thir three hundred and fifty million paid subscribers or subscriptions, right? YouTube and Google One being the key drivers. So YouTube is meaning YouTube premium, you people paying to not have ads, which is ironic. Um, or Google One is that whole they there's all these dumb names for these things now. It's like Google AI pro, Google AI, whatever they are. You know, it's it's that stuff. You get the Google uh Google Drive storage, you get the Gemini AI rights, et cetera, et cetera. So uh they're doing good too. I mean that's yeah, that's great. Uh Amazon also kind of kicking it. Amazon's tough because if their press release is ten thousand words, about a hundred of them matter to me. It's like the most pointless pre every quarter. It's like an insane list of things we've done, which don't have anything to do with anything, but uh net income of thirty billion dollars and revenues of a hundred and eighty-one point five billion. Um, their profit kind of thing almost doesn't matter because it just goes up and down so sharply, it's hard to even know what that means. But for our purposes, Amazon Web Services, AWS, 37.6 billion, right? So again , that's bigger than all of Azure and you know, that business intelligent cloud. It's bigger than all of more productivity, sorry, productivity and business processes, right? Which is Microsoft 365. Uh growth was 28% in revenues. Um there's a I don't know what this means. Well, I mean I do know what it means, but it's kind of weird. They don't really call this out elsewhere, but their their chips business is the way that uh Andy Jassy described it , uh, grew triple digits uh to I don't know why I assume this number, but about five billion dollars in the quarter. So this is in other words, customers paying Amazon to use their CPU TPU, whatever they're calling those things, uh on AWS essentially, right? Right. And uh and their advertising business all by itself is seventeen point three billion dollars up twenty four percent. So they're also they're doing pretty good. Yeah. Um A figure the run rate of a bottom tier Fortune one hundred company is twenty five billion years. Oh, is that what it is? Okay. Twenty five billion a year. We're talking quarters here. Yeah. So that these individual business units have quarterly revenue the equivalent of the bottom of the Fortune One hundreds equally. That actually that's an interesting way to kind of level set this because Yeah. I often think if you do six billion in a quarter, you're ranking. Oh my six billion and a quarter? I mean that so remember uh in this uh and when I say remember, I mean literally this is like twenty years ago. But yeah Microsoft would have trouble getting businesses off the ground if the expectation was that they could n't figure out a path to this being a $1 billion business. A billion. That was Ballmer's line. Don't bring me anything that isn't business. And when we say a billion-dollar business, that's a year. It's not a quarter. It's like it's not a quarter. Exactly. So if you look at individu al business units or businesses or whatever inside of any of these companies, Microsoft, Apple, uh, Google, Alphabet, um, Amazon, right, uh the sheer number of them that are high double well or double digit billions, right? Is that maybe worth looking at. That's astonishing. Like that's an incredible because you can look at users. You know, Google often talks about how many of their services have over a billion users or whatever numbers of users and it they're big. But at the end of the day, it's about this money, right? I mean, you know, your business. And I I that's an incredible. We say the number billion too casually. Yeah. Yeah. And and we also use the term big tech too casually because a lot of tech is big, but these guys are big, big, big, big. Like really big. The biggest companies that have ever existed. Yes. Right. I mean people like the ali Alien being the famous w version everyone's heard of, but there's a lot of science fiction that involves how the future is run by giant corporations, not by governments. You know. And that's what you see here. Like uh the giant corporations are here. They're not quite running the government, but they're awfully close. But they are talking about putting spaceships out there and they're gonna c you know, like it's gonna be it's gonna turn into aliens. I mean it's I don't know, it's incredible. Um Andy uh is one of the smaller of the big tech companies, I guess. Uh 1.4 billion of net income, uh 10.3 billion in revenues. Um that's a 38% gain on the revenue side. Uh now And they are, you know, two NVIDIA what may be bang or edges to their markets, meaning a distant number two. But you know, uh over half is that right? Yeah, over half their revenues, 5.8 billion, uh came from data center. And that's up 57% year over year. At the time I wrote this, oh I should just say I'm sorry, client and gaming, which is everything related to PCs, right? So actual chips for PCs, Verizon chips, um, and then the uh radion graphics, you know, that people might buy for gaming PCs. Um that business went up twenty-three percent year over year, three point six billion. That obviously used to be their biggest business is basically used to be their only business. Um I I didn't have this information at the time I wrote this article, but I guess in their post-earnings conference call, which I did not listen to or read, um, they're predicting like a big double digit shortfall in that business in this quarter and for the rest of the year. So um uh what's your name? Lisa Sue, uh the CEO and chairperson for AMD has made a a big and very public bet on AI data center uh activities and it does seem to be paying off. And I I think this is the dark side of that because of course, you know, they have to have that kind of growth because if they were only PC gaming, whatever, this would be a much smaller company. Sure. One of the arguments I'm making in the AI hype keynote right now is that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are all cementing their leads as theers world's data cent. That's right. In the same way that cell phone companies have. Like you you wouldn't start a new cell phone company and expect to put up enough towers to matter. It's not impossible now. Yeah. That's a perfect comparison. And you're also going to see the uh data center or AI equivalent of uh MVNOs or whatever they're called, the the little uh mobile companies that are really using T Mobile uh bandwidth or using Ver Verizon or whatever it is. And um yeah, it's but it's really you know in the US at least we basically have three companies, you know, and that's it. So it turns out that's basically the world, except the world's getting really concerned about data sovereignty, which now gets into this whole MVNO model where we might now start see you know national sovereign entities that utilize a portion of this multinational's data center under some different rules. Right. Yep. Yeah, this is this stuff's moving quick. You are in interesting times. But it and I but I also say not unprecedented because we've seen these kinds of consolidations before. Yeah. It's just the scope and I guess scale or whatever of it that is what's notable because the yeah look we've our monopoly laws in the United States date back to the eighteen hundreds and things like st you know, steel and railroads. You know, and so I mean they were big and bad in their day, but I mean they look they look like and and those companies consolidated control and you're seeing these ones consolidate control. Yes. Yep. Uh Qualcomm was last Wednesday. Um the the these guys are actually down. So Qualcomm is the biggest maker of ARM chips. They're the biggest maker of chips that go into mobile devices. Mobile devices like PCs are having a down year, especially smartphones. So uh their revenues actually declined three percent year over year, which honestly is probably not too horrible to ten point six billion, but they uh had a knit income of 7.4 billion on that. So their their margin is crazy high, like uh for a hardware business. That's amazing. Um the vast majority of that, like nine of the 10.6 billion came out of the hardware division. This is the the the part of the business that But not specifically the X and X2. Not specifically the what? The X or X2. No. The Snapdragons. Right. So well actually the way it's structured now, let me look at this before I say this. Mm-hmm. It probably is part of that business now, like a small part. Yeah. And I would think it would be, but I think their their broader ARM mobile manufacturing is a far larger portion of their business than the laptops. I want their laptop chips to dominate, to be monsters.. Yeah To be the best thing that ever happened to them. Right. But but I don't know that that's true yet. There's no I don't I mean, look, I I question them getting into the PC business because relatively speaking it's so small. And they're and it's But if anybody was going to make Windows on Arm come true, it was these guys. Of course. But in other words, uh let's say they uh this won't happen this year, but uh in in good years we'll have like a billion of these devices grow up. So there's they there're selling a billion of CPUs. They're selling a billion of wireless chips and other things. They're selling billions of chips, right? If you uh go gangbusters in the PC market and get like 10% somehow in the first year? It's 20 million. Yeah. It's like it's this . That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter how successful it is, it's never going to be huge, you know? Well, this was strateg ic argument always about when Intel missed mobile, they missed the opportunity to go to the ultra high nanometer stuff because you need billions of sales to make that make sense. Right. And you know what? I think on just on behalf of the planet Earth, I'll just say thank God they never figured it out because X86 on mobile would have been please. They know they tried but it's not the chipset for it. It just Exactly. Exactly. What anyone ever thinks about X sixty four or X eighty six versus ARM, whatever. But yeah, I I I'm sorry, but on these types of devices , you need you don't you don't want a fan, you don't want it to be an interesting. If you're gonna carry design elements from the nineteen eighties for forward, you're gonna pay for it. Mm-hmm . I was explaining the Itanium and the X8664 architectures the other day. And just how badly Intel got punished for making a new chip for scratch. And gee, I wonder why they're sc they're jumpy about trying to do that again. I mean, don't get me started on a Titan It'd be like um if you were driving around in a car and then had to pull a second car with that was just the battery, that would be titanium. It's like it was just so big and heavy in the wrong direction. But whatever. Well that's it. But you know, they they blame it on the customer only wants us to maintain our old design, not we couldn't make a new design to save our lives. Right. Right. That's depressing. Okay. Um just two more points about Qualcomm. Uh they previewed the fact that they are going to s very soon announce a uh a data center based chipset, right, for AI, of course. Um they claim there. Yep. Uh a leading hyperscal er uh has engaged with them on a custom silicon engagement. Which they could could you be more vague? No. Um but so they'll be more down to five companies. So okay Yeah. So June twenty four they're having an investor day and they're gonna announce that stuff there. Um and some other things related to what they call physical AI, which I think is gonna be for the wearables like pins and you know, whatever whatever comes out of that which which is IoT IoT is the smallest part of their business basically um but that you know maybe will help change that um the other one is that uh there's a bunch of people I really like at Qualcomm and this this guy who's one of the good guys uh and I'm gonna I'm gonna butcher his last name. I'm so sorry, but Alex Kat usi an, who was an executive vice president, group general manager of mobile compute and extended reality. So he was one of the guys, you know, behind Snapdragon X. Um was hired away by Intel. Interesting. Yep. Uh and he will be uh it's a similar position. Let me see if I can find this. Where is this thing? Yeah, he will assume the role of executive vice president and general manager of client computing and physical AI. So that's that thing I was just talking about, right? So client computing is, you know, X86 and physical AI is hopefully something that's not X86 . But whatever. Um, that's surprising. I assume they uh Intel chip back uh the Intel truck backed up beep, beep, beep, and dropped a bunch of money on his front line. I don't know. Um, but you know, good luck, obviously to him. He's a good guy . Okay . I didn't write about this, but late last week, I I think it might have been Friday night, you know. Um Marcus Ash, who's a guy I know I've known for a long time. Um the when we took the kids to Germany five ish years ago, we met him. He was working at Microsoft in Germany at that time. And uh he's a great guy. Um but he's now one of those people that's back in Windows doing some of the stuff to address all these pain points. And so what he was he was over in MSR, wasn't he ? I don't think so. I he he was doing um it was like mobile apps and uh this was a while ago. It's possible between that and now he's done something different too. But um you know it was like the uh like the one was it one note or I don't remember so like some of the mobile, it was a bunch of mobile app stuff. Oh um remember they bought a company from Germany that did a uh the to-do app. Um not to doist or um I don't remember, but they tried Oh yeah yeah it had a funny name that's where those that's that team was there like that they were in Berlin and that's where that was from and it was uh so they moved they did it became Microsoft to do. Microsoft to do, right. And and oh wonder less . Wunderless, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was top of that group was from that team of people, right? And he moved to Berlin. Yeah, he was living in Berlin for several years. Right. Um, so now he's back and he's uh he's working Windows, like I said. So we're starting to see this guy. They're you know, they're communicating, they're tweeting, whatever. So back a couple of months ago, Pavan Dab Lurry comes out and says,, Look this is what we're gonna address the pain points. You know, we went over that whole thing. I made the point of saying, Well, you're not addressing some of the big insurtifications up, blah blah blah, whatever. Um, I didn't write about his little post here because uh we've already covered all this elsewhere and it we c wrote about it as it was happening, but I do think it's worth just kind of uh d doing what he is doing, which is just providing a progress update. Like so what has happened in just a month or so, right? Which is kind of interesting. Um the only problem I have with this is that some of this is shipping in uh the insider program only. So it's like experimental right now, but we'll get it in what Microsoft calls retail now, what I think of as um I don't know. It's stable, you know, in stable or what, you know, not in the insider program, right? Um, in the next couple of months. Um, some of this is already shipping uh to stable or retail. I'm gonna have to wrap my head around that term. Um, the two big ones, of course, are the ones we talked about last week of the week before. I don't remember. Um, the changes to the insider program where you can now enroll in uh two new top level, well, one of two new top level programs or channels, I guess, right? Experimental and beta. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's that is available. And then the uh Windows update improvements where you can basically spread that thing out as long as you want. You can pause it basically forever. And so like that's that's happening. I mean that',s cool. Um they but started removing the copilot icon from superfluous places in the UI, like a notepad, for example. Um, as a reminder, that does not mean they're getting rid of the AI features. They're just getting rid of that obnoxious icon that everyone seems to hate so much. And then some of this is I've not seen this, but Microsoft is going to configure widgets the way I actually configure widg ets, which is fascinating to me. Meaning by default. Like in other words, I go in and make changes so that this is what it is, but now this is going to be what it is. And what that is is not that feed will be off by default. So it will just be the widgets. You won't get all the garbage news stories. Nice. You won't be able to hover over the icon and have it pop up inadvertently, which I I do all the time by mistake, that's when I remember to turn it off. Um and it will uh do far fewer interruptions, meaning like notifications, little alerts about like stock market went up or down and blah blah blah, whatever. Now you can turn all this stuff back on if you like it, and are a child. Um, but they're gonna go to a default configuration that to me makes sense because like I said, it's what I do. Um the other things that they're doing and and again, uh it's not 100% clear to me with each of these where this is, meaning if it's happening in the insider program or if it's happening in stable slash retail, but um we're still CFR ing to some degree. So your uh mileage will vary. But uh performance across file explorer for things like performance and reliability, consistency, et cetera, and then there's going to be some deeper changes coming down the road. Um system performance across the board, like smaller memory footprint, be more aggressive with book giving a RAM back to the system when it's not being used by anything. Uh improve the responsiveness of the core sh ell experiences, meaning like start file explorer, taskbar, et cetera. Um that kind of stuff. Um that's pretty much most of it . Uh and then the taskbar update, the thing where you're going to be able to move it around and hopefully make it small, by the way. They don't talk about that as much. Um the startup dates where they're rewriting parts of it to be not JavaScript but native or when UI code, whatever, is happening soon. I take that to mean we're going to see in this month of May those things appear in the insider program as soon as this week, right? So Friday maybe we'll see. And then uh the updates they promised to search will come later. So I take that to mean June. And then they explicitly did say that uh they will have another update like this for build, which happens in June. So Yeah, soon. It's like yeah. When will then be now? Soon. Yeah. Um but it's happening, right? Doesn't this feel to you like this is this Pavan started in in sort of January, like now we're a few months on and they've starting to build a list of what people want and what they can do, sort of the prioritization getting getting taking a long time to get here, but here we are. Yeah, the two things they're doing right, and these are the same things that the Xbox team is doing right right now, is communicating what they're doing and being, you know, really clear about it for the most part. Um, and then providing updates, right? Um, this is a nice status update because it's only been a few months. Maybe you're arguably less than a few months but we'll call it a few months. And that's it's a pretty good, you know, it's like, look, this thing is out in the world it's we're not we're not changing code for something that no one this is a billion people have this thing right like we you know you have to be it it's it we all want these changes it's great but you have to you know the there's a certain bar they have to uh meet here as well for quality and so forth. So I mean this is I think this is good. This is keeping us apprised of what's happening because some of the stuff wasn't completely obvious. The back end stuff, you know, you might not notice or know, you know, even though it was happening, right? So it's it's nice. I think it's nice that they're doing this . Um now let's see. This is where are we? It's May. So next week, right? Next week, let me make sure that's correct. Yeah, I think next yes. Next week on Tuesday is Patch Tuesday. So this will be I think this is right. The first month this year where we're actually going to get some major feature updates in Windows this year. Last year we had major feature updates all but one of those months because January is kind of an off time. Um so this is a nice change, right? But we are getting two big changes, right? So um one of them is Xbox mode. This is the replacement for game mode. This is the also the replacement of full full screen experience, which debuted on those Xbox Rog Alley gaming handhelds. Um I do not see this on any of my computers and it's freaking me out because I'm sorry. Let me I should explain why I said that. Um last Tuesday, or no, well, sometime last week, I don't think it was Tuesday. They released the week D update, right? This is the preview of next month's patch Tuesday update. So if you want this now, you can go and it's available in preview. You can kind of go look for this. Um, I've installed it on multiple PCs. I don't I'm not seeing. it I think we're still stuck with the CFR thing for a little while. Um and then the other big one is AI agents on the taskbar. And that's big because of what I just said. It's AI agents on the taskbar. It sounds really big, but you're not gonna see this, right? Like you're not just gonna like wake up one day and some agent thing's gonna pop up and be like, hey, we're here. What do you want us to do? It's not it's not like that. So this is the capability in the operating system that enables this to work. And so if you have a Microsoft 365 copilot subscription, there is a researcher agent that is available now that you could potentially run and it would, you know, it would it would do this thing. You know, the the thing that was so outrageous last fall when he made the stupid move of uh talking about it ahead of uh not build uh of Ignite. So I've not seen it. I've only seen the demos they've done so we'll we'll see. But is this a big change and you know it's gonna go down like a lot of medicine poorly. Um and then there's a bunch of minor things. I the drop tray is being renamed, but they're also making it a little more elegant, meaning small. I just turned it off. I hate that thing so much. Um and then minor, you know, file explorer, Microsoft Store, et cetera, whatever. It's the the other stuff small. But um Xbox mode and AI agents on a taskbar is uh Yeah, that's big. Potentially. We'll see. I mean we'll see what happens. But yeah, we just got to figure out where the customers actually act here. Like, you know, the devs are getting are using a bunch of agents, but they're using it through their own tools. They don't need it the on taskbar. I know. A regular mortal user is going to have one widget wiggling away on the taskbar going, hey, I got something for you. Yeah. If somehow I was magically in charge of UX at Microsoft or whatever, I would never have come up with this scheme. But I will say that watching that demo from Ignite and that you know, that session or whatever, I was like, okay. I mean like, you know, they're they're making it make sense within the context of how Windows has worked for, you know, since nineteen ninety five basically, right? So it's like yeah, maybe you know, we'll see. I I still feel like agents are complex and for technical users only at this point, um it's gonna get there. I mean, it's gonna get there quick, but I mean, you know, i God help any normal human being with some stupid thing pops up at the task par and they're like, what fresh hell is this? You know, it and's some agent thing like, hey buddy, we can blah blah blah. It's like, oh no, I don't want to do that. I do not want that. I don't know. We'll see what happens, but it will go great. Um and then finally, uh a security researcher, hopefully not the same guy that found the supposed security problems in uh rec all, uh discovered that Microsoft Edge is loading all of your saved passwords into memory and clear text even when you're not using those passwords. Like it just does it as part of its boot process. Yep. Don't save passwords at edge. For a bitwarden ad. Geez, Lawrence. Yeah. Holy cow. I don't I don't know what to say to this. Like it's not good. So maybe Microsoft could talk to Anthropic and uh get a little red team going there. Well and I and I wonder if that's what's actually happening and some of these things are starting to leak. That could be. You know, after the Firefox experience, if you've got a commercially facing piece of software, if you're not on this right now, you're you're you're hopefully committing suicide. Everyone that is running any kind of a software organization should be pointing to this and saying, we need to do this right now. Right now. If that's not your response, if your response is to do the you know ostrich head in the sand thing that's gonna be fine. It's not a big deal. Yeah, you need another job. You're doing the wrong thing. Well and Microsoft has access to mythos, so this may well be a mythos. I I presume that's in where this is the one that's not a thing is just leaked in the right. This is an external researcher supposedly from the Microsoft. No, no, no. They haven't said this, no. No. Microsoft would do this in what I would assume would be a fairly responsible way and saying this was happening, but we have fixed it. You know, and that you would find out about it after they'd already fixed it. Yeah. No, my my expectation is that every one of these companies is going to abruptly announce two hundred plus patches, security patches to their products. But we already uh I didn't, I don't know who like who who has this kind of ADDHD, but like somebody last uh that did it, yeah, last patch Tuesday was like, this was the most security vulnerabilities Microsoft has ever fixed in a single month ever. Yeah. And it's like, okay. I mean you don't really see that in the top level announcement. You know, like you don't really Microsoft doesn't say it. No. I think Steve Gibson said it was the second it was the second big it was it was just enormous. But it was like yeah. And you have to think that has to do with it. And yeah, Firefox two hundred seventy one vulnerab or not vulnerabilities, bugs. They didn't say vulnerabilities. We don't know how many of them were actually security for us, but two hundred I guess there's right. So yeah, there's the vulnerability like um bar or whatever, but then this yeah. Many bugs lead to vulnerabilities. That's the lesson I've learned from doing security now for twenty years. That it's often the bug that then gives you an interesting buffer overflow says, hold my beer . And Steve said, and I think this is true, that you can count on AI not to make those kinds of dumb mistak The adversarial models we're starting to use now is literally you have a tinfoil hat agent that's attacking every piece of code for its vulnerabilities and spitting out issues to fix them. Yeah. And ChatGPT has done the same. They've announced a security model that they want to do it Everyone's doing it. Yeah. That's great though. It's this everyone should do it. It's fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. It's gonna make things. And it speaks to sort of the reality of what's happening as we get faster at building code is we're building more code. You know, they fell right over. Yeah, because there is a lot of AI slop out there too now. Holy moly. We're gonna talk um in the next show on intelligent machines to Troy Hunt. Uh the legendary founder of Have I Been Pwned. Oh, nice. And of course he's the guy who's been c cataloging all these breaches Troyers. Yeah, Troy's amazing. Australian fella from the Gold Coast. Yeah. I need people like Disney a few weeks ago. Did you? Yeah. This wouldn't be my area ever. Like I just am not intro uh I'm not inclined or whatever, but I I love that we these people exist. Oh, you know, he's the so you remember we always talk about that XKCD cartoon where the entire internet is supported by one developer with this little brick, this whole house of cards. That would be funny if it wasn't true, by the way. Um He's the guy. He like something like 14 billion requests a day from every browser. Every open source maintainer on Earth is like, yeah. Right. And it's it's Troy Hunt and his wife doing this thing. Right. Charlotte. Yeah. Charlotte. Look, you can't reuse passwords. The fact that it turned into a business was kind of accidental. He was working on the c and now it's all consuming. Yeah. Richard, as it turns out, you can reuse passwords. It's a hugely problematic thing to do. But every lot of time . Monkey one, two, three, and you're done. Bob's your and I I was on his beta and so the first time he put the thing up, I was already in a breach. Yeah, I think that so he put it up as a kind of project while he was at Pfizer and then uh there was a big adobe breach, and all of a sudden everybody in the world was coming to have I've been pwned. And he said, You know, yeah, Alice could be a business. It's a terrible Australian accent. I will never do it again. And I said, That's not a vulnerability. This is a vulnerabil ity. Hey, let's pause for a minute and uh we'll get back with more uh Windows Weekly in just a bit with Paul Thurott in Mexico City and uh Richard Campbell in uh beautiful Toronto. You're there for what? A conference? Yeah, NBC Toronto. Nice. Speaking? Yeah. Yep, doing the NBA. Oh yeah. That's right. The Norwegian developers in Toronto . Yeah. Like I'm an American, so I don't quite understand geography, but Yeah, my one of my favorite talks and uh one of the the one of my favorite books I've never finished writing. Uh and uh but there's a bunch of Microsoft Hanselman's here, uh Mass Forginson's here, like there's some great great. I love Scott Hanselman. He is is he he's exactly what you want at a company. Yeah. I bet he is. All right, we'll have more right after this. Hey everybody, this episode of uh Windows Weekly brought to you by Delete Me. Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet? For anyone to see, don't look. Don't look. 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Look at the beautiful Hawaiian day behind me. It's gorgeous. Yeah. It's a little bright, so I have all these . Yeah. It's really silly. And I think at some point window washers are going to come. And they're gonna they're gonna be they're gonna be behind me on ladders. So just uh word a word of warning. Uh let's go on with AI. Paul ? Yeah, I don't want to talk about any of this, but I'm gonna just do this quite it's like so Microsoft announced something called Microsoft Agent 365 at Ignite. It's been in preview probably since then, I guess. I don't know. It's out of preview now. Um I okay. I guess it's an agent for monitoring agents. It's like what? I don't know. It's an open club something. I don't know. Jeez. I don't know. I just this is like gross. Also a related Microsoft 365 for agents. This is in public preview, uh I guess semi-related. I'm not sure if that's related, whatever. Uh anyway. Um also on the phone, and this is this to me is slightly interesting only because we were talking earlier about this Windows 11 UI for agents where it they'll behave like apps sort of where there'll be an icon and the taskbar and notifications and that this is a uh a familiar way to interact with the stuff for people used to windows. So if you now let's think about mobile a little bit, right? So in partnership with Anthropic, interestingly, Microsoft created a uh co-pilot cowork capability, which is now available on mobile, right? And this is a way to and I should say it's extensible with reusable skills, third-party plugins, right? Um, this is an early preview. So the the AI era version of what used to be like the RD RD RDP program, right? The rapid deployment program Microsoft used to have for a long, long time is called the Frontier program now, right? For Microsoft Frontier. Um this that's where it's at. So it's not like a you know can't go to the app store and just get this thing, but there is a I'm gonna call it a yeah, co-pilot co-work app on mobile that can send autonomous agents out into the world to create multi-step tasks or complete multi-step tasks on your behalf. Uh which is very similar to what cloud uh cloud cowork, right? So same thing, built on cloud code or whatever. Um the UI is uh almost ridiculously friendly. It it it's um it reminds me of something from the distant past in the Microsoft sphere, but um but it's basically just big buttons, you know, and it's stuff like organize my inbox, arrange you know, my will. It's not a paper clip? You sure it's not a paper? Uh one of them is a paperclip. Um prep for a meeting research company, right? So you what you can do is connect this to whatever data sources and this is where it gets it's a pretty UI, but it's stuff like dynamics 365 customer service, uh dynamic 365 sale, fabric IQ, and then whatever third party services, right? So it's like it's not for but the UI is so it's just it's like silly, you know? So obviously if you're using Microsoft three sixty five copilot, you're gonna have different entry points into this thing, right? That you could do this from the web, you could do it from a sort of a native app on Windows, um, you can access it from within individual Microsoft three sixty five apps, you know, like Word and Part, whatever. And now uh mobile is well mobile there there's already a mobile app, but there's gonna be an app for agents. And I the the way this should work is that you get some kind of a you know native or normal or familiar kind of mobile like UI on mobile, but you could then go back to your PC, you know, boot log in and maybe you get like a notification on the taskbar because that's how we do it on Windows, right? So I'm kind of curious to see how this stuff all uh interacts. You know, I hope they yeah, I hope they coordinate together with each other. Yeah. That hasn't been my experience so far. One of the uh connectors by the way is for Notion . Okay. Interesting . So um and then my least favorite article or you know story of the week. Uh Microsoft has announced a legal agent for Microsoft Word . Why don't you like this idea? Because there are already examples of lawyers who have used AI to fabricate uh legal precedents or whatever it is or write their you know arguments and so forth, and this thing literally is designed to do exactly that. I mean they not not this is not trying to do legal cases. This is just trying to trying to be a a legally intelligent contract editor. I think I put it in the right place because you usually open contracts in Word. Yes. So the idea that then there's a tool there that has some visibility into legal language is interesting. It's inevitable . I mean I I I accept that this has to happen. I I also just think the the timing's not really totally bad. It was it's not there wasn't a famous case last week we can point to say like you're doing this now, but there are unfortunately several examples of this kind of thing. So that was, you know, that that lawyer did it to himself. He uh he asked the tool to come up with citations and it fabricated citations. Then he showed it to a judge without validating it. That's on him. No, no, a hundred percent. Yeah, you're right. You're right. Um so yeah, I look this is the uh without being cynical, which is hard for me, I mean this is the definition of what AI is and should be used for. Like is you know, you're gonna save people time, save the money, etc. You're gonna get get some of the the gross, you know, work out of the way, you know. Uh hopefully , well, just a legal translator. You take a paragraph of legalese, you're like, what does this actually say? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, uh this is a good it I hate I hate this. Let's move on. All right. So I just I just hate it so much. But this is the kind of integration. This is not hey, go to my new app, check out my new icon. It's like, hey, in this tool that I use all the time, I was trying to do this thing. And all of a sudden the the tool got better at doing that thing. Yep. Yeah. I mean, uh the last holdout use major use case for WordPerfect was the legal market, right? That was a big thing for them. And so Microsoft obviously uh got that going at some point and now all lawyers, everyone like everyone on earth who uses Microsoft Word. So yeah, I I I I understand. I I just uh I I'm looking forward to like the nuclear reactor agent. You know, the you know it's like I just please don't tell me about these things. So you want to build a nuclear reactor? It looks like you're trying to shut down Reactor Five. Would you like some like uh Um And then these two are just interesting because of who what the companies are and the different approaches. The the first one And the next one was an actual announcement from the company, which makes it also interesting. But um Apple is going to do in its platforms uh what it's doing now with just with chat TPT where you can kind of hand off to this third party AI, but they're going to expand it to basically any AI. And that makes total sense to me. And I this is a it also is a punt by Apple. This is not how they presented their plan for AI, that they were going to curate the best version of it. So you'd have an excellent experience. Now they're going, Yeah, we don't know. Use what you want. I mean there is a two hundred fifty million dollar settlement because Apple over uh marketed an AI that still to this day does not exist. Does not exist was complete vaporware. Anyone who bought an iPhone sixteen or s and or seventeen will get between twenty five and ninety five dollars per device because of this. So yes, to your point, that's true. Um but I mean what it does is it just says to Apple, it says to all of us, Apple is a mortal company also. Well or I'll give you a different interpretation. Uh Apple realizes that uh there's more money to be made being a hardware company that provides a portal to the AI of your choice, instead of trying to become an AI company. It's pretty gonna be pretty hard to compete with Microsoft Exactly. So this is not what they're doing here. What they're saying is we don't know what the best of anything is. Well as a user, I'm I'm thrilled. Right. I want to be able to do that. I want to just be clear, they will never say that. Well that's true. You're not but yeah. supposed to be the curated experience. That's why you live in their walled garden. And now they're doing what everybody else is. The privacy if you sign up uh for GPT and you decide to use them as your model, you it's all going to open AI. Yeah, if you sign into that account, right? I mean, one of the things I I I I think there's a model here for Microsoft as well. If Copilot continues to tank, et cetera, et cetera, um, giving customers the ability to uh either choose the model they want to use or the AI, whatever, or automatically kind of orchestrate that uh on their behalf is well, and I think you've seen this example with Claude Cowork, right? Claude Cowork booted M365 copilot in the butt and Microsoft response is to bring co-work into the product stack. That's not unusual for Microsoft. They will always go and recruit elsewhere when they can. Apple a little more hubris. Uh so yeah, no, that's true. And and I I'm not saying Apple's making the wrong choice. Right. What I am saying is this is not how Apple normally presents itself. They normally present the curated experience. You want the curated experience, we're hosting Gemini , which they're paying for, uh on our servers and you'll have that. Yep. Um I guess the question is Apple so far has said well, people want AI to do things like correct grammar or writing or you know, summarize emails, very simple things which you know I I guess people want. Um and they say if you want the you know heavier duty inference, well you're gonna want to use a heavier duty model and we'll let you do that too. You know uh, Walmart is apparently making new devices that are gonna have Gemini built in. Right? Well they have a big so Walmart is a big micros or a Google partner. And right. Google has like first-party hardware for things like uh T V streamers and smart speakers and what you know, right little smart devices, whatever they are. And but uh That's not a failure for Walmart. That's uh no I mean Walmart, right? They're gonna sell they're gonna sell for cheaper. And a lot of them are actually fantastic. I mean, the g the Walmart version of whatever the Google TV streamer is called looks identical to it. And I think it's like one third the price. I guess the question is going forward, how important is it for Apple to be an AI company? Um and and you know, there are some and maybe you feel this way, Richard, that think that's gonna be critical to their future success. Um I think they're a hardware company. And if you're a hardware company, yeah. So this is the difference between you know, kind of fully embracing I hate to say this term, but like vibe coding essentially, to allow people to do fun things in the UI of whatever system or whatever is versus uh kicking them out of the app store. You know, which is kind of the the Apple approach is a little different. You know, uh the App Store is Apple's Achilles heel, there is no doubt about it. Uh they make some that's part of that services income. They make so much money on it. They're so disincented to let anybody do anything uh different. But it's not a long term strategy for them. It's a reminder that Siri was once an app in the app store.. Yeah Which they then bought. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um I was just reading there's a oh go ahead. You have one more story, and then I want to uh mention something that I thought would be interesting. Go ahead. Okay, I'm sorry. I just uh canonical, which makes the Ubuntu uh Linux distributions, announced how they're going did I talk about this last week? Actually, as I'm saying this, I feel like I kinda did say, I don't think so. I don't remember. So um they announced how they're gonna roll out AI functionality into Ubuntu . Now, if you know anything about anything, right? And uh in in my world, I deal with the more like the older, more set in their way, like technical people in the Windows community. That's everyone in the Linux community. I mean, like literally. And and I and I saw this and I was like, oh oh, this is not gonna go well. He is he is being completely reasonable and he is gonna get eaten alive. And that's exactly what happened. It's literally like it's like, all right, so we're going to fork Ubuntu. So there's a version without this crap. And then, or like, what other distributions could we move? Like, this is literally what's happening right now. But I have to say , this plan is a solid and smart. It's a little bit like the thing that uh Mozilla is doing with Firefox, where they're saying, like, look, we we understand there's a big segment of our population is knee-jerk, just doesn't want this stuff, but there's there are a feat ures in Firefox that are actually AI where they're like, well hold on a second. I I want that. And and the the version for Firefox is a language translation, right? And that's why in that UI in the browser,, um you can turn it all off, but then you can go turn on individual ones if you want. And the top one is language translation. Cause that, you know, even the people that hate AI viscerally are like, well, I I mean, I need that. You know, like that works. I mean and that uses the local model. It's kinda it's interesting . And so they're differentiate in Ubuntu's case or canonical's case, I guess. Um they're differentiating between what they're calling like explicit and implicit AI. And implicit AI s are uh AI are AI features, are those features that um are just making something that's just an OS feature a little bit better, right? And so instead of um language translation and talking about speech to text and text to speech, right? Um , we already have this, right? And maybe it doesn't use AI today, maybe it will in the future. It's not about AI. It's not like look, a copilot icon. It's like this is, you know, and you could, you know, there's all kinds of like uh they don't really say this exactly, but like system moderating tools, you know, whatever you want to call it, like you could imagine where they would want to use AI where it makes sense to use AI, right? That's kind of the way to say that. So in what they're going to do is uh there'll probably be a checkbox and setup. We could just turn this off. Yeah, an initial setup. But um other unless you choose otherwise, those ex implicit features will be on by default because they're just augmenting something that already exists. They're not, you know, they're not uh actually they do have some ex uh these are general, but uh these are things that might be No there's I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet shot. Actually, they don't. I'm sorry. The the examples that we're going to give for is for explicit AI. So explicit AI is new features, like features that are wouldn't exist if it wasn't AI. This is the thing we're doing because of AI, right? And uh these are AI centric features, right? So authoring new documents or applications or automating or troubleshooting workflows or uh personal automation, you know, things like that. And so those will be off by default. And they will allow you to turn those on if you want them. And you know, they bring up the whole AI slop thing, you know, we're not doing that. It's all very, it's honestly it's logical and I, you know, even thoughtful. And uh in their language, deliberate, secure, and aligned with their values, et cetera. Yep. And nobody wants it. Like the the reaction to this, I saw this Yeah, it's obvious it was gonna be I I told my wife about it, knowing I'd have to explain why this was so serious because she doesn't know anything about this stuff. Like, why what was she? She's normal. But I was like, Oh my god. This guy's they're gonna this is gonna be a this is gonna be a little bit of a creator. Hey, you're gonna love all the AI in the game. We're only gonna do it. The next Call of Duty is gonna be all AI multiplayer levels. You're gonna love it. It's gonna be awesome. They're gonna be personalized to you. Hey, I'm an AI lover and I'm a Linux user. And I don't want AI built into the operating system. Let I can handle it. Just let me do it. I don't need you to do it. So I don't think you're unique in that particular regard. Other than most of those people probably actually are AI haters, you know. But other than necessarily, I mean Linux is really popular among the vibe coding crowd because we're mostly working in terminal anyway. Um I I see no reason. You know, every time I use Google Docs now, I am so annoyed. I want to turn off all the AI features. So it's just intrusive. This is going to come up in the first gaming story, but like this this no this is a very specific to Microsoft, but this happens everywhere. Like um, you're doing some work and something pops up in your face. And maybe you are typing and can't type anything or Yeah, what are you doing? Like what are you doing? Why are you interrupting me? And then the worst the most offensive of those are, Hey, could you take a second to rate this app? Oh yeah. Yeah. I can. I can. You're not gonna like it, but I'm gonna do it. I hate that. I hate that. I mean oh so I you wanna AI would be particularly offensive in this regard, I think, because there's already that kind of visceral thing. And God help this people if that happens. You know, some AI thing pops up like, Hey, hey buddy, I got some AI for you. What are you thinking? I'll just click it for you. Don't worry. I honestly think uh this this is where Firefox has the right idea, you know, and Vivaldi too. Well no AI. Well Vivaldi is literally no AI. I mean Firefox gives you the kill switch, which I think is smart. You can turn it off. That's actually a good way to do it, right? And uh yeah. Well it's just essentially what Ubuntu is doing. I mean it's very similar. Uh well I'm never going to install Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu, so I don't know. I don't really care. Because I know every other Linux distro will do what Firefox or Vivaldi is doing, saying, Hey, don't worry, we're not putting it. Um, so I I I think there are a lot of the I think that's very common. I will be quoting that SNL um Uber Eats end of year wrap up skit for the rest of my life where it's like, oh no, I know what it is. I just do not want it. You know. And and and it and I think this applies to like AI and in Linux. Absolutely. Uh actually uh we talked a lot on uh uh security now yesterday because Google w,ithout telling anybody, just started downloading a 4.7 gigabyte. So is that true though? Like they're downloading Gemini in Chrome. So when you get Chrome now, you're going to get a Gemini nano model. Wow. And also a low disk warning because what? 4.7 gigs. Yeah. That's the nano model. It's nano. They wanted 22 gigs, but they realized nobody would nobody would do that. You know, it's funny because our in our Discord, our AI loving uh Daranoki said, That's great because developers will use that uh uh all the time to help their code. Yeah. You know, so he said, you know, I always have to figure out if somebody misspelled Dubai in my code. Well, now I can look at the case. This is um this is a prop. So this is the modern equivalent of we are going to design features for Office because we know you have all of the apps. And before we had to do all these if-then-else is because maybe you don't have PowerPoint and maybe you don't have whatever it is, right? So you can see the benefit to it. But it's also gross bundling and enormous, I guess. It's a huge land grab because if suddenly every website says, oh well,, you have have to nano. Uh that means you have to have Chrome. Yep. Uh that's not that's not but that's exactly Google's point, by the way. They're establishing a standard. The Google search antitrust thing in the United States were one of the DOJ proposed penalties is not happening was to strip Chrome away from them because it's exactly and then Google fought very hard in this one because you know it's AI in search and not the same thing. And then uh you know but, but you use this as the distribution uh distribution point for both. And this is how you this I I forget which of you said this, I'm sorry, but these companies are all maintaining their dominance in their respective areas into this new era. I think it was Richard, but whatever. Um, is this is how they do it. I mean, of course. So I wanted to bring up uh we're gonna talk about it next on uh intelligent machines. Oh Malik, who I love, wrote a very interesting uh piece about how ai is changing uh internet internet consumption patterns okay and uh and microsoft is one of the four hyperscalers he talks about microsoft amazon, Google, and Meta, all of which are building their own proprietary interconnects uh network data centers. Because it turns out uh uh that the we thought that, you know, in the traditionally in the past, everybody said, well, internet bandwidth use is going to go up because people are going to be sending data to the cloud. Right. That what they call north-south data is not as important to these hyperscalers as the east-west data, the inter that interplay between GPUs in a single data center and multiple data centers. And so Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have all developed very sophisticated, completely incompatible, completely proprietary ways of having interconnects between data centers. Microsoft now has half a million miles of fiber. And it's not single strand fiber. The standard now is 24 strand fiber, these giant cakes. Can I make a joke about how you need more fiber when you got it? Well you do if you're a data center. They also he also talks about how it's changing changing geographies because companies are building data centers where power is cheap. Uh where land is cheap. And so most of the bandwidth of the internet is not coming from cities anymore. It's coming from, you know, Memphis. Because the land was cheap and the power was cheap. So sort of it's a complete so reworking of the a economy thing of the data center economy and internet economy. Microsoft about uh expatriating, I guess, or ex exporting whatever code or um uh user data out of Azure in this case to other clouds was made difficult through licensing costs. Right. And it was really just artificial. And at one point they were all doing it. I mean, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were all doing it. And then after Amazon and Google stopped doing it, they started complaining about Microsoft. And so Microsoft did it for a little while more, but they got in trouble and now they they just let people migrate the data. They you know. But I I uh this um that could I mean that could also be a stri uh what do you call it, a competitive strength, right? Oh absolutely. Listen to listen. If one of them figures it out, you know Well, they're all competing. Yeah. Microsoft and the only reason we talk about Microsoft is because Google doesn't disclose. But Microsoft does for some reason. They haven't figured this out. And that November of last year they don't tell them don't tell them they told uh they disclosed that they added 120 000 new fiber miles in the year 2025 uh to dedicate to extend their WAN their, AI WAN which, connects its Fairwater AI superfactory campuses into a single system. Powered by Enron. Azure's overall WAN capacity reached eighteen petabytes petabits a second by It's also one of the best arguments for why we can't do data centers in space. Right. Right. Think of the interconnect issue. You think the latency is bad on your cable modem. It's not just the latency, it's the bandwidth. You can cram so much data down fiber and you can put bundles of fiber together and it just doesn't work that way in orbit. Right. uh holo core fiber technology that is forty seven percent faster and thirty three percent less latent than single single uh mode fiber. So short length short lengths though. Ah interesting. They also uh they well but if it's within a data center, that's right. Within a data center makes a huge difference. I do the whole undersea cable uh infrastructure talk and it's like what about Holocaust? Like you don't get that under oceans. Yeah. We're not mak es sense. Although the they're buying they're buying cable uh subseat cables like crazy, right? Oh yeah. No, mostly it's the hyperscalers putting the cables. They're still putting them in the overall network, but they're the ones building them now. You know, some work to disconnect all the wires that are hanging around Mexico City here. They'd have the biggest data center on earth. Before 2012, the four hyperscalers collectively accounted for less than 10% of the total subsea cable usage. As of 2024, they now have fifty-nine cable systems. Google has thirty-three, Meta 16, Microsoft 6, Amazon 4, 71% of global sub sea fiber capacity. Capacity, yeah. There's about seventeen hundred cables total. Right. So they don't have that many cables, but the cables they're laying now individually are terabit cables. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Uh it's a table Google laid about four years ago that represented more bandwidth than was laid in total before nineteen ninety nine. Right. This is and this uh you know all about this, Richard, but uh it's something I don't think people think about uh that often. It was a really good article by uh by Ohm about how really this is going to change network topology. I do a whole I did a whole hour on it. I should probably make the podcast too. I wish you would. Yeah, I wish you would. Um broken ring technology. Actually they have something called Sonic, I think, that they're uh using as their uh fabric interconnect. Also proprietary. He says uh I love this. He says uh uh he he first pointed out Netflix was the first killer app of broadband many years ago. He says now it's just a matter of time when AI will be the new Netflix. Oh boy. Yeah. I'm looking for something like and then it just comes on. Yeah. We are we are in the future, folks, in some really interesting ways. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, I just wonder The granddaughter's just gonna make her own stories. Oh a hundred percent. Yeah. But I thought it was interesting. It's not inference is not really the driving force here that that north-south traffic is. It really the fabric of the east-west traffic between data centers. Because there's so many there's hundred hundreds of they're saying they're gonna get to million GPU data centers soon. I mean, it's mind blowing. I'm gonna go back and use an Amiga twelve hundred for the rest of my life and uh store everything on floppy disks, which I guess you cannot buy anymore. Um I think zip discs are the thing. Zip discs in the future. Yes. I love zip disks. Xbox coming up in just a little bit. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, but first, this word from some guy in Petaluma. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Helix Sleep. How are you preparing for spring cleaning season? Well I got an idea for you, time to upgrade to a Helix mattress and get a good night's rest. That's what we did last spring. We replaced that old mattress. It was, I think, eight years old. But you're supposed to replace your mattresses. 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Yeah. We have uh we've made a lot of uh plans. Which I'm glad . Yeah. This is coffee country too. I'm really excited about getting a bunch of Kona coffee in my veins . Uh here's something that'll pep you up. The world famous Xbox segment. So it's good. A lot of Xbox news this week actually. Um so Xbox CEO Asha Sharma's been in the news a lot. Um CNBC has been in role for a month. I know. Very vocal. I like it. Um this is not something they announced publicly. I feel like at some point they probably will, but um CNBC has obtained an internal menu men memo. Sorry. That's a difficult world word. Geez. Okay. Anywho. Um big shakeup in the organization. And this is when you called Firefox firefarts, but that's okay. Did I do that? Yes, you did. And I wasn't gonna say anything, but Did I did that today? Yes. Okay. Well, I need to sleep more. What was the name of the mattress? Felix, Felix, go get one . All right. Um I did not sleep well last night. I honestly fire farts is not a bad name for a browser. I'm just be my accent. You know, I don't maybe half hats. Uh okay. Um so uh two senior executives, uh Kevin Gamel and Rowan Soones are leaving. Um the latter is taking a leave of absence and will uh you know be an advisor in the future meaning she's gone um and then sham er picked four senior executives out of core ai which is where she was at Microsoft previously to uh forum part of a new leadership team uh in Xbox. Um one of them's named Tim Allen, I assume that's not the comedian. Uh Jared Palmer, Jonathan McKay, and Evan Chackie, who none of whom I'm familiar with, unfortunately. That's interesting. And uh look , you could uh it's reasonable to question someone coming in running Xbox who's never been involved in this part of the business. It's like, okay. And then you know, I I I like what I've seen so far, but then you like poach executives from like core AI. Mm-hmm. Where you came from. And who also don't know seem to know much about gaming. And in the process seem to be forcing out a bunch of gaming leaders from Xbox. Right. I'm not sure what to say about this. I'm concerned. I'm concerned that you're crafting a bubble around yourself that doesn't know anything about gaming. Yeah . Yep. Uh yeah. So okay. Um I and I guess part of this too is uh I think it came out of this same memo . No, I'm sorry , she said this. Actually, I'm sorry. Since then she has tweeted about this a little bit, but she's also said that um they're getting rid of the gaming co-pilot that Microsoft announced for the console uh but i don't think ever released or if they did they're retiring it uh and then the the similar the gaming co-pilot that is uh on mobile for some reason is is being retired and okay. And then the thing we have on PC, this is kind of it's it's a little strange, but there's a there's an AI assistant built into the game bar experience, right? Or the game, yeah, the game bar experience. Um, and that's still gonna be there. This is the thing where you can bring up kind of like a mini web browser and you know, because you're stuck in a game and uh it's very common for people you don't wanna switch to a different uh app or whatever. I guess that's still gonna stick around. So um I, think this is another example of that thing where it's like you're in the middle of something, you're playing a game in this case, and this little freaking clippy thing pops up, and it's like yanks you out of your experience. Yep. It looks like you're having trouble getting by the goblin there, big guy. You want some help with that? And you're like, who are you and what are you doing on my screen? I I even within games where this is part of the UI, there are UIs that pop up that I find confound ing. Like in Call of Duty, uh you know, typically you're you be, you know, X uh or B the red button out of something, whatever it might be. So you go up and you look at the the whatever the scoreboard is or something. And then you go back. But there are there are a couple of UIs that pop up that that does not work with, and you have to hit a different button. And it's like, guys, get off of my screen. And and that's part of the game. Like I don't want that. I don't think many people want that from outside the game. So that's a little don't interrupt me while I'm playing. Like don't interrupt me when I'm doing anything. I Yeah. Don't interrupt me. Yeah. Respect my time or my whatever, my ability to concentrate and mispronounce Firefox, one of the simplest words on the planet. Anyway. Um so uh this is tied I don't know why these these are separated actually, but dippy dippy doo. Yeah. So Forza Horizon Six is coming out this month. It's gonna be one of the games they've released to Xbox Game Pass, along with several others. And uh yeah, a couple of things in here. Well, May nineteenth is um for Horizon Sex. So Game Pass, Ultimate, and PC Game Pass are in fact gonna get that. That must be day one, right? Um Doom the Dark Ages, uh, which is from last year, I think. Uh May 14th, coming to Game Pass premi um. Um, call the Elder Gods. Some good stuff in here. This is this is a pretty good Final Fantasy V. Yeah, some good stuff. So, you know, across whatever the platforms are. So this guy you're gonna be hearing a lot about this for uh Forza Horizon game. This just a PR. It's a great series of games. Yeah. Yeah, it's good . Um this must have happened right after the show last week too, but they released the April update for Xbox. And this time it is there's something for everybody, like literally. So on the console you get that uh up to 10 groups feature we've been talking about, the ability to turn off quick resume on a game by game basis, super important . That stuff's happening there. The Xbox app on Windows 11 is going to let you manually add any game or app to your Xbox library and then customize the name, how it looks, the icon, et cetera, et cetera. You can pin games, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Bunch of stuff there. Um there are wish list alerts on mobile. There are some really cool updates coming to Xbox Alley Gaming Handheld, although since I wrote this, I'm hearing that some of these aren't so great. But uh including things like automatic uh resolution, you know, when you dock, et cetera, um the um game uh gamepad cursor, which is actually in the Xbox app on Windows 11 as well. Support for Bluetooth LE audio and enhanced vibration, you know, lots of stuff there. So and then some changes, or not some changes. There's a promotion now in the Microsoft Rewards uh program with this a total prize drop for a chance to win a million dollars, like Dr. Evil, a Mercedes-Benz , I swear to God, Xbox gift cards, or something, whatever. You're not going to win any of that. But anyway , it's all happening. Um Activision has uh tweeted, announced, I guess, that the next Call of Duty is not coming to PlayStation 4, which is the previous gen console or Xbox One. So Okay, yeah, also previous gen console. So XS and and PS5 only. That's right. NPC. Yep. Yep. And okay. I mean draw a line somewhere. Yeah, several years. You know, it's been a while, right? PlayStation 5 is getting close to 100 million users, which is amazing. Uh Xbox. The customer base is big enough now and it'll save them coding costs and possibly make the game look better too. Exactly. And people tend to upgrade within the platform. So if you were on PS4, chances are you've moved to PS4. Yeah. That one's understandable. This one is not quite understandable . What's that? Sorry. Okay. What's not understandable? Uh Microsoft announced that Age of Empires 2 definitive edition is gonna be released on the Mac. Yay . They're doing it for me, Paul. They're doing it for me. And they said four. Oh what okay. Current version of Age of Empires is four. Why are they doing two to the oh I see because oh they it's the definitive edition. Yeah they rematched the other one. So this is over the past year or so. Like this probably I don't know oh that's interesting. Maybe that's how they're doing it actually then, right? It's probably just the iPad app, essentially. So okay. I mean I it says but it does say Mac OS specifically. Yep. Yep. It requires an M1 chip or newer . Not an M0 . Um well, you know, it's Apple Silicon Map, whatever. Uh yeah, I don't I don't know, whatever. As uh Laurent who wrote this article points out, uh Mac gamers account for two percent of the user base on Steam. So I don't know. Oh Oh well . Whatever. I know. Presumably Claude did all the work. There's weird stuff with Mac gaming. Like I've I've been trying, you know, there are there are a handful of AAA games and they're okay. But on I have a MacBook Air M3 , so it's not completely up to date, but it's also not completely ancient. And should we a game like control , um, which is probably like Ultimate Edition, whatever, uh runs horribly on this laptop, but they just made it available on the iPad. So I had bought it because it was like six bucks or something. And I'm like, okay, fine. I'll just try it. And I was kind of surprised. I it doesn't run well. Like the Resident Evil games I have, those run great. Um, but then I put it on the iPad and I didn't have to pay extra. It's like a what have you called it, like a universal purchase or something. And uh it runs awesome on the iPad. It's like the iPad the iPad is not as powerful as the , probably. I I although I guess it's an M three too. But come down to the dev work, how they code it. Anyway. or to grant Apple's emergency stay of its order in Epic v. Apple, which is the U.S. antitrust case, where Apple won most of this case and then belligerently just didn't comply with the order. Two executives were found to have lied under oath. Um posed all these restrictions, new restrictions and new whatever. And the thing that's amazing about this is there's been an appeals process, of course, that's going on, and they've lost it every step of the way. Um the Supreme Court They've already been to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court threw it back down the nice district. Yep, they said no before. They said no to Google, same thing. Yep. And um yeah actually let me relo this was fast because Apple appealed yesterday. Well, because they almost immediately said they were due to they had to legally comply otherwise, right? Right. Right. So just as you as that last ad was playing, I looked at my email and I got an email from Epic and they were like, Hey, we we have a quote about this now up on Twitter or whatever. So uh that was not available at the time. There was really little information about this. I tried to find the Supreme Court anything, like even if it was like we just declined I couldn't find anyt So uh what they're saying now is great news. The Supreme Court denied Apple's delay tactics. Now we head back to the district court to determine what Apple can charge for only the necessary costs of implementing external purchase links. In other words, what Apple was doing before was they had a 15 slash 30% fee for all app, you know, in-app purchases, et cetera. And they, because of this ruling and other rulings elsewhere, they imposed the this new system where, yeah, it would go down to like 27%, but then you would have to pick up the fee structure from whatever third-party payment thing you were using. And it, you know, the point of it was to make it more expensive to go a third party party route. And what Epic w ants, and not just for them, but for everybody, is for this to be lowered because it should Apple, you know, Apple should be paid if they're incurring a cost, of course. Yes. Um, but they're just re you know, they're just sucking in money for doing nothing. And so I don't it's gonna be interesting to see how we can um figure out like what what does this actually cost Apple? I'm I've seen a lot of commentary on this including from the uh some information uh came out in one of these court probably this court case business and he was like oh we lose something? Okay, okay, deal. Um where he said, oh no, this thing is hugely profitable. We don't even this is they we we don't you don't even need these revenues. Like they there's nothing about this business that requires this kind of payment. Like it's ridiculous. Um I mentioned this not only because it makes me smile, but because, you know, Microsoft last week, I think it was or two weeks ago was talking about how like we're still still want to do this mobile Xbox GameStar thing. And this happening is what's going to make that possible, right? Because they can't Apple denied them this, right? Uh they they wanted uh well not this story. I'm sorry, m Apple denied them the ability to do uh Xbox Game Pass Cloud Gaming, which is the game streaming service, because they wanted a per game payment for someone streaming a game that they get through the subscription. And it's like, what you don't charge that to Netflix for streaming movies. What are you talking about? Like so this is it's kind of a big deal, uh, if you want to see the Xbox stuff. Uh fun little footnote in this the judge who spanked Apple. Yeah. I know what you're gonna say. She was really angry at them and said basically said you lied to me. Oh, I thought I by the way, I think this isn't the same woman who's overseeing the uh Elon Musk. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. Yep. She is now equ ally pissed off. Yep. In the Altman versus Musk case. She's like I don't want anything to do with big tech after this. Like no, no. She's great. You know what? She said, look, I'm not gonna let you guys talk about AI doomerism in this trial. That's not on that's not on the table. That's not the topic. Yeah. Yeah. She uh look, she has tight control of her control room and a control room, her courtroom. And I think that uh on her. She's not taking any guff from big tech. Right. No, I mean like these people are yeah, they're behaving like babies. Treat them like babies. Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful. And one of the things we learned in in Apple versus Epic and and uh uh Google versus Epic is that these trials are always bad for the companies involved because of uh you know these court uh discovery uh and testimony always ends up you know, being embarrassing the emails and so forth. And the same thing's happening in Altman versus Musk. It's it's embarrassing. These people want this to go to court. Sturdy laundry. Listen, if if if my experience over three plus decades cover ing Microsoft has taught me anything. It's subtle . Have some say over your future. Do not allow a judge or a jury or whatever to tell you what you have to do now because you were so belligerent about your thirty percent fees or whatever. The line I've always used is nobody wins a court case. It's like winning an uh an earthquake. It's not here's my line. Discovery's a bitch. Yeah. Just you really you really don't want them going through your old emails. You really don't. Right. Yep. Yeah. And Greg Brockman, the president of uh OpenAI, just embarrassed himself uh yesterday on stand and I mean it's just apparently this guy keeps a dream journal that he for some reason should be how come this journal that he's been keeping is is is in the court record. I don't understand. Well I can t I can actually tell you why. I mean like Lily why it's there, but I I still want to understand the decision behind letting this happen. OpenAI's lawyers introduced it as evidence. Yeah. Dear diary, today I'm going to steal money from E Lord. I hope that's okay. What do I have to do to get to a billion dollar valuation for me? What what what? And then Brockman, the the the uh open AI um the uh I'm sorry, Musk's attorney is saying, Well you know what this suit's about? And he says, No, I have no idea. And he said, Well, let me read you the suit. I still have no idea. And he's just making an idiot of himself. It's really um So I think uh it's an earthquake. Every once in a while in companies you'll find a a person that just keeps really detailed notes about things, right? And so I think part of it is to show timelines and whatever. But the problem is you don't get to pick and choose. You you don't put it in the right. Writing stuff about his relationship with his wife and like what it's like, dude, what are you doing? Just don't put it in writing. Yep. It's really stupid. Or you know, if you do get one of those diaries that has a little lock on it so that the lawyer can a TSA approved like a locker nineteen seventies. Yes. And if you are gonna write it down, don't litigate with it. Well, I I I'm still puzzled. I have to really look into this why his diary, how that I' thinks it because it they intro so open AI introduced it into evidence that was on them . That's their mistake. Okay. Yep. Well there you go. But I think it's because there is other things in there. Like you you know there's going to be you know you're going to be embarrassed by this. You know it. But yeah, but you can have my diary. Actually you don't care, right? This is a curse fight, right? Open AI already does have my diary. The agent is reading it every day coming from. So here's the thing look we we already know these people are all terrible every one of them they're off yeah they're they're all off they are borderline antichrist yeah but now we just have the details I didn't we didn't embarrassing we already knew you were horrible in robotic and I also have the documentation that you're terrible. Oh yeah. No, you have no idea how terrible I am. Look at my diary. Like diary. Why? Today I stole another billion from the people. So good to be rich. Yep. All right. Let's uh pause. The pause that refreshes, because you know what's next? The back of the book? And we got some whiskey. Actually, you did I think a piece about a Hawaiian whiskey distillery. I did. And we are gonna go visit that this week. That's fantastic. Because of you. They make it out of honey, right? Yeah. So we're gonna do that coffee. I'm trying to decide which order is the best. expect until you go and see it. Like it's like s it's out there like rotting away like the Oh the refinery. Yeah . They're all gone. Uh there's still some sugar cane. You can buy it on roadside stands, but no, yeah. That business is is is long. You got any teeth left? This will take care of it. Somebody really just what I should shoe sugar. Yeah. Good idea. Uh we'll be back with more exciting, gripping, thrilling information on Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by, I mean, quite literally brought to you by Cashfly. Cashfly has kept our content moving for years. Every stream, every download, every on demand episode. Cash fly, quietly, without any fuss, does the heavy lifting behind the scenes. You know, we've been using them for almost twenty years. They've been around for more than twenty years. And by the way, they don't rest on their laurels. They're anything but static. Here are a few things to know if you're evaluating CDN options for your infrastructure. We actually did this, and that's why we chose Cash Fly. It was a no-brainer. Games download 158% faster than on competing providers. You get subsecond video start times on any device at scale, really important for us. Rock solid software delivery, even on those crazy chaotic launch days , live streaming to millions of concurrent users without breaking a sweat, under one second latency. It's amazing. Cashfly's always improving. They just added some new features, advanced analytics for deep CDN visibility , either in the portal or your observability stack, edge control for programmatic request and response handling at the edge, and Terraform integration to manage CDN resources as code. I just, they're so impressive. With more than 75 points of presence across six continents, over 5,000 customers, including us, and a 100% uptime SLA. 100% plus the best 24-7 engineer to engineer support. And very important for us at the time, you enjoy flexible billing, no strong armed contracts. They will work with you to make it work. Cashfly is the CDN built for your busin ess? Look how you can get your first month free at Cashfly.comslash twitch. Say it with me. I've been saying this for 20 years now. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E -F-L-Y .com slash twit. Thank you, Cashfly. Now back to the show. Uh, this would be the time that we go to Mr. Paul Thorott for his tip of the week. It's the back of the book we all look forward to. Paul You know, this is an amazing coincidence. I I got an email recently from Netflix that told me that my subscription price was changing, which was the word they used. Yeah. It's not it's not going down. I just you know, in case that was a mystery. It's not going down . Um so now I'm paying this company twenty seven bucks a month for Netflix, right? So here's the thing . Um, if I paid them what I actually technically should be paying them, meaning I have kids who are my kids, but they live in different households now. They're different outside of the house. They would charge me 10 bucks a month for each. So I I could be paying them forty-seven dollars a month if I wanted to. Yeah. And I am not doing that. So it's like a cable company subscription. Yeah. Yep. So Leo went into the ad there and I went over and looked at my email and I swear to God , I got an email from Google Workspace Space that says the same thing. Price changes for your upcoming Google Workspace renewal. Yeah. Price change. I bet it's not going down. Guess what? It's not going down. And so look, the notion that we all have too many subscription services, uh, we're paying too much. We most of us don't know. Um, you know, the built into this business model, literally, is the notion that people will pay for a service they never use. Those are the best customers. I am an excellent customer, because I do this for a lot of th ings. Now, some of the stuff that I pay for every month is ostensibly work-related, but and I've been taking these steps to kind of uh wean myself off of this stuff. Like, you know, with the NAS, I can use Synology drive instead of OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever it is. But when you when I start listing out the sheer number of things that I pay for, I think to myself, A, this number is too big, uh, it's too much money, and there's too many of these things. And B, isn't there some happy medium balance, whatever you want to call this somewhere? So I it in a the also just a weird coincidence, I was literally start I had written the beginning of this thing. And I got an email, uh PR email from doesn't matter from whom, but from a book publisher. And I get these things sometimes. And I usually I don't even know why I get some of them, but this one was about a book that's coming out um late this year that's about um convenience and how we the p the the price of convenience is actually much higher than we understand. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, send me the book. I wanna I'm gonna read this. I'm gonna review this thing. This is really interesting to me. Now, I've not really looked at the book yet, but that's what this sort of is. And I mentioned this to my wife, and she said, You know, they have a term for this now. And I'm like, I'm not gonna like it. Don't tell me the term. And she goes, It's called can incvenonience maxing. Nice. And I'm like, I will punch anyone in the face who says those that term to me. That is with two X's, by the way. You're gonna have two X's when you do it. No, no, I'm not doing this. I this this is up there with my disdain for terms like daily carry or like it's like what were we stupid? Like we we have to have like so obviously there are influencers out there you you can um I there's like looks maxing and I guess con inconvenience maxing. And this is not about inconvenience for inconvenience sake. It's not about just being inconvenient. But I do think, you know, th I there should be like a little bit of a bar for certain things and that maybe some inconvenience is an okay alternative to the hyper convenience of just paying so much money for all these subscription services. So the I didn't intend this, but I think this is going to turn into like a series of things. But like one of the I'll just throw out one example and I I because I use this in the article, but I'm currently paying for three music subscription services because I'm an idiot. And uh and part of it is because two of them are tied into other subscriptions where you just kind of get it as part of it or whatever. But um one of them is because my wife and my one of my kids still use Spotify. So there's that. But if you add this, I don't know, I you know I'm not gonna add it up. It doesn't matter. It's a lot of money. So it's like is is there some ver so I'll be out in the world. Like I do I'm even though I'm almost sixty years old, like I'll go out in the world. I could be in an Uber, a bar, restaurant, whatever it is. I hear music. I open my phone, I shazam it, or it if I'm on a pixel, I use the Google uh the yeah, the Google built in thing. And I find out what the song is.. I'm like, cool And it creates this list of those things. And then, you know, every couple of months or whatever, I go through that list and I listen to it for a little while. I'm like, yep. And I'll put it into my playlist, right? Which is super easy because I'm paying every month to I have access to all of the world's information, you know? If I add it up, like even just the cost of one of these subscriptions , and and instead of instantly just getting it for free as part of the thing I'm paying for. I went to some service and paid for the song. Would I pay more or less doing that? Because that's how I discover music. And I would pay less. It would be a little less convenient. I would wouldn't happen instantaneously , but I think I'm gonna go there. I think I'm doing this. Like I think my goal is gonna be to call this stuff. So this is gonna be something that comes up again. And I I'm gonna look at this across all kinds of things. And then of course my wife, because you know, God help me, smarter than me, but also not in my industry and does not care about tech. Um, when I say this to her, the first thing that comes out of her mouth is like, well, you know, it's not just digital, right? And I'm like, what does that mean? And she goes, Well, everyone pays for gym memberships and never use two. And I'm like please don't, please, please, dear God. This has to this has to stop somewhere. You know, even in Mexico, which is not a rich country by some measures, right? Or at least the people here don't make a lot of money, there it's astonishing how many food delivery services there are here, including some we do not have in the United States, right? And people are delivering like people are on a bike or a motorbike or a moped or whatever, driving to a restaurant, paying with some kind of a barcode thing, putting it in the back in some kind of you know, heated bag thing, driving it across the city, delivering it to some person that makes twenty eight pesos a day or something. And somehow that's makes sense to these people, you know? Right. And I we have I think convenience is a disease. I mean, and this is something it really, I mean, you know, so I I I invented this um uh definition of hipster. A hipster, in my definition, is someone who is nostalgic about something they never experienced, right? This is someone my kid's age who's like, I want an iPod or I want a record player, I want a cassette player, I want a CD player. And they they're doing stuff like I used to do. And there's a reason we move past all that stuff, right? But there's also this kind of misplaced nostalgia where um we have uh ev if you did experience something you remember the good things but you kind of forget the downside, right? And so when you go from like physical media to digital and you're buying digital and you own this thing, you have a file, you can move it around devices, it's not super convenient. I actually do feel that that level of inconvenience, it's still better than physical media in many ways. And I'm and I I know know vinyl is warm whatever but the the subscription service streaming thing is like it's too far like so yeah I'm I'm doing I'm doing the thing I complain about, which is I do think this thing that we had before is better than the thing we have now. And mostly it's about my soul and my pocketbook or whatever you want to call it. But anyway, I'm gonna I mean the the problem is canceling a gym membership is a nightmare. Yeah canceling Netflix is a breeze. And you know what's even easier than canceling Netflix? Signing up again when you 're Yeah, so right. So this is a bit uh very I I came to this independently, but I I see that many, many people have as well, which is like one strategy for streaming video. And by the way, thank God, I don't have a need for like a live TV service. Talk about a hundred dollar a month outlay unless you can throw an antenna on your roof or whatever. Um I would just go like this month we're gonna use Netflix, you know, and then we're gonna quit and maybe this month we're gonna use who yeah just cue them up you know use them up put them down this is something that I feel very strongly is an excellent idea I've never done it well we we sign up for live sports when curling is on. That's when we have live sports in the house. Right. As soon as the curling season is over, we shut that account down. It is really live. Yeah. Okay. A snail is alive. Um no, like I uh we we run into this problem on New Year's Eve because we have like, you know, 10 to 20 people over depending, and we want to watch the ball drop on you know TV. And I do not have live TV. So no usually my brother in law will bring over like his fire TV stick or something. Um and we just use it for that night or something. But or maybe you know the kids will come home over the holidays and Mark's like, I want to watch basketball on, you know, NBA on Christmas Day. I'm like, well, enjoy driving over to your cousin's house because uh we don't have that here. Sorry, you know, or whatever. And uh so it's not convenient. But you know what? I'm also not paying YouTube Music 100 bucks a month for a service I never use. So it's okay. Anywho, anyway, I'm gonna like I said, I this could this could turn into something really ugly and big. I'm kind of nervous about it. But there's there's um prof it, uh who's Scott Galloway's uh you know, unsubscribe thing, which she did I think back in February, which is more of a protest. But it was also just a reminder. You have way too many subscriptions, you just pay attention to this. Like sometimes people uh find out they don't have a net script Netflix subscription. They have three of them. I had a so what this is a little this is borderline unethical maybe but like one of the things you can do is subscribe to a publication like the New York Times or Bloomberg or whatever, and with a new email address, because you get some entry price and it's not something they offer to existing subscribers. You can save money that way, right? So a a year ago, literally a year ago, I dropped my Bloom Bro omberg subscription and I bought one under a new uh address and save money, right? So I have a I had an email reminder, cancel Bloomberg and do this again. And I I thought I I'm like, look, I'm smart. I'm not gonna do this the wrong date. I probably gave built a week to 10 days of wigger room into this thing. So I let the day go by. And the next day, Stephanie's like, hey, you got a bill from Bloomberg. I thought you were getting rid of this thing. And I'm like, So I was thinking I must have paid too much because it renewed, right? So I looked it up and actually the price I paid for for a year you pay for a year was less than what I paid last year and it's less than the nor and I was like, Yeah, I'm just gonna keep it uh you know, 'cause I th I'm I'm gonna get this wrong off the top of my head, but I wanna say it was a hundred And I was like, Yeah, no, I think last year I paid $140, so I guess I did okay. I don't know why, but um so I screwed that one up. But you talk about trying to make a useful a agent. Have subscription management agent, man. That's by the way . Nice. That's a that's a really good idea. Yeah. Um anyway. And the and the double whammy of monitoring the output of your or the the the feeds of your house to say these are the services are used, this is how much you're used, these are the ones that are used. I'll unsubscribe to these. You know, off we go. Yep. I gotta find yeah, no, that's an that's an excellent idea. I know it might work on that. I'm gonna I mean uh you have to it has to have access to what you're subscribed to, right? So one one easy way would be like here,'s my checkbook. You know. And I guess I want to be careful with that. But still no, but that's still an excellent idea. That's an excellent. Sorry. What's a checkbook? I don't know why I keep using these terms. Um I think I've established that I'm old. Uh there actually are uh I know one of our sponsors uh does something like that. There are a number of apps tracking your subscriptions 'cause they have access to your checkbooks so they'll see yep. Oh you keep paying this every month. Do you want to keep doing it? And there are even some that will cancel it for you. So right. But you're right. This would be a better, I think an AI agent, this would be a I like this. I like that. I'm gonna I'm gonna see if I I'm probably gonna have difficulty with this, but I'm gonna I'm gonna look into that. That's a good idea. You can ask it LLM about building it. My current uh recommendation, Paul, if you're curious, is um there's something from news research we've interviewed their uh founder, Jeffrey Cannell, uh called Hermes. It's a really good agent model. You can use Anthropic with it, but you'd have to use API keys. But ChatGPT lets you use a subscription with it. And ChatGPT 5.5 with Hermes can do almost anything. Lisa was saying. So Hermes, like this is like Herbie's Hermes like the Mercury, like the winged messenger. No, no, I mean but I mean but it's like a fine essentially a fine. It's like Claude Code. It's a it's a harness. Okay. So it runs in the terminal. But you then set it up and it will run actions in the background. It's kind of like open claw. And so for I'll give you an example. Lisa said, you know, I keep seeing this rumor uh that uh oh what was it? Some celebrities dating some other celebrity. It Tom Cruise is dating I can't remember who it was. And she said, but I don't know if that's true. I said, Well, I and so I had Hermes every six hours it was checking for are they checking it are they are they dating it are they dating it i finally turned it off because they weren't but this is that this is that message protocol joke from last week it's like is anyone there yeah is anybody there hello is anybody there but you can easily uh the problem is you're right, you'd have to give it access to your bank account and you might not want to do that. But the road to hell will now be paved by the uh services I make available to some AI agent, you know. Exactly. then running up to the mm I'm actually uh in the process of setting up uh access to my cameras, my unit ubiquity cameras. It turns out it can do that. And it can see the video and it can process the video. And it can say it could tell me stuff like you just got a package or there's some guy lurking around the backyard or so I have a blink camera on my balcony. It points west. Right. Right. So when the sun sets, you see the sunset. Right. So uh it has motion detection, it has a microphone, it does all this stuff and and yeah, let's just say not a lot happens out there. Yeah, it's spore and goes down, it's pretty . But every once in a while I get like a like an alert, like, hey, start a vehicle. Like, really ? I gotta I gotta see what that looks like. And or it'll be like motion detected. Like, nice. And so sometimes it'll be like a bumblebee flying around in front of the camera. Some twice it's been like a bird. You can see it's like feathers and it's like scratching itself or something. Right. But the um the one that was a vehicle was my hand because I slightly I changed the direction just a little like up by a hair, but I guess my and it's like that it's not a truck. It's my hand. Um also we're six stories up. It's probably not there's no vehicles up there. Unlikely. There better not be. Something's gone horribly wrong. Like it's a VTOL. Yeah. Um sorry. Uh that was just the pick. You got a tip. I know I'm sorry. These I'll make these quicker. So I 'm two picks. Um I look you guys do this, I bet that doesn't do whatever feed you use, you see news headlines and things. My case, every morning I'm looking at tech news and then you know figure out what's going on in the world. And um I, you know, sometimes I see the side lines where I'm like, oh, I don't like it, I don't like it, I don't like it. And I'm like, ignore it, ignore it, don't look at this. And then it appeared the next day again and I was like I'm gonna just I'm gonna look at this and it was PC Mag probably and it was uh a guy I actually respect. He's been around for a long time, but he he was like, You cannot trust the antivirus built into Windows. You get a butt you have to have third party antivirus. And I was like, yeah, no, you don't. So I was like, um, so I read this thing and uh it God helped me, I read the whole thing. And I'm like, I I there was not a single salient point to in this entire and I'm like, oh, don't I'm like, I gotta write about this. I gotta write about it. God damn it. I hate me. I don't want to go after a person, then that's not what my point. I wanted to be super clear. I do respect this person. And I'm but I'm like, no, you do not need this. And goddamn, I went through this line by line and I quoted them everywhere. And it was like, nope, nope, nope, no, no, no. Guys a security expert. I listen, you I whatever. I I will say I was vaguely excited to see the next day. I think it was Jared Newman or one of these guys. I get this new email newsletter and he wrote an article about this exact thing and he was like, no, absolutely not. And I was like, thank you. Like just thank you. Um so there's that. You don't need anything else. The thing you have built in is fine. G please, dear God, do not pay for one of these things. And all the extra nonsense that they give you, most of which you don't need, either because it's just in there already or you're getting it through your password manager. Like, you know, I have advice about security involving you should have a third-party password password manager which does pass keys. You should have a third party authenticator app for two of a uh that's separate from that thing, by the way. And I have whatever set of advice I have, but you know, you're running using a computer. No, you're fine. Uh Enterprise, however. Yeah, well there's some to some degree. We kind of security monitoring Yeah, maybe you wouldn't call it an antivirus. No, I'm the um look I'm very definitely look for malware on it. Speaking when I review laptops, you know, whether it's being a markdown uh commercial class PC that with you know, HPS like HP Wolf, which I'm sure it's fantastic and is a you know managed service, whatever. I mean, I I get rid of that immediately. And you know, McAfee, which is basically a virus, which by the way, has two installers and they cannot be uninstalled from the same place in Windows, dear God, this is malware. Stop. Um I removed that stuff immediately. Like this ridiculous. Um you look if you're I I almost want to say like uh just using Windows as configured with some common sense. You don't even need common sense. Just don't touch anything. It's fine. Like you're fine. The only thing in Defender that I turn off is that stupid weekly announcement where it's like, hey, a week went by, nothing happened. Yeah, thanks. Turn off that thing, which by the way, it triggers a UAC control, which is unbelievable, but it's just an informational notification. I don't need that. Yeah. I know what it is. And I do not want to be a administrator to find out nothing happened. Exactly. It's unbelievable. So there's that. And and just uh the other one real quick is there is there was an so the guys that made Adam, which is the developer um one of the the developer editors, right? I think it was that yeah, Adam , decided they were gonna start from scratch and make a completely new software coding editor written entirely in Rust. And they just released one point oh so it's cross platform. This thing is faster than it's unbelievably fast. Like um, I don't ever I don't have a problem with Visual Studio Code. I just don't. No. But this thing is notably fast. Like it's awesome. Well, and uh doesn't have all the plugins either, I imagine. No, it doesn't, but it does have plugins and it supports uh where's the number, it's got some number of whatever, but it's free for personal use. Um it's worth looking at it's called Zed, and it is uh what's the website? Is uh it's a Z.dev . It's look if you use this kind of product with Visual Studio Code, whatever it is, um you should look at this. I think you could be like if you especially if you're in this thing all day long, if if this thing had like a nice, it does edit markdown, like it's fine with markdown, but if it was like a good markdown editor, I could see using this thing. It's awesome. Like it's super, super fast. Um yeah, worth knowing about. All right . You saw that uh John Gruber, the creator of Markdown , uh mentioned you, wrote a little piece saying, Oh, I see Paul Thorat, whose career has paralleled mine in many ways, yes, is about to write a markdown book or is consider ing it. Yeah. I think I'm gonna talk to him. Uh he created it. I mean Markdown has this life of its own at this point, and there are many flavors of Markdown as you well know. No, but I his idea at first. The thing he wanted to say, yeah. I mean his it's interesting if you go back to his original um announcement post. Markdown was two different things. It's the the syntax of the you know, the styling in the plain text document. But it's also this parser, which in his case he wrote in uh Pearl, I think, at the time. Yeah. Um, to take the markdown document he was creating and transferred into HTML so we could publish it to the web, which is yeah, excellent, right? But today we have these markdown editors, some of which work like word processors. We actually just use like control B and it does the B you know the bold formatting, whatever. And then you could use something like I IA writer that is kind of a mix and you know of actual code and or you can use those shortcuts, whatever. It's it's a little uh different, but it it in the same way that it met the need he had, which was probably what, 10, 15 years ago, a long time ago, um, it absolutely meets my needs for writing. And I yeah I look 20 years ago I, I said this, like Microsoft Word is amazing. It's a battleship when I need a sailboat, you know. And I'm a professional writer. I mean, I'm only using some tiny percentage of what's in there. I don't need it. I know what it is and I do not want it. And uh, you know, to me markdown is the is perfect. It's perfect. Human and machine readable. Perfect. Yeah, I mean I um I laugh. I mock all of these things said and and the markdown because I use Emacs, which in invented I mean org mode predates markdown by several years. And and uh I think Emacs is probably an excellent markdown editor if you want it to be like a it absolutely is and it will convert it to HTML. Uh and it's a it's not written in Rust, it's written in Lisp. But uh the problem is you know for me Emacs on Windows is a big heavy thing. Oh, I wouldn't use it on Windows. No, I it's not it's it doesn't make as much sense on Windows for whatever reason. It's too bad. Yeah. Uh and by the way, Aaron Schwartz also worked with uh with John Gruber on uh Markdown. Yeah. Should get credit. Yeah, should get a lot of credit. Mr. Richard Campbell's next Runaz Radio. This week's episode is the one that I showed Excellent at uh Zero Trust World where I talked to Spencer Alesi about securing uh active directory, an ongoing theme. Uh and uh Spencer's a particular approach and he is the tooling side of the equation. So uh actually this is borrowing from Troy Hunt's You Should Hack Yourself kind of mindset that is ZD, you know the, active directory is not uh particularly exploitable from the outside of the network, but it is a lateral vector . So when uh a phishing attack is successful, it's very common for the black hats, once inside the network, to immediately try to get to an active directory server. Because your goal is always to get off the workstation you exploited. You know, you're trying to get into the the per in the in your ideal case, you'll get into one of the servers that's always on, that's not you know managed the same way, that kind of thing. And Active Directory has some challenges. Now it can be made secure, but most people that are operating A D are kind of doing it in the default mode with And so we talked through a bunch of the various enhanced security tools that you can use and tests you can do inside your network as if you were the black hat to show you have these lateral vectors you're you're vulnerable to and now it's well worth locking things down. He has his own uh active directory security resource kit if you want to get further into it. But there's lots to learn there. And just a reminder that uh you know, we do we do defense in depth. We not just talking about don't get through the perimeter. Don't count on people not being fished. Count on the fact that after they get fished, because it does happen, nothing happens from there. But they can't get off that machine that, you're cleanup of that computer is sufficient. Uh that they they got nowhere after that. That's really your goal. All right. I think if uh my uh calculations are correct, it would be time to talk about brown liquor. Yeah, and then that that 12th Hawaii Distiller's Reserve, which was the mead uh uh whiskey, yeah, it's on the on the big island. And uh that was about a year ago. That was show nine twenty eight. And it's obvious because it was came to me for the MVP summit, John White brought it to me. So it makes sense that it was the good? I can't remember. Yeah, well it was great. It's uh it was a really cool, you know, it was distinctly different, right? To have distilled honey rather than to be distilled um uh grain. Lisa really wants to visit that and I really want to visit one of the Kona coffee plantations. So I'm just trying to decide should I do coffee then whiskey or whiskey then coffee? I don't know. Whiskey then coffee. I think it's okay. Coffee's both at the same time. It's a speedball. So last week while I was at home we talked about Rifle Rye, which comes out of Alberta Stiller, so one of the biggest manufacturers of whiskey in the entire planet. Although this was a specialty edition they did and we got into the whole prohibition storeboard. So being in Ontario, I thought I'm gonna go find an Ontario craft whiske y. And uh I lucked into this stock and barrel. And stock and barrel was created by is was the first micro distillery in all of Ontario, actually. And Ontario has not been easy on the micro distilleries. Not the they haven't done the same kind of excise tax breaks and so forth that uh that places like British Columbia and elsewhere in the in Canada and the US have done. So this is the two berries invented this. This is Barry Stein and Barry Bernste in. Barry Steen had a background in logistics, uh, Barry Bernstein in software. So he had uh he'd made some money in the software industry and so back in they were both fans of whiskey and back in 2005 they decided to found a company uh to start figuring out how they could make whiskey. Now 2005 is way back there. You know, this is again very much before the craft uh whiskey movement had taken off. So they were they were a bit ahead of the curve. They they set up another entity they in two thousand seven they called premium bottlers, and that was because they wanted they they realized how long it was going to take to get into production. They were getting through the licensing process. They wanted to build out this distillery, which take a few years. And so but being a bottler is much simpler where you buy your whiskey from elsewhere, make your own blends, make your own label and bottling, and then sell it. And so that's what they did with premium bottlers, was they started to do their own branded whiskey, which they also called Stalk and Barrel. The actual distillery got built in 2009 and into operation. It was called the Stillwater Distillery. And of course, again, challenges of building whiskey is it's easy to do the distillation and so forth, but then you got to lay up those barrels and store them for a while to let them age. So in addition to starting to lay up whiskey, they also start to produce a vodka. So they get some income going. Plus they have these blends they're doing through premium bottlers. And it's not until twenty thirteen, so a good you know eight years after they first started going, that they made their first single malt. And they actually did a two-row barley single malt uh that they sold through the here in Ontario. Liquor distribution is fairly strictly controlled. So the LCBO or the Lickel Controlard of Bo Ontario is in charge of all alcohol, so the government controls alcohol distribution in in in this province. And they're quite powerful. Um they're also the reason that there's exactly no bourbon in Ontario at this particular moment . Uh it's all in storage. And then when I go down to the local bar here and want to get an old fashioned, it's going to be made with Canadian whiskey. It's after they're in operation that Ontario finally gets a small distillery program in 2017. So the county came to it late. And it's not excise tax breaks, it's actually uh cash grants for small producers. So as a small producer, you report into the service run by AgriCorp , and they look at how you're doing and the size of things, and they'll actually grant you some costs, uh, cash to ease things off. So stock and barrels claim to fame was always to be totally low. You know, it'd start from the stock all the way to the barrel is to buy barley, rye and corn from local Ontario farmers. Uh of course barley is what goes into their single malt. They did all of their own maltings. Of course no peat. That's not a thing around here. Typical fermentation, 48 to 72 hours depending on the types, using column and pot stills. Uh although apparently their single malt was only distilled in the pot still. So they did double uh pot still uh aging there. And as they note specifically, they age in ex bourbon cast both from Tennessee and Kentucky. And Tennessee, of course, would mean jack ets. Their warehousing technique is uh a mod are a hybridized rack house, so uh on the horizontal stack three to five high, aging three to five years, and traditionally in their production they were doing both cast strengths and a forty six percent, which is your typical high uh cut . And that is not this whiskey. This is a different whiskey entirely. So we've got to talk about the changes that are happening. Because this is a 40%. This is the only one that's on the shelves, the LCBO now. So I had to start digging into their background more because and I and in many ways they were pretty hush-hush. Dot a lot of stuff on the website. I ended up spending a lot of time on archive.org and looking at the old versions of their sites. And so up until August 2021, they actually had four different editions from the on the still water distillery site. They had their red and blue labels. These were the blends they made through premium bottlers, and we don't know anything about what they were combining, but that was their original products. And then they had both a single malt and a hundred percent rye. Great . But in the fall of 21, shortly after that, this website goes to be back soon, and it'll be that way for like 18 months . So it appears, and now I've found additional evidence of this, that the berries decide they're gonna sell the company. Now it's the pandemic times, right? So it's challenging time to be operational. They also stand up a new website called PureTrack, which is a software site. And remember that Barry Bernstein is actually a got a background in software and apparently had written all of the software to operate the entire operation of both the distillery and the bottling facilities. And so now he was offering a complete distillery management solution . In this whole time, they also own the domain called stockandbarrel.com, which is the link I provided in the notes. And that up until 2 2 always pointed back to the Stillwater distillery. So there was no stock and barrel separately. But in May of 22, it suddenly points to this whiskey and only this whiskey, this particular version of stock and barrel. And weirder yet, if you dug in a bit , it actually says that the parent company of stock and barrel is Iceberg Vodka Corporation out of Newfoundland . What? So, and then in December of twenty two, so this this the site for this whiskey goes up in May of 22. And in December 22, the still water site comes back up with a different list of whiskey. All the blends are gone. Now they just have the single bolt and the 100% rye both in regular strengths and cast strengths . And then this year the site changed again. And now it's really changed because now there's a whole conversation on that site about these two fellows named Kelly and Lucas Wood. And Kelly and Lucas Wood had to talk about how the berries have retired and we've taken over and they're selling their own whiskey, they're call it three buck and eight buck. They've got a whole other branding going on there. But if you dig into their site a bit, you find out they still have the old stock and barrels, which they'll sell only online. They're not in the LCBO. The only thing in the LCB O is this one, sold by iceberg vodka . So what the heck is going on here? I thought I had a nice little craft whiskey story. And apparently, if I had picked this whiskey in 2022 or so, that would have been fine. Right. But I picked it in 2026, where everything had changed. I went and found stock and barrel uh in the LCBO in the liquor store and I bought a bottle and uh you know I've already had a few tastes of this because it's pretty good. But it's also very inexpensive. The the original single malt the 46% and the rye, they were about 6 5 Canadian dollars, so somewhere around 45 American. This was is 35 Canadian, so like 20 bucks American. That is very, very cheap . Doesn't smell too threatening on the nose, but it's only a 40%, right? So like a very mild Canadian whiskey . And that's exactly how it drinks. At $35 , I mean this is a bargain, right? You kinda can't go wrong. Uh it's just a question of what's really going on. So , we have of a lot of liquors in general as these big companies come along and well yes, this this would be a very normal craft distillery story that the old guys wanted to retire out, they sold to the younger generation who are now making their own whiskey and selling off the old lot. The weird part is the iceberg bought yeah. And here's the thinking : the when you get into the LCBO, which is a big deal, right? This is the main liquor seller in Ontario, and you have to sign agreements with this, you're under contract to produce a certain quantity of whiskey, right? Again, Ontario's fairly hostile to craft distillers. Today there's more room for you to sell online and so forth. But to be in the L CBO, you have to produce minimum quantities of things. So I think uh when when these guys wanted to sell in the early 2020s and they got these two guys on board who wanted to buy it, they realized they did not want the LCBO uh requirement. It was too much baggage. It was too costly to them. And so they turned to a very large experienced producer, because vodka uh um iceberg vodka has been around since the 90s, and said, Hey, do you this has got position in the LCBO? Do you want to finish out the contract? Maybe make some money. And since premium bottlers do contract production, I suspect they just made an inexpensive version of their whiskey produced by premium bottlers, through sold through iceberg to fulfill the LCBO contract and got it away from the new owners. Not that they've talked about any of that. It's all sort of hush-hush, and probably under NDA . And this is the sad part, and what I should uh maybe I should have done if I was really going to finish the research is go hunt down a bottle of their single ball, which I may not be able to do. They may be all gone. Because this is a very inexpensive basic whiskey. It's nothing wrong with it. It's just nothing special about it either. And at 35 bucks Canadian, that's a bargain. Like, don't worry about it. You're drinking local whiskey, right? Presumably they're not lying on their bottle that this is locally made, which premium bottles could do it, that it's made from local grain. Totally reasonable. Just a low price point, probably a column distilled whiskey, that's for probably likely to fulfill an LCBO contract. And when that contract's done, maybe they'll continue production, maybe they don't. Well, there's no way to know. All of this has largely gone down in just the past couple of years. So it's probably got a ways to go. But it's just one of those wacky stories that I spent several hours on trying to untangle. And I'm a bunch of this is speculation on my part, but I think I probably got it right. Yeah . The handcrafted part bugs me. It says handcrafted on the bottle. I'm betting that's not true. But you know, there's no particular requirement for handcrafted. Like just that's So for those of us not in Canada. The LCBO is what? The L C BO is the Ontario government's liquor distribution board. You can't there aren't liquor stores in Toronto. There are liquor stores. They're just run by the government. Right. Yes, they're not independent. Like God in Pennsylvania intended. So it it's a big uh I imagine bure aucratic nightmare then to get into the L C B O It's a fairly hefty job to do that. And like I said, there's there's legal minimal recruitment requirements because there's a bunch of stores you have to be able to stock those stores. Okay. And so that's not good. That means you don't go to an L C B O and buy some small batch you can't sit get something really, really good there. Is that right? Well really rare anyway. Now since the Craft Distillers Act came in in twenty seventeen, those craft distillers that are don't have to be in the LCBO to sell, they can sell directly on their websites. So there is a way for a small distiller to do that. Okay. Um but normally you would not find these guys in the LCBO. But when these guys started, you know, when when Barry and Barry set up, that that didn't exist. They got up and running in 2009. So they broke themselves arguably to produce enough to get into the LCBO because it was the only way to sell. And now I think that contract probably was too heavy for the woods, the new owners to deal with. And so this was the workaround. It's like if you wanted to get into Walmart. You have to make enough whiskey to get in every Walmart or they're not gonna look at you. They're not gonna do it, right? Right. So and what if the only way to sell was through Walmart? Like in two thousand nine Yeah. So in some ways I wonder about yeah, the berry ha the berries got out of this because they were under these things. Now the funny thing is they're still sort of adjacent to the business because they have pure track. They sell services to Canadian distillers and on their site you can see their pictures and they're still talking about yeah we used to be in the distilling business and we can help you be be better with yours. We figured out how to get around these government. This is socialism at work, ladies and gentlemen and this is exactly why we're glad I don't think any of that is true. Where do I start? Yeah, and we're just like you, just no guns and a health plan, right? Like that's oh yeah. Yeah. This is apropos of nothing, but I just saw the word Pennsylvania written in the discard and I have to tell you this story, which you will love, which is nobody no here knows anything about Pennsylvania or anything is whatever. So everyone it's always like, so where are you? It's like we're near New York, you know. So we don't so my my wife got her gets her fingernails done every so often here, right? It costs like two cents or something. And the woman says, you know, where are you from? And she says, Pennsylvania. And she goes, so you have you must have a lot of vampires there. She's like, no . Um not so much. Oh That's amazing. There's a lot to it. Yeah. If you think about it, they're the two vanias of the world. Yeah. Sylvania's the woods. Sylvania's yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Paul Thorat, he is at Thurott.com. That's uh where you'll find all of his good stuff and of course even more good stuff if you're a premium member. In fact, one of the good things you get as a premium member is copies of all of his books. Windows Everywhere, The Field Guide to Windows 11, the new uh D and Shittify Windows, all of that. Also available at Leanpub.com. That's where his books are published. And maybe soon a markdown book. Yeah. As well. It will be short. I can tell you that if it happens. It'll have lots of asterisks and understands. Yes, ampersands. It's nice. Uh Richard Campbell does Run As Radio and Rocks, two great podcasts on one great site, runasradio.com. Together they are the dynamic duo of Windows Journalism. They join us every Wednesday, 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Hawaii time, as I have learned. There you go. Which is uh also, I think, a breakfast Mai Thai. Yeah. You know. Uh I I leapt out of bed just to do this show. Did you? You have a m you have a more of my experience now, Leo, right? Like being down at the farm in New Zealand and doing the show at 6 a.m. Yeah. I don't think I've ever leapt out of bed. Uh you do if it's 7:30 and you got a show at 8. I think you do. Um, we will be back next uh Wednesday. I will be back home. Paul will be in Mexico. Where will you be, Richard? I will be in Antwerp, Belgium. I don't know how he keeps track. I don't know how he does it. You can find the show online. I mentioned the live times because you can actually watch it live if you're in the member of the uh great Club Twit , which I think we really ought to thank the Club Twit members for making this show possible. It's their support of independent podcasting uh uh like this that makes such a difference uh to us we really appreciate your membership. If you're not a member club twit is at twit.tv slash club twit and you get also access to the discord that's where you can watch in the club after the fact oh I should mention you can also watch live, everybody can, on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. We stream on all those platforms to make it uh easy to watch live. But after the fact, you can get on-demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash dubdub. You can also watch it on YouTube. There's a video on YouTube from every show. And of course, the whiskey segments have their own YouTube playlist, which you can easily get to by going to something weirdfrommycloset.com . And uh it's a podcast, so you can get it in your favorite podcast client, audio or video. Subscribe to Windows Weekly. You'll get it automatically. You won't have to think about it. Make sure you have a copy. Uh every week for your enjoyment. If you want to talk about the shows and you're not in the club, we do have, of course, forums, the best place to comment on any show at twit.community. All Twit listeners are more than welcome to join. We'd love to have you. There's also a mastodon instance, uh, just for twit listeners, twit.social. So twit.social for mastodon, twit.community for our discourse forums. Um I don't mention them enough and I and I and they're really a great place to hang out. Club members also get to comment on the shows in the club twit Discord . All right, that's enough. As I mentioned, Troy Hunt is coming up uh in Intelligent Machines in just a little bit if you're watching live. Uh we're gonna talk about have I been pwned and his new AI agent, which he calls Bruce . After the shark? Uh yeah, I guess. You know, it's funny when we were swimming for the mana rays. Uh there are sharks uh in the harbor here. I was hoping by God that was like a callback. I quite a few sharks. Yeah. But uh they said don't don't yell shark if you see a shark. We don't want to scare anybody. Just say Bruce . Is that from finding Nemo? Where is that? I think that must be. Oh that well, no, Bruce was the name of the shark in Jaws. Jaws. Oh, okay. That was a little bit not in the movie, but behind the scenes. The mechanical shark. Hey Bruce. It was a Monty Python sketch where they were all drinking fine Australian wine and they were all named Bruce. That's great. Uh all right, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us on Windows Weekly. We will see you next week. Bye bye. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Richard.