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Belgian Whiskey and Distillery History
From WW 983: Puts the Buh in Benelux - Can Googlebooks Challenge Existing Laptops? — May 13, 2026
WW 983: Puts the Buh in Benelux - Can Googlebooks Challenge Existing Laptops? — May 13, 2026 — starts at 0:00
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here. Richard Campbell. There's a Windows update that actually adds a bunch of new features. Paul will talk about that. Microsoft releases an AI security model with a great name, and we'll puzzle over Amazon's interesting numbers. There's something wrong here. Anyway, stay tuned. You'll find out about that next on Windows Weekly . Podcasts you love from people you trust this is tweet This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorrad and Richard Campbell, episode 983, recorded Wednesday, May 13th, 2026. Puts the bu h in Benelux . It's time for Windows Weekly Hello, all you winners and dozers . Time to wake up and say hello. Smell the Polly. No, it doesn't matter. It smells good in Taco Territ ory. That is Paul Thorat, Thorat.com. He is in Mexico City for the last week. Uh for a couple of months. And also uh Mr. Richard Campbell. It's always fun. Where in the world is Ricardo Campbell? He is in where? Below country. Antwerp. Where it is? Antwerp. That's uh that's where all the diamonds are, right? The diamond mark. Not anymore, not so much anymore? Yeah. That's where they'd all go and get their diamonds, raw cut diamonds. And uh bring 'em back to New York City and sell 'em. Okay. Well, enough uh history. Don't worry, I'm gonna do plenty. Oh yeah, let's not forget. I was gonna say a lot of this is technically history. The debate rages in the uh Twit forums at uh twit.community over the whiskey segment. Some say just stop listening. Others say yes, but then Paul says something clever at the end and we don't want to miss that. That one still blows me away because I feel like that's pretty rare. It never happens. Yeah. It never happened. Well, it might happen four times a year. Clever is the wrong word. It's like uh bizarre segue, you know, some kind of random. Stick something in. Yeah. Uh usually so yeah, four times a year we got the last minute It's problematic. I mean everyone's podcast player has a little fast forward thing, right? I mean what's you know, and we're working on uh chapters. I know everybody wants chapters. That'll help you. The problem is imagine if we just unilaterally want. No, nobody wants that. I like the whiskey segment and I don't care. Right. The second we get rid of it, we're gonna hear from a day of many people who are like, the What hell does happen? Like I look forward to this. And the history of it is of course Mary Jo Foley used to do beer. Right. Did she always do beer? From like day one, you mean? Yeah. I figure I feel like she did. She's always she was a beer drinker. I bet she's always eating. I don't I'd have to go back and look at the notes, which means I'd have to open one note, which means I'll never do it. But I uh I feel like what it what what you call the back of the book has been there it feels like forever. Oh, yeah, I think we've always a long time. Yeah. So I think I told the story the other day of coming up to Penaluna after the build event and being a good, you know, guest and bringing a couple of bottles of whiskey. And then you went and oved them on the a Like with my precious I um I think he I think you said something pithy like I believe I've been shot in my tongue. Yes, that's exactly he said, What do you think? And I said I I think I just got shot in my tongue. That's funny. That's a good line. Yeah. Yeah. My tongue is drunk. We have pretty much always had Abel or Abunda in our house since that week. Since we've never that was fifteen years ago or something . Yeah. Long time ago. Whatever it was. Yeah. All right . I believe this is am I right? Is this it was yesterday a patch Tuesday? It was. It was. What does that mean to you? What does it mean to me? Yeah. Um well it means it's another uh monthly reminder of how broken my brain is because I always forget it's past Tuesday and then it happens and I'm like, God damn it, and then I have to write about it. And you'd think I would just would be the biggest day on my schedule or something, but I always forget. Um but uh I did know going into this because we've talked about it in terms of um like the preview update from week D a couple weeks ago, 10 days ago, whatever that was, that um this was gonna be a big one in the sense that this is the first patch Tuesday where we've received what I would call major new features for Windows this year. Um, you know, this has been quiet, right? We've seen mostly kind of low-level fundamental things, whatever. And uh and this, you know, there's a bunch of that. But um this what the two big well I should say too, actually. Um the other weirdness to this is that um 24 and 25 H2, both supported still are getting the same update, right? So it updates to a slightly different build number, but this the the the point beyond the decimal is the same, right? Because it's the same update, same features, same everything. Um, that's where all these new features are. And then there's also Windows 11 26H1 , which is on the new Snapdragon X2 based laptops, which coincidentally are the only ones I'm using now as we start winding down this trip. And uh there's not much going on there. So I had to break out like a couple of laptops that I'd packed away to be like, all right, I gotta go see if I can look at any of this stuff. Um but if you have 25 or 24 H2, you're gonna get Xbox mode, which is a replacement for two things. This is the game mode replacement, which was previously or to this moment is just a toggle switch and settings. It's on by default. Doesn't it's nothing you can do to configure it. And then the full screen experience that debuted on those uh Xbox Rog Ally um gaming handhelds or handheld yeah gaming handhelds. So uh this is the new version of that. Um it's a full screen experience, like the old full screen experience. It um gets rid of a lot of background processes, so it reduces resource RAM usage, et cetera. The Xbox app essentially becomes the shell, if that makes sense. It's controller-based or controller friendly, certainly. And um, you know, the game bar is still there and all that stuff. And so if you're just going to use this computer for gaming, which you would with a handheld, obviously, but maybe you would with a gaming PC too, you can just leave this on forever and you'll just have that kind of console-like experience, maybe is the way to put it . Um and I've seen that on one computer and I'm trying it wasn't one of the ones I play games on, which is, you know, we're still dealing with uh CFRs, right? These uh random deployed features. So that will eventually go away. Um, but it hasn't yet. The other major new feature is agents on the taskbar, which everyone remembers was what got Pavon Double Or in so much trouble late last year. Um I believe uh though it does support first and third party a AI agents, I think the only way you could test it right now or use it is with the researcher agent that's part of Microsoft 365 Copilot. And uh this is where the uh agent will behave like an app. So it will put a button or you know, an icon in the taskbar. It will uh pop up notifications if it needs to get to you to ask it for you know next steps or you know to clarify something, whatever it might be. And then you can also click on it, it will pop up a little UI that will show you what it's doing, you know, where it's at, you can get a progress report, that kind of thing. So uh not seeing this yet and I don't have 365 copilot, but I'm kind of I have to say I'm kind of curious because this is Microsoft's attempt to make AI agents make sense within the context of how Windows works, right? Um and in a in a bit we're gonna talk about uh how Google is doing the same thing, which is kind of interesting. Um not the same UI, but uh uh their own take on this. And then there's just some other th you know drag tray has become drop tray, uh hate it, I turn it off, so I don't care. Um bunch of low-level uh improvements to file explorer, which is getting, you know, performance improvements, right? We're seeing those across the board. We'll talk about that in a moment. Um this is kind of interesting. So the Windows kernel no longer trusts cross-signed third-party drivers by default. Instead, uh, if a driver is in the HCL, the uh hardware pet well the I guess it's the H C P the hardware compatibility program. It's not a list anymore, right? I I still think of it this like nineteen ninety-six, like the H H CL. Um if it's in there, it that will be trusted by default. Um I think admins can uh make an allow list of trusted legacy drivers that will just be trusted by default. But um this is you know, Microsoft kinda shoring up that driver bit similarly to what they did with printed drivers, right? Where they kind of just took that over and said, Yeah, we can't trust you guys anymore. Uh we're just gonna do this ourselves. Um so that's kind of interesting. Um if you do have 26 H1 and you probably don't, but if you do, um it's the stuff we saw in previous months, it's it's like 26 H1 is the shipping or stable version of Canary. Like it's always like a month or two behind, or more than that, I guess, depending on what it is. But you know, the uh there were improvements to the narrator, the smart app control thing where you can toggle it on and off in real time now. Um some pen settings, improvements, the the s the new setting about page, which I feel like we've had for nine months or something. I have no idea. So these are just things like we've seen elsewhere I don't know why these are different. I mean to me, I feel like twenty six H one should have the same features, or perhaps be a superset, if you will, of twenty five H two, but it's not. And I don't I can't explain that, but you know, why why could I? Um I haven't had time to write this. I I I wondered when I saw this patch Tuesday release and then I it was later confirmed, but Microsoft not, surprisingly, has developed their own in-house version of uh anthropic mythos, right? This thing that's finding all the security vulnerabilities everywhere. Um their version is called M dash, which by the way, I like the name. Um but and it's not it's not really at the same level yet. Um I th I don't remember the exact number of vulnerabilities that it found this month, but it's in the double digits, like 20-ish, something like that. Um, I expect that to be, if not exponentially bigger next month and then beyond, but maybe, you know, it's gonna be a lot more. I mean, as this thing ramps up, if you think about what Firefox has done with Mythos , um, I this is gonna be you know this is gonna be big, you know, because this is going across Azure, uh Windows, obviously, on the client window server, um, probably the Office apps, everything. I mean throughout Microsoft. I just think we're gonna get huge numbers of patches everywhere. Like that's I mean it's nothing special to Microsoft. They these new tools are turning up vulnerabilities like mad. And if they can turn them up themselves, the bad guys can too. Like the pressure is on. Oh yeah. So the the the the reason I mention this is only because, you know, like for example, um OpenAI last week announced their version of Mythos, right? Whatever. I don't remember the name of that. But um yeah, everyone's doing it. You know, this is the thing with AI. Like if you see a feature over here, just wait two seconds, you're gonna get it on the AI thing over here. Um but this is stuff, this is not available to individuals, right? This is something they make available to um companies, governments, et cetera. And in Microsoft's case, um they could have probably, I mean absolutely could have used anthropic mythos, but you know, they're they make AI, so they want to have their own. So it's it's not I I mention this only because it's not really surprising that Microsoft would make their own um agentic vulnerability finder or whatever. So we'll see how this goes. I think uh this year is gonna be very, very interesting for found security vulnerabilities, I think. Yeah. I it speaks to I I was almost making neuromancer reference is like we're just not that far from having these models running inside of your network constantly monitoring and right resisting attacks. If I didn't I I think is yeah Firefox well Firefox Firefox would come up later in the show. But the if I didn't say this last week, like one of the observations I kinda had about this is that you know, at some point you you find the bugs that are in the existing code base, but then you start using it more proactively because you're submitting new code in Yeah. And it'll it'll be part of the CI C D pipeline, right? Yeah and this evaluate on the fly. Yeah. So in Microsoft's case, they've been promoting this notion of you know secure by default for possibly twenty five years or whatever whatever it's been, um this makes it more of a reality if that makes sense. Um so we'll see how it goes. But anyway it's also seems like Microsoft is positioning itself as self-contained on the AA realm. Like they obviously got into open AI first and so forth, but keep showing they have their own product. So I haven't right. I I haven't getting it ready for a go it alone day. Yeah, I suppose there's a possibility this is in fact based on what of the open AI thing is. And I don't know. I just haven't had a chance to look at it yet. So after the show's over, I'll probably write it up and figure that out. But um but yeah, if this is in fact a homegrown model , great. I mean that's you know good for them. Yeah . Yeah. Interesting times. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Um yeah, I mean I can't get like a Android Kotlin project even compile it alone, figure out if it's secure, you know. But uh but you know these guys they're on their they're on a different level. So Yeah but you're all you you hit the point, which is that a lot of people have a tough time even evaluating what security means. Like what does it mean to actually have this code well locked down? Yeah. And I think for app developers, regardless of the platform, you know, if you're Android, uh iOS, you know, web-based, whatever it is, uh, you know, Windows obviously, um, there's the whole notion of like, you know, starter templates and like starter projects and you know, it's a code review thing you can do through AI, et cetera. Yep. I think that the security angle is going to be part of it from the get-go. Like that you know, that this is a lot of sense to have an agent that's running and gathering the latest CVEs and evaluating the code it's seen. Like I could the same way we have dependabot inside of uh a GitHub, we could be at the point with our own code bases where this agent is actually adding issues saying this CVE likely appacts this application and we need to be run through the evaluator. Yeah. In the old days we would say uh oh did it compile? Okay, ship it. Um yeah, and now it's gonna be more like did it pass, you know, whatever the version of M dash is? The security profile. Then you ship it, right? So it's good. I mean, that's look, I'm sorry, but that's a hundred percent progress. Like that's that's good. This is a great this is maybe the best AI kind of thing I've seen so far. Like it's it's gonna benefit everyone, even the people that hate AI because there's you know, the stuff they use is gonna be better because of it. It's it's nice. My um my AI hype note ends w ends with the story of uh Alpha Fold and giving away the two hundred million protein foldings. It's like we fundamentally changed medicine with this technology now, you're never gonna take that back. Um doing the insiders program . Are you waiting for me? Is that what you're I mean? Well you did this so fast. I can move the ad down a little bit. I'd like to go at least twenty minutes before I make you. Stop touching my notes, Leo. Okay. So uh I'm always guessing just how long it's gonna take you to get to bullet point, you know. And I'm I did well I can I do the same thing just when I do the notes, I kinda think about it like this is gonna be a long show or short show or whatever. And I'm like I'm wrong every time. So Yeah, it's very hard. Yeah. Sometimes you got more to talk about with Yep. Sometimes you go into it thinking, all right, this is gonna take some time. We've got to get through this, and then it's like bang, done. You know, I do like M dash, by the way. That's edited. I do too. It's a good name. Yeah. They should rename all their AI to that. Yeah. They should fix all their bugs. That would be cool. Yep. Well, now you're just talking trades talking report. That's not how that works at all. If it's so good, why can't it just fix all their bugs? Yeah, just fix it. Just fix it. That's what I want. Yeah. Yeah. Um simple. That was easy. Yeah. So um I feel like for the rest of the year, or at least for the next few months, we're gonna be dealing with this kind of a weekly thing. And the weekly thing is gonna be, well, two parts, right? There's the uh Microsoft will either talk about or implement some low level changes that improve Windows to some degree as part of this pain points thing they're working on now. And then you will run into people who complain about it . You know, which is bizarre, right? Because I think most of anybody, I mean pretty much using Windows, it would look at what they're doing and I could I can point out things they're not doing, like that's my job, but as far as like what they are doing, it's all you know, it's it's good. And uh unless you're a complainer. So um one of the things that Microsoft is quietly working on is something called a new uh low latency profile for Windows 11. And this response this this what does is actively engage the CPU very briefly to boost the performance of an app launching or a UI like the start menu or widgets or whatever it is responding to that click. So in other words, the the delta of time between you clicking the thing and it you know coming up or whatever, like file explorer notably. Um the app shell comes up fast, but that display of the home screen is slow. And slow in this case means like one to two seconds. Do we really think it's CPU bound? I think it's usually network bound. So it depends on the UI. So actually that's we're going to get to that because that's actually part of it. But this is for a specific on device uh display of UI, essentially, whether it's an app launching or like I said, like a start menu kind of thing. So start menu is uh I'll just get to it now since you said it, um, start menu is an example of something that is both, right? Because it is connecting to the internet in in in Scott Hanselman's words, too many times um to do certain things. And so people are like, oh, it's React Native, it's slow. And it's like, it's not that. It's like it's just doing too much. And uh that slows it down. You know, the initial you know, you expect to click on something and see it. You know? Um Yeah. And it and and by too much you mean stuff I didn't ask for . That's another issue. Um but yes, uh yeah, absolutely. I uh it's fair to say that you can customize the start menu to some degree if you don't like that stuff. Uh but yeah, fair enough. Um so uh Windows Central and some other places have tested this, and according to those people, um with this enabled, if you you know, side by side, same machine with this low latency profile enabled or not, um there They're seeing like 40% faster launch times for inbox apps like Edge and Outlook and 70% faster launch times for interfaces like start and you know right-click context menus and so forth. So it's working, right ? So, but of course, you know, like I said, people complain. So someone on, I guess Twitter X, whatever we're calling this, he's like, so let me get this straight. It's like you 're the slowdowns here are really coming from whatever the runtime is, like React Native on top of XAML or something, blah, blah blah. And it's like, so you do like screwing around with the low-level pro how the processor works and like that's the fix. And Scott, of course, you know, being technical and uh having the brittleness that comes with that is like, yeah, that's not it. Um it's not it has nothing to do with React Native. Um and this is something that Linux and all mobile platforms do as well. And so, you know, what it what doesn't matter what the device is, you you bring up a phone, you you tap an icon, you went, you know, you don't want you don't wait seconds, right? Like it, it just appears . And so every uh interaction, whether it's touch base on a phone or in Linux now or Windows as it's happening, it's like uh like cores get woken up on the processor, um, clock speeds get boosted, the thing occurs, and then it drops back down to idle. And this all happens in milliseconds, right? Uh Apple does it, Android does it. And then Scott Hanselman's words, Apple does this and you all love it . So um, so fair enough. Uh I 'm not sure of experience this. I've been using like Snapdragon X2 laptops lately. So I'm already seeing an awesome performance boost. So, you know, I do I'm sure I'm sure this will help you guys. Uh so anyway, that's good. Um and that's something I don't know, I'm not even sure where this I don't know if some of this isn't stable yet or if it's just inside a program. I think I believe it might be inside a program . Um this is probably late, yeah, it would have been late last week. So Microsoft is announcing insider builds differently now. Um, in the past, what they would do is have a blog post for each new build. So if there was a beta release, a canary release, a dev channel release, whatever. They would be a separate blog post for each, even though in many cases they might have a lot of overlap for features and so forth. Um, now they have simplified uh the program by having fewer top-level channels, but also made it more complex by having subchannels, which is super confusing. And um and they're doing a single announcement for everything. So whatever day comes, uh Thursday, Friday, whatever this was, they're like, here are all the builds we released. There's four of them. One is in the beta channel. And then three are in experimental because again, we can't have nice things. So there's experimental that used to be the dev channel. It's just experiment al. There's experimental that's on 26H1, which is essentially the former Canary 28,000 series builds, I think. Um, and then experimental future platforms, which is now what I think of as canary but the right further out stuff that may or may not make it into the uh system and I when this was canary I was thinking of this is like 26H2 essentially but you know who knows? Um, so we got those four builds, and then there were two notable changes or new features, or however you want to say this. That neither one is, I mean, you know, groundbreaking exactly. But um, one is that they're adding additional gestures That have all the multi-touch gestures related to scrolling and zooming and automatic scrolling, et cetera. Um, I didn't see one that I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to try that. I was like, no, I don't care about these. But um the other ones is nice. I mean, uh, one of the issues, and this is probably related to uh you know, Chromebooks uh being super cheap, and then MacBook Neo is now super cheap. And if you um uh are in a smaller educational environment where you don't have IT staff, especially and you don't have any budget, right, you might want to just go buy computers like either in the channel or even at retail, because they're so cheap. Like you can get these really cheap Windows laptops. But when you buy them that way, they come with what's Windows 11 home, like the consumer version. Right. So what they're allowing now is for you to buy a Windows 11 home based PC and then upgrade it to what's called Windows 11 Pro Education for K through 12 and um for free. So it's not it's stable yet. What do you need to be able to do that upgrade? Like you have to be a teacher of some kind? Uh I didn't even look into that. So I would imagine, yeah, I don't know. So probably, right? And the idea here is that like pro, but also you know, pro education is can be centrally managed to some degree. Uh not to some degree. Right. Can't can in fact be centrally managed. Right. So it might be uh an MDM type solution. It's unlike it's not going to be active directory probably. It'll be in tune. Yeah. They're not doing anything new with AD. It'll be into. Yep. Yep. So per seat charge. So yeah. That's nice. I mean to me that's just nice. So uh they're tough. That's just nice. It's nice. It's that nice. th Iting's n ice. Anybody say the word can ary? Oh , this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by the Thanks Canary . This thing. Look at this. This looks like a uh what? An external, you know, USB drive. Just kind of plain black case. You could put this on your network. Nobody'd think twice about it, except it's not. This is a honeypot and man this is the the kind of honeypot you want. First of all, totally secure. I know when you say well plug a device into your network, you go, okay, but really? And but this is designed, these guys at the Thinxed Canary folk are super good. They they have been in this business for decades teaching governments and industry how to break into their own systems. They've always been White Hat, but they're but they but they do a lot of pen testing, that kind of thing. So they know what hackers are looking for. They understand that. They know how to design a super secure box that looks like something super valuable. That's the key to a honey pot . In this case, mine is a uh I've mentioned this before, Synology Nest, but it's so easy to change it. It could be a Windows server. It could be a Windows XP server if you want. It could be a SharePoint server. You know bad guys are looking for that. It could be a SCADA device. I mean y,es, it could be almost anything . And when I say it impersonates those devices, it does it perfectly. It does it down to the MAC address, down to the exact login screen. Everything looks real. The hacker, even if the hacker is suspicious, the hacker cannot resist because inside there is potentially gold. This is what they're looking for. So these are tools that everyone needs, every business needs any way, to know, let you know if there's somebody inside your network prowling around. We all have, I'm sure, perimeter defenses that are very, very good, but are they perfect? You know, just ask Well who's the breach of the day today? Just asking anybody . The breaches are happening 50 60 a day now, right? That we know about. That's because perimeter defenses are not perfect. But the problem is when somebody gets into your network, they're they're sneaky. They're clever. These hackers are wily. And they don't, you know, telegraph that they're in there until they've done everything they want to do, exfiltrated all the information so they can blackmail you, put little time bombs in there so they can ransomware you. They do that. Then they send you a little note. On average, this is the wild stat. On average, companies don't know they have been breached for 91 days. That's way too long. 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We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly and for keeping our family safe . Now uh let's go back to Paul where the word is a new threat has emerged. Yeah, I mean Google's been kind of previewing this for a year, but they finally announced well what the device there we' cllall Google Book, which is a new kind of Chromebook, right, based on this aluminum OS thing, which is not going to be the final name of the OS, but uh Android. Aluminium, by the way. Not Yeah, I'm not doing that. Um Um no, no, I'm not that's what they say. But anyway, uh that's how they spell it. But they say, don't worry, it's a code name. It's it's code name, yeah. Yeah. Um still a lot of questions here, but uh and I I've written a lot about this. I'm I'm fascinated by this notion of like uh scaling up a mobile platform to make it compete with the desktop platform and how that might or might not work. So um a couple of things I will say uh because this is pertinent to our space, you know, Sacha Nadella , the CEO of Microsoft, once described Copile as potentially becoming the new start menu. And we all kinda chuckled and laughed and everything. But when you think about it, this thing you go to to get work done where you start, you start, you know, you launch literally start. I keep saying start, but you start your day, so to speak. Um that makes some sense. But you know, Google um, unlike Microsoft, has had a lot of success with its AI, and they're putting Gemini in their case across their entire stack. They have incredible uh reach with consumers and businesses. Um and this thing, uh, you know, I don't like some of the marketing here. It's like uh it's not an operating system, it's an intelligence system. And you're like, okay, guys, whatever. But you know, Android-based makes sense because that's the w the popularity and the and the scope that you need. All the developers there, the drivers go there first, et cetera, et cetera. Um so this, you know, they're doing what they did with Chromebook. I, you know, it's sort of reth inking the laptop. Um you know there's a uh I really like and I have I got it from my daughter the Lenovo Chromebook with a media tech companio process ing. No, those are great. That's the funny thing. Terrible name. Great processor. Yeah, so it's a this that's a like a co-pilot plus PC class Chromebook, right? As far as the harbor goes. But the benchmarks make it kind of equivalent of Apple's M two. Yeah, so the the Google Books, we don't know a lot about the hardware. Um but I hope they use this media tech for us. So they're gonna use Snapdragon, they're gonna use the Media Tech, whatever what do you call it? And the Lenovo has it a lead screen. It's pretty nice as well. Yeah. So um we know that all the top five PC makers are on board, um, which you know they are for Chromebooks as well. Um I didn't realize this at the time, which kind of shows you where my head's at, but one notable exception to that list of OEMs is Samsung, which is Google's biggest partner in this space. They make great problems . Yes, they do. And there was a rumored uh Samsung Galaxy book running this OS out doing benchmarks or something in the world. So like that will happen. I it's more likely that this was not a snub and that because these guys are such close partners, that they'll have a special thing with just the two of them, you know, uh at some point Right. Because I feel like the schools have kind of soured a little bit on that. I don't I mean I don't know about I don't know. I mean I will say having recently reevaluated a Chromebook, using it like a really cheap one too. It was like under two hundred bucks. It's actually It's fine. It's pretty good. Like it's as long as you don't need to install any software on it. Right. Right. Nowadays everything's web based. Well I mean like a real Chromebook, you could install uh Linux environment and run Linux apps. I mean that's you know for developing. That was just a bit complicated for most people. But almost everything's web-bedas now. Everybody ha even QuickBooks has a web interface. Well, a game. That's why schools like it. Frankly. No, I right. No, there' goods reasons for it. I mean you could see where a business might like it too, but yeah. Um anyway, this is you know, this is interesting. Like I uh the question is, is it more Android compatible than Chromebooks? I think this will be. I think that's the whole thing. I think it's literally just gonna be Android. I think it's Android. Yeah. Well it's Fuchsion. That's fine. And it will run it will run the full desktop Chrome web browser with the extensions and all that. So that's important. So in that sense, it will be like a Chromebook as today. Um there's no plan to replace Chromebook immediately, but that's obviously gonna happen. This these are gonna be premium kind of Chromebook Plus or co-pilot plus PC type devices. Um they did uh there were a bunch of announcements around this, but one that is pertinent to us is that I'm you know I mentioned this agents on the taskbar thing that Microsoft has in Windows. And for this system, um Google is rethinking like the mouse cursor, right? And so if you're familiar with Windows, you have to enable this feature, but there's a it's it's called uh shake, I forget what it's called. It's called I think it's just called Shake, but you shake your mouse cursor and all the windows minimize. And so what Google is doing is you shake the mouse cursor and then it turns into what they're calling a smart pointer or magic pointer. And it becomes this Gemini kind of front end. So it does that vision stuff where whatever's under the mouse cursor, you can learn more about that. You can select items and put them into kind of a little, it's like a pop-up bubble bucket and then have and then write a prompt in right there, it like next to the cursor, you know, on screen anywhere. And I'm you know, okay. I mean, I like I I've not used it. It looks interesting. Um and it is a way to bring kind of new AI capabilities into what is essentially like a what I'd call a legacy desktop type platform. I know it's not a legacy, but it be as far as the, you know, there's a basically a taskbar star button, you know, it's let's like the thing ever yone knows and knows how to use. And um, you know, they're kind of rethinking it, which uh, you know, Google has a pretty good history of doing this kind of thing. It's kind of interesting. Um, and we'll see. There's a lot of questions. Um a lot of questions. So uh questions. Yeah. Devices by the end of the year. Um one of the inevitable conversations you get into with this kind of thing, and I and I say that because I often trigger it myself, which is you know, you can take something big like Windows that's been around for decades and you can kind of strip off, strip off, strip off, and try to arrive at this more uh mobile-like or literally mobile platform that's uh simpler. You know, does that make any sense? And Microsoft's tried this with Windows CE and all the stuff that became you know Windows mobile over the years. They tried it with Windows RT and the Windows 8 timeframe. And then what we have today is Windows 11 on ARM, which is just Windows 11, right? With I mean, there is some culling of legacy code in there, which is great, but they haven't really changed the, you know, it's the familiar Windows interface. Um Apple did the same thing, right, with macOS 10 when they made the iP hone. Um and then they've since used that smaller code base, which they added things like multi-touch and whatever to, um, and created all their other platforms like iPad, you know, iPad, Apple TV, uh, Apple Watch, et cetera. Uh Google's done the same thing. Like they have Android XR, they have Google TV, Android Audio, Auto, Wear OS, I'm forgetting some, it doesn't matter. Um so it's interesting, but you know, the the question of whether a mobile platform can replace a desktop platform is a obviously dependent on who you are and the things you need to do. But I kind of like the idea of like scaling something small up in a way. Like you're starting from a maybe a simpler code base, if you know, hopefully. Um and we c you know, we'll see. You know, we'll see where that goes. But um I uh they position this, this was their wording, uh the that this thing is modern, right? In other words, they're not really saying mobile, like it they don't really describe it as a mobile platform. It's a modern platform, right? And you can make the argument that desktop systems like Mac and Windows are legacy platforms, right? I mean they've been around for a long time. There's a lot of cru ft. And with great power. I mean, I'd definitely like to see one of these as a tablet . Yeah. Well, right. I mean, so the answer there would be, well, we have that, right? We have Android tablets. Like this is very specifically a laptop. Good . Well we'll see. I mean, you know, like the iP ad can be good at like like a laptop in the sense that you have a magic. Definitely that and that was my point. It's like are you really gonna make the iPad Pro competitor that can snap into the keyboard and be very laptop right? Um so we may see that. They they're not talking forum but I mean in the past they were talking Android laptop, but um they you know, we'll see. I mean it's possible OEMs, Google itself, whatever we we don't know. But um I will say, you know , uh with the iPad, there's still some little rough areas where it's touch first. You know, it's it's awesome as a tablet, of course, but there are interfaces, you know, depending on the app and whatever it is where you're trying to right click and it doesn't right click, but if you click and hold, it then gets the menu, which is how it would work with touch, not how it should work with a mouse and you know if Google can kind of get by that and uh make this a little more seamless I you know maybe they're on to something so awesome. Uh yeah we'll see. Okay we'll see . Okay. So that's kind of fun. Um, always like to see that. Um out of the middle of nowhere, uh I guess that's not the right way to say that. Um, Microsoft announced a major update to Edge across both desktop and mobile tod ay. Wasn't expecting that. Um oops, I just closed the tap. Um so this is gonna be another one of those uh you know, you'll cheer, then you'll boo moments where it's like, I'm happy to announce that they've gotten rid of co-pilot mode. Yay! No, because it's all co-pilot mode. Now you knew that was coming, right? Come on. Like we don't need an icon when you can never get away from it. Yeah, it's just there's no mode. It's just gonna be all this AI crap. So uh there's a lot of new capabilities that are occurring across both desktop and mobile. There are some things that had been on uh desktop before that are now coming to mobile. So for example, co-pilot vision and voice are now available on mobile for the first time. Um, so that's kind of cool. Or if you want that, I guess I don't know. Um but the things that will be across both is Copilot has first of all long term memory, which I think is, you know, uh important to all these things, meaning you can ask it about things and it will have the context of all the stuff you've given it permission to see, which can now include um, you know not just multiple tabs but like reasoning across multiple tabs so you can compare information, um, you know, get summaries, see what matters the most, you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Um the new tab page has been redesigned. This is the thing. This looks like the co-pilot mode new tab page to me, but that's fine. Um cop ilot has these two features that were experimental. Uh actually one of them still is, but there's a feature called journeys, which is now broadly available across desktop and for the first time mobile. I don't think it was even tested on mobile before, at least publicly. I could be wrong about that. I don't think so. Um there's a study and learn mode with guided study sessions. There's a writing assistant , which is obviously AI based for drafting new things or just rewriting or you know for tone, clarity, whatever. Um there are co-pilot quizzes, so you can generate quizzes, flashcards, guided uh sessions, et cetera, based on information you might be looking at in a tab. You can turn any tab into an audio podcast, right? So in s if you think about um what's it called? Uh uh the immersive view or whatever, the reading view in in edge today , you know, that's a way to read the actual article, but without the distractions of the webpage with you know whatever ads and nonsense might be there. All the blinky and jumpy stuff. Yeah. But you can also click a little play button and it will read it to you, which is nice. But the the podcast feature is not a literal reading of the article. It uses AI to kind of summarize it and then it presents it as if it were a podcast. So you might be on your phone, maybe you see some interesting article and you're like, I gotta get on the subway or the bus or whatever. I I can't sit I can't walk around and read this, but you can listen to a like a podcast version of it. Uh which for some reason is super common with AI making a podcast out of things. I don't know. It's almost like they were training all their models on all the podcasts, but I'm I'm sure they didn't do that. Um and I think uh that's probably most of it. Um so these features are all rolling out uh across Windows, Mac, Android, iPhone, and iPad. So cool. There you there you go. Um this one kind of hit me personally because I I love Markdown. I write Markdown. I I almost think in Markdown at this point. You're writing a book about Mark down. I might be writing a book about Markdown. John Cooker's expecting you to write some pressure. But the thing is Markdown is has become even more uh prominent lately because it's the language of AI and especi especially AI agents. And I guess I never really thought about this too much, but it's one thing for it to be able to easily process Markdown because Markdown is just plain text with a couple of uh formatting tags, essentially. Um but it also outputs a markdown. And uh there's uh an a um an engineer from Anthropic, and I think Anthropic as an organization is making the argument that this is not the right approach that the output should be HTML. And because this is richer, you know, possibilities there, including programmatic interac tions and you know through JavaScript, et cetera. Um you know, you can link to images in Markdown just like you can in HTML. So there's some there is some visual kind of things that you can do there, but the thing is, you know, this isn't uh the part of the book or part of that book I'm working on. I I wrote this, but I haven't shared it publicly yet because that that chapter is not done. But when John Gruber created this, um and Anaran Schwartz. I really want to make sure Aaron gets credit. Okay. I'm just based on me reading his blog, right? Um he said he described Markdown as two different things. Um there was the the syntax that gets added to plain text, which is both human and machine readable, obviously. And then in his case it was a I think it was a Perl script, but it was a a way to uh transform that markdown plain text into HTML because that's what gets published on the web. And the, you know, doing that in having AI do that, having an AI agent do that actually to me does make sense. Because the the surface that you're looking at in cloud or whatever you know AI you're using, if you're on the web, whatever, it is going to be HTML, right? Like you might it might as well use the thing the whole world already uses and it has richer display capabilities as it is and must maybe better understood as well. So even though you can do some, you can do some, you know, kind of some kind of cool I mean you know if you depending on the uh markdown editor that you use, um, a lot of them have like a side by s ide view or a view where you can bring up the it's called a preview usually, which is the HTML view, right? So you're writing in code essentially. Well, you're writing plain text, but it has little hashtags and whatnot. Um and you can read it. It's readable. It's just not particularly pretty, but um but if you want to see what it's gonna look like on the output end, that's that is HTML. It was always gonna be HTML. Like, so it I think this it's an interesting point. Like I I don't know why AI agents spit out Markdown other than the I don't want to uh let me think of it. They like text, right? They're just they love text and it's yep, could have been HTML, but yeah. And he's and they're saying maybe Markdown. It's just whatever if you told your agent use HTML from now on instead of Markdown, it would just do it. But I mean I think what they're saying is maybe you just smell you mean mar quee with flaming text. Yeah, you can I mean blinking text. So after after that article uh came out from Tariq, I uh But I don't I so and uh some have said Daniel Meessler uh who I think is uh really smart has said stick with Markdown and do HTML when you want something that's easy to that's you know, prettier or easy to read. So I still stick with Markdown and you need to for things like Claude..mmd or agents d. I think right . I think the reason it is marked down on output is because it is on input too, and these things all interact. And so it's just easier, you know, it this is the this is the workflow. I'll sh I'll show you what I've done. So what I do when I want something that I can visualize better, I'll say make the markdown and put it in my obsidian, because obsidian reads markdown well, but also make a page. This is on Cloudflare, so I just have a Cloudflare page. Right. So we're working on uh some a workflow and it it just did this page now it also did it markdown, but you can see instead of using mermaid to make diagrams and stuff, it does it HTML, and it's nice and it makes it easy to read and it's stuff like that. The other thing I had to do, which I I guess I can share this with you. Uh we're planning a vacation in the fall and I I didn't know what to do where we're going, so I had the AI act like a travel agent and recommend stuff. And I said, make that an HTML page and put it up on the Cloudflare. Cloudflare's free for pages. And yeah. So it so it just and it's easier to read. That's all. That's the beauty of it. Right. R, rightight. That's all it is. And then I have an index on it. Um so this is just like a quick bookshelf. They're they're disposable. And I think that I I still use Markdown because I still put it in Obsidian. Like I said, I almost think in Markdown, so to me that's just normal. But it's easy. It's how you type. But yeah. Nowadays with the when the AI's typing, it doesn't matter. Python go markdown HTML. Yeah. It's spitting out a thousand lines a second anyway. Right. I obviously can read HTML. Yeah. Right. So obviously can handle it. Anyway, I just I was I kinda It's an interesting conversation. Yeah, it's interesting. I do both is what I say. I don't think about it because I'm not producing anything that I want to Well for things like those the diagrams and stuff, it's a little easier to visualize. But uh anyway, it's just as fluent in both languages. So I just say, hey, give me an HTML of this and put it up on Cloudflare. And it does it. Yeah. Okay. It's easy. Yep. Yeah. It's great. Yep. Um so we I think we referenced this last week. I hadn't oh I've I still to this moment have not written about this, but Google Chrome was found to be downloading this four-gigabyte uh local AI uh uh model, which I said at the time has to be Gemini nano, and it is. Um I also have this vague idea, like they said a couple years ago they were going to do this, and they did. Actually, this is not a not a secret thing they're doing. I made the point, I think, last week that you know Firefox does this with like the language translation stuff. Every time you select a language in there and say, I want to be able to s you know translate between this and whatever other languages I've downloaded, um, it downloads local AI models for that. That's what it does. Now I they're probably not four gigabytes of space or whatever, but all these people are writing tips like here's how you can free up four gigabytes of space on your computer. And it's like okay. But I mean if you're actually using this stuff and you want this thing to work off line, for example, or whatever it might be. I mean you you know, and you have the space, I guess you might want this. But it w it was sort of presented as this nefarious plan or something like we're gonna sneak, you know, Gemini and the only thing nefarious about it is that it's changing web standards unilaterally without the help of the W three C. So I you use the word only and that's actually serious. So I mean I is is it actually trying to change the RFC s? I mean the No but it's but it's de facto, right? So if if a developer says well I have an API, which it is, by the way, there's an API, if I have an API to a local AI, I'm going to use it. But the problem is that only works with Chrome. So there goes Firefox, there goes Vivaldi, there goes this was the uh internet exporter uh strategy back in the day. You know, make stuff that only works in IE and this is not what we want. We don't want a button that says this page works best in whatever the browser is, right? So I don't think it's a bad thing at all. Yeah. I mean when well the first outrage about this wasn't that, although that it was the four gigabyte. It's just the four gigabyte thing. And it's like, okay, but you know, whatever. I if you have a And there's a lot to be said for a local only model, right? Yep. Yep. Especially Gemini, which is very, very good. Exactly. Uh there's a lot to be there's a lot to This is the same model that Google puts on their Pixel phones, for example, right? I yeah, right. It's on every phone every phone is a local model. So yeah. But I I do think it's it's uh unfortunate because it means Firefox is there should be a W3C should set a standard for local models in the local API. I agree. I do. But I agree. Google has a rich place doing this kind of thing. So they're remembering to do that. What was that saying Yeah, they bigfoot everything. They eventually gave up on, but they were just basically pushing by whatever the standards are and and doing their own thing. And and my God, where they was there complaining. So the good the good news is that complaining and leads to antitrust uh investigations, which leads to them completely reversing course. So um maybe they'll do that here. I don't know it's early. Yeah, they gave up on the um whatever that privacy sandbox. Privacy sandbox. They gave up on that, didn't they ? Five years, maybe longer. It was you know, they were gonna be doing that for a long time until they were not. The difference was it was the advertising community that didn't like that. This would be end users that don't like it. It blows my mind that uh yeah, it's like we want to find something that's gonna be really good for advertisers and uh and y and doesn't violate your privacy so much. And it's like there's no such thing as that. I'm sorry. Just pressed a bronze button on my trying to get my watch to shut up. Instead I made it made more noise. Uh sorry. No, it's okay. Um OpenAI has a coding agent called Codex. Um like Anthropic Cloud Code, it has uh expanded to include productivity functionality. Um So they go in cowork. Yep. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yes, they are. Um they released a codex app on the Mac and then on Windows. And this is over the past, you know, X number of months, I don't remember. Um, and what they found was, and it's always fascinating to me, like you think you release software and it's intentional, but then you users actually use it and you find out, oh, they're doing different sh stuff with it than we thought. Um, the most common workflows that customers were using happened in their web browser, whatever it was. So now they have a version of codex that's for Chrome, meaning it will work in I I haven't tried this, but it should work in any Chromium browser like Edge, you know uh, Brave, whatever. And uh the idea here is that if you're doing uh like across multiple browser tabs, you know, workflows like inspecting log, this is their words, uh inspecting logs, testing web apps, reviewing dashboards, moving through internal tools, um CRMs, dashboards, docs, yada yada yada. So okay. Okay . Whatever. You're cute. So that's happening. That's all I get. Suddenly OpenAI is chasing, which is weird. Isn't that strange? Just like that. They couldn't quite get to a billion users. They wanted to. They thought they were and they the consumer side. They're chasing that valuation thing, which is very similar to what OpenAI is doing. And I don't know the organization, but there's some, you know, in the same way that we have like analyst uh bodies that uh tell us you know what they believe market share is for like uh OSs and browsers and blah blah blah whatever. Um apparently anthropic adoption with businesses just surpassed open AIs. Yeah. It's the enterprise uh that's the m that's where the money is. Those are the people who are going to pay the money not. Right. And I'm doing this off the top of my head, so forgive me. Uh I think this is correct. But uh they're doing the run rate thing, right? So they you know, they have whatever revenues they had in some great quarter and their annual run rate is was either thirty or fifty billion, I can't remember, but um their annual run rate the year before, or maybe their actual rent revenues, I guess, were nine billion. So like that's great growth. That's awesome. It is awesome. The thing is, they're on the hook for like four to six hundred billion dollars in costs. Yeah. And that run rate is not going to pay for that. You know, you there's no such thing as a 30 year mortgage for this stuff that makes any sense. Like so these it's not anthropic. This is not unique to them and I'm not dumping on them. But the the financial story, and it's always presented as this giant uh positive, is very close to what you see with uh open AI. And uh meaning big numbers for like growth, yes, but right not enough to cover their costs. No . Well and it and also so much of their cost stuff is speculative based on further growth. Like these are hard numbers to work out. I know. I know. I keep waiting for this whole thing to come crashing down to earth, but yeah, we are. I don't know. I'm not convinced. I mean it's bubbly. It is bubbly, but is it a bubble bubble? But is it bubble? To me, the moment the momentum shifted is when the memory companies refused just double production. Like that at that point all those projections for all those servers were impossible. It's like we're gonna we're gonna stop selling this to individuals, but we're not actually going to increase capacity. No. And I think they're looking at this as a bubble and thinking, I don't want to be in the situation of a global crossing or a KPN at the end of the dot-com boom where I laid all this undersea cable and everyone went broke. The market is flush with RAM that nobody wanted and now it's you know selling at 20 years. It takes us three years to build a fab. You guys aren't going to be wanting these things in three years. We're going to stick to the production we can do. This is smart for AI companies because it puts all the risk on um the company, you know, the the microns or whatever these companies are that make RAM and other components. Um and they're all like, no, we're not doing that.. Like sorry We're not we're not doing that. You also see where they micron's saying we're taking deposits if you want more RAM. Like no more speculative ordering. Because they're just not going to be caught holding the bag. Yeah. But at that moment , that you know, slope graph going up and to the right is impossible. You can't keep scaling. We don't have enough equipment. You have to get more efficient. Yeah. You know, it's like that's how you deflate a bubble. And hopefully in a graceful way. Exactly. Not the balloon or going around the room, but rather a yeah, a a graceful ten came off what, two trillion in the first quarter And they've had a bounce back for the past few weeks, which is the pattern that happened in the dot-com boom too. At some point the investors go. Right. Yeah, I mean it it comes down to how much um the investors will put up with. Right. Yeah. Yeah, putting up with a lot. And and you know, in the same way that you know if you watch sporting events on TV now, you'll see all the ads are for like basically gambling apps or services, whatever. Is that Wall Street has always been speculative, obviously, but like it is become more and more like gambling than I think ever before in history. I've never I I don't know what's going on here. That's Well they moved on from crypto . Fair enough. Sorry, they're collecting junk. I'll be right back. I know the junk girl is here. You said it was like a child. I can hear that yeah, it's a a girl she's a woman now, but she she it's a child's voice they recorded. She's famous. She's famous in Mexico. So funny. I tell you who doesn't like her though is the dogs. They're all like all the dogs out there are going Uh all right. I can hear like five dogs. It's so funny. Can you really bark and they look like they're not barking, they're whining like they hate it. It's like they're the sound of this is punishing. I don't think that's it. I that bone . Right. All right. We'll take a little break. Dogs howl. The the adult woman cries as a baby. Right. Mexico is alive . Lavadoras, etc. Lavadoras . Our show today brought to you by Trusted Tech . If you are managing Microsoft 365 for your company, mm-hmm you,'re responsible for, well, both the cost and whether it's set up correctly. Now let's talk about cost first. And on July 1st, uh, I think everybody knows this. I hope I'm not telling you something you don't already know. Microsoft is raising prices . That we're now less on less less than two months away. So any mistakes in your licensing are about to get more expensive. Most companies using Microsoft 365 are either over licensed, meaning paying for unused seats and features, or underlicensed, creating compliance and security risks. And believe it or not, it can be both. The result , either way is wasting thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a year on tools your team doesn't use or worse, missing critical security features you thought you had, but you didn't license. It is, I understand. It's complicated. There's no shade. I'm not throwing shade on you. That's why you need trusted tech. Trusted tech helps businesses understand what they have, what they actually need , and how to lock in the right setup now before costs go up. Yeah, I know you could feed it to an AI. Don't you don't want hallucinations on this, you want the facts. That's trusted tech. Their team ensures your Microsoft 365 environment is well supported and aligned with how your business actually operates. Think of it as a tune-up. You need this. You should probably do this all the time . Oh, and by the way, they're also there if you need ongoing help, because they offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment through their certified support services. So they do both. Microsoft licensing is a moving target. It is changing all the time. E3 versus E5 versus Premium, business premium, and then the add-ons. And but there's the new E7. It's confusing. It's easy to misconfigure. It's easy to overpay. Or underpay. Yes, that can happen. 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Trusted tech dot team slash windows weekly three six five and get a clear data back ed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in savings before the price increase. Let me give you that address again. Trustedtech dot team slash windows weekly 365 . There's a form right there. You submit that form. Get in contact with trusted text . Super smart. Microsoft licensing engineers. They can cut through all of this, tell you exactly what you have, what you need, and do it now. July first is coming faster than you might think. Trustatech. team slash windows weekly three six five. We thank him so much. For their support of Windows Week ly. All right, my friends, onward . So I'm not a security expert. But I play one on TV. Yeah, I pretend to be one sometimes. Um I do have common sense. Did you really? I'm so sorry. No. Uh yeah, I was gonna say. I broke the waffle machine. Sorry. Um Um so uh but I I I do have a a a sort of sp pet pee about security vulnerabilities, which I should put air quotes around. Like where the first step in the um the way that you duplicate you know that you make this happen is uh first of all sign into your computer like uh okay but like but now you're signed in i mean when you're signed in you have access to your web browser which has all your information on I mean you're you're signed in, you know. So th there were a couple of these uh this past week. You know, the recall, the the more the recent recall um episode is one of them. So this first one I've I've I've not written about . I just was alerted to it today. So I gotta I'm gonna look at this in more detail. But um it's the the person who found this vulnerability calls it yellow key. Um he describes it as one of the most insane discoveries he's ever had . Feels like a backdoor. So it says how to pre reproduce. Step one. Copy the whatever folder to some other location. Well, oh actually, that's not step one, is it? Step one is sign into your computer. You can''tt right can just copy that folder. So, yeah, to me, that's like the the rest of what you're describing. It's like I'm not I've I've kind of stopped listening. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, uh when my the recall one was a little bit like this, it's like, okay, sign into your computer and it's like well bh uh you know, and then sign into recall, which requires the Windows Hello ESS nonsense and it's terrible and slow. It's like I I'm sorry, but that's that's the security. What are you talking about? Like, so I don't know what to say about this one. I gotta look into this a little bit more. Um, we'll see. But uh in the same vein, um, there was a report this past week, Microsoft Edge loads all your save passwords into memory in clear text when you first run the browser. Um, Microsoft has responded to this one similarly to what they did um with recall and basically the the short version is yeah that that's how it works. It's supposed to work that way. You're signed into a computer like securely. Like um this is what you know the the security protecting the browser, which is the operating system which, is Windows Hello, is what secures this. And yeah. But at the same time, it's like then you click on a phishing email that drops a payload on your machine. I'm and a hundred percent . Yeah. So today they're saying this is by design. Um I agree. I I feel like look, they've already done the thing where they want to make it more secure so it becomes less convenient, right? That one of the reasons, well, maybe the reason you would do this in plain text is fast, right? Um if this is encrypted and you have to decrypt it every single time you access any password that could take a long time, that would slow down the performance, et cetera. People would complain about that. Um and uh yeah, there's got to be a better way. I mean, you know, the the new Windows Hello experience is very is slow. I hate it. When you're in Windows. Signing in is the same. That's always work great. But the um, you know, do we want more of this? I don't know. You know, here's the way you can secure Microsoft Edge. Uh don't use it. And um, you know, just use a uh like an actually secure browser. So I don't know. I don't know what to say to this one. It's an interesting story. The same by the way, Chrome Chrome used to do the same thing. Keep the passwords in the clear. of this was well if like you said if somebody has access to your computer I mean you have problems you know it's not just this you know it's like Yeah so so I mean I think it is kind of a tempest in the teapot. I don't but you should be using a password manager anyway. That's the real answer. Yes. But cool but Google for a long time kept passwords in the clear in Chrome. I'm sure that's why Edge still does. It's just uh Uh yeah. I feel like you know they have the Secure Future Initiative, they have the Windows Resiliency Initiative, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera . Um this is gonna get caught up in that. I uh I can't Google does encrypt them now. Which is why it doesn't. Right. So m no one's complaining that Google is slow when it comes to accessing a password. Then again, if you're using a Google password manager in a Chrome browser, you have mental problems and you need assistance. I hate to say it, but that's how most people are passing. Of course. But most people don't know any better. They shouldn't and I this is why you use a um a third-party passion. You would also think that if uh that people would start to say, Well wait a minute, but I'm also need those passwords uh in other places on their microphone. What how do I Yeah with the third party password manager. Yeah that's how they keep them encrypted all the time. Yep. They're there everywhere. They're everywh ere. I'm just saying they're free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bitwarden is free for indiv personal. Yeah. Proton is for, you know, yeah. Uh what's the other big uh one password I think you do have to pay for, but uh, yeah, but most of it. But they're they're good for Bitwarden is you know for this audience. I mean Bitwarden. Yeah, Bitwarden's open source, so it's free free forever. Uh your primary consumer breach is a phishing attack. And that's the moment where whatever you had loaded in memory under your context is now vulnerable. That's true. Like that you're you are the weakest link, in other words. Yeah, and you're going to make mistakes. The whole trick here is how badly punished are you going to be for that mistake? If those things were encrypted and rest only decrypted when you use them, you know, like Bitwarden does, then you're not going to have all your passwords immediately hijacked. And we should mention Bitwarden is, of course, a sponsor of uh the podcast. The other thing though, I hesitate to say this. Most individuals are not going to be attacked. Right? Or not? Is that not true? Uh well most fishing attacks are cheap and happen everywhere. That's true. Yeah. I mean valuable attack uh target is of course an enterprise, not an individual. forty eight hours, I've been under steady attack. Like I'm getting authenticated . I had a phishing thing this morning. So yeah, I it looked uh you can get distracted, you're out in the world, you're on the phone maybe don't see it so good. You didn't think to look at the email address. No, I mean that happens it's it's very real. So I had my my hadn't had coffee yet. First stage breach is always a possibility. Everything is about what happens next. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And in that case, a password manager didn't help me because I was I was going along. I was helping the bad guy. Oh yeah, I got all the I got all those credit card numbers. What do you need? No problem . Yeah. Oh yeah, they're encrypted, but I I know how to decrypt them. Yeah. Could you do that now, please? Oh yeah, of course. Sure, sure. Of course I'm signed in. That's a good question . Oh yeah, there I got the code. Thank you. Do you need remote access to my computer? I'm gonna be out for a few hours, so that's what we do with open claw. That's kinda I know. That's what I I have I counted up 19 different cron jobs running on my framework uh all the time, doing all sorts of stuff. I mean, it's code, so it's not I mean they know what they're doing, but Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, you can get a Stripe account for your uh AI now . Which is great. Uh it's gonna buy a bunch of those little terminals so it can start running people's credit cards for you. Okay, now that I can I can have a stripe account of I I said to my agent, buy yourself a gift. What would you like? Bought like an eight dollar ebook. What who owns um Stripe is Stripe is that Block? Is that the same company? No. No, it's the Collisons. Uh uh Stripe is Stripe, right? I don't know. I I I'm trying to larger name. Okay. I can't. Stripe is Jack Dorsey. Yeah. It is? Oh, so it is Block. Then it is Block, right. Okay. Well, he c he's trustworthy. I I I wouldn't He likes his AI . Yep. I think he likes his Nazis too. Anyway. No, um Jack Dorsey. Oh no, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm I'm sorry. Right. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. He's not Peter Thiel. Uh these people, there's too many of these people. I can't. I apologize. No, Stripe is not. No, it's it's Col son. It's the Collison's, yeah. It's it's privately owned. I feel like the only person is not Berg. It's like uh uh uh automatic , the company that makes WordPress Dorsey Is that Dorsey too? No. Stripe is not Dorsey. Let's get this clear. That's the collisance. The lock is Dorsey. We should probably just say automatic is Mark Mar Matt Mullenweg. It's hard to I look, it is really hard to keep track of this. I see this. Especially because this is on the periphery for me. This is not my focus at all. Like I yeah, I would know this if I was cared about this stuff, I guess. I don't care about it and I have to know it. I know I'm sorry, I'm I don't want to ask those stupid works. I'm so stupid. All right. Um we have talked a couple of times about Mozilla and Firefox and using anthropic mythos, et cetera. Um, there were when they released, I think it was Firefox 150, uh, 270 fixes they had made in that release alone. By the end of April, they had fixed four hundred and twenty-three security vulnerabilities just in that month. Um a year ago in April, they pitched uh fac fixed or patched 31 vulnerabilities to give you an idea of the scope of how this has changed. Yeah. Yep. Um, so that's great. And I'm uh not all of those are actually from Mythos. They they still do all the traditional stuff. People s still submit bugs and they still find things and they that still happens, you know. Um I think they're also starting to use the new AI development style too, so they are moving faster as well as using these tools for detection. And that's one of the things I guess Smithos is very good at is not just saying, hey, here's a vulnerability, but hey, here's how you can duplicate it yours elf, and here's how you can fix it. And for an organization like Mozilla, but whatever company, they can take that information and prove it to themselves, prove that the fix works and make that fix. And uh not a lot in the way of you know false positives, although I think I guess it must be the Microsoft one. I think they were talking about false positives there. But uh you know but these problematic fixes too. Like there's ways to fix things that are they create better issues. I'm hearing over and over again from different teams that they're using tools like this and they're just finding incredible reams of vulnerabilities. And they and there's a as a as it was described to me, keys to the castle kind of vulnerabil ities. Like that's not a that's not just a buffer overflow. They might exploit someday. That's I have I have admin access to everything. Yeah. I was so looking forward to that. Yeah. That's incredible. Um, but th these guys are doing that thing I said, which is they're gonna shift into a a place where now they're gonna be proactive using AI. So they'll find problems in code bases as they're submitted and before they ship to the public, right? And it doesn't mean it will be perfect. You know, software's never perfect, but um I think this is going to lead to a new level of uh and level of the problem. And the problem is because it needs to, right? Because that same set of tools are being used by the black hats to find and take advantage of vulnerabilities at zero day at high speed. Right. And uh there is a panic going on. It's a it's an underlier since the fall last year of all of these major companies going, we have to get this stuff patched as quickly as possible before they the attacks really come in full bore. And then China was like, Hey, uh can we have access to mythos to o? And Anthropic said, no. No, you cannot. Um interesting. Um in uh in other uh good news, I guess this is not AI related, but rather security related, um, I I think Monday or the other day, whatever day was Passkey Day, which used to be password day. Um and Amazon uh used that to announce that they now have over 4 65 million customers who have enrolled in pass ke ys. So that's how they sign into their Amazon accounts now. That's a 75% gain year over year. That's awesome. It's not going to continue, obviously. That's now most of their customers. So they won't do that. Yeah, I don't what the know yeah, exactly. But uh but that's good. I do hammer away at sign up a pasky, sign up a pasky, sign up . So it's like I can make this go away by sign up. I think you guys are the same, but you know, I use passwords wherever I can use passwords and I gotta say the best pass key implementation to this day is GitHub. GitHub's implement like the nice signing of the GitHub is the best. Like it's I love it. You know what's great is that many, many AI tools and I think other geek tools use GitHub as their single sign-on provider. So there you go. It's great. So now pass keys everywhere because it's really passky. Now uh the caveat to this is it's possible Amazon's is just as good, but every time I sign with a passkey, I still get a code on my phone. No, and yes, it's not just as good. Okay, okay, I would say I wasn't sure if that was like something I did like it's not just you, it's me too. I hate it. Yeah, I don't like that. I I feel like the pass key should be it. Um fully secure. You do not need a third factor. If you sign into Google a lot, which I also do, um your experience will either be the best experience imaginable or are you serious? Like because they literally do it randomly when you sign in. So one time it will say, Oh, uh, do you want to use passion? You like, yep. And the little, you know, my password manager will come up and boop. done Other times it will be like, oh, uh you'll get an alert on your phone. You're like, oh come on, man. Like just do the same thing. I haven't had that experience. Oh, I have this every day. Mine uses and I had to have uh Russell our administrator turn on pass keys for workspaces because they're not on by default. Yeah. So I have one in workspace and one for a consumer account. And that might maybe that's part of it. I don't know uh because I go back and forth between the two, but um I have always been able to say yes and that's a good experience. Like to me that 's yeah, that's good. Huge. I still have to enter my email address. I really don't even want to do that. Honestly. I know. A a site should say you have a pass key. Exactly. And give you the choices if there are choices. Or just the one. And you click and then you do a Windows hello or whatever you're using for authentication. And uh I don't want to have to enter anything. I just want to click a click a look. 100%. Yeah. Uh yeah. If you're feeling suicidal, I mean uh remove the uh password from your Microsoft account. Have fun with that. I regret that so much. I did it. Yeah, I did it with a secondary account and I will no I will I can't say never. I mean I will not do it to my ma the one I use all the time because it's just like are you serious? Like what is this? Like it's screwed up. it as long as M makeake it to 32. Mine's three digits. But yeah, I mean it's but it that's another inconsistent experience. They have all the right stuff. Like they they have all the secondary forms of authentication and the the problem is you have to use them every single time. It's like a uh you know, all right, now uh we're gonna send you an email to a secondary address, type out the full address and then you go to that address, you get the code, you go, okay, now do it over and like seriously. Is this just because you're in Mexico? Is that what it is? No, it's happening to me. And and it happens at Xbox, and Xbox won't give you enough time to type in the code every single time it says you didn't do it fast enough. And it's like 10 seconds. I don't know how fast it's supposed to be, but this is the problem with the like a two of a code thing is um you can see like on the countdown it's like I got 12 seconds I got this and then I'm like you know and then like you you finally get it in and it's like nope it's wrong because they moved on to the next code. Yes. Right. Like I . Oh well. Someday. Oh well. Someday. I that's an amazing number. 465 million. I know. Yeah. I don't even believe that. Okay. I don't think that's true. Interesting. All right. Wait a minute. Well, how many people are in the U.S.? Including info. Amazon is humongous in other parts of the world, too, right? And and how what is PASCI adoption generally the percentage? It's not more than twenty or thirty percent. Right. This is everybody in the world who who So I don't I don't understand it. I look, the first day they offer ed this I did it, right? So I can't tell you what the experience is like if you're not using it. But I I don't believe it. I suspect they're pushing it pretty heavily. I don't think they have any reason to lie. I mean it must be true, but it just seems you want that thing to be you want that to be secure, right? I mean it's money. Like you're how many customers does Amazon have? That's a good quote. Let's find out. I don't know. Must be several billion in order for them to have four hundred and sixty-five million pass keys. Remember, so when companies start doing e-commerce, the in the early days they'll always say something like And they might just be counting we have X number of credit cards in our system or whatever, right? So there are two hundred and sixty million prime members worldwide. Okay. So this is more than twice as many almost twice as many prime as prime members. Yeah. So maybe the one that's just counting the number of pass keys, not counting the number of this number. If if it's if it is the number of pas kies, I must have ten of them because I sign in in indifferent looking. Well let me see. Let's look at the where's the wording . This is on LinkedIn he posted this. Yeah, 'cause that's where all the good stuff is posted. Um Man. I actually have a LinkedIn account just because of people like this. Literally said four hundred and sixty five million of our customers. Oh. So I don't know I don't agree. Doesn't mean they use No the No I They agree. No, they they actually do say four hundred sixty five million customers enrolled in PASKIS. Not in this post. Uh let me look it up. I got an email. In this post, PASCI is one of the most useful changes in user auth security. Guess what? 465 million of our customers agree. All right. This is the email I got. Oh yeah, you got an email. Let's do it I'm just looking at the link. Yeah, no, I I well it should be in there too. Like so where is this I don't agree means. Like yeah, you're right. Oh no, you're right. And the first quarter of twenty twenty six, more than four hundred sixty-five million customers have enrolled pass keys in their Amazon accounts. That's the language. That's amazing. I just it doesn't seem like it passes the sanity test. It's almost like it's every it's everybody, you know, basically. I mean how many well they must have billions 'cause I guarante I mean Lisa's not using PASKIS on Amazon. Most people are. I know we agree. Everybody should be. Put her on the phone. Um we were talking about this this morning. Yeah. And she said, you know, I really should be using passkeys everywhere. And I said, Yeah. She said, but I don't want to take the time to go through all my accounts. Right. Which one you have to do this. Just do it. A good password manager would tell you which ones support it that you're not using, right? That's true too. This is a good feature. But I don't think you have to go through everything. Just as you use accounts, whenever you log in, uh and you go, Oh, another password, see if they have passkeys. And if they do , which is, you know, reasonable. I do have two Amazon accounts. I mean I suppose let me I gotta ask Perplexity how many how many p how many people have Amazon. I love that you turned immediately to Perplexity. Well I paid for it, I might as well use it. Amazon accounts globally. Right. Cause if they only oh wait a minute, I'm not locked in. Let's see restore. Can I restore it? Something went wrong. Okay, by perplexity. Sorry I pay for you. Don't make me regret this. No make me I gotta I yah gottada. Okay, what would be the next God, everything's malware blocked? What is going on on my machine? You rocket it. This is what happens if you this is what happens. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's exactly probably what it is. Yeah. When I go home, net Netflix is gonna be like, Where do you live again? What the hell is happening? Yeah. Do you you must go through that, right? That's a huge problem. Yeah. Cause suddenly and and what how do you watch TV? Do you don't don't does So we don't watch much live TV, but when we do that's out in the world somewhere, like a sports or whatever. So we just we have Apple TV. Oh okay. And the Apple TV complain. We do uh we do watch Netflix here though. It works. I mean it's fine. I have a I mean I also uh on this trip I've used Proton VPN on the Apple TV the whole time for the first time. Like it's interesting. Yeah. I didn't know you could do that. That's great. So it thinks you're in Pennsylvania. Yep . And I am, uh Leo, wink wink. Um I I uh I sure am. I don't know why I just said that out loud. Uh it's fine. Okay. So he this is wrong. I mean, this is chat GPT working really hard, by the way. I mean, it has been looking at the city kick the hell out of it. It's looking everywhere. Yep. Says I'll go with about 300 million Amazon accounts. Amazon does not disclose this. So that's not that number. That seems small though, right? Uh you know, given how much money this company makes , most of which is on literally things being shipped around the world. I I I don't know. I don't know. That's an interesting question. I don't know. I don't know how to even Hello Marcelo in Argentina listening today. I think art Marcelo and I had a lovely meal in Buenos Aires, I think, many years ago. I believe. million users across Amazon through its mobile app. Oh, okay. All right. I mean I anyway, the ChatGPT has apparently given up. It's gets checked everything from Axi os to Substack trying to find a number for Amazon accounts. Right. We're gonna get it. Let's look at uh uh AWS's internal servers. Hold on for one second. Yeah, really. Come on. You're you're you're chat GPT, you should be able to look this up anywhere. Yeah, I don't know. All right, I give up. Let's take a break. Maybe by the end of the commercial. It this says this is a site, but it says Amazon had six hundred thirty-five million users on its e-commerce. Oh, that's the same thing. But it's just said it different way. You mean regular retail customer accounts? Like on the app, you know, which No no it's going with three hundred million. So uh I don't know. I think and I think this is wrong. Anyway. All right, so I'm still puzzled by the four. I'm gonna write a story that's gonna say Leo Laporte Colon, Amazon is a liar . And um using math to support this uh assertion. You know, I don't know. I where would it get so yeah I just I don't Copilot says Amazon has three hundred and ten million a monthly active users. So 465 million PASCI users is a nonsense number. Well, if it's monthly active, so you know it's not all the users. True. Huh. I don't know. Huh. But in if they're not active, why would they send up a password? And at least three of those customers are paying for Amazon Alexa Plus. So I am, I'm sad to say, although it's it's jaunty. It has uh different personalities. No, it is it has different I'm using the sassy it's sassy personality. Jauntily wrong. That's funny. There's nothing like jaunty AI. Let me just say Everybody wants jaunty AI. Yeah. Let's take a pause that refreshes and then we will get to the Xbox segment back of the book coming up. We've got some uh I think there'll be something interesting because uh Richard is in Belgium in Antwerp and I imagine last time you were in Belgium you had something interesting to tipple. Our show today brought to you by Threat Locker . Love these guys. Actually, I'm wearing the shirt that I got when I went out to Zero Trust World in uh this uh in fact, Richard was with me when I bought this shirt. This was from uh the Houston, not Houston, uh Kennedy Space Center. Let's see, it's got all the badges of all the Apollo's and all it. Uh Threatlocker is amazing. We love them. They're zero Trust platform delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. And with the big announcement they made at Zero Trust World, they now do not only endpoints, but networks and the cloud with zero trust. By extending zero trust enforcement to cloud services and company networks, ThreatLocker really is going the extra mile, ensuring devices are validated through a secure broker , that means even if uh an employee is successfully fished, attackers would actually have to have physical possession of the user's trusted device to go any further. That's huge. 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It's a G2, high performer, and best support for enterprise summer 2025. Pierce Spot ranked threat locker number one in application control. GetApp gave them their best functionality and features award in 2025. And the awards list goes on and on and on. I won't read them all. Just trust me, it's the best. And guess what? We're already gearing up, Richard. And this time, Paul, I want you to go. We're already gearing up for Zero Trust World 27, ZTW 27, where they'll host some of the brightest cybersecurity experts. It's the seventh in a row. It was so much fun last time . Zero Trust World provides crucial education and training to support IT professionals along with full session access. I did a couple of the hands-on hacking labs. They were fantastic. There's a great after party. I will keep my costume. I'm re I'm ready. You don't want to miss this exciting interactive three-day event. It's happening February 17th through 19th in Orlando, Florida, so please set that date aside. I want to see you out there. Visit threatlocker.com slash twit right now. Get your free thirty-day trial. Learn more about how threat locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com slash twit. We thank him so much for their support uh all year long of uh Windows Weekly. We appreciate it. You remember I when you were picking up that shirt, I got the little jumper for the grand baby that says I, need my space. Yeah. So 'd that go? I got pictures. Oh, that's so cute. So cute. Uh yeah, that was that was the best. Kennedy Space Center. And then we went to Gator World. And I have a Gator shirt. Uh I don't know where I'm gonna go next time. There is apparently a sloth world. Of course. I'm not a big fan of the only in dot dot dot, like only in Florida type things, but in that case, like only in Florida, like Orlando Orlando is pretty Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely an interesting place. Apparently Sloth World has had a uh problem lately, a number of large numbers, several dozen sloths have passed away. I don't know how you know. It's the new bumblebee problem or bee problem or whatever. Yeah. I was reading about it. I thought, how did we miss Sloth World? We saw Capy Baras at uh Gator World, which was great. I don't know if they have them there for food or or oh god amusement, but it's still I always wanted to see a copy bar. Anyway, enough of that. Let's let's move on to the Xbox segment, Mr. T . Yeah. Um number of things this week. If you are in we talk about the Windows inside of program a lot, but there is also an Xbox insider program . And if you were in that, there's a new update rolling out now for insiders, uh, that has basically three new features. So one is a a new uh boot time animation for the console, um, which they had previewed on Twitter or whatever a couple a week or so ago. Um, there is a uh they're doing like badging now. So when you have game of score milestone, so the game of score is when you get achievements in games and your the total is the game of score, right? Of all those achievements. Um they have badges now for Miles Sons like 10,000 achievements, I guess, or achievement points. Well, the gamers score points through achievements, right? Like twenty thousand, thirty five thousand you could say, you know, a million, three million, five million, whatever. Um, that's whatever. And then this uh just a new way to filter the game library so that um uh to me, but who cares anyway? Just some filtering. No big deal. I was kinda I saw this thing, I'm like, oh cool, they're they're racing for it. No, it's kind of small. Um Forza Horizon Six is coming out soon, unless you're on Steam, in which case you could have gotten an early leaf copy. Um and uh apparently it was not supposed to be leaked. It was someone I don't know, someone someone figured out how to access the game early and uh I wish I could remember the the time frame, but I I think I think Steam said the anyone who played this game is going to be banned from Steam for 8,000 years. I think I it think it was was it was some stupid it was some stupid number. Like you're just never coming back. I think it's not like somebody downloading that game is like in on the scam. They saw it and they downloaded it. Come on. I know it's crazy. But um anyway. Uh early access launch is May fifteen, which is in two days. So this Friday as we record the show. And then I the release, the general release, I think is May, it's next week sometime, May 91th, I think. Um okay . If you're a Discord fan andor user, I guess you would be a fan because they have uh Discord Nitro subscriptions, right? And so um Nitro is the nine ninety nine a month version, uh ninety-nine bucks a year. And they uh just added a new Xbox related perk, which is Xbox Game Pass Starter Edition. And this is the one that gives you like access to over 50 games across PC and console. Um actually that's the whole thing pretty much. So um yeah, I mean that's that's cool. I mean, I wouldn't personally pay for Discord. Um I feel like I pay for Discord every time we do the podcast because that app and that up at app updates literally every single time. Every it does, doesn't it? Every single long update. Yes it is. Yep. Uh they've somehow managed Electron. Yeah, exactly. Um okay. So Mojang, which is the Microsoft company that owns uh or you know does Minecraft, uh they have these uh I don't know if they're quarterly or every so often they have like a Minecraft live event . Um, they're gonna do one during what's called TwitchCon Rotterdam, uh, which is Saturday, May 30. So they're gonna announce new stuff about uh updates to the game, you know, blah, blah blah, whatever. So there's literally no information beyond that. So uh May 30, there will be a Minecraft announcement or series of Minecraft announcements . Um so uh we know that Microsoft 's not selling many consoles, um, but they also don't tell us how many they're not selling. Um Sony and Nintendo do tell us how much they're selling, and now they're sell telling us how much they're not selling. Um because this most recent quarter was terrible for both of them. So Sony sold 1.5 million PlayStation 5 video game consoles in the most recent quarter that ended March 31st, probably. This is by far their smallest number of PS5s ever sold. Um sequentially going back in time, the previous figures were seven point nine million, four million, two point five million, two point eight million. So they sold seven point nine million last during the holiday Right. But this was a particularly year over year bad um first party . But I'd also say hardware sales across the board are off this year because Yeah, but it's the whole business like Right. For all this yeah. And you know, they've r had to raise prices, et cetera. But you know, the the revenues from first party software sales are down. Um th they're uh digital numbers are big, like meaning eighty-five percent of people who buy games to PlayStation do so digitally. Um that situation is very different on Nintendo, which we'll get to in a moment. Um the overall game and network services uh revenues, which is the part of Sony that does PlayStation we're flat basically year over year. Um you know, like hardware revenues, 110 million yen last year in the same quarter, 183 million. So it's like not not, you know, not great. Uh monthly active users are good, actually. So they they're pretty steady uh and they were up pretty good from a year ago, 133 million versus 124 one year ago. So it you know the people out there are using it. I mean it're just not selling as many. But they're not buying new ones. Yeah. This is a great year to skip it with the price prices being up on all those sorts of things. So I think you see that. Yep. Still kind of price Nintendo sold as many as they have, except that I know they ran out of them over Christmas. So maybe first catching up. The Nintendo one is weird to me because um you know they launched Switch 2 in I think June last year, so we don't have you know we don't have a full year yet. Um it got off to the fastest start ever for any Nintendo hardware. But I think we all kind of understood that the original Switch is by far the best, well, not by far, is the best selling uh switch Nintendo console. If you forget about the mobile stuff, it is by far the best -selling. Um , and I just I never felt like this was gonna have the legs of the OG switch. I just don't we, you know. Um, and it's kind of collapsing a little faster than expected, but it but for the reasons Richard just kind of alluded to, which is you know, the whole component crisis stuff. All the everything is bad. So um let me see if I can come up with this. They sold two point four nine million units in the quarter ending in March. Um they've sold a total of just under twenty million units for their fiscal year, which also ends in March. Um the previous quarters were seven million, four point five four million and five point eight two million and that goes backwards. So 7 million is the holiday quarter. Um it makes sense that this would be the slowest quarter of that year, but it just came out too. So um their quarter was fine financially, but they warned on the coming year. Um, which is good, they're then this is their only business, right? They don't have other stuff. Sony, you know, makes washing machines or whatever they do, or they have other stuff they can sort of rely on if they have to, but this is all Nintendo does. So they lowered their uh they well first they've raised the price, remember the switch to, or they're about to, I think that's still about to happen. Um, or maybe it just happened. I don't remember it. Um, but they've also lowered their estimates for the current fiscal year for unit sales. So previously it was about twenty million units. They were expecting no, I'm sorry, that's not true. Uh that's what they just sold. This year they expect to sell sixteen point five million. So they did lower their estimate, but I I don't think we ever saw that estimate. I think they just said that that's what happened. Um, they also sold another 560,000 original switch units in the quarter, you know, down from 1.36 million, whatever. You know, they was hovering around a million for a while. Um, so that console has sold like over 156,000 . Yes. No. Million. No, what? 156 million. Sorry. I wrote that as thousand. That's not right. That's an yeah, which is awesome. Uh but software sales were up, you know. Yeah, like you said, b you know, the markets are saw are are the the work is soft as stuff, so people are gonna play their machines, but they're not gonna buy 'em. Yeah. So So yeah. the two other data points are about 55% of Switch software cells are digital, up from about 54% of year. So it's yeah, I think it's low too. Um but you know they they come on these fun little card things. L Iike don't know it's kind of like a it's kind of a thing in that market. And then it's retro. Yeah. Yeah. It is, right? I mean I want my games on vinyl. Yeah. You want like a fun little carrier like you would have for CDs, but really small because these things are tiny. Um I don't know if it was last year or two years ago, there was like a like a Super Mario movie or whatever they did awesome, and it actually really helped them a lot, which they really needed at the time because you know the original Switch was winding down. But this year they have a Super Mario Galaxy movie that's out that's sold, you know, has made a hundred or I'm sorry, eight hundred million in revenues in its first four weeks. Who watches these movies? What is wrong with you? Apparently. I mean the great thing when you get a good kid movie is the kid wants to just keep going. Yeah, that's what it is. It's why baby shark is so big. Okay. So just play it over. Back in my day we just not my day, my kids' day, we had Caillou, we had Dora the Explorer, we had the Telet ubbies. It wasn't the same. Teletubbies. Oh my God. We had Barney the Barney . Yeah, Barney. That was before my kids. Uh yeah, Barney the Dyson. Oh, you're so lucky. Well, I but we did have the teletubbies. I but the teletubbies is like curious storage where they screw up constantly and then some adult figure, in that case, the new new vacuum cleaner, cleans up after them and they never learn any lessons. And I'm sorry, but like as a parent, I have a huge problem with this. Like I always hated this. I hated this so much. If I could take out curious jersey with a sniper rifle, I would do it right now. Oh my god. Um Making a joke. He just is a is a cartoon monkey. It's fine. It's not a person. It's okay. Has no tail, by the way, despite what many believe. Like we said, curious. So not a monkey then. Oh no, anyway. Um anyway, let's move on from that. Uh so I like most normal people with brains, I get excited every time this Apple suffers a legal defeat. But in this case what happened was the U.S Su.preme Court said that it would not review this uh awesome remedy thing that's occurring in the uh Epic v Apple case. So the next steps are that they will get in front of Jarge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Roger, who by the way is the judge in Elon Musk versus OpenAI, right? She's awesome. Yeah. And determine how much Apple can charge for the services it offers to its app store. And I'm guessing it's not gonna be 30 and 15%, but we'll see you know, we'll see how how low can we go? We're gonna find out. How did Apple get here? Honest to goodness. Talk about by being belligerent jerks. Um is so yep. That's how we invented an arbitrary price and then we defend it to you know like as if it were sacrosanct or something now it now it's going back to judge Gonzalez Rogers who is not happy with this company. She referred an e executive of the company to the attorneys general for lying lying on under oath. Yep, that's Apple. I I don't think she's gonna be that sympathetic to the other. What apples on your iPhone uh stays in Apple's pockets. Oh no that's not the phrase. Sorry. It's it's fun. It's fun. That's fun. A billion hands in your pocket, y'all . Should have made a deal. All right . Uh you know what's next? I'm so excited. The best part of the show, the back of the book is just around the corner. Before we do that though, I'm gonna make you pay I'm gonna make you join the club dollars a month. Now this is a good deal. Ten dollars a month gets you ad-free versions of all the shows. It gets you special program we don't do anywhere else, including by the way, especially by the way, because I don't, you know, look, I'm not a paywall f an. So we don't really paywall anything except we've been forced to paywall the keynote speeches because every time we put Apple's keynote speeches on YouTube, they uh they threaten us with a strike and a takedown . Uh so we decided rather than jeopardize our YouTube account, the keynotes from now on will be club only. So there's one coming up Tuesday that,'s WW No, I'm sorry, Google IO . That'll be 10 a.m. Tuesday, this coming Tuesday, and that will be only visible to the club members. Sorry, everybody else. Normally what we do is we stream everything in public. And I believe in that because I don't want to keep anybody who can't afford to join the club out in the cold. I'm not I'm not that kind of person. But we do need your support. I mean, that's what keeps us going. So we do want to reward people who join the club. So the reward is no ads, no plugs, no begging. You get ad-free versions of all of our content. You get access to the club to Discord. Now that is fun. Uh it's it it is nice to be in a social network where people have to pay to be there. The quality just soars because of that. Uh and you don't get the bots, you don't get the spam. It's just really uh high quality a social network. I love it. Uh you get all that extra programming. Stacy's book club is coming up on Friday. Great book, by the way. Can't wait to discuss that. We've got the AI Users Group. All sorts of stuff happens in the club. But the most important reason is you're supporting independent podcasting, not owned by a big company, uh, not beholden to anybody we cover. The only people we work for are you, our viewers and listeners. We appreciate your support. And if you're not a member, I'd love it if you'd join twit.tv slash club twit. Enough said, that's all. Just wanted to say that. Experience and membership that back's what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Get two times membership rewards points per dollar on eligible purchases and key business categories, as well as on each eligible purchase of $5,000 or more, on up to $2 million in eligible purchases per calendar year. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more at American Express.com/slash business dash platinum . Where is Daredevil ? Alright . Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I believe we're gonna we're gonna take this city back over Medicaid in an all- new season, now streaming only on Disney Plus. They're hunting us. It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil , born again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappertino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Now let's return to Windows Weekly and Paul Thurat with uh his ek his world famous. Okay. I hate the pressure that you put me under. Actually he did the Xbox. It's the world famous tip of the week. Two tips. I one is real I I've been working on this switcher series of articles um since the beginning of April. Actually, it's probably the end of March. So this one it's gonna it's extending into this month. It's gonna be a busy month because we're going back. We have some travel and whatever. But I'm gonna expand it beyond like OS platforms to include things like applications and services. So I wrote something up about web browsers. And by the way, part of the advice there is use a third-party password manager, obviously. Um a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Helium, which is one of the newer kind of Chromium-based browsers, uh privacy security focused. Um it doesn't even support like account sync of any kind. Um I love it. Like I love this thing. It's it's almost like um it's basically Brave, but even more lightweight and with less going on in the UI. So you you know in Brave you kind of want to turn certain things off if you don't want like their wallet thing or their VPN or whatever they offer. This thing has none of that. It's just really stripped down and light, and I love it. Um And then this is this is so random. I have no idea why this was uh uh promoted to me on YouTube, but I was I just went to YouTube the other day and there's something there called Cloud FM, which is described as music for thinking and building. And it's that little crab character from the uh probably open claw, but the you know, the cloud code thing. Yeah, cla it's clawed, the code. That's the little Yeah. So he like he he fries an egg or whatever and he flies he flies in space. He plays a guitar. That's going too far now. But he but but it's all it's eight bit and it's cute. But the thing is it play it plays this kind of um uh ambient music in the background. It kinda reminds me, you know, like uh Richard does the uh dot net rocks um podcast with Carl Franklin and Carl has recorded a lot of music to code by like uh you know uh where he put s it twenty seven tracks of it. Yeah, like that it's grown over time and it's it's kind of the same theme in a way. Um there's a lot less of it from Anthropic so far, but uh it will I showed my wife making green eggs and hands. We sat there and watched this for like half an hour the other I c I think I can play the music, right? This is generated. It's this is music to code by. What makes music good to code by? No lyrics probably. Yeah. Twenty minute units and you know uh one of the things I've noticed with music to code by the certain tracks that I like the most and literally it's now in my psyche to send me into the zone hear it. But that's great . So it's worried so it's actually working for you.. Yeah It's a chance. I find I find any music to be distracting when I'm writing, especially. Uh unless I'm on a plane, oddly. Then I do always listen to background track. Yeah, I can't explain that, but this emergency. Well, because you're using noise canceling headphones, you don't want to hear the jets, you don't want to hear the babies crying, so you gotta have a little background. There's uh the the last album that uh uh yeah Pink Floyd put out was all instrumental. And like that's an it's like it's called like the river or something or the river something something, but it's uh it's just a great you know, it's it's nice for that. Like in this, you know I saw a tweet from somebody who said he's been coding for twenty years listening to fish. Okay. Right. Which would probably be okay, Code. It's just all Ozzy Osbourne. You know. It's a jam band. It's like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Thought it was kind of cute. This is a little soporific, a little repetitive. But I guess it's the idea is to get your ADD calm down. Exactly. That might be what attached me to it. I don't know. Yeah. Um , I already mentioned helium like an idiot. Uh so two things on the afternoon. I mentioned helium already. So so so helium is only on the desktop. So one of the the problems is there's no mobile client. But I I think you can mix and match pretty easily with that kind of thing. If you are on an Apple device, there's uh a mobile browser called Orion which is similar, although they have sync and and so forth. And uh Orion is another one that offers kind of a nice uh experience, but on mobile, but only on the Apple side so far. Um I had forgotten about this app. I I maybe I'm wrong. I feel like I use this on Windows phone or you know, I think I did like back in the day, or but uh Snapseed, which was made by an individual, it was a small company or whatever, um, originally for the iPad. So the year the iPad came out, it won the award for like best iPad app the first year they did it. Um then it went to iPhone very quickly, then it went to Android and then Google bought them. And they don't release major milestones all that often. 3.0 came out last summer, I think, but only on the iPhone. But now 4.0 uh is out and it's more full featured on Android this time than it is on iOS. But um I've been looking at uh camera apps and also photo editing apps on mobile. This one is this is this is really impressive. Like I've not looked at this in so many years. Um it's astonishing like how many uh tools and fixes and things there are in this app. It's really, really good. It's worth looking at if you've never heard of it or haven't thought about it in years like me, um it used to I know it used to be on Windows. I feel I swear to God I used this on a phone, but it was a million years ago. I don't remember. Um anyway, it's worth checking out. It's free. And it's a stock Um please install a new web browser. Every freaking week. I know, I'm sorry. It's all right. Helium is good. I installed it some time ago. It's a good one. It's good. I'm I would love to see it. I feel like everybody needs a Chromium based browser as at least your second. I use Zen, which is a Firefox spin. I really love it. But everybody needs a Chromium browser in the back pocket just in case . Uh and helium's probably if you want to I mean and what oh and I should say so there's a site, you know, cover my tracks or cover your tracks, which is the EFF from EFF, yeah. This is the only browser I've ever seen out of the box where it's comes up gre en for everything. Like it's it even the even the fingerprinting thing comes up right. Like I've never seen that before. Like yeah, even Brave doesn't do that. You block Origin built in, I think. Yeah, oh right. Actually, so there's the caveat, I guess. Yeah. Um, but it works really well . Well there you go. Joe . And if you only use it as a secondary browser, the sync isn't important because you're not really bookmarkings. I mean, Zen has all my very elaborate bookmarks and tabs There's an astonishing photo that Joe Esposito has posted to the Discord . I have been uh unfortunately missing there have been so many good photos coming over the transom here and I've been missing a lot of them This will be a new segment on the show where we show what's going on in the Discord This is a good one. Oh yeah. There you are. Sniping curious George. Yep. And you look a little worried, like you might be. No, I'm like, I want to get it right. I'm like uh you can thank you can thank me later, world. Oh my god, with his fifty millimeter cannon. Uh let's see. I know they've been putting a lot of good stuff up here, and I haven't really been showing them I should spectacular. Yeah, I really should because uh these guys this is this is why i love oh this is a fun one when during the club twit thing i'm uh promoting a trash 80 there but this is an old radio shack at Joe Esposito is a Photoshop whiz, not an AI guy, so he takes uh uh original ads and then puts our own you know content in there. It's pretty good. He's really good, I have to say. There we are as teletubbies. Yep. Oh no. And then they run around in circles, you know. Which one of these is the girl teletubby? I don't remember. Oh boy. I think they're all uh in the right are they gendered? Yeah, they're in dramatic. Yeah, there they are. Okay. There's Bar ney, the purple dinosaur. Okay. Here's Mario. I think we've got I've got a lot of people that people need to keep themselves entertained while they're watching this. Here we are. Here we are with the sloth. Yeah. Visiting. Actually, uh they've closed Sloth World. I'm very sad to say, because of the now fifty-five sloths have died uh in Slothworld, including Dumpling. The must much beloved Dumpling So I think that we there is something here we are in our space outfits. Thank you, Daranoki . Uh one of these will end up being the thumbnail for the show. You know that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Here's the sad story of Dumpling, the fifty fifth slothworld death, which now has uh caused Slothworld. Into the death of dumpling. Dumpling . How do you can't get much more Florida than that, really? Exactly. I'm sorry if your kids are watching this. That's probably pretty upsetting. Sorry about dumpling, guys. Now, ladies and gentlemen, Richard takes over. Uh an adult finally in the room. It had to happen eventually. Unlike with the teletubbies. We're all telletubys in the end. What's coming up on Runes . Uh published today was my conversation with Vaishnavi Ghudura about production LLMs. Now what do you figure is the largest LLM uh application like that uses uh that it has LLMs embedded in it runs every day. Um I think it's teams because every team's call does transcript summaries, multiple languages and and Vesn avi is one of the ladies that operates that system and just talked about what it means to manage five hundred million Teams calls a share. Wow. And they and what that what it takes to scale systems to run those kinds of language models on all those things and also cover all the rules of the countries, all the regulatory bodies for that kind of data transcription. Like it's a huge problem. And just it's one of those things where you come out the other side of it going, pfft A, I'm glad I don't have that job, and B, what you're doing is easier than what they're doing . True, true. Yeah . Anyway, it's a great opportunity to talk to just an extraordinarily brilliant lady who just w cranking on a hard problem with a great team. Run as radio, episode 1036. You get it at RennesRadio.com. And now I'm wondering: do you have something from Belgium this week? I went shopping in Belgium, because you know, and it's Belgium. You know about Belgium. Nobody likes Belgium. Beer. They're famous for beer. Mannequin piss. And mannequin piss and Bruce. Right? Yes. You put the ba in Benelux. You put the ba in Benelux. You're Belgium. What's that um the the bear with the pink and uh uh uh uh elephant is from there um yeah, I drew it.'m gonna tal Ik about that later. So uh Belgium is Flanders in the north, which is the Dutch speaking spot, although they are their own variant called Flemish or Belgian Dutch. The South part is Zwallonia, which is much more the French speaking part, and then there's of course there's Brussels, which is actually in Flanders, the Dutch part, but they mostly speak French there. Is Antwerp in the Flemish part? Where what is Antwerp? Yeah, it's for yeah very much up against the Dutch border here. So I flew I actually flew into Amsterdam to the train down. Only takes about an hour. It's a it's a great ride. Easier than flying into the Brussels airport I swear. Uh this is also the country that just doesn't have government s sometime. You know, in twenty ten their election uh was so uh bro uh their their election had so many parties involved they couldn't get a coalition together to actually make one for five hundred and forty one days. What? Wh seichems like a lot. Except that in 2018, the same thing happened again and they didn't actually have a government for 652 days. What? And you know what happened in that time ? Nothing. They were fine. That tells you it's Belgium. Yeah. They're kind of chill. At one point during that that long break , they talked about actually splitting the country up. Flanders going to the Netherlands and Wallonia going to France. Like, let's not be a country anymore. But of course, Brussels make that all impossible. Um, this is the headquarters for NATO since 1967. This is the de facto capital of the EU. Normally there isn't the capital of the EU, but there are some major centers and the one in Brussels is huge. And like you said, Leo, it's all about the beer, the Trappists, the Lambics, the Whitbeers, the Césan, the Strong Ales, like the Christmas beers. So many years. So if you're so good. If you're going to talk about a whiskey in Belgium, it only makes sense that it's a 15-year-old distillery attached to a 500-year-old brewery. But maybe we should go to the start . We're talking about the low country lands here, this area that they now call Belgium. And there's evidence of human habitation going back 100,000 years. So that's mostly Neand erthal . Even the Neolithic period, this is the western edge of what they called the LBK or the linear pottery culture, so named because their pottery has a very distinctive style with bands on it. That was about 7,000 years ago. So 5,000 BC. They were doing agriculture here fairly early on, one of the very first agricultural societies anywhere. That actually collapses after a thousand years and literally for two thousand years there's no evidence of farming in this area whatsoever. We don't see really permanent farming culture around here till about the end of the bronze age, 1750 or so The Celts show up in this part of the world about 500 BC. They were the big traders, of course, so the trading into the Mediterranean and so forth. And Julius Caesar himself arrives in this area where he refers to them as the Belge uh during the Gallic Wars. And in his Comitare de Bello Galacchio, he describes these residents as a fierce confederation of tribes that of course they've won over between the Sine and the Rhine rivers, and this area remains part of the Roman Empire and subsequently the Holy Roman Empire until the collapse of the Western Empire in five hundred AD. So five hundred years this was Gallia, this was the Roman uh Roman uh part of the world. Uh as the Western Empire collapses, we get the Merovingian dynasty, followed by the Carolingian dynasty. They actually fight back and forth and have control in different times. Around 800 AD, you get Charlemagne in the area, and then after his death in 184 uh 814, there's a conflict for the better part of another hundred years until the Franks dominate, the French, sort of take control of that . And that largely breaks down into a series of feudal states for the 11th and 12th centuries. And so by the 1200s, this area is basically tested between the French and the English, going back and forth repeatedly while trade goes on through the Hanseatic Lead, which leads us to the story of this particular whiskey, which is uh actually made it's as the uh the golden Carol is, this particular one's the port oak. And uh this is from Mecklen, it's just south of here in uh outside of Antwerp, uh particularly in the Grutbenhof. So uh Mecklen is a small town, or not that small anymore, for people but back then, and there were these uh areas, these colonial areas, Bagajas, and this is the grand one. This was a religious a lay religious woman's community. So they didn't want to be nuns, but they did have a strong Christian influence . And the community was founded in 123 2. So this is old doctrine, old culture. And this particular one is seven and a half acres over 100 buildings now considered a UNESCO World Herit age Site. And this uh group of women were running a hospital, but they also brewed beer as part of their charitable mission. And in 1471, Duke Charles the Bold granted that uh group a tax exemption for their beer. It's always about taxes in the end. And they had operated continuously in that form for the next 400 years. It's not until 1872 that the Van Breden family, who were distillers in Blasfeld, further to the east, there, acquire the brewery because they want the tax benefits. And of course, they focus on ales because a lot of Belgian beer is ale-based. And by 1904, they breweries known as the Het Anchor or The Anchor, as it was such a important part of the city's past and it's always been there, always been part of the process. And so the name Golden Carolus actually comes in 1960 after a flagship beer. Remember, this is a brewery this whole time. And they Golden Carolus actually mentions the is about the golden coins that are minted during the uh reign of Charles V , the Holy Roman Emperor, and Charles the act the man himself, had spent his formative years in Mecklen, and so was effectively the brewer's patron saint . So by 2010, so again they've been making beer all along, Van Breedem and the V and the Leclef families finally build a distillery they call Distillery de Molenberg, uh on the back on in Blasfeld in their seventeenth century farmstead, which is w had once hosted the family's Ynever distillery. This part of the world made a very an early variant of gin called Yeniver, still aged with juniper and so forth. But that had long shut down, but they already had the space, so that's what they used. It's the common product. They moved that distillery to Mechlin in 2024. It's all very recent. Um and Charles LeCleff, which is the current managing director, is represents the fifth generation of the Van Breed Mc andClellff families that have run the brewery and now also the distillery. But it turns out he's the last. He has no family successor. And so he's actually at the end of 2024 sold the entire facility to the Bourgeois Hug n out of Mel, which also is a 300-year-old brewery, but never got into distilling. But they're famous for a beer called Deli rian Tremens, which is the you know name for severe alcohol withdrawal. It's a strong blonde ale . It's a good beer. It's been made later. Well, they because they call it delirious tremendous, it actually upset a lot of people. It was banned in the US for a while there. So they changed the name, but they put the pink elephant on it, and that's where you get the pink elephant from . So this is a very modern distillery. It's you know, built a modern way. They actually bought stills from Forsyth to Scotland. It was the first in Belgium because whiskey culture is not a it has not been around here for very long. It's not a big thing. But when you got a five hundred year old brewery and you're gonna make whiskey, you start with beer. So they literally use the same process that they make the Golden Carolus Triple, which is a 9% blonde ale . And at the point at where you would add hops to it and it becomes the ale, now they actually divert it into distilling, which has some interesting consequences. And I want you to notice this bottle is mostly empty because I was hanging around with a group of miscreants last night and we just had to taste it . Um now who's got delirium tremendous? Oh boy. I I call it being at work. But okay. But otherwise it's still it's a classic modern still, so stainless steel mash tons, ladder turns, uh they do the double distillation in copper pots. They of course use X-Bourbon barrels for their primary aging. And then they this in this case of this one, which is the port oak, they do their finish in Portuguese uh It's warehoused in Mecklan, which has got a good climate for this, relatively uh cool winters, mild summers, steady humidity. So they actually have a very slow angels loss. Uh they typically distill up to 68%. They barrel is 63.5. This is bottled at 46, I think I wrote down here, but it actually says 48%, so I probably misread it. This is the 48. And this is only a 500mm bottle. It's a small bottle. There aren't a lot of rules for Belgian whiskey, 'cause it is a relatively new thing. They've only been really making it from the two thousands. And so they're pretty relaxed. They don't care about what grain you use, although admittedly this is all barley, 'cause they do make it from be Their original uh head anchor whiskey was it was a single malt and it immediately won Best Belgian single malt, which is not much of an achievement when there's only two , but okay. Uh this porto condition is a much newer version. Now, this beer is of course because it's a port cast, it's got a lot of color in it, right? That's just cheating because you've got the port . It's not gentle nose. For a 48, it should be more fiery. It's just not. And that's typical of, you know, Belgian beer is eight , nine, ten percent, and you don't notice it till you drink too many of 'em. Mm-hmm . And they come in nice big bottles, just so you can't do come in nice big bottles. Here's what's really cool about this whiskey . It's got a beer note to it. It's kind of beery. It's got that sort of sudsy feel at the back of your throat. I mean, it's still heat going down. Like I'm definitely drinking whiskeys, no ways about it. But the same way when you take a big slug of ale, even after you swallowed, you've got sort of a juiciness in your mouth, it's like the beer suds, it's in there. And I figured out why. It's because they're using the ale yeasts, the normal yeast that they make the triple from. The usual distiller's yeast, which is also an ale-style yeast, right? Like there's ale yeast and there's lager yeast. The lager yeast are bottom fermenting and they're slow, they're for preserving beer for making lagers. Ale yeasts are fast, they run hot, they they uh cook off quickly, short duration, and so forth. But distiller 's yeast, the type that the Scottish use are very neutral. They don't have a lot of flavors in it. But man, this is Belgium. And Belgium takes their beer really seriously. So this is a bright flavorful yeast that's in that this whiskey was made from and you can tell. You can tell immediately. I swear to you, if you put Belgian whiskeys, and there's two that do this, that use the ale yeast. There's also one called Belgian Owl, which we'll save for next year, because I'm probably gonna be back. I'm telling you, you'd know right away. There's something so distinct about this. And it makes me laugh because there's so many countries that are trying to make whiskey that you can't distinguish from Sc ottish whiskey, right? We've tried them all. We go to all kinds of places. But all of a sudden, like, wait, this is Belgian whiskey. And you know right away, because the Belgians aren't afraid of serious yeast. And that's what they've done here. And it's made something super special. Now I picked up this bottle at Hoos Verloo, which is just down the road here. Guys were very nice, easy for me to work with. Cost me 51 euros. It's about 60 US dollars. And admittedly, that is only a 500mm bottle. So if you're going to balance that number out for a technical 750, we're talking about about a $90 bottle of whiskey. And unfortunately, not sold in the U.S. You can get Golden Carolus beer in the U.S. They've never exported the whiskey . Is that because they don't make enough? I think that's part of it. I think the licensing is complicated. I think this is still a relatively new product. It's just changed hands. So the new guys who who don't have a distillery at all, they're still going to figure this out. It'll be interesting to see what happens going forward on this. But I'm a fan of port barrels. I really like uh port yeah, port aging's great and their regular single malt there's won multiple awards and it's an and it by all means people say great things about it. But I'm telling you the secret of the Belgian whiskey is that ale yeast. That's made it just a thing that we would know immediately that it's Belgium. And that's I mean good on Belgium. You know, they've came up with a way to make their whiskey theirs. And I'm I'm delighted, delighted. Isn't that nice? And now it's you know ten o'clock at night here, so I don't feel bad having a drink or two. Yeah. I mean, by the way, Richard will take one for the team, no matter what time of the day or night, sometimes five AM. Six in the morning. Sometimes he doesn't. You know, he's he's that kind of guy. He's very selfless. It's not even day drinking. It's like m early morning drinking. Yeah. I I usually take a very small sip early in the day. That's probably what I'm saying. No, this is the end of my day, so I'm sorry that's the end of it. I'm delighted to find this whiskey. Just very I bet it's really good. I'm I can taste it. You don't get surprised very often, right? Genuinely, and then sort of unravel the whole plan and go, okay, I get what you've done here, and I'm here for it. Cool. Very nice. Very nice. Richard Campbell, uh, besides being our whiskey expert, also does a couple of really interesting podcasts, run as radio and with Carl Franklin.NET Rocks. If you're a.NET fan, I'm sure you know about that. That's the.NET Podcast. Both of them are at Runas radio . com. Paul Thorat has a very famous website called Thorat.com. No, it's coincidental. He has no relation to Thorat, but uh no, he does. It's his eponymous as a matter of fact. T H U Double R O Double Good dot com. Uh his books are at leanpub.com, although I'll give you a hint , you can get them for free. Windows Everywhere, the field guide to Windows 11, and of course the new D and Shittify windows, if you become a premium member at therot.com. So it's well, well worth your money. I'm a proud premium member. Uh and uh I guess Paul's heading back to f to Pennsylvania tomorrow tomorrow? Wow. Friday. Yeah. Friday. For a couple of months. Uh Richard, where are you headed next? Ber lin . Ah . That I am jealous of. I am so jealous. So many great places. Yeah, no, I'm really looking forward to it. And the Germans make some interesting whiskeys too, so I'll be doing some search it on Monday. Are you flying or training? Uh I'm gonna fly. I'm I'm taking the train tomorrow up to Alcamar to spend a few days with a buddy of mine and then Sunday fly to Berlin and home on the trains in Europe. It's so easy to get around. It's so great. So great. Uh well uh we will be back. We do the show every uh Wednesday 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it live uh if you're in the club, of course, in the club twit Discord, but if you're not in the club, you can still watch on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick. We want to be wherever you are. So that you can listen and watch live. And if you're in any of those places and you're chatting, I see your chat and I appreciate it. We'd love having you in the chat. Um, after the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at twit.tv/slash w ww. That's our website. And we have audio and video there, so you could take your pick. Everybody seems to be liking video more and more these days. I I still think audio's a dominant podcast medium, but uh yeah. But videos up and coming. I hear this YouTube thing's manifest. It might yep. It might catch on. You never know. We'll see. You never know. We are on YouTube. We have a Windows Weekly channel there. The nice thing about that, besides it making it easy to watch, is you can share clips from it. You know, you can actually jump to a part of the video and share it with somebody, and everybody can watch YouTube, so that's kind of a good way to tell people about the show. We appreciate it when you do that. Uh, but for somebody who watches every week or listens every week, probably the best way to get it is subscribe. Now, if you're a club twit member, you'll have a unique URL just for you that's the ad-free version. Uh everybody else put the, you know, just search, go to your favorite podcast client and search for Windows Weekly and you'll see it right there. You have a choice of uh audio or video or both. Actually, if you search for Tweet, you'll find that and all the other shows, something like 15 other shows that we do, all of which are subscribable. If you want to comment on this show, club members of course can do that in the Discord. There's a kind of mini forum for all the shows in the Discord. Uh, but everybody, it's open to the public can go to our forums at twit.community. Uh I don't mention them enough. And I uh I think it's a great way, and it's the only really way that you can directly comment on the shows. I read those comments uh and we appreciate those positive and negative you can also participate in our mastodon instance if you're a fan of the fediverse that's at twit.social both of those uh are open to twit listeners so, when you sign up, you won't get you know, I have to approve it because there's a lot of spam and bots out there. And I finally figured out I saw your post about this. Uh yeah, I finally figured out how that happened. So uh there is a organization called Iftas that that looks for disinformation on social networks. They sent me notifications a couple of days ago that there were like a dozen Russian bot accounts on twit.social. And I thought, well, I have to approve all accounts. I can't couldn't figure out how they got in. And then I looked at their application and they were invited by somebody. So that was a little loophole where you could invite somebody to join. Okay . And then I wouldn't have to do that Russian bot thing. I you know, I'm not really good associated. Don't invite Russian bot. Well I turned off invitations. So that ain't gonna happen anymore. You will have to you can't get in via invitation. You just go. I'm inviting you. Twit dot social . Uh all you have to do is m say I listen to Windows Weekly or any th you know, just as we mentioned. They need to be invited in. That's then they can get in. By Waterloo says, I only invited them for the free vod ka . They were nasty too. I mean the stuff they were posting, it wasn't uh nasty. It was it was disinformation. It was real propaganda. It was actually kind of interesting. And I thank you, Ift us for catching them. Uh and I think I've purged them all. Um at least I've turned off the invite capability. It was uh Julie invited them all. Thank you, Jul ie
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