Building a Markdown Editor with AI

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul's here. Richard's here. We've got things to talk about. WinHec is back for the first time in eight years. Paul talks about his experiences vibe coding a program yesterday and what he thought of the Google I.O. keynote, that and a lot more coming up next on Windows Weekly. This episode is brought to you by Out Systems, a leading agentic systems platform built for the enterprise. Organizations all over the world are building, orchestrating, and governing agentic systems on the Out Systems platform, and with good reason. Architect, deliver and scale governed agentic systems with agility and trust, using one open and unified platform, power secure company-wide agentic orchestration for core business operations. Teams of any size and technical depth can use out systems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost-effectiv ely without compromising reliability and security. Without systems, you can rapidly launch ideas from concept to completion. It's the leading agentix systems platform that's unified, agile, and enterprise-proven, allowing you to accelerate growth, reduce operational friction, and deliver real enterprise impact with AI. OutSystems, build your agentic future. Learn more at Outsystems.com/slash twit. That's outsystems.com slash twit . Podcasts you love from people you trust . This is twit This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, episode 984, recorded Wednesday, May 20th, 2026 for entertainment purposes only . It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And ladies and gentlemen, winners and dozers alike, here they are. Your champions of Microsoft journalistic fortitude. Mm-hmm. Boy. Your jugadores de Microsoft. You know what? I'm gonna adjust a little bit 'cause you guys are a little lower than me. There we go. Yeah, right. I don't know why. No, don't do that. I'm slouching. Oh, the ball's deflating. Okay. Okay. I think we're good. Head height. You're kind of in the middle there, Paul. You might want to uh sit up. Just sit up. I don't know what I can do. You know, you have big hair, it should reach the top of the screen. Ladies and gent lemen, I introduce to you our dear friends and compadres in arms, Mr. Paul Thorat of Thorat.com. Hello, hello, Pauly T . And uh little richie C. of uh run asradio.com. Radio A MC Richie Happy Days reference uh Richie Cunningham. Hello there, boys. I found my thrill. Woo you came back to Pennsylvania. He's in Penn. That's such good news. You know what the worst part about coming back is I have to go through Newark . I hope America welcome you back with open arms at the uh C VP folks said, Paul, we we've been missing you. Welcome back, and we see your Twitter account. Yep. The only um part of our government that's functioning correctly right now is the whole TSA Global Entry thing. Oh, you've got global entry that's oh my god right it was like right through. Yep. All you have to do is show them your eyeballs and you're good. I spent more time waiting for an Uber than I did getting from the plane to the Uber. Isn't that great? Yeah. As it should be. Yeah. Yep. Well on behalf of Newark, uh, I welcome you home. Up in New York. Screw yourself, buddy. Get out of here. What's that smell? And Richard, you're in BC? Nope. I'm in the Netherlands. Oh you were in Antwerp last week. So you've just crossed over. I already did Berlin. So I went up I went up to Alcar for the weekend and then I popped over to Berlin, did the show there, and then came I took the train this morning. Yeah, the fast train from Berlin. But yeah, that's the big yellow train or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And it boogieed. Yeah. Two hundred kilometers an hour. Ow. Yeah. How fun is that? I'm back asconced in my friend's home. The guy who owns his own whiskey shop. So needless say this week's whiskey is amazing. Amazing. Yeah. And it's always good to be, you know, this is my home too, and I get very comfortable here. We put the uh whiskey segment at the end of the show so that you don't have to listen unless you want to, and I'm making sure Paul says nothing of value after it. So there's no reason to stay tuned if you don't want to hear it. All the complaints actually there's zero complaints about the length of any of our shows. Right. Well, except for me. You know except for our hosts. The hosts are constantly complaining. The host is a living hell. But you know, whatever. I wanted to listen to Lex Friedman's uh latest podcast with uh David Hennemyer Hansen of the Ruby on Rails Guy till I saw that it was six hours long. Oh yeah, and the way that guy talks, it's gonna feel like twelve hours long. Yeah, he's like a slow talker. Yeah, I don't like I don't know what his deal is. Maybe that's the theory is that well, you're really only gonna listen for three hours. I don't know. Yeah, they bury they bury something important at our four. I'm just gonna say I no longer feel at the least bit guilty uh about the length of our shows, which are really pretty uh, you know, concise compared. Concise. Concise. That's the word I always use. Concise. The concise Windows Weekly. Let's talk. Um, I don't know. I'm thinking Windows. Yeah, I get a lot of stuff. Oh, well, forget concision, folks. You're gonna get concision. Detail. This is we live in interesting times. Um certainly do. So uh Microsoft seems to be getting back on a normal normal I almost put that in air quotes, but an actual normal release schedule for Windows. So sometime in the past, I don't know if it was Friday, I don't remember what day it was, but um because you know I just traveled and I'm out of my mind. But uh there is um a series of release preview channel updates in the Windows Insider program, including what I think is the first twenty six H one build to make it into release preview. And I know I or I think last week it came up that twenty six H one, which is on all these new Snapdragon X2 laptops, is like a month behind the rest of the planet in uh from a Windows update perspective. And so the twenty six H one release preview update is like last month's patch Tuesday and is a preview of the next patch Tuesday, which will be the second June and second, sorry, Tuesday in June . June, Pat . Yes. And is it's not there's nothing new here. You know, we talk about all this stuff a lot, but uh to me it's interesting they're finally doing this. So shared audio uh for over Bluetooth fit supported MPU usage, which is already in task manager, but I think a more expended view of that, multi app camera support, if your camera does support that, and some magnifier improvements, et cetera. So whatever. Anyway, that's happening. Of more note, however, was a set of updates that went out before that, um across the new channels, you know, like experimental and the new beta, I believe, which is our first look at the new taskbar features they were talking about as part of that pain point thing. And uh this is this is a weird Paul problem, I guess I'm gonna call this, but uh I came from a small apartment in Mexico City where I have sent 10-ish computers to this place where I have 40-ish computers. And man, I spent a long time trying to get this update on something . Like I , you know, like the the computers I'm actively using right now for the most part are these new Snapdragon X2 computers, and I can't get well, I could, but I'm not gonna screw on with one of those. And then as we'll discuss later in the show. I I've been you've been gone for five months. Like every single one of those machines needed an update, maybe three or four. Right. So start plugging them in and not even the new ones. I did have two computers and boxes waiting for me, and then um I brought I don't know, four home, I think. I don't remember. Um but yeah, I mean the they're all over place. So I I think between Google II , which uh all the AI going on there, which we will talk about a little bit, I think took down the West Coast, me bringing up all those computers at the same time and updating them brought down the w east coast. And uh I'm still not done, but I finally got one. I I have to do some hands on window stuff tomorrow. And I'm pretty excited I finally got it's a good computer too, so it'll be good for the show, but finally got that installed. So is that the ASUS? No, this is no. No. It's just secret. It's okay. No, no, no. It's not a it's just no, it's just a standard X64. It's a X64 computer is a pretty good GPU. So So it's a good computer to do like screen recording on. It's like a Ryzen AI seven something, something. I don't know. Um anyway. Uh so yeah, so everyone, uh I you know, the it it's a lot of it's big news, I guess, that you can move the taskbar around again, you know, like I don't think anyone does that. I mean, I don't mean literally anyone, I don't want to hear from all seven of you, but um to me the bigger deal that's in here and it is in here is the ability to make the taskbar small again, which is something we lost I guess from Windows 10. I don't even remember it was in 10, but I get it probably was. It's been a while, but um, you know, certainly before then, because the default windows 11 taskbar is actually pretty tall. Yeah, it's big. It takes up a lot of space. So one of the things I'd spent a bunch of I probably spent over a year doing this is just like hiding the taskbar. And then I had to put some little clock app that appeared over everything up in the corner because I couldn't see the time anymore because the taskbar was gone. And I found out that I actually look at the time a lot. You know. So anyway, having that be like a little skinny thing is awesome. And um I used and one of the other things I tried was uh if you install uh Stardux Start Eleven, one of the many options in there is you can have a small taskbar. So I was using that too, but um now it's gonna be built into um into Windows, you know, directly Windows 11. So that's that's great. You know, there's no new start menu stuff, right? So they're gonna be changing that too. You're gonna be able to resize it and do different things there. Um that's not part of this, but um but if you like the your world upside down, you can put your task around the top of the screen. So that's fun . Um num nom nom nom and I guess that one also came to Canary later um in a separate real update or whatever a couple of days or a day later, but who cares? Okay. Um and then I I I just put this in sort of an in certification remedy section because I wasn't sure what else to call this, but they all these things all and and actually that last thing kind of address that notion that you know Windows 11 isn't exactly what people want and Microsoft is finally paying attention and they're doing things, right? And so the first one on this list is uh Microsoft just held its first WinHec since twenty eighteen. Such a flashback name, man. Like I know. So WinHec tedly, it was an online e vent. Well, it no, they were somewhere. It was in um not Shanghai. Um it was somewhere in the middle uh the uh far east. Um when this thing began if you think about the natural progressions of things back when Microsoft made sense, um you would WinHec would be the lead place where you'd find out about some future version windows because they had to do the low level stuff first. So if there's gonna be some hardware advance like when they were doing TPM stuff maybe or uh uh you know a uh graphics driven user interface or whatever it might be, you know, WinHec would be the first place where they would talk about that stuff because that's where the driver developers would go, the hardware guys, et cetera. Um it became newsworthy enough that the press used to go all the time. So I I've been to many pr uh win hex, although I not to better it was in Taipei. Wow. Taipei. There you go. Yeah. Um but uh and then they would go from there and then they would have really like to have gone to that, you know. That would have been fun. Well, except I have to go there and it's like, yeah, no thanks. Um I'd love to be there, but I don't want to go there while you still can. That's what I'm thinking. Oh good point. That's true. So so uh anyway, back in the day after that they would do a uh PDC and now a build, but you know you now you're talking to application developers and they'd usually put a beta out and then whatever. That was the progression. So they haven't done this in a long time. They haven't done a winhex since 2018, like I said. Um and they just did one. So uh among the things that occurred there, they announced something called the windows I'm sorry, the driver quality initiative uh for Windows. And this is, you know, Microsoft basically kind of doing what they not taking it over like they did with printer drivers, but rather um doing the work that I this probably came out of CrowdStrike where you know you have uh in that case security vendors who were able to write kernel code and they can screw things up and did in that case, et cetera. And of course, one of the problems with uh drivers is that there's a transition between kernel mode and user mode uh in many cases. And so what they want to do is uh kind of raise the quality bar there so that um you know drivers won't crash your computer essentially. There there's a I mean they added this in Windows B originally, but there's there's there's long been this notion of if something hardware related caused your computer to crash, you just installed a new driver, you could roll it back when you came back. But now what they want to do is constantly monitor this and uh get you the latest updates through Windows update, obviously, et cetera, et cetera. So um so that's good. Yeah. I mean I again I don't think this is something a lot of people were clamoring for, but it's hard to look at this and be like, okay, this is this is nice. Um Microsoft also revealed uh through a support page, so they didn't reveal, but they but in a support page, they're going to allow um users to re map the copilot key to right control, which if you think about it, is sort of what it used to be before. So we used to have a control key to the right of the keyboard with a right alt . It turned into a right click menu key or whatever you call that, the context menu key for quite a while. Context menu, yeah. And then it became a copilot key. And of course everyone hates the co-pilot key and you know, Microsoft, b,lah b blahla,h. They, you know, they try different things. They don't really want to change it. They they kind of forced the entire industry to adopt this. You see this in all kinds of new computers. When they originally announced this, I thought it was going to be a um uh something you only saw on Copilot Plus PCs, but no, it's on pretty much all computers now. Yay. And um after a lot of complaining, they puts uh a control in into settings where you can change it away from Copilot, but only have And what I wanted to do is nothing. You know, I don't want to gouge it out with a knife like I'm Steve Jobs taking the Apple logo out of his Mac when he went to Next, but I hate this key so much. And um I've been using the uh PowerToys utility uh keyboard manager to remap it. I usually map it to the right arrow I'm sorry the, left arrow key. Whatever is to the right of it on that keyboard. Actually this keyboard, that's not even close. This keyboard has all kinds of additional things going on. But a traditional laptop keyboard, typically that would be the best one. Right beside my left arrow key on my server. Yeah, because I'm like, you know, I I type like an ape, so I'm gonna I'm making mistakes and and that's probably what I meant to hit, but yeah. My face on my keyboard. I generally want the keyboard. Or my cat walks across it, whatever it might be. Yeah. Um I I since they announced this or said this, I've been sort of look I I've been on a couple of computers remapping it to right control just to see if that makes any difference or does anything. But the goal for me is a key that does nothing. Yeah. Right. Exactly. I want to, yeah, I'm typing like I said, like an ape, and I just want to keep going and whatever. Just don't interrupt me. Don't flip up a dialogue. Don't don't. Just don't. Right. So this is my my uh goal in life is not to just write articles that rip on other human beings. Like I really am not into that . And you know, there was a thing that came up uh came up recently I would have talked about on the show, there was a an article on you know PC Mag or PC competing, whatever it was, some former magazine uh guy who's been around for a long, long time, Ne Neil Ru Ribbon King, who I like and respect. I I 'm not trying to criticize him, but you know, he basically said you can't trust what's built into Windows. You need like a third party antivirus. And we talked about this. I was like, yeah, no, you don't. Yeah. And I and I went through the whole thing that he wrote and looking for some like kernel of justification Like I'm not disrespecting this person. I I I just disagree with this opinion, you know, whatever. So that kind of came and went. I thought, well, okay, good. You know, it'll be like another year, you know, or something before I have to deal with that kind of thing again. Then I go on YouTube and I watch this video from this, like I've been watching a lot of Linux content lately 'cause I'm doing that switcher series. And there's this guy who most he's a privacy expert, I guess, or a privacy nut at least, but he does a lot of Linux videos. And I respect his opinion. I I like his content, I guess. He's kind of a weird guy, but of course he is. I just described what he is. And uh, you know, those people are wh what you think they are. Um and then come out of nowhere. Yep. So of course, because I'm watching his videos , um uh it YouTube recommends a video to me that he made about Windows. And just like the antivirus one, I'm like, yeah, don't do it, don't read it, don't watch it. Why would you? What do you think? And then it kept coming up and I'm like, okay. I don't value my own time. I'm gonna do this. And then I 'm yeah, the only way to get it off the roster is to actually watch it. So people listening to this podcast probably had this experience with me, uh, which is meaning um in this case listening to this guy and I'm like, no, no , no, goddammit, no. And then I'm like, all right, so I have to deal with this. Now, now I must respond. But I decided in this case just not to go through his thing point by point. I just kind of uh I I he is he's conflating privacy and security, um which you know I obviously they're interrelated. But I my central argument uh here, and this is very general, is that if you care about your privacy, you need to properly secure that thing first. In this case, a computer, um, that that will go a long way to protecting your privacy. Now, obviously if you're using Windows, you have other concerns because there's telemetry and other things you may not like, et cetera. There's tracking going on where they're you know gonna serve you ads because of that, yada yada yada. So there's additional things, absolutely. I you know that's that's true. But I I went through this and I was like, oh, try not to do this, try not to do this. And so I I I wrote an article just a without going into every little point he made, you know, the internet privacy guy . Just about, you know, how this matters and w whether it matters if you're going to stick with Windows or go to another platform, et cetera, et cetera. But then because I can't help myself, I wrote a very long article about configur ing Windows from the get-go, meaning you buy a new computer, it has Windows on it. You're not going to install Linux or something else. You're you are actually going to use it. But you know what I'm using the pre-installed version of Windows. Yeah. But you you don't want Microsoft in there as much as possible. In other words, you're not going to use OneDrive, you're not using Edge, you're not going to use Teams or whatever else it is in there. You want to turn off the telemetry. You want to do all that stuff. You know, I just wrote a book about disincertifying Windows 11. And, you know, uh because I feel like normal people are gonna read this, you know, one of my bits of advice in there is, um, you know, just use a Microsoft account for all the right reasons, but then do the the things to protect yourself as well. And in this case, I was like, All right, look, these guys, you when you you go on a Linux, it's a local account, you sign into a Mac, it's a local account. You can sign into Windows with a local account. Let's just do this from the get-go. So there 's there's problems with this configuration, including such things as your disk does not get encrypted when you do that, and you can encrypt it after the fact. And this is part of the thing where in his video I was like, nope, nope, nope. And so I was like, I'm just gonna write the one where it's like, no, this is right. And um so if you're interested in that configuration, um I written a pretty long article about it. And I have uh two computers here um that I'm using this way. Um I didn't use anything like Wind abloat or Tiny Eleven Build or anything like that. It's like I said, stock Windows, but then do all the right things. I never used the microscope. All the configuration settings. Yeah, wing get for every app. Um I don't and and from the web, not from the store. Um no Microsoft account, no uh OneDrive, no Edge, no whatever. And you know, the thing is, I uh I think for a lot of people, I I watch videos where people freak out about like all the ads in Windows and all the times things pop up and everything. And look, I I live this nightmare more than anybody and it's not as dramatic as people are making it sound. But but I get it, right? And so in one of the little Zen of Linux things for me is that there there is a certain if you're used to Windows and you and you experiment with Linux even, you can kind of see like, oh wait, this is my computer again. That's fun. You know, there is that kind of aspect to it. And you can you can actually kind of achieve that with Windows. So that was the the point of this. So I'm I'm doing that and we'll see how this I'm gonna keep doing it and we'll see how that goes. But it's it's very long and um yeah if that appeals to you there it is. Um and then I think last week we talked about Yeah last week Microsoft Edge was found to be uh loading every password you own into clear text. As designed. As di uh on purpose. Which sounds crazy. It's like, why didn't you punch yourself in the face? You're like, that was by design. Relax. Yeah. Um and I you know, I I probably compared it a little bit to the recall thing that came up recently only because Microsoft came back and said actually this is by design and in that case was not a security vulnerability. And I will say look uh one of the issues here is that you have to be signed in as a user for to even access this information. But that's how virus, you know, malware works, right? I mean, and it will run in the context of your user account. So if you're an admin, which you are um in Windows, you know, this that obviously is a problem. So I'm I don't remember exactly how I phrased this last week, but I I do know that my initial reaction to this was like, uh that doesn't sound smart because you know all of the browsers don't do this. You know, Google Chrome encrypts these things and decrypts as needed as you access each password. You don't load the whole thing into a plain text file or whatever. Um anyway, Microsoft. Yeah, it's it's it's it's kind of worse than lazy. It it's it feels like an oversight. You know, I don't feel like there was a bunch of meetings where everyone discussed it and we're like, Yeah, no, let's leave it as it is. You know, uh so uh I still feel very strongly that you should use the third party party bass or advancer and not use whatever's latent edge. But I think that's what we agreed on last week, too. It's like yeah. Which by the way, we'll encrypt that stuff and decrypt on the fly. Um, but Microsoft is gonna fix this. So if you do use edge and you use it in the default configuration, you're probably not watching this podcast. But uh if you know anyone in your family or whatever who is doing this, just know that uh this will soon be safer than it is today. So I guess that's good. I don't know. Fair enough. Safer. I don't recommend using Edge um personally. But you know, whatever. And they had a chance to make a great browser. They just chose not to. Yeah., right So maybe as part of this pain point thing, Microsoft is doing in Windows, there'll be some edge work. Well, this this is an example, right? I mean, we'll we'll see . Um Well, while I was in Mexico, I got uh two Snapdragon X2 laptops from Lenovo, which I flew home with because I like to carry hardware back and forth. Um and As us offered uh the the Zenbook A sixteen. So this is the um Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme Chip, right? The the I'm the only one you've gotten, right? Like that, yeah. Yeah. Um I think it's the only one in the market. I could be wrong, but I think right now um one thing we'll talk about this in the next section, but uh there appears to be like a a supply issue with X2 chips. Um I thought I thought ACES had an exclusive. Like they 're not . I mean Yeah, so uh in the last gen uh the Galaxy book whatever from Samsung had the only not the one that was in the dev kit, but the next one down, I believe was the only laptop that ever shipped with that one chip. Um so maybe they're doing I I can't imagine they're gonna relegate this chip to one computer. Uh there are two tiers of the extreme elite. Um the notable thing there is that these things have the memory integrated into the SOC. The bandwidth on that RAM is dramatically faster. And I I have this in the article somewhere because I looked this up. I was really curious about this. But um for example, if you have a Snapdragon X1, you know, the original family, no matter which version. The bandwidth for RAM is 135 gigabits per second, which I believe is roughly the same. Let me see if I can find it. I think that's roughly what a like an M3 MacBook Air is, you know, so it's got like I think all MacBook Airs, that's the speed of the CIE two times eight. Okay. So on the X2 family, other than the Elite Extreme , the the normal Elite and the Plus chips all run uh the memory bandwidth is 152 gigabits per second. So it's a you know a small ball or whatever. But the Elite Extreme chips run at 228 gigabits per sec ond. Okay. And that's a 50% improvement over the normal X2s, right? So money. Compared to the Apple side, I I had to go look this up. This is something I hadn't thought about too much ever in my life, I guess, even though I review these things all the time. But um to get a Mac that has that kind like RAM that's in the rough, you know, roughly the same category, you have to go up to a MacBook Pro, but then you also have to go to an M5 Pro chip, right? And so the base MacBook Pro, the RAM is not as fast as it is on the X2. But if you get a Pro Chip, that's faster. It's 307 gigabits per second of bandwidth for RAM. And if you get the M5 Max, it's 460 or 6 14 yikes. And they start to understand why that machine is that expensive. Because it's a $7,000 machine. The cheapest MacBook Pro you can buy that would compete with this from this perspective, which granted is not how anyone buys a computer, is over thirty one hundred dollars. Yeah. Which is about double the but the max is almost twice that. Oh it's probably three times that. Yeah, it's a lot more. I didn't even look it up. I don't even care, but um so this computer is uh sixteen it's sixteen inches. It doesn't have a numeric keyprint pad, which I love. It's so light it feels like an engineering sample. I had my wife like pick up just two 16-inch laptops side by side and I showed the first one normal. She's like, yep. I'm like, now pick up this and she's like, woo. And I was like, yeah. I'm like, it's like, it's uh it's like there's nothing inside it. Like it's that light. It's crazy light, um, especially for the size. Um, and look, I review a lot of laptops, and I gotta tell you, they're gonna have a hard time getting this one back for me. I this is this laptop think I might need one of those. It's awesome. Yeah, it's really, really good. So I mean I'll go through the whole process, but um I'm using it for this, but it's uh yeah, it's awesome. It's just awesome. It's nice to see I mean I I have nothing bad to say about how brilliant Max has been for the longest time. Because I thought it would just push the L. No, me by the way, I would say me too. Uh the the exception being the OS. Like I I mean I just hate it. And um if I could deal and I do everything I can to make it work the more like I'm I want it to, and I just hate it. Um and the A sixteen has an HDMI port on the side of it, so that's one less dongle I need to carry. Yeah. I think there's a yeah, there's like a a normal USB port than two Thunderbolt four slash USB four um ports. There's is a head you know, like a headphone jack thing, which is becoming less and less common, whatever. Yep. It's yeah, it's mostly pretty great. You know, eventually your Bluetooth earbuds run on a battery. Ask me how I know. Plug regular wired headphones in like an animal and let your headset charge. I guess I should just get two and switch between them. Like I don't know the answer to that. Right. I have USB C wired headphones that I keep in a in my panel bag, just in case, right? You know. And I I don't like to use them as I really have to, but um but I love using these things. So and that's why I connected in disconnected because I had plugged in the headphones after I connected to the screen whatever we're using here. Yeah. I should get the I should get a pair of my over ears with the USB C connector on it. Yeah. So anyway, um that works great. So I was super I'm glad it was worth the wait then . Well, I mean not waiting would have been good. Um but yeah, it's um it's a good one. Yeah. I feel like this thing, you know, before the so uh this configuration, I think, is this non-touch and touch versions of it, and uh this is the non-touch, which is what I want. And it's probably sixteen, maybe seventeen hundred bucks, which is probably two or three hundred bucks more than it might have been a year ago because of the component stuff. But um it's still I don't care. I I mean it's not realms. I might be buying one. Um but forty eight gigs around. Yeah, which is curious, right? And so I I saw someone in the comments compromise on price. Thirty two be too little, sixty four be too expensive, forty eight So yeah, so p someone had said something like, Well, the X two n the normal X two's uh elites come with thirty two, the Xtreme comes with forty eight. And I'm like, No, that that's not a hard you could put any amount of RAM on any of these computers. It's just that that's what they're doing. I just double checked the M five Pro Max comes with a hundred and twenty eight. So seven thousand dollars. Right. So in the system on a chip, they might actually have it's hard on, yeah.. Ye Yeahah. So it might be that they don't make that that's the part they made, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean Apple Apple has that issue with the Neo, right? It's only eight gigs because that's the part they have. Right. Yep. No, I mean that was the decision here. But the point is a PC maker could say I want sixty four, I want one twenty eight. If they can get the SOC with that in it. But the point is they could do it. But no one's building those things because they're gonna sell eight of those and what they want to do is sell a billion of whatever the other things are. Who makes this one? ACEUS? Yeah. The laptop. I'm sure they went to TSMC to get it, right? I mean who else? Well, I'm sure Snap or uh Qualicom did and ASUS got it through them. But yes, I mean the effect is still the same. I mean in the uh Qualcomm is humongous in mobile, they're the biggest company by far, but in the PC space they're not much. Right. So, you know, so they they're at the back of the line. Um right next to Microsoft. Yeah, Nvidia and Apple are eating all the capacity. Yeah. So uh and more more so NVIDIA. I wonder, I mean, do you see uh part uh uh people making this Yeah, but um probably not this year. Certainly not in the very not before the end of the year. Yeah, no, this is I can 't do that. Yeah, no, I mean we when we went out to the Snapdragon Summit last year, someone that act this actually came up that not in the context of the component crisis, because that wasn't really clear at the time, I don't think, but rather, you know, are are they restricted to this, this, or this and you know uh what they said was like, no, you can you can connect this to any amount of RAM you want. It it's just that it has to be made. And then in the X2 elite extreme uh or yeah, elite extreme variant, it's on the you know, it's on the SOC. So that's a special that's a special order right there. So yeah, so for this particular computer, yes, it is forty eight. Um and I think that was just an attempt to further differentiate it from a like a normal X2 elite, right? And they'll they'll come with thirty two or sixteen to thirty two, depending on the laptop. And then um this one comes with forty eight because forty eight is bigger number than th thirty two. weird. I don't must be better . Yeah. Oh, Richard. It is better. It's it's better . It is better. It is better. It is better. So much better. Um I don't have any kind of battery life estimate yet. I've only I I did a couple of rundowns on it. It's been in the nine-ish hours, which is not high for Snapdragon. Um but it's early days too. And I my experience with the previous gen is that that actually goes up over time, and so we'll see what happens there. But I guess it's not unreasonable to expect this thing to maybe not get as good battery life, and that's part of the trade-off, right? You're getting to um performance levels that are more typical for much more expensive computers. So especially and not just like the M whatever on the Apple side, but uh but they also are competing with Intel and AMD chips that have very good integrated graphics. And um, you know, you can buy it's not really it's not a mobile workstation or anything, but you can buy like a pretty pedestrian laptop with one of those newer chips and play triple A games really well. You know, so that that's the that's the competition for them really. I don't think anyone's shopping like Mac against Snapfrag and X2 . Only in my dreams. But um, you know, maybe someday. I think really what you're they're shopping it against is other, you know, X or against X sixty four laptops. Mm-hmm. But we'll see. We'll see where it we'll see where that lands. Yeah. The conversation about Snapdragon and the Enterprise is still an interesting one. The X 2 is the great promise, but we're not seeing enterprise style machines so far. Just well, part of the reason I think is the component crisis, and in this case because specifically in the enterprise, they're in a holding pattern, right? It's like we're gonna eke out more time with the things we've already purchased as much as we can. Yeah. And um yeah, look, there's all the uh uh Snapdragon has always suffered from that kind of fear of the unknown or you know, uh resistance to change kind of problem . Um and this only exacerbates that. But I think that's gotten the ARM machines into the normal windows up by pipeline now, and that's the next that's the next story. It's another piece of the prop pies. So but I'm I'm I'm waiting on the hardware in that degree. That being says that's this is the market that should embrace it. Like I I would imagine um uneducated with regards to tech uh normal mainstream consumers do not understand the the benefits and not un you know, maybe be nervous about it. But uh to me, and it's not what has happened, but it seems to me like the this should have been embraced immediately by the enterprise. This is a better computer in the sense that it's much more reliable, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If it was just a bear to maintain, like your normal maintenance tool, you need to have a separate process for our machines. And I don't know in admin that's we're gonna willingly embrace another process. Yep. They're so lazy . They got enough to do. Let's pause for a moment . Uh and we will have more of Windows Weekly in just a bit, but Paul needs some more cranberry juice What time is it uh in uh the Netherlands right now? It's uh ten to nine PM. So it's early PM. Oh good. Oh good. So the sun's gone over the yard arm is my grandfather. It's still a little light out there, but it's getting down that way. It's not that it's ever held me back before . Well you're also like getting toward the middle of the year, so this is gonna be one of the longer days of the year. The sun will probably set pretty pretty late. I remember pretty late around the cinky on the fourth of July and it was like, wow, it's it's midday. So you know so uh you know I've lived in the northeast United States for my entire life, basically. We lived in Phoenix for several years and whatever. But um, you know, this should be normal to me, right? But we got home, we went to our favorite restaurant, we walked out of there at 7 30, and it was full light. Yep. And I was like, what the hell is wrong with this place? Like it's weird. It was it was like three o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, Mexico, you walk, it doesn't matter what time of year. You walk to the place it's dark at you know 7 p.m. And then you walk out and it's really dark and that you know that's feels normal to me. And like I I know this is nor I mean like I I'm like I say I'm I'm I recognize how stupid. You need one of these you strap this up What am I like a Chilean manga? What is that? You know what I like? This one has red, so it won't blind you. What is that thing actually? What is it? It's just uh headlamp light. It's so you can walk to uh the uh Takeria at eight PM and uh not get uh fall off the curb. Yeah, I have done a friend gave me this and I thought I don't know what you're trying to tell me, buddy , but uh thank you. If you're worried that um you know expats, whatever they're called, like stick out at all in uh Mexico. This would this would that would that would do it. Yeah, I have the San Miguel shirt,. so So you know, with the mariposas on it. Yeah, so that's how you say cyclops in Spanish, but I can assure you that some of the rag ing you would get would involve that word. It's funny because you go to Hawaii and people, you know, the Hawaiians aren't wearing Hawaiian shirts. It's just like a big fan I wonder if that's true in Mexico. If I wore this shirt in Mexico, would I stand out especially if I wear the headlamp? I was wearing a shirt that would look nothing like that. It it it had a pattern, but it was a short sleeve shirt. It was not a Hawaiian shirt. Yeah. And but I had my sunglasses, you know, hanging in the front. And one of my friends there walks up and he said, Hey Magnum, are you gonna get a ride home in the uh helicopter after dinner and I was like, What are you talking? I didn't even understand what he was like, What? 'Cause I've made this joke to a friend of mine like years ago, but he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt. So I actually got this thrown back in my face, but it took me a sec I he had explained what he meant. I was like, Oh I'm like, what? This is not a Hawaiian shirt. I mean it's I mean, this is a this is made in San Miguel de Allende. This is a Mexican shirt. But I think, you know, probably on cursory examination you might say, well, you're wearing a Hawaiian shirt. No, it's very colorful. I mean, it's funny 'cause when I went to Hawaii I I forgot to bring any of these shirts to Hawaii. I just said boring shirts. Finally in Hawaii. Yeah. Yeah. We ended up buying a couple just so I would fit in with the tourists. Nice. No, everybody there's wearing a t-shirt. They're not stupid. Let me tell you what it would happen if you walked into like the place from going to dinner tonight in the Pennsylvania kind of Philadelphia area with a Hawaiian shirt on . You know, be like, what are you, a Mets fan? Like this? Okay. Good to know. Time for a little break, then we'll come back with more Windows talk. Actually, Microsoft and that's some new hardware. We could talk about that in just a little bit. But first a word from our sponsor, Trusted Tech . If you are listening and you're managing Microsoft 365 for your company . Um I'm not telling you something you don't know. You're responsible for both the cost, ongoing cost of it, and, you know, whether it's set up correctly. And you probably know, I hope you do, that on July first, Microsoft is raising prices. That means two months from now. 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If you need ongoing help, they also offer reactive support for your Microsoft environment. They are, they have certified support services. So it's really two things. But I want to focus on licensing because the clock is ticking. July 1st is not very far away. Microsoft licensing already is crazy. E3 versus E5 versus business premium add-ons, the new E7 . Very confusing, very easy to misconfig ure, may very easy to overpay. Or underpay licensing mistakes don't just cost money. They can create compliance exposure that gets more expensive after july first . So even if you think your licensing is dialed in, it's worth a little, you know, consult, a little second look. And if you wonder who these trusted tech guys are, listen to Kevin Turner. You know him, former Microsoft COO. He was talking to Trusted Tech. He said this quote You have an incredible customer reputation. And you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Kevin likes them. After July 1st, you're gonna be stuck paying more. This is your last chance to fix your licensing before the costs go up. Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation right now . But all you have to do is visit trustedtech dot team /slash window s Weekly 365 and you'll get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in savings before the price increase. Now's the time. Go to trustedtech dot team slash windowsweekly three six five. Submit that form, get in contact with trusted tech's Microsoft licensing engineers and let them help you dodge a bullet. TrustedTech dot team slash Windows Weekly three six five . And we thank him so much for supporting uh the show, Windows Weekly. Couldn't do it without them. Who who was the guy from Microsoft who was uh complicated? Kevin Turner, you ever heard of him? No, I was just wishing he would turn his attention to uh the parts of Windows I care about maybe give them the same advice. You know , I think he's he's he's retired. He's gone, yeah. Yeah, he does not work there anymore. He left around when Saty came in. Yeah. Yeah, I think he was kind of hoping maybe he was gonna be the guy. He was kind of legendary though in his time. He was the stack rank guy. Stack rank. Oh really? Oh yeah. X Walmart. Legendary for all the wrong reasons. Um anyway. Microsoft. He never bothered me. I he was a he was a regular uh appearance at all the shows and stuff. Yeah, we talked about them a lot. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. On this show. Um, that's how I know the name . So Microsoft announced new hardware. Yeah, so someone was just asking me about this last week in that weekly Ask Paul thing I do, and I I knew this was coming and I couldn't really talk about it at the time. But of course the question is when is Microsoft gonna rev its uh surface hardware for the latest gen processors, be them uh Intel, which is what they usually use on the X64 side or the Snapdragon X2. Um so what they've done is uh refresh the business line which uses the Intel chips and so they're they've moved on to Panther Lake. Um I have to say, you know, for uh you know I don't I wouldn't use Intel on your computer, but if uh you know if you have to go that route or you want to go that route, um that's it's a good choice. Like the the Panther Lake stuff is actually very Yeah, but of all of all the Intel chips in this line, yeah. Panthes is the most impressive. Yeah, on the mobile side, yeah, for sure. It's it's a good chip. The first since lunar lake that really wowed. Yep. Yeah, it's it's this is it's good. Um I've I have limited um experience with this particular chipset, so I can't make any broad statements about reliability, et cetera. Um, but my experience has not been great in that capacity, but you know, we'll see. We'll see how things uh go over time . Um the problem, though, and the thing that really stuck out in my brain when I read through this thing, uh the announcement, is these things are wicked expensive. Wicked, wicked expensive. And I don't mean like twenty, thirty percent more than last year. I mean in some cases, like you know, fifty to seventy percent more expensive, like really expensive. Um for example, a thirteen inch surface laptop, this is the the kind of um the newer version, like the when as originally or as before the previous gen , like when they did the Snapdragon Gen 1 chips, there was a 13.5 and a 15-inch model. They still sell the 13.5, but now they saw a smaller 13 inch as well. So you could make a pretty good argument that this thing is uh competing with like a MacBook Neo, except it's not at all. Like not even close. Because yeah, so in in the markets it's available and today it starts as sixteen gigs of RAM. There's a twenty four gig configuration as well. Um it's a copilot plus PC. That's a requirement, right? The base price of that thing is fifteen hundred dollars for this I mean I I'd have to go look it up. Yeah, like come on. Like this this should have been nine hundred dollars, right? Yeah. Um but they're gonna sell a version with eight gigabytes of RAM later this year. I wonder what really I what made him think of that. Wow. Thir thirteen hundred dollars. That's too much. It's way too much. So I I lo look I like this is not the the question is what's the full load, right? Like well, the one of the that's one question, right? So part of one of the look, they're doing work in Windows now to reduce resource usage, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. That's cute. That's cute. Um we do have a Snapdragon. I'm sorry, a copilot plus PC spec, which, you know, granted is semi arbitrary, but sixteen gigs of RAM, at least 2056 gigs of storage, which I think is inadequate, but whatever. Um, an MPU that could do at least 40 tops, right? So that thing will not be a co-pilot plus PC. So in 2026, they're gonna sell a business class surface laptop that does not is not a co-pilot plus PC, unless they arbitrarily change the spec, right? Or do what they should do, which is make those capabilities across whatever computers, if you have a GPU, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Um, no word on that. So I don't know what to tell you there. But um I don't know. I mean, and you could spend a lot of money like the um on these things. The um 13.5 inch version, 13.8 I guess, uh starts at almost $2,000 Wow. Look, I uh n in the scope of the PC maker space, Microsoft is a boutique PC maker. You know, they they don't qualify. To be sort of reference hardware, high-end price goes. The problem is with this component shortage, um, you're seeing how this can be a real Achilles heel. And you know, look, I I I don't whatever anyone thinks of this stuff, and whatever anyone thinks of the quality, whether that's up-to-date or out-of-date information or whatever, I will say, you know, they they did kind of formalize this kind of three by two tablet form factor with the pro, starting with Surface Pro 3 many years ago now. Um, this is like 12th edition to give you an idea. Yeah. Um it's uh this is this is gonna do this is almost like the final death knell for this brand, right? And it's not their fault in this case. Um, a 13-inch Surface Pro for business, the base model, is $1,9 50 dollars before you buy the keyboard and the pen and guys no like just no and by the way businesses are not buying computers right now yeah. So I I don't know. It's again, I'm not blaming Microsoft. I they made mistakes or whatever and surfaces, whatever it is. And now you're seeing, like I said, the kind of Achilles heel here is they just don't get preferential Well yeah. And this is you have to wonder if Panos was still around. Would he would he have fought for this? Right , would have but have d may cut a better deal, been part of the launch of the ship. Right. Like if you right. I I I don't know that this world is completely gone, but there's always been this argument with Microsoft hardware and certainly with Surface the where you're essentially um uh betting on some percentage of the customer is to have Microsoft 365 subscriptions and that can in some way make up for you uh breaking even losing money or whatever it is on the hardware. Sure. And I just feel like they're like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Like this, you know, it just like with AI, where you're starting to see as pricing on AI moves to more of a consumption model, like actual consumption. Yeah. Um, you're starting to see what I think of as the true cost of the thing . Yep. And I think that's what you're seeing like. Yeah. This is the same thing. It it's it's unfortunate because I feel like a a Lenovo could sell a laptop with this exact spec and it would be eleven maybe twelve hundred dollars yeah thirty percent less yeah it's it's gross like how awful yeah I mean it's just awful so it's too bad I I feel bad about this because you know these are I don't have one and I'm not gonna get one, but these are probably really good computers. They're just stupid expensive and it's just a shame. Right. Who would buy this? An idiot. Uh no, I don't know. Um I don't know. I I really don't I well I will say this. Uh one of the reasons you go out to businesses first with this, because they're they're obviously taking it slow now because of the component prices is they get volume pricing, just like they do. And and what you can do, and this is where you can kind of make up for it, is um this is a customer who's already paying for multiple seats of Microsoft three sixty five, various SKU levels, et cetera. And they're doing a service contract and whatever. And so you can cut them a deal maybe on the heart, like the these are retail prices, like the businesses that buy . Yeah, I have to wonder . Yeah, when it's sold internally, do they get better deals? I don't know. Yeah, like uh an indiv you could as an individual go to surface.com and configure one of these things out, probably and buy one as a person, that would be dumb. Um, unless you super, super need a new computer and you, you know, whatever, it's for work and you have to do it and whatever. But I mean, as a person, uh this, just doesn't make sense as a purchase. These are they're just too expensive. Buy a MacBook Air for Cornell. It's stupid. It's too bad . Well, that's the goodness, my friend. When it comes to enterprise PCs, we're even st ingier because we are buying a hundred of them . You know, the big argument last year was I'm not paying for an NPU if I'm not using it for for enterprise machines because that's another hundred dollars I can cut out of that machine. Yeah, and that's a good chicken egg problem too, because then um you know it it's uh non-virtuous cycle. You know, there's no one's paying for the MPU, no one's developing software because no one's paying for the MPU, do itesn't have the MP U. A lot of questions around a lot of people have GPUs though. You know, that keeps coming up. It's like, I don't know. Um, so I don't know. Uh this is what you know, look, uh the the fact that Microsoft's gonna let you configure a copilot key on a keyboard to a control key is a minor step in the right direction, but it's a step in the same direction as how about letting those things work on a computer with a good GPU or an integrated mod ern GPU that you might have on an Intel or an AMD chip. You know, just a thought. I don't know. Just let them let people do what they want to do. I don't know. I know. That's not how the world works. Um I don't I couldn't recall. Did we talk about M dash at all last week? This is the Microsoft uh just being Steve Steve did yesterday, of course. But yeah, okay. So everyone knows, well, most people probably know Anthropica as a model, very mysterious sense and uh secretive model . Mythical almost. Mythical, yeah. One might. Um and uh obviously people at different companies are trying to get involved with that. One of the questions I had with last week's uh patch Tuesday updates were is Microsoft using any of this stuff yet, right? And so um it turns out Microsoft has been working on an in-house um multi modal, not model. Agen , well, I guess it is multi-model. Agentic scanning harness. This is this word, if you watch the Google A IO keynote, um came up 115 times if you were gonna have a drinking game. Harness is the new term in AI that everyone's using. But anyway, it uses a hundred specialized AI agents across various frontier, what we used to call like just LLM models and uh distilled models to discover, debate, and prove exploitable bugs and in other words, they've made their own version of mythos. So um I don't remember the exact number, but I think that it found 16 of the 20-something Windows rentabilities or whatever the number was that Microsoft patched last Tuesday. I expect that this month and our coming month and then going forward, these will be much, much bigger numbers. Um one of the things you know we're starting to see, and this is coming up in the context of Linux now, is AI generated bug reports overwhelming companies or individuals or organizations or whatever it might be in the Linux world that are working on these distributions or working on the kernel or whatever it might be. And that's we're gonna, it's gonna be a tsunami of this stuff because it turns out AI is actually very good at this kind of thing. And of course, individuals will do it and they'll send in their things. And it will you know, the the the nice thing about the mythos thing is it was not just here's a vulnerability. It was like here's how you can prove it's a vulnerability and here's how you fix it and you can test to see that this is in fact the case. And um anyway, m Microsoft will do the it's closer , so this is not out in the open, right? But um I guarantee you uh you will see astronomical numbers in the coming months for fixed vulnerabilities on patch Tuesdays. There's no doubt about it. Yeah, and you're already seeing numbers going up. I mean, obviously Firefox was the most public with their increased patch r ates, but even the rate on Windows Update has gone up. Yep. Yeah. And and you know, they probably won't be as vocal about it. I mean, they'll there's a marketing case to be made if it's like RM dash thing is so great, it did this and it's awesome. You know, okay, that's fine. Um Firefox is relatively small. It's a big code base, but I mean compared to like Linux or any operating system, it's you know relatively small. But it's not a publicly traded company and it has no money. Right. Yes. And uh, but they can get ahead of this and probably will. Like sometime this year, they're gonna be just pretty much proactive at some point. Um, Linux and Windows are gonna, and you know, there's already uh I think Methos found something in Mac OS as well. Um this th this can be a problem. These are these are big, very well and the and the other the corollary to this is the black hats have be are playing with these tools to exploit vulnerabilities as fast as they can. That's right. Which is why it's all the more important for the white hats on the other side to be using this to, you know, and moving fast. Trying to get the patches out there as quickly as possible. Yeah. So okay. That's fine. Um what else we got? Oh, and then all right, so uh moving into AI, my favorite topic. Um I've avoided writing about this Elon Musk trial, other than when it's started . Um , there's been a lot of uh terribleness that's come out of it. As it which is what happens when you go to trial, right? You uh you have discovery, um people look at emails, uh these people are terrible human beings. I've made this case a lot. I'm not even sure Sam Altman is a human being. Um but um you know a lot of bad stuff comes about out about everyone. But the thing I kept uh sort of not understanding because it doesn't actually make any sense. Was how he was even able to bring Elon Musk to bring this to a case. What like what's the legal standing for you said you were going to do something, but you didn't, but you're not, you don't have an ownership stake in the company, you're not an investor, you're not involved with the company. It's like you wanted to do the thing you're accusing him of do actually doing it just never made sense to me. Like what's isn't there a bar for like a a leader. He was. Okay. But that's like saying, you know, uh yeah, I know it's been forty years, but um I wrote the version of basic that was included in MSGOS and use tension is and I don't know why I'm in the position They all along knew that they were gonna uh go to a for p a profitable model, but they didn't want him to participate in the profits, so they misrepresented their plans and got rid of him before they would have to give him any profits. That's not how that happened. That's not how you're not sure the the jury decided that uh uh and by the way it's an advisory jury, not the kind of jury that makes a decision. They tell the judge this is what we think. Judge agreed. Judge agreed, yeah. The decision to go n uh for profit occurred uh more than three years ago. So that statue of limitations had run out. So there was only a technicality. It wasn't that they didn't really rule on there was no but this there was no they didn't say that they all merely said that all of this happened more than the evidence that did come out in court was that Elon Musk wanted to take it public himself and he wanted to leave it Yeah. He talked about the now. So maybe he has a motive and kind of failing terribly. But the but the jury of the five. I can't believe this went to that.. No, of course They didn't have to, but uh it doesn't matter if you paid attention to this trial at all. I mean, it is gonna be appealed. Okay you know what else is gonna happen though? OpenAI is going public as soon as Friday. So right. Whatever. And the internet , by the way, is going public on Monday with SpaceX. Yeah, great. So this this whole thing is Twitter. This has been it's just it's a a farce. This is just a waste of the legal plenty of dirty laundry on both sides. So you come away looking at both these guys going, This is the leaders of AI? Like good lord. Look, I um I get bad news for you guys. Uh well you guys know this, but I mean I We now and then are terrible. I mean there are exceptions, there always are, but most of these people are pretty terrible. So um AI is just terribleness as scale in this case. Um so I don't know. The other thing we know from all of these trials, Epic Google, Epic Apple , is the the the the collateral damage of the discovery and the testimony always hits both sides, regardless of who wins. And you shouldn't enter into these kinds of cases unless you don't put anything in right. Same thing. Same thing the interesting the interesting thing that came out of that was uh Intel was sued by the uh European Commission, similarly to Microsoft for having a uh for similar abuses, and they settled immediately. They later, by the way, went back and um appealed and got the money they paid back. They actually paid a massive multi-billion dollar fine. But they did the thing which I think all these companies should do, which is what I always talk about, which is settle or otherwise work with antitrust regulators to have some say in the outcome. Um because it's not it it's it's look, the the bad stuff that came out about Sam Altman and uh Elon Musk and whoever else doesn't I I don't think registered with anyone normal in the world. I don't I don't think most people are paying attention to this. No, that's probably true. Yeah. But the We are. But the well, I mean, but if you want to have if you want to have an outcome for your company that you have some role in, you can't allow it to go to court. I mean, it does it sometimes. It works out, of course. That's the gamble, I guess. But like it worked out sort of for Epic, right? Well, it didn't work out for Apple as my you know, in that case, the way I would say that is Apple mostly won that case and then was so belligerent and terrible because that's what they are as a company. Right. That the judges threw the book at them after the fact. Right. And then that ruling withstood every level of appeal imaginable. Um and you know, it will still be appealed, of course, but like or not appeal, like attempts to stop the uh No, I think it's done. I think it's done because they went to the Supreme Court. Well, send it back to the district court. The next step there is going to be a uh a remedy. Judge Roger determine what they can charge. Same judge, by the way, that yelled at Apple for lying. Well, yelled at re uh referenced or gave uh the attorney general a reference to an Apple executive who lied on the stand. Right. You know. And she's gonna decide what the percentage is uh not twenty seven percent. Can it can we can we let 'em charge a negative number? Is that a thing? Yeah. And I think the the appeals court will uphold Judge Gonzalez Rogers. I mean Musk. Her this ruling, which is extreme extreme, there's no other way to say it, uh justified, I think, but also extreme, has withstood every legal hurdle. so far I mean, it's all looking good for those guys. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. And I and I I think that the uh appeal, Elon's appeal, if he does make it, he says he's gonna make it, we'll probably go nowhere. So no, it absolutely will go nowhere. Our long national nightmare is over. Right. Well, probably. Um, the Apple one, I'll just bring this point up again because I would have said this a year ago or whatever. It's like if you know Apple had this 15, 30% fee structure, it's based on nothing. If they had dropped that at any point to 1020, this never would have happened. And that's that fee structure is four to eight times too expensive as it is. Yeah. Like they could have dropped it by a half or by a third , and they could have reaped billions in undeserved revenues for the rest of that company's existence, and that's not what they do. So I sorry guys. Well, I mean at one time they did. It's just the height of hubris now. Yeah. Like they really are so arrogant . Yep. Yep. This is the uh the soft bark episode about the Prius, you know, 20 years ago, like these self -righteous, you know, we know better than everybody types, like it's just disgusting. Anyway, at least Elon Musk is overtly uh evil. You know, there's no subterfuge there. He's just a jerk. Um Apple. And apparently Albin lies to everybody and everybody knows it. We already knew this, right? I mean, like, you know, uh like uh Sacha Nadella was on the stand. He didn't say anything we hadn't heard before. You know? It's like, well, it looks like you were orchestrating stuff by yeah, he was he put thirteen billion dollars into open AI w at a time when they had thirteen billion dollars in outside investment. Like obviously uh he was involved. Yeah. Um, I don't know. Anyway., okay Sorry. Um, because the we're in my notes here. Uh the open I terribleness can never end. Um, there's a rumor, uh a report that open AI might actually sue App le because of the Siri integration thing they did in iOS twenty six, probably. Um that's another one where I I I don't get it. It's like these listen, this is the j I told a story, you know, my friend Dave Colton who used to work at Microsoft. He was talking about Dell at the time was probably the biggest PC maker in the world and Microsoft, big you know, biggest company in the world, and they hated each other and they were fighting all the time. And he was like, These two companies deserve each other. And I was like, yeah, that's the best way to say it. And like that's how I feel about OpenAI and Apple. I'm like, you know, have fun, guys. It's just like I don't know. Apple um has one thing that open AI would want, which is access to uh not just a big audience of billions of people, but a big audience that has shown itself uh very welcome to spending lots of money all the time. So I understand why they got in there. But what Apple does not have is that infrastructure thing, which is what they really need, right? And um so it's it's an interesting kind of friction here, but um we'll see if anything comes out of that. I hope they sue each other. I think this is going to be funny. It's like oh Godzilla and Micro or uh Microsoft, yeah. Godzilla and King Kong going at it or whatever. Um it's it's funny. So that would be good. It makes uh it makes life interesting for we who cover tech. Yeah, yeah, right. Most of the stories we cover are kind of boring. So this is kind of cool. This is uh fun. Um if you follow AI at all and chatbots and all the way things are going, you know that we've moved from like these conversational interfaces to kind of agenic things where these little services go off and do work on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. You probably know that Anthropa came up with something that they called and uh cloud code for coders. And then they came up with cowork, which was like, oh, we found out this code thing actually works really well for productivity as well. And so they have a separate offering for that. Uh open AI, of course, came up with Codex because Anthropic came up with code and but they're using that for the productivity stuff as well. So it's coding but also productivity, et cetera. It's part of cloud. Although there's a standalone codex app, I think it's on uh Mac, Windows, and I think there's a Chrome version too, right? A couple weeks ago they announced this. Um so they brought it to mobile, but they're not doing it the way Anthropic will probably do it, meaning they're not gonna have a standalone app. They they're doing it through the chat GPT app. And the way this is supposed to work is that you can check on the progress of agents you might have fired up on the desktop from your phone. And then you can conversely uh, you know, get notified on your phone about things that the computer's actually doing sort of on the side there, or uh generate new tasks uh through the chat GPT app. So yeah, it's like tomato tomato, like this different way of doing the sample. It's agentic. See, this is so it's funny because OpenClaw had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get uh these guys to act in a kind of persistent agenic fashion. But everybody says, oh, that's what people want, because OpenClaw was such a success. So that's what people want. So that's all everybody's doing. In fact, that's what Google announced yesterday. I know we're going to get to you ever yeah. So this industry is I I equate it to five-year old girls playing soccer, meaning there 's a ball and you just throw it in the field and they they swarm around the ball. And it doesn't someone will hit the ball probably by mistake. And it goes down the field. And they all go down the field and they run around. And they're all just falling. They're just chasing each other around the field until someone trips and cries and the game's over. It's a fan stuff. I can't think of another technology uh No, nothing. There's nothing like that. That has changed so you know, if you like, oh yeah, I use perplexity, that made sense six months ago. Mm-hmm. Well cursor. You were like cursor. Oh my god, it dropped whatever I was using for cursing. Cursor somewhere was worth billions of dollars. It's like an a Visual Studio code clone with I'm sure they're calling it a harness now. Uh like whatever. Harness, my friend. It's a harness. It's ridiculous. It is changing what this reminds me. What did you call you said it was a gen. When you said Agenic, I swear to God, this is what you made me think of. When IBM and Motorola uh and I think Apple uh but IBM and Motorola certainly in the nineteen nineties were working on the power PC processors, you would go to like Comdex or I guess C S by this point, maybe or whatever. Yeah, I guess it would have been condex. And uh you go into this room, it was all full of like smoke and everything, and it was like lasers flight through, and they'd be like, Power PC , it's an enabler . And it was like Yeah, it's a chip . Um but that's what you just you literally just put that in my brain. Like I I instantly went back like almost 30 years, like um anyway, that's the AI industry. It's ridiculous. Um I just as a sideline, that conference I was just in Berlin was actually uh an HR conference. And I was sort of the AI subject matter expert for this group of folks. Okay. Just uh you know they wanted to field questions from someone with a more technical background. And HR people are usually responsible for training an organization as new tools come to play. And all of them have these massive initiatives inside of their organizations to incorporate AI. One of them said, my CEO has told me, uh, we need to be AI native by the end of the year. And I'm like, okay, so um what's that mean? He's like, I hoped you knew. I'm like, no, they're they're just making that term up. That's just a thing. But it it was kind of shocking to me because I mean as someone who's done enterprise level deployments of software involving HR and so forth, like there's pretty clear workflow patterns. And it starts with actually a stable piece of software you know how to use and that you have some tra ining materials around and so forth and you sort of grow it out for how it's going to fit with your enterprise and that's just not what's happening. One of the ladies talked about the fact that they just got co-work uh for everyone. Like, you know that we're native. That product's two months old and a research only product. Do not use on important information. Right. I mean this is I I'm not sure about cloud, but I'm sure it is there. But I I think it was open AI. There's like a financial connector now for Chat GPT so you can put in all your bank information. But and it's like yikes don't like it's for entertainment purposes only. Um entertained you were when it dropped your entire database? Watch when it drops your entire bank account. Do you I I would imagine I would what I was I mean, I didn't really gonna say this, but as you were talking about the HR people, I was thinking like one of them was gonna say something like, Yeah, so my uh CEO or CFO or whoever it was told me like uh I need to implement whatever AI thing so, I don't have a job anymore. So can you help me with that? Well a couple of them confided me like they were planning twenty percent layoffs based on how this initiative went. It's like how do you know it's gonna be twenty percent it's like twenty percent arbitrary. Yeah, these are the managers in office space who bring in the bobs and then they're like they get the lens of Sauron turned on them and it's like oh I we I I thought we're getting rid of the losers. Uh you know, it's like we're getting rid of the drift in the middle that doesn't need to be there. That was the other one was they had one of the big firms in saying, oh, it'll be a 40% pro productivity increase across the board. I was like, great, did they bring case studies? Why no? No, they didn't. You know why? Because there aren't any. They can't exist. It's someone invented this two seconds ago. Yeah. Like and you're paying 20 bucks a month per person for it, you idiot. Yeah. If you're lucky, that's all you're doing. It's like I'm hoping that what your bosses are telling you, without saying it out loud, is I And now we're AI. Now you're AI native. Congratulations. You almost have literally described the uh Beavis and Butthead uh episode where they learn about AI and they think it's like a trash container in the parking lot of a There's a Beavis and Butthead episode about learning about AI? It's new. Yeah.ah. Ye I mean, I felt for these people. I came away angry, like your company's abusing you. And it looks like they're gonna abuse their employees too, but technology is just not ready. Well, today's the day that uh meta fires eight thousand people after copy you know, after recording every stroke uh keystroke and every mouse movement so they could duplicate them in AI. This company don't get me started on Meta, please. I God, I hate that company so much. And I you know, they make this thing that could connect people and then they do all this other stuff. And it's like Yeah, what happened could you the metaverse? Could you just do the thing that is your thing? I don't know. Standard. We're gonna pause here uh before before anybody pushes again. I'm really curious what you think about Google IO. We covered the uh keynote yesterday, Jeff, Mike and I. And uh, you know, when you're there watching it, as with almost all of these keynotes, it goes, Yeah, that sounds great. That sounds really good. That's really awesome. I went out and bought a Chromebook just so I can, you know, play with all this stuff. Oh, by the way, my back of the book thing is related to what you just said. Okay. But then you start seeing the stories filter out that is it? Uh you know, and so I'm really curious what your day later. But don't don't do it yet. I want to take a break. But what your you know, day after analysis is uh always a little bit more um thoughtful, shall we say? Well, it could only be it could only be. That's right. Uh distortion field. Uh we will have more Windows Weekly just a bit, but first a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. We're talking about AI, and I think you know, I have some sympathy for business because the potential reward s of AI at this point you feel they're just too great to ignore. But uh cautionary tales abound, the risks are also too great to ignore, the loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. 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That's zscaler.com slash security with thank them so much for their support of uh Windows Weekly, zscaler.com slash security. I think one of the most telling things about Google I.O. yesterday, that's their developer conference. Right. Of course, last week they did the Android show. Right. And they and they mentioned new Chromebooks coming. Uh even called Chromebooks, new Google Books coming later this year. So they got they kind of cleared the deck. There was n this was going to be an AI thing. And the fact that Demis Hasibis was like the most prominent person on stage, the guy who was a pretty quick too, right? Like up front almost. Yeah. I mean Sindar was there. He seemed very low energy and kind of depressed. Okay. And then he just got out of the way. Someone who is low energy and depressed. I get it. I mean, you know. You can't always be happy. Yeah. Well, so what did you think? They they announced a ton. So here's the thing. I I you may be or may not be surprised. I have a pretty good relationship with Google. I I get pre briefed on a bunch of stuff. I um mostly ahead of the show I mean I got the developer stuff, so I had that going . But as they were I was taking notes as Sundar and then the whoever else was on stage was speaking during that initial keynote and I quickly found myself overwhelmed, right ? And some of it is like just numbers. You know, they have 13, I think it was yeah, products that have over a billion users, right? You know, Gmail search, et cetera. They have five Gmail search, Android, Chrome, and YouTube that over three billion users. Um but they had all these numbers, you know. Um they're talking about the processing of tokens. Like uh one year ago it was three point no I'm sorry. One point year ago it, was 9.7 trillion tokens a month. Sorry, that was two years ago. Sorry. Went to four hundred and eighty trillion one year ago and then to three point two quadrillion now , a seven X uh improvement. I don't know if it's an improvement, but a expansion over that uh period of over two years. Um they have third, they have customers on Google Cloud, which by the way, a distant third in this market. Yes. Uh over 3 75 of them have each processed over one trillion tokens over the past month alone. Wow. Um it's just like the numbers are staggering, you know. AI overviews and search over, 2.5 billion monthly active users. AI mode, over 1 billion monthly active users. Gemini app uh is over 900 million monthly active users, up from 400 million one year ago, more than double. Um you know, 'cause it just goes on and on. They talked about the they said this during the car the uh earnings call, but one hundred and eighty to one hundred and ninety billion dollars on CapEx spending this year, um a six X jump over the thirty one billion they spent in twenty twenty two . Um you know, they have new TPs Well uh spend that money, but okay. I know it's insan it's insanity, right? So Well, they're all the it's also commits like there's really interesting studies going on saying how much of this money they actually spent. You know, when you're building a data center, you only the money only goes out as things get built and lots of stuff's not getting built. Yeah, I I I don't have yeah, I don't have a lot of insight into that, honestly. But the it's just I think the thing that's interesting about Google is that you can make a very good case, and I've made this case and I still believe this, that they are in many ways in the client computing space, the next Microsoft, right? Sure. Um their operating system is something they use everywhere. They their product naming strategies look at more Microsoft every day. The naming is terrible. Um they uh the c the the Gemini thing is getting a little co piloty. I think we could make that argument. But the um uh they work with partners to get the devices out to customers. They're not like a monolithic kind of Apple type company or whatever. Um so there's that. And and I I was overwhelmed by this, right? So on the developer front, just some of the biggest ones, because there's like 117 of these things. And by the way, figuring out what their products are now is getting very difficult. Yeah, it's very Microsoft. It's very Microsoft. They introduced something called Google AI Studio I I think when Gemini 3 came out about a year and a half ago, which by the way it was when they also announced something called Anagravity, which was a big deal in this I.O. as well. Um the the point of Google AI Studio is it's a web-based IDE where you can prototype application UI. If you follow the Google space, if you think about like XAML and the Microsoft space as the way that you create UI for apps, um they have a declarative thing called Jetpack Compose, which is Kotlin-based. So it's using the same programming language as your programmatic code, but it's how you write UI essentially. Um they've switched over to that completely now. Like Android is now what they call compose first. So the old style of do it using XML like which is like a a XAML to make views in Android apps is in maintenance mode. That's going away. Um Android 17 has a bunch of stuff going on and but the big one to me is the Google book thing, which is um that Android apps have to adapt to large screens. They're not going to allow you to target that API, uh that level of API, and not have an adaptive app. So it has to work right if you have a foldable phone, it's on a little screen, you open it up, it gets big. It's not just a phone thing stretched out, right? It does layout and all that stuff. Um so if you have it on Chromebook, you have it on a tablet, you have soon on a Google book, etc. Um, so that's all kind of happening. So there's all this stuff, you know, they have like um uh they're they're gonna let people vibe code um widgets, right, on Google phones. Uh and it eventually all Android phones, which is like um the gateway drug to vibe coding when you think about it, because widgets are very simple app surfaces essentially. Like it's you know, it's kind of excit ing. Um I'd coded mobile apps because we did not have enough iFart. Yep. It just goes on and on and on. They have something called app functions, which they announced previously, which is basically MC power MCP, but for Android apps. And the idea there is that you're on a phone AI is occurring and it can interact with the capabilities inside of apps, like Microsoft's doing in Windows, right? Um, using this thing that's very much like MCP, just like they can interact with other AIs using MCP. So it's a kind of a common interface or whatever. Anyway, there's a lot of stuff just on the but that's just like the developer stuff, right? And I'm gonna touch on that this is for the back of the book. I don't want to step too much on that now I but then they kept talking and they started talking about things I was not pre-briefed on right like the two thousand things that are happening to Chrome which is turning into a intelligent proactive assistant that will work on, you know, like of course it is, it's getting all hygenic. Um Gemini is coming to Chrome and Android. Autobrowse, which is in Chrome on desktop, also is coming to Android. Uh you're gonna be able to within Chrome uh transfer on images using nano banana. Um there are skills, AI skills um that are coming to Chrome first on desktop, and no doubt next year will be on and on uh um mobile as well. But the idea there is that you uh are able or a AI, in this case Gemini is able to work with the content on multiple tabs and go off and do things on your behalf, et cetera, et cetera. It just goes like I said, it goes on and on and on. It's crazy. Um, it one thing I made this point uh somewhere recently, I don't remember why, but Google has these uh Google One subscriptions, which are kind of morphed into Google AI subscriptions. And so like a Google AI Plus, which is the eight dollar per month version. You get whatever you get for, you know, storage and access to models, et cetera. The mainstream one is the Google AI Pro, which is the one I got from uh buying a Google phone, but it's twenty bucks a month normally. But now it has like five gigs of storage. Five sorry terabytes on Google Drive across photos, Gmail, and whatever you want to use it for . And it's like yikes. But then they have the Ultra plan, which was 250 per month, is now 200 per month. And that's where you get like really expanded access. And one of the things they announced at this show was that there's a $100 tier for that as well. So they have a an AItra Ul 5X and 20X and the 5X and 20X are references to the uh essentially the limits compared to the plus plan. Like it's 20, right? It's five or 20 times as much access or whatever that is. Um, those plans, by the way, 30 terabytes of global . What? Like what? They really want you to use their AI tool. Let's face it, they're the original AI guys. They're the reason Open AI exists. Yeah. Right. Well, I think. Imagine if they they of course the the whole point here is they weren't turning this stuff into a product until Microsoft backed OpenAI and then lands on chat GPT and blows the market apart. I you know and to that point, like everybody's suffering from S SEO decline because Google now presents their AI mode and you're just not getting directed to web pages anymore. Yeah. So their concerns were legit. It's actually happening. Right. I mean they will continue to adjust, you know, so to speak. But I uh like anyone uh twenty years ago, twenty five years ago, whatever it was, you could throw a website up, a blog as we would call it, and uh have one Google ad on every page, you could make a business out of it, it'd be great, you know. Now you have to spam your site with more ads than content and it still doesn't make any sense. And you get a nickel. Yeah. This is the insertification of the ad business, which is by the way, why there's an antitrust case around that. They control this, right? So they take more and more of that for themselves. But um but you know well and I would argue they were doing this even before ChatGPT showed up. Like Oh yeah. No they were searchers on a horrible trajectory for the past few years. Past many years maybe, yeah. Um yep. But uh but from the perspective of a like an individual, and you have a phone and a computer and you're out in the world and you do whatever you do, like when you compare what they have and what you might want to to other companies , it's actually really compelling. And that's the thing I I kind of took away from this, which is that, you know, the one thing they have that Microsoft lacks is an incre over three billion people just on Android, but um they have great reach into the consumer market, right? Um they're first party devices don't sell very well. They're sort of like the surface of the Android world. I get that. But um, you know, people use Google photos and their phones to back up photos, even if they have an iPhone in many cases, right? I mean, they uh people use Google Maps, duh. They use Google search, et cetera. Like um, when you combine all of the perks here, this is what Microsoft 365 cons for consum er used to be uh I used to describe this as like a no-brainer, right? Um for 20 bucks a month with all this AI that works everywhere, and not to, and I mean literally everywhere, not just on the Google stuff, because you can just go to Gemini.google.com or many of the other entry points um and just m do whatever it is you're doing with AI and do it from there. You know, Gemini stands up very well against the best models, you know, anthropic, uh, open AI, et cetera. Um, and they have this all this you can't get like free YouTube premium through open AI. You know, you can't, you know what I mean? Like you're not gonna, it's it's this is back to antitrust behavi or, network effects, just hey our product's not that good, but look at all the good stuff you get with it. Yeah. I mean there's a whole tiger stripe conversation to be had here, but but uh uh but again, just looking at it from kind of a mercenary perspective as a person who just like look I'm gonna do some I need cloud storage maybe or whatever it might be like it's kind of nuts like Microsoft 365 for consumers still stuck at one gigabyte or one terabyte sorry, per person, unless you get family and then you get, you know, you have six people with up to one each. But you know, they quickly went to two and then they went to five, and then now there's twenty or thirty, depending on what tier you're run. It's like what is happening? It's insane. Like it's it's really kind of incredible. So I I I I think my Leo asked, you know, what was my takeaway from this is mostly um that I was overwhelmed. There there was one thing I'm gonna talk about in the back of the book, which is um you know, AI related, obviously, but I had found out about ahead of time. I I I was in a briefing, I saw a thing about it, and I was like, okay, that looks interesting. But then when they were talking about it on stage, because it was a developer keynote after the main keynote, I can't remember which where it came up. I i if it didn't come up in the first one, it obviously did in the second. It might have come in both. I don't remember. But wherever it was first mentioned, whenever they first showed it , I was like , I gotta try this, you know? And one thing I have rich experience at, which is I I think someone was alluding to earlier, which is you back in the day you would go to a show . Uh more recently you would watch a thing online, you were on YouTube or whatever. And they announce something and you like, oh, that's interesting and you go over to your web browser in this case and you go to the play wherever it is and you're like, I'm gonna try this thing and it never works. Like it's never it's never like it you just don't have that experience. That is not what happened. Um I had a freaking incredible experience and I and I'll like I said I'll talk about that at the end of the show. But so I went from like a overwhelmed and I I I had the lightest non-b usiest day yesterday until about noon. And then I was frantically writing and like the guy who writes news kind of checked in on me later. He's like, You is everything going okay? Like it, like there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm like, dude, I don't know what's happening. Like they, just keep announcing stuff. Like, I I was overwhelming. I've only touched kind of on the tip of this icebreaker. There's so much going on. Um it's it's rather astonishing. Uh and it's a flood the zone kind of strategy too, right? Like you've just got to show there's so much going on. My um Google when Microsoft started their copil what became copilot, right, February twenty twenty three, I think it was. Um, you know, they stumbled out of this gate, right? This is the company that kind of invented all the stuff. They could have done this. Yeah, Google had barge. Remember Barge? They've been in that name in a bit. That's what I mean. Like they this I called this the face rake thing. It was like they stepped on the rake, it hit them in the face, they took And the funny part is that was it that was back to back with the co-pilot demos. Yeah, that's right. And if you if you went back and watched them carefully and like counted the errors and mistakes, they were the same. I was just gonna I wasn't sure what you're gonna say, but I'm like actually the Microsoft was just as bad. But Google got ripped to shreds because I think the expectation was Google's gonna get this right there. Google and Microsoft has bang and seriously, what are they gonna do? Yes, and so by by the So there's I think there's this other resentment angle of Google had this stuff for years and never showed anything until somebody else did. So like what have you been up to? So it's almost you know like uh when Apple uh ended up buying Next like what I I sort of imagine like as that kind of unfolded that at Next they, had given up on this thing, they weren't doing the OS anymore. They they had given it up, and then Apple wanted it, and they were like, Blow the dust off this thing and like come out to market with like, okay, look, it still does all this crazy awesome stuff. Um, I feel like the uh what became Bard and then Gemini was like that. It's like they they were like, oh, we weren't gonna go to market with this. Like what does anyone have any like what like people were working on this? Like, what do we have? Well, and yeah, and the argument was it was uh undermining the princip al product. It was undermining search. Right, which is why they didn't do it in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. Um they they were they were gonna fully intervene dilemma this thing and just sit on it. Right. So I I was uh I was I'm still kind of reeling from this. I Google I.O. is going on today. I mean there was some there was more stuff. There were more keynotes today that were, you know, lesser, obviously. But um I I was exhausted by the end of the day yesterday. Like it was exhausting. And I I left things on the table, so to speak, for Laurent to write this morning, knowing because you know, there was glasses stuff, there's all this other stuff, right? Google TV stuff, there's wear OS stuff there's all there's all kinds of it just goes on and on and on. It's crazy. Um the the uh the only thing else I think where am I not that I pulled out . Um where's this damn thing? Uh yeah. So um last week they announced Google Book without providing some details, right? Which is kind of weird. Um and then more information kind of eked out over time because people started asking questions, et cetera. Um, but one of the things that was part of that announcement was something called Gemini Intelligence, right? So Gemini Intelligence um to me is a little bit like Copilot plus PC in in the sense that it felt like a spec and that you were gonna need a certain level of something, something. And it wasn't clear which devices were gonna get it. Obviously, Google Books will all have it. They are kind of the co-pilot plus PC of that space. Um, but there are existing devices in the market, like flagship phones, Samsung especially, but maybe the latest pixels . Um, there are Chrome Plus uh Chromebook Plus devices like the one Leo just bought running flagship in that case ARM chips that should be able to do this as well. Like what are the like w what's the line? You know? And one of the early rumors was that I saw someone had written like it's possible this is so big as a spec that like a pixel nine series phone won't even be able to run it. You'll have to have like a 10 or newer, 10 being the latest gen . And um and there is a uh I think it's just a support document on Google.com that actually listed it out or someone found this somehow, but um the device is gonna have to have at least twelve gigabytes of RAM, which is a little unusual for phones. I mean it's getting more usual, but um it's literally like Samsung Galaxy S26 series phones, all Pixel 10 series phones, except the A, right? Because that has less RAM. Um you need to flagship SOC, etc. et cet.era It's like it the the list of existing devices that this will work on is actually very small. Um so a lot of this is gonna be next generation gear. Yeah, it's gonna be all new stuff. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Um it is interesting . Uh and then I could go on it. It's not a Google show, but there was I I look as a uh you know, having gone to so many builds and covered so many shows and everything, I was just like it was like the uh memoric side with the guys in the chair and the stereos playing . Yeah. He's like literally sliding back. That was my day yesterday was that guy in the chair. Like it was just uh it was hard to deal with. I I had to take a nap afterwards. Yeah, right. I mean no that's right. It's over it's too it's it's information overload, you know? Yeah. Um I sent my I again wonder if that's by design . I look, uh Leo had mentioned you know they did the Android some Android 17 and the Google Book thing a week before and it was like it's all AI and everything. Yeah, but I I feel I do feel like this part of it is the Android stuff might have got lost in the mix a little bit because of all the announcements if they waited. But also I mean just logistically, how much time do we have to talk about this stuff? Like I it they have to space it out. There's too much stuff. So I I don't I don't think they were scrambling to find stuff to talk about. I I I I'm sure they had a problem figuring out I'm I'm sure there were certain topics where like, look, we're gonna have a session, we gotta we gotta cut this off. This is just too much. Um I do think they have too many products. I think they have too many overlapping products. I I'm sure describing Microsoft. I know. Really? That's what I mean. The next Microsoft. I mean, even just in the Android developer space, you have the Google AI Studio thing. You've got Android Studio, obviously, and all the agents and AI that goes on. There's an Android CLI now. You can go from uh uh Google AI Studio or Android Cli, start there, and then push that into Android Studio and go do the you know get all the debugging, whatever you get in there. There's there's more. Like uh there's the anti gravity. Um there's like I I can't I can I I can't keep it in my head. And I this is not my primary focus in some ways either, right? And um it's it's difficult. Anyway. It was it was was a lot. It a tsunami, I think is the only way to say that. Um I didn't have a place to stick this uh phrasing. Um, but Microsoft announced yesterday, which I can't find my article about it, it doesn't matter. Um , that they where is this thing? I don't know. Oh, there it is. Um the they've released the fourth version of their Azure Linux distribution, which is for Azure , obviously. They announced something called Azure Container Linux, which is an immutable version that's optimized for containers of a Linux-based OS for Azure. Of course, this generates stories like, oh, Microsoft is making Linux distribu tions now not exactly yeah um it's version four yeah and they've got money's not new i sorry i i mean they're not you're not gonna go to like fedora.com or ubuntu.com or azure linux.com and maybe install this on your computer. I mean, I don't even know if you could, but um the the the it's not a dirty secret. They're very upfront about this, but the the majority of workloads that run on Azure are running on Linux. And the reason is Linux comp ared to the Windows or whatever, Windows Server, whatever it might be, is lighter weight, right? And it has cost support from developers. Yeah, exactly. So they have a version of Linux that's optimized for these cloud and now AI workloads that run on Azure, you know, this makes sense. So literally like two-thirds of the the way Microsoft says this is the customer curres in Azure And um a lot of they don't say the number or percentage, but um chat GPT chat GPT is scaling across over 10 million compute cores on Azure and serves billions of queries every day. Crazy. Yeah, it's just the scale of it's incredible. Um it's big. Yeah . Yeah. Um Um yeah, it's big. So okay. Uh and then some quick, really quick dev things. Um Apple opened up the schedule for WWC, so we know it's gonna happen there. Uh, you know, to some degree, meaning uh schedule-wise like, the keynote, the platform state of the union is their developer keynote. That's the real keynote as I think of it. Um, they obviously have sessions and whatever they do on there. Okay . That is June 8th. Um, build twenty twenty six is June second, so it's the week before it's in San Francisco. I think I know Google AO is two days. How many days? You said four. No, it's two days. Yeah, but it's two. I th I was go okay. I thought it was two days. Um yeah, I think both of those new other shows are two days. So that's that's this is the developer season. Um for Bill, this is late. Usually it's in May. I think they had trouble finding a place. And usually longer. Yeah. Yeah. Well maybe this is a good . You couldn't register for it. You had to sign up for the opportunity to buy tickets. And they literally were pre screening who could get in. Right. Yeah. They invited me and um I I thought about it. I if it was in San or um Seattle, I it might I made a made a better case and maybe more effort. Um but I didn't know we have we have a we're doing something with the kids and I it's not actually that weak as it turns out. I thought it might have been, but um I'm in Stockholm. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense. So yeah. I don't I build has always been my favorite Microsoft show, but Yeah, just think this is not the same. It feels yeah, it feels different. Yep. Um and then last week I didn't mention this because there was nothing to talk about, but Microsoft released I think it's the fourth preview release of.NET eleven. And I've kind of made this complaint. I don't know what I'm complaining about over there in the corner, but there's I've I've never seen like a point to this release exactly. Like uh every milestone they talk about like, well, this has been updated across whatever dot net platforms, none of it seems major to me, blah blah blah, whatever. So I didn't mention it last week on the show, but then since then they announced that Maui is switching to the core CLR runtime, which is the runtime that most of almost all of.NET uses. I think there's one Blazor component that is still running on the old runtime. But Maui, this is a little bit of history. This is amazing to me. Maui is running on something called the mono runtime. This literally dates back to like 2002, 2003. This is Miguel DeCaz.a As does the.NET Framework. But yeah, this was the open source version. Right. Credible, right? So they're switching to the more modern one. Well, so it was the cross-plat version first. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. That's interesting. So that's good. Well and and fundamentally Maui is where Xamarin Forms ended up . Uh yeah, that's right. Yeah, Zam right. So yeah, Xamarin Forms becomes well, Zer they buy Xamarin and Xamarin Forms becomes Maui. Yeah. They seem to have lost a lot of momentum, unfortunately, with Maui. I yeah, yeah. No, you can't argue there. And I gotta tell you , with all the shuffling around of leadership inside of Kore AI, where DevDiv now lives. Um I don't I think people are pretty the folks that aren't part of the battle for who's leading what, they oh look I adjusted my camera by waving my fingers around. Sounds funny. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Uh because I just don't know how inspired those folks are. Like it's just been a crazy time. Ever since mobile has been a thing, meaning in the modern smartphone era, like the iPhone Plus or whatever, um, you know, there is a need for dot net developers to be able to write C sharp code that ends up on mobile. Like this is this is there's an obvious need. So there's there is a role for this product. Um I think there's some weird overlap now with um Blazor . And um uh that's maybe confuses matters a little bit um and i but i don't i this is like silver light was this right you know silver light was essentially she sharp and a wpf light kind of a framework um you know running at aning run. It was originally WPF everywhere. Right. WP, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Because if you have a dumb code name, you get a good product name, but if you have a good code name, you can get a product name. You can't have both. That's right . Yeah. But those were far more inspired times with the dev dev that knew what they were trying to do. I just feel like they they should have just by nature have had some percentage of the market, but you know, uh things like React Native happen this flutter, obviously. There are other things I don't even I don't really care about the space too too much. But I just I I look looking at it from the perspective of like a what I think of as a Microsoft oriented developer, because C sharp is not just.NET necessarily, but but.NET, we'll call it.NET. Um you know, yeah. They 're gonna wanna C sharp. net is all C sharp. I mean, of course. I mean, uh, you know, the Windows app, SDK, UWP, etc. also uses the C sharp language. And then you know what your problem with Maui is? It's trying to unify mobile development and Windows client development. And then you stop at say , Why am I building a Windows client? I know. Especially like a really constrained mobile app, silly Windows thing. Like I I look there there are there are certain apps where that does make sense, of course. Um but yeah, it would be a good idea. They're getting few and far between. And if it that it's that important, then you're making a WPFF . Yeah. You don't want constraints. Right. Right. Which is I think going to be the problem for Flutter because they've expanded to desktop and web. Flutter has done a great job on Android and iOS. Yep, and less so on desktop. Now they're struggling to get to that. And it seems to be the way. Like we you realize the only people who want this are the developers. Because we want to write one code base runs everywhere. The customer couldn't care less. They just wanted to run on their thing. Right. Right. And so the fact that we're jumping through hoops trying to make something designed for mobile to run on a desktop, it just may be a mistake. I think this is the make a web form or you make make a web version of your client or make a standalone Windows cli ent. So trying to combine them is just fully formed in my brain. But I I feel like one of Microsoft's big strengths with developers historically has been a kind of no developer left behind mentality where we're gonna bring these guys forward. You know, we're gonna bring you forward. We're gonna, you know, things will change. Well, but they did in a way. I mean, you know, another I I mean I right. I understand. From a code basis. No, I know. In other words, like you know C sharp, you know how those libraries are going to work. So maybe it's a new , you know, you move from you know, whatever it is, like uh it doesn't matter from WPF to Windows app SDK and it's like it's not the same. No, I mean this similarity. Like you you the the way forward is there. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm I just saying there is a way. It's it's and I feel like um Maui is in some ways the last dying gasp of that. It's like uh it's too bad. I I I really feel like this should and could be today a first class mobile development environment. And I I just you don't really it just doesn't get a lot of momentum or interest. I don't know . Okay. In other depressing news. Um you'd have to be really well into the Microsoft world to even know who this is, but um a guy uh Somar Somas Somasagar, right? Somas igar. Um is that I'm pouring whiskey now because I have to toast a remarkable. He was one of the good guys. And he was the same age as me. He was born like like three, four months before I was born. Um went to started work at Microsoft working on OS two . Um quickly moved over to MindSo. Right. And he was on the NT team. He shipped, I don't remember the number, eight or nine versions of Windows over time. Um led the developer effort for many, many years. That's how that to me is really. Yep. And is in a very indirect way. There aren't many people like this at his level, but is a curious combination of technically smart and a good guy. Which I know sounds stupid. And he was never a great stage guy. Like that was not his style. But if you were one-on-one with him, and I had that chance a number of times. You couldn't say no to him. It was impossible. Like he was just so appealing. We had a we did.NET Rocks interview with him many years ago. And uh his PR team handled him carefully because he wasn't a natural, glib kind of guy. He's very thoughtful. He takes his time. And he's not a performer. And so they wanted to script the conversation, which is super normal. PR always pitches that I never go for it. And ultimately, we we came to an impasse on that as Soma called the boss. He says, I'm doing it without a script. And the first 20 minutes of that interview was very um and eye for him right until he forgot he was an interview he was in interview. And now it becomes normal. You know? And so we actually managed to construct a new intro in the course. We did a big recap at one point and made that into the intro, the list because you saw the best side of the guy. The guy was so brilliant and so into what he was doing and how he helped people to be successful. Like I was really glad to capture that part of the story. And he uh had all the time in the world for me. I was super generous. So uh yeah no I'm I'm I'm devastated here to see you, Soma. He's a good man. Yeah. So he's he passed away this week. We don't know how or you know what happened yet. Um I'm not gonna speculate . No, I I wasn't going down that path. I'm just but it's it's sad. And you know, he um what was he he left Microsoft and went to He went to Madrona. And and I used to have a I used to meet with him almost quarterly at that time. Every time I was down there, we'd have lunch or something. And uh then I then he went to Madrona and I pinged him right away and I'm like, Madrona? He goes, yeah, I gotta take it a little easier now. I'm just a limited partner. Like I got down there at lunch and uh and I and I look around at what he's doing and I'm like dude you don't know how to limit partner. Because I'm LP and I know what to do with LP. He comes from the whatever the version of Makunji is in India. It's like the smallest town imaginable. Yeah. And um his first name is unpronounceable, I believe, even to Indians. Yeah. And thus the Soma thing. And uh I I I won't I don't wanna expla I was it was it was him and so I can't say who was there, but I I jokingly said to the other person, I said t I said, Do you have a hard time every time you see this guy now going soma soma soma soma soma chamele and he goes dude he this is what he said I'll never he goes every time every time and I was like that is amazing but uh one quarter later I go down to visit him again. He's the managing director. He's running all of Madrona. Wow. And it has ever since you see what you have like in other words, he must he got in there and they were like uh you know and he knows everybody and everybody loves him and he and he's moved the whole place forward. Like no two ways about he you running an investment fund and you've got a Soma Sagar, you should put that guy in charge. Like and that's what happened. Right. So you know, and I feel for Madrona, like that, he's been their leader for a decade. Yeah. That's gonna be a challenge. Yeah. He's a that's uh yeah. His family's lovely. He's a great man. I'm really I'm really sad. And I know a lot of people are in the same boat. Yep . Yeah, that's too bad. Fifty-nine years old, very young. Very young. Lots to do. Uh you know, it's uh very impressive when somebody uh can be in that position and and nobody has a bad word to say. No, that's the thing. I mean, look, you could be infamous and we're gonna remember you. Yeah. Right. Um or you could just be awesome. And he was awes ome. Yeah. You're watching Windows Weekly, Paul Thorat and uh Richard Campbell, and we tip one out to Soma . We're glad you're here. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com . More uh Windows Weekly now. Uh time for the Xbox segment, Paul Thorat. Yep . And um yeah, once again, there's a lot going on. So this just happened as I was preparing for the show. So uh Laurent wrote this up. I didn't have a chance to really look at this in too much detail, but Asha Sharmer, the CEO of Xbox, has announced more leadership changes uh inside of her team. And uh sit down, Richard, um if you didn't see this, she has brought over four more executives from Core AI. Oh no, sorry, that was from before. Sorry sorry sorry. Yeah. Brought over two more. Two more. Sorry. Two two more. Um that was four before. Um so Christopher Dring. Nope. That's the person who announced it. Sorry. Matthew Bell Ball will be the Chief Strategy Officer of Xbox and Scott Van Vliet. Niet Vliet, okay, is the Chief Technology Officer . And then both these guys at least have backgrounds in gaming. Because the four she brought from Core AI did not, and that freaked me out. The fact that she's brought in people really serious about gaming is a relief. Well, yeah. So the second guy, uh he previously was an Azure C V P. He worked at Amazon, general manager of Apps Games in Alexa. But yeah, I mean at least he's in there. And then I guess this is the third one. I'm sorry. So Chris uh sh why don't we even try to say people's names? Schnackenberg, uh Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development at Xbox is being promoted to corporate vice president of Pnarterships and Business development. That guy worked at Activision Blizzard for twelve years. Yeah. So gaming guys. Yep. Um according to Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games, uh world class team being assembled, foreshadows serious dedication to the future of gaming for Windows, Xbox, Minecraft, Call of Duty, and the many world-class studios. Jesus, who wrote this? Uh, in the Microsoft family. Okay . No, it's very nice. I mean, that's like that's not his usual kind of plain spoken style, but that's nice. I mean, so it's nice. Um, okay. I got a bad thing. That just happened. I I don't know a lot about this yet. I just kind of saw this. Um this is really weird, but we've had two controller leaks in the past week. The first one is the Elite Series 3 controller, long awaited. The last one, I think, was 2019, 2018, something like that. 2019. Um, I owned the first one and loved it, but they're super expensive. If you drop one of these on the ground, it explodes into a million pieces because all the pieces come off, right? That's by design. Uh but I eventually broke one of the sticks and I just couldn't bring myself to spend whatever, almost 200 bucks on the second one. But it looks like they're doing a third gen uh well they are doing it, but they're working on it. And the big thing here, other than small visual redesign, you know, slight changes there, but the big one is in in keeping what we're seeing across a lot of consumer electronics these days , uh, the battery will be replaceable. So it's gonna be like a smaller built in capac or built in battery than previous gen, a little bit, but um you can replace it, right? And then that's, you know, so that's good. It's at least more sustainable. Um the other one's an oddball. So this one is called uh it's like a cloud connected Xbox controller. It looks like a bar of soap with Xbox c buttons and sticks stuck into it. It's very strange. It's it's it's kind of it's it's like and uh someone in the comments on my site was like, why why can't it just look like a controller? Which is a fair question. I don't know. I mean I I I don't I have big hands, right? And so if you think back to the original Xbox Xbox, the first one, um, one of the uh the do controller, the original controller, like one of the big um complaints about that was too big. I loved it. Like it was awesome for me. But when they went to Japan, they actually had to make, I think they just called it an S control ler, but just a smaller, you know, S for small. Um, and that became the controller. So by the time we got to the 360, that became the standard controller. And basically you could trace the lineage of the normal Xbox wireless controller back to that. I mean it's basically them the same size. But this thing is smaller. It's weird looking. It looks like a it looks like a Sega Master system or something or Nintendo NES, you know, but rounded. Like it it's very I don't know it's weird looking. Anyway. Um I don't know if this is coming to the market or not, but one of the things we know Microsoft to be working on, and one of the things I called on Microsoft to make when Stadia had come out was that this might be that controller that connects directly to the cloud. So if you're doing cloud streaming, this will offer you a better latency kind of experience because it's like one fewer, like it's connected directly to the game. It's not connected through your device, which is connected to the game. Like that's one of the reasons Stadia actually had pretty good experience um until Google killed it. And I think if you buy an Amazon uh Luna controller, it works the same way. So I can't explain why it looks like a bar of soap, but it does. Um and it is the second half of May, so we're starting to get the a new wave of uh games across Game Pass, the big one being uh Forza Horizon Six, um, which just became available generally, I guess this week, right, for everybody, right? So you could buy it now, it's out, but if it they're actually doing this day one on Game Pass, which is, you know, they're not always gonna do. So um it well, it depends on the tier, right? So if you have Game Pass Ultimate or PC Game Pass, you do get fours of Horizon Six, and then there's a bunch of other stuff. I think the key one we can all agree is pigeon simul ator. Um doesn't want to be a pigeon. I mean, I like to crap on people as much as the next guy, but um Is that part of the game? Is like who can 't I don't know. The last one I played was Go Simulator, and that was pretty funny. I enjoyed that. Yeah, that was fun. And there was untitled Goose Game. Yep. I think train simulator is more my speed personally, but all right. Um and then yeah, oh and then if you have a uh Laurent, the guy he writes news normally, but he asked, he said, Hey, you know, we don't review a lot of games. Do you think it'd be okay if I reviewed Forza? I was like, dude, of course, you know. So he got it early and re he wrote an awesome review on my site. Check that out. Yeah. It's really good. And now I'm like, no, we can do this. He's gonna be doing more of this. I'm sorry, did you just ask me to do more? You idiot. Uh yeah, no, that's fine. Um, no, it's really good. I found for says all the four is really fun to play for like an afternoon, right? Enough to get through a few matches and stuff, but the last time I improved. So it must have been horizon it was Forza Horizon 5, right? So the last one I remember. I played this game for about a week. And um better part of a week, probably not a full week, but my wife came downstairs and she goes, What the hell are you doing? And I'm like, it's uh forza, uh it's a racing game. She goes, all I can hear upstairs is And I'm like, yeah, that's pretty much what it is. Like I'm sorry. The whole thing. She's like, all here is this droning sound that never ends. And I'm like,, oh I'm sorry. I think that was the one was in Mexico, right? The last one. And then this one, I don't remember where this one is, but somewhere else. Okay. Um so uh the Xbox team being more transparent, yada yada, yada. They've launched a play a player voice feedback hub, probably a mistake, by the way. Um, and I think I don't know if this is like literally the I think it is the number one item of feedback was you need more exclusives. Love it. Guys, love it. Frick's sake. Tell the judge. Tell the judge. God damn. So But the customers told us. I know. Well, so ironically, or coincidentally probably is maybe more accurate, um, there is a rumor that Sony might be moving their single player games, which lately have been also being brought to the PC and in some cases even Xbox, right? Um making the single-player experience games like the games that are just like an interactive story, basically, um keeping those as PS 5 or PS whatever exclusives. And um because the argument for being on all the platforms was to maximize the player base and multiplayer. And you don't need that. Yeah, like that I would say for a user that's right. I I I would say maximizing the amount of money you could make in some ways, right. But I guess uh by selling more to people maybe on PC or whatever. I I I don't remember the numbers, but you know, PC as a gaming platform's about as big as console together. So it makes sense that Microsoft, Sony, whatever, would want to put games on PC. But just fails. Yeah. I mean, we talked about how poorly Sony and Nintendo are doing right now. We know Xbox has been doing terrible as a you know console business for a long time. But it's not like they were making money on the consoles in the first flipping place. Just sell more games. That's where the money is. Yeah, and you're right. So I we'll s that's not official, but we'll you know we',ll see what they do. And then uh because Sony always copies Microsoft. Just kidding. Um actually they're doing the opposite. Um they announced they did announce they will raise the price of their PlayStation Plus subscriptions in certain regions um by one to three dollars depending on this you know one or three month span, whatever. Um they cited ongoing market conditions. I struggle to understand how a component shortage would uh factor into a uh subscription service or whatever, but um whatever. I mean, so like in the US, for example, like a one-month PS plus essential subscription is 10 bucks. Now it's gonna be 11, you know. So the three month version is going from 25 to 28. You know, it's not like a not a big, big deal, but um, you know, prices are going up. So And uh I will never stop celebrating Epic kicking Apple to the curb. But um as of I think it was today or yesterday, um Fortnite has made its triumphant comeback to the uh Apple App Store five years after they were booted up by Apple. Um the one exception is Australia. I don't actually know why Australia. Um they're the ones lead the charge for keeping kids off social media. So maybe uh uh towards guys uh uh Apple oh Apple apparently is breaking the law in Australia. I don't know. Well it's hard to say but um anyway. Uh so it's good., you know Um Fortnite is actually a very good game, by the way. I I was I this has been several months now, but I was I played it quite a bit uh after not looking at it for years. And uh yeah, I was surprised like how good that game still is. Or is, you know. It's actually better than it was when 've done a lot of stuff. It makes them so much money that they are keeping it up. Yeah. It's uh it's it also doesn't seem to be as toxic as Roblox or the others. You don't take the teabagging as personally when it's a cartoon. You know, like if it's if it's a guy dressed up like a U.S. Marine and he's teabagging, you kind of it's like hard not to take that person ally, but it's like a a cartoon sprite or something, you know, whatever these things are. This goes back to the was the the red blue the red team blue team stuff from Halo early days. They used to have those awesome videos, like Oh, those are so good. One of them which was like the guy like the like a new player like killed someone and then was teabagging the guy, but then he fired his rocket launcher into the ground and killed all his teammates and they all yelled at him. It was just like it's just it captures the multiplayer experience so perfectly. Yeah. Dude. Why is your finger on the trigger, man? Hey, let's pause uh briefly uh for uh station identification, then we'll get to the back of the book. Tips, pics whiskey, all coming up. The usual. The usual . But first uh I would like to invite all of you, just briefly, to uh join the club the best club in the whole darn world club twit we love club twit uh we love our club twit uh members we thanks to you we're able to do what we do. You cover uh at least a third now of our operating expenses. And that's how I like it. Honestly , uh if we thought we could do everything we do with without advertising, I would do it. But a good news is if you join Club Twit, 10 bucks a month, uh, we're not going to show you any ads. You're not even going to see these plugs for Club Twit because, you know, you're you're supporting us. We really appreciate that. If you believe in the value of independent podcasts, not owned or run by any big company, with no obligations to any big company. Our only obligation is to support uh and represent you, the user , because we're all users. Uh support the club. Twit.tv slash club twit, add free versions of all the shows, access to the fabulous Club Twit Discord. You get special programming, all sorts of special programming. We the the Google IO keynote, for instance, yesterday was club only because we don't want to get taken down by putting it on YouTube. So, and that's going to be the case for WWDC, June 8th. They got Micah's crafting corner, Stacy's Book Club, Chris Markwart's photo segment, which is coming back next month, by the way. Um Friday, I'm gonna uh I uh do a uh a redo of the interview we did with Jeff Atwood, the guy who writes the amazing coding horror blog, he created Stack Exchange, founded Stack Exchange, and is also uh uh responsible for our uh forum software, the discourse software that we use at twit.community. And he's just a wild, wild man. We will talk to Jeff Atwood 2 p.m. on Friday about coding. Uh he's also very big. Uh he's a promise to donate half of his personal his family 's personal fortune uh to uh a charity, including he's very big on um guaranteed minimum income. He uh he came from a very poor area of West Virginia and he wants to support that . So he's working on that as well. Very interesting guy. That'll be Friday in the club, two PM Pacific, five PM Eastern. Just one of the many things we do in the club. Please support the club by going to twit .tv slash club twit. We really appreciate it. Now to the back of the book. And where is Teradov on my don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I've deliberated. We're gonna take this city back. Over medic ated 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. No . 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 Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your grocer And Mr. Pauly. Little Pauly Thirat . And his tip of the week. Yeah. So I've been doing these kind of focus month things. I was focusing on like switcher articles in um April, but then as we got into May, I was like, this is too big of a topic. I'm gonna keep going with this and kind of expanded it out into applications and services. So I had written this thing about markdown editors um last week or whatever. And of course, in the back of my brain, you know, I I spent all that time writing these various versions of like Notepad as.NETPAD or WinUiPad, et cetera, in different frameworks and languages and so forth and stru ggled a lot with the the multi-tabb multi-document stuff whatever but people have asked me multiple times like you should you should you're gonna turn this into like a markdown editor like why don't you make your own markdown you know and I'm like yeah you know that's that's been in the back of my brain you know for for a while but I mentioned you know the school Glyo thing and as I'm watching the keynote they're talking about ai studio and how AI Studio which, was designed to be like a web-based IDE for prototyping apps, the UI for apps, um, can now create native uh Android apps. And I was like, really interesting. So um throwing caution to the wind like an idiot, I uh I went to I wrote the simplest prompt imaginable in AI Studio. I would like to create an Android desktop app version of a full-featured markdown editor similar to Typora . It should run perfectly on a large screen device like a Google Book. And it's okay if it works on a phone too. And it took uh 158 seconds and it created the most full-featured markdown editor I've ever seen in my life. Um not um not a native Android app, by the way. It's a TypeScript uh web app, but um I I don't know if that Android thing is not there yet or I missed it or something. But uh the point is I didn't I I didn't spend time on this. I wrote the quickest thing imaginable. I went back to watching the keynote, I checked in on it, it popped this thing out, and I was like, oh my god. When you did this last night or today? Yeah, yeah, last night, during the show. It took it took about two and a half minutes. So I was like, okay, this is interesting. And then I was like, well , okay, let me get it closer to what I want. So there were four panes. There's like a a lot of apps, a little like a no like a Notion or Obsidian will have like a navigation pan on the side, and then it will have like a a a text editor, like a text view, and then like a preview pane like side by side like a lot of markdown editors do that. This thing this like full featured Gemini co-writing pane like full of like things to generate text or fix text or whatever. And I'm like, all right, this is too complicated. I just want like an editor. So I I I got it just to spit it like a like a two-pane side-by-side view. And I was like, okay, that's pretty good. But what I really want is like a what you see is what you get, like single view, just like an editor. So you it looks like the preview, but you can edit it. And then it did that. And uh it did it in the context of the thing it already created. So you had to go into the preview mode only and then you could turn it into what you see is what you get. You could edit it. And I was like, okay, this is insane. So I tried a few times to do the native app version and I could never I never got it to do like a Kotlin jetpack composed, whatever. But I was like, all right, well, you know what? Like don't worry about that. Who cares? Like a web app is fine. A web app will run everywhere so this morning I got up and I was like all right and I actually wrote a a more detailed description of what I was looking for and it's just a couple of paragraphs of text really, it's not that long, but um, and goddamn it, it created this thing. And I gotta tell you, this is pretty good. It's not pretty good, it's friggin' really good. It's actually still more than I need. Um, uh, you can see it for yourself in the article I wrote, you can link you can go you can go use it yourself. You can open documents, you can export and save documents, you can use keyboard shortcuts to do formatting of any kind. There's a little floating toolbar for formatting, there's a full menu system with all kinds of stuff going on and like I'm sorry but this is insanity. I I just spent the better part of a year probably more than a year trying to do like multi-document multi-tab whatever in the when you well originally in w pf and then in the when you windows app SDK just for a text editor. Uh didn't quite get it there. I got I got closer than I actually understood at the time, but I used AI to get it up the top. So it took a month or maybe two months to kind of put that together and finally put it to bed. And this took 15 minutes . 15. I mean, look, I could spend another 15 and make it perfect. I just I was blown away by how good this thing is. Yeah. It's pretty amazing, isn't it? It's astonishing. So, you know, like I said, the typical experience keynote at some industry event, they're like, blah, blah, blah. You could try it now yourself. And I'm like, all right. And it's always like, yeah, no, this is garbage. I was like, no , this is unbelievable. Like this is what ? So I I would I'd like to make a native Android version, frankly. I'd like to be able to push it into Android Studio and work on it further, et cetera, et cetera. But the way this thing is right now , I mean, again, I would I'd still play with it more and at you know, whatever. But it's like this is like this is really good. Now this is a web app, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's a React app. It's incredible. It's incredible. Did you uh does it post when you do it this way uh on GitHub? Does it post the code or it can um you can connect I did, so it is on GitHub. I I didn't make I didn't make it public yet. I'm gonna I wanna play with a little bit. But you can actually I include the link to the app. Like you could just go run the app. I mean you can see it. The reason I always do that is not because I want to distribute it to the public. Right. But but because I want people who who say, oh, that's interesting, to be able to start with the code. Because that's what the other thing you can do. You could point your AI to Paul's GitHub and say, okay, this is a starting point, but I want to do it this way. So okay, so it is in GitHub. Uh it's private right now, though. Right. you don't have to. I'm just saying. I no, I know. But I I was gonna jokingly to say you're looking at this from the perspective of a developer. Like the thing that's amazing about this to me is like I I've AI progresses so fast that you say, like, soon you will be able to dot dot dot. And by the time you finish saying that sentence, starting . So, like, I've said to my wife, like, this has come up a bunch recently, because I like to bore to death with this kind of stuff. But you know, it's like you as a non-programmer, non-technical person, will be able to create like little apps all by yourself, you know. Personal apps. She could do this, like she could do this right now. Now she wouldn't know how to edit the code. I I mean I don't either. It's TypeScript. I don't you know, I but I mean I have I I've obviously spent time doing this kind of thing, but like, um you just keep talking to it till it's exactly what you want, then you're done. Um it's I love it that it's a web app. This is it. Yeah, it's crazy. So you know you can yeah. I love it. It's crazy. Oh, I think of all the time that I spent , you know, on uh.NET , WinnieiPad, whatever, and then on all the time it did not spend creating this thing which is approximately a hundred times better. And I want I I mean I 'm not gonna hurt myself but it's like this is like yikes I mean that's amazing so sorry but this is amazing yeah it is pretty cool so so I can view it yep. Well you you'rere alady I mean you're you're technically already viewing the what you see as you know I mean this is already like rich text yeah um yeah crazy. Nice. Yeah supports different themes. Um I know. I know. Yeah. I I there's stuff in here, there's a focus mode, never asked for that. And by the way, I actually that's an important point, not to drag this out, but the um I this just came up recently too. One of one of the things, any anyone, even if you were non-technical, you grew up in the 80s, 90s, whatever, one of the things you always hear is like computers will do exactly what you tell them and only what you tell them, you know, meaning that you as a programmer, if you don't tell it exactly what you want, you're just gonna get what you told it to do, not what you meant, you know, that kind of thing. AI is actually kind of the opposite of that. It knows what you meant. It's in ferring from what you wrote. It's assuming. So in this case, what it did was it implemented features I did not ask for because they're common in markdown editors or whatever, right? So the first version of Zap had that sidebar thing, which I do not want, or the focus mode, which I will never use and did not ask for, or there's a couple other things I don't remember off the top of my head, but there are like features in this that are there because other apps have these. And it's like that is yikes. I mean it's crazy. I just uh you know again not a professional programmer but as someone who has spent time doing this I I yeah. I mean, I don't and I I don't don't think any one person said this, but many people have said this. You know, the role of the developer doesn't go away. But I feel like developers almost become program or project managers where most all I don't know , uh the code is gonna be generated by AI and y you ha you should know it, you should know the code, you should understand how it works, et cetera. But you you're really kinda guiding the thing from whatever beginning, wherever that means, if it's a new app or uh to where you want it to be, meaning whatever features you're gonna add over time, et cetera. Um and that's what I see right here. It's insane. So I'm I'm blown away by this. Um you know, the job as a developer was never to write code. It was to solve problems. There you go. Right. Okay. Actually, that you know, that's you 're a smart guy, Richard. I don't think you get enough credit for that. Um you uh that's a good point. No, I mean it really is a good point because you I I think in some ways no, not in some ways. We do this just as human beings. We do this all the time. This is the change diversity thing. We get so used to doing things a certain way, we stop thinking about it. And then we get affronted when there's an improvement or just a change, right? Like um a lot of traditional old school people my age would look at this kind of thing and be like, that's not you know, whatever. But you know, you you I I someone in the uh Discord referenced this uh uh Heiles Andersburg uh interview on YouTube I watched twice already. And you know, one of the amazing things that his career kind of um doesn't parallel did it. I mean you used to in MS DOS write in a an editor of some kind, exit out of it, go to DOS command line, type you little commands to compile, link, run the thing, find out what the problem is, exit the app, go back into the editor. And so you we go from that to an integrated develop uh development environment where you could do all those things in one place. And then of course we go to GUIs where that becomes better with you know uh more complicated or uh capable environments, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, we were happy to make those changes. I mean, but some of us weren't, right? I bet there were people like, oh, well, I would never not do this with Edlin. Why would I, why would I want this all in one place? Like that's silly. And it's like, well, no, that's progress, you know. Um why did you take your hand off the keyboard and put it on the mouse? That's crazy talk. Exactly. Right, right. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The only problem with this particular change is the name and the excess amount of money that's been stuck into it. The combination of those two things has made everybody extra stupid. Yes. So I I mentioned this early just in passing, but um I you're gonna see stuff like this everywhere. But one of the first ones is gonna be that kind of ability to create your own custom widget, which they announced a week ago at that Android show thing, whatever that was. This is going to be something that works across devices. So you could create a widget that is on your phone, obviously, but you could have one on your Android Auto screen on your car, et cetera, et cetera. And it will be created conversationally, right? This is not a this is not you constructing a script. It's not using a an automation tool, an if then whatever, then you know whatever it is tool. It's not like that. I mean, it is doing that kind of thing probably in some ways, but um you don't need to know that. And that's I it's powerful and simple and it's gonna have it's gonna be everywhere. Like this is gonna be very common. Yeah. Anyway. Very exciting. I I I what I expected was I would go into this, fail , and then say, okay, screw it, who cares? And I it worked so well. I was like, um and then, you know, it wasn't exactly what I wanted, but then I, you know, I added I I didn't but that's part of the reality, right? It's like you get to that point where it's like now make it the thing you actually wanted. Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep. It's uh I joke about this sometimes just with people. I'll say something like, would you do what I mean, not what I said, you know, but that's like that's kind of what this is doing. It's crazy. Um anyway, so that's it. Look, just go look at it.. It's amazing I I'm kind of blown away by this. And I think this, you know, like I said, I think we're gonna see a lot more of this. Um and then just for apps, real quick, uh Star Doc today released something called Desk Scapes 2026. I enjoyed that they've suddenly switched to your your face naming for this one product. Um this is a way to use local AI, and this will run off of CPU, GPU, whatever you have, um, to either create new images for your background, but also to edit images and do all that restyle stuff, right? That's getting very common these days. And local, I don't know what models they're using. I'm going to talk to Brad tomorrow and find out. But um I would imagine it's probably Phi or something that runs on your Windows machine, right? But um, you know, you have an image, you're like, I like this, but I want something close, that kind of thing. Um it's only 10 bucks uh if you want to buy it and it's uh available on sale right now during the launch period for seven bucks. So it's not particularly expensive. So kind of a cool thing if you like to customize your desktop. And then uh Firefox 151 came out this week on mobile and desktop, and they've added a bunch of stuff on across both. So they added the free VPN with 50 gigs of data. Now it does uh location selection, like a normal VPN. You can say I want it to be here. They're gonna make that more granular in time. It's available in Can ada. It wasn't before. Um, and I think it's coming to more markets soon. Um, the AI kill switch, which unfortunately is not called out, is in desktop. That's been there for a couple of months. It's now available on mobile as well . Um shake to summarize was a big feat I don't know why I just made that Shake to Summarize uh was a feature they brought to Firefox on iOS I think end of last year. They actually won some award for that by the way. Um it's available now on Android. Um there's a one-click reset of private browsing. So instead of closing the private browsing window and restarting another one to clear out your cookies and history and whatever else, um, you can just click a button to do that and some other stuff. So there's yeah, bunch of stuff across the board. And that's it. There you go. Last is very nice. Let me see. You can make your own apps. You don't need apps. Just make your own. Make your own. Write them all. Everyone's doing it. They uh they wrote a operating system yesterday. Just you know that was the other I know they write and then they were like it's not an OS unless it runs Doom, so let's make it run Doom. And then it's that was kind of cool. They wrote a video driver. I'm like, stop it on the fly. Yeah. Seriously. We live in an an insane interesting world. It's crazy. Interesting times. It is. That's why run as radio is always so important . Uh well, at least for the administrators. So uh show 1037, the one we did, I did with Richard Hicks a little while ago actually, but we knew this was coming. It was very much a time to release because we're talking about secure boot. So for those of you who have been following along, secure boot is a uh an update to Eufy to allow to resist uh root-based malware. So it's a whole mechanism for certifying where updates come from, uh patches to UFI, uh your your BIOS configuration, that kind of thing. And when it was set up, they in 2016 when it first came to pass, they put a 10-year certificate on it. And look, it's 2026, and this certificate expires next month, June 2026. It's the very first original one. And so there's been a big push for a while now inside of Microsoft to just update machines to point to newer certificates. And now that we're getting close to the end of the road, there's been a bunch of tools put out there to allow you to check that your machines have gotten the update. And if your computer's current in any way, uh you know a gen 10 or above, and if it uses Windows Update, you've already got it. You can try uh in the links there it there is uh a client for for checking to see that your registry update's been done for secure boot, and you can just say yes or no, easy to check. Uh but if you haven't, it's not like the world's gonna burst into flames if you haven't done this, because the reality, of course, is that the certificate will be invalid. And that means you won't trust any place for updates. And so if there is a vulnerability to your UV, that sho ws up, you won't be able to get patches for it. And that could turn it into something fairly dramatic. Yeah, buddy. So I had two people ask me questions about this last week, and my understanding of the plan here is that Microsoft's gonna roll out this these updates through Windows Update. You'll just get it. It happens. It's already done. Yeah. Yeah. You can go into Windows security and you can see, you know, green dot, you're doing good. Yep. But what if what if you don't get it? Like I don't I don't mean like you've explained like uh it's a year from now if something happens, whatever. But I mean, do you do you or did you is was there any discussion about whether this could ever come from like your PC maker, your motherboard maker? Like if you for some reason No, no, I mean the and it's coming through the Windows pipeline. So you can go download it. You can do it yourself. It's not science. Yeah. Okay. But and the reality is uh a vendor can make it impossible too. Uh most vendors, if you bought machines in recent years, have already moved to new certificates. So new new computers will never have this problem in the first place. I've been trying to find one uh that does not have this new certificate and I yeah. No, I think any one anything that's gotten 24 H2 is already fixed, pretty much. Okay. So it's just yeah, I'd I I'm not I'm looking for and have not heard from like an administrator's like, oh no, I have 150 unpatch machines. And now that's yeah, that's what that's what I was saying. Like right. As this thing kind of winds down to the end date, it's like what happens when that date is passed? You know, Microsoft will know through telemetry X percentage or something. I'm thinking it's going to be so small it's negligible, but you know, and that's always the goal, right? The goal put coming in like this is that it becomes a non-event. And we've they've pulled it off a few times lately. Okay. And I've made shows about this. You know, the same with the certificate, the strong certificate requirements for Active Directory, right? Which was a little sh literal showstopper. And last year they deliberately triggered it to try and get Sysadmin's attention. And you could fix it with a registry change. Right? So they thought they'd got enough people fixed there's only a few left. It's like, let's even get their attention by they put this update in and it would break something if you haven't dealt with it. Then you could switch it back and it's like, okay, we're gonna make it permanent in September. And when September or October finally rolled around, nothing happened. And it's like, and uh it was Steve Seiphas I was doing that one with, and he's like, perfect, that's what I wanted. Nothing happens. Everybody's fixed. It's one of those challenges just can you get the guy's attention? The thing that's evil about this one is when the date goes by and you're unpatched, nothing happens. That's what I mean. That's the thing. Like I there may come a time in the future where this is more of a problem, but in the short term for certainly you're not going to notice anything. It's not like it's not like oh your firewall doesn't work anymore. Sorry. No, you know. No, what's going to happen is there's going to be a vulnerability and you're going to go trot up these meet these machines and you're not going to be able to, you're going to have to go fix a cert first and then do it. Hey, you can't even run Call of Duty right now unless you have an updated T PM. So you like I use like a or an enabled TPN, I should say. Yeah. Uh yeah. Yep. Anyway, sorry. Uh you know, Rich Rich Hicks is one of the best. He's the guy Microsoft calls for a bunch of like remote access and stuff like that. And he's just been all in on this particular problem. And you know, it's actually we've had a lot of certificate discussions on run apps lately because the biggest problem with modern certificates even in the browsers is the revocation strategies just don't work. And so if you have a bad cert, a cert's been exploited in some way And and so right now the current plan is to shorten the lifespans of search down to forty seven days . Wow. So that you'll have to automate replacing certificates, which means even if the revocation doesn't work after 47 days it's not being used anyway, at most . Okay. It's all part of the game. Okay Many a tear has to fall. But it's all right. Uh you know what I'd like to do right now? What would you like to do, friend? I'd like to have a little drink. Well and I'm in one of my very favorite places, right? Because I'm my the I'm back in Alcmar with my buddy Remy. And Remy, if you recall, because I've been here a number of times before, uh he has a favorite whiskey shop here in Alcamar. And the gentleman that used to run it wanted to retire, and so Remy bought it from him. Nice. And uh and has done very well, more than doubled sales over the years. He's never been in retail before, but it's been a thing he's been doing with his son and they've been having a lot of fun with it. Built a great website, have been really collecting on it. The whole point he's had with hit with the whiskey shop here in Alph Mar is if you can buy it at a regular whiskey store or regular liquor store, we don't have that. Only things you could find. nowhere else And this thing, draft uh daft mill, yeah, you definitely can't find anywhere else. This is very special bottle. Daft. What a great name, huh? And it's truly one of the rarest things you can imagine because it is a single estate whiskey mak er . All right, let's start at the beginning. We're going to the lowlands. Do you remember the lowlands? You know, all the different regions of Scotland, this is the lowlands. It's the southern and eastern part of Scotland. So this is sort of the flat terrain, more temperate, compared to the highlands where the weather's more extreme and more certainly more mountainous. The general area, if you draw it out, there's this area called the Highland Boundary Fault, which stretches across the mainland of the UK from Helensburg on the Firth of Clyde in the southwest across to Stonehaven in the northeast. And I was just in Stonehaven in January. It's where we saw the amazing tides and stuff like that. But yeah, really lowlands for a reason. No higher at any point than two hundred meters or maybe six hundred feet. It's just mostly the central lowlands, which is just river valleys and rolling hills, and also the rivers of Clyde, Forth, and Tay. And then on the southern end of most of that is they call the southern uplands, although remember, no higher than 200 meters, which has got more lands and stuff like that. This is all the big cities. This is Edinburgh, this is Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee, Sterling, not that they're all that big. And Daft mill is in the how of uh fife. A how in in Gale, of course, meaning uh a hollow or tra ct of flat land. So this is the how carved by the river Eden and near the village of Khalisi . It's called Daft mill after the Daft Burn. Again, Gaelic, a burn is a stream , and there's parts of the daft burn that because of the shape of the land that appear to run uphill. So that stream is clearly daft . And so the fact that the mill uses the stream, means it must be if you use the daft burn, you must be a daft mill. Oh yeah. So that's where it comes from. And up above that area, there is the Lamont Hills, which is where all the royalty and so forth. And this has been productive land for literally millennia. Archaeologists have pulled out Neolithic sites, Bronze Age sites, all the way through. Kales i, the nearest village, is also famous for Kales iman , which is a sandstone pillar about nine feet high, two point seven meters or so, with a carving of a naked male warrior carrying a shield and a spear. And this is likely fifteen hundred years old. This is the Picts. And this is at the time that the Romans were trying to control Scotland and failing against the Picts. And so this was a kind of an artifact that was built at that time to terrorize the Romans. Now, the particular chunk of land we're talking about in the Hau Fife has got lots of land records. The earliest ones show the Kinlock family had controlling the charter to the mill and the lands that were already there. From the reign of Alexander III. So that's 1245 to 1285. Then this records of it handing passing to the Sandalins and then to the Walkers. So in 1701, the Walker family, so we fast forwarded here 500 years or so, uh, established Daft the Daft Mill and uh and Pitler . And uh also on the property is this stone water tower. It was built somewhere in the eighteen hundreds. Nobody's exactly sure when. It has a Dutch look, so they presume it was built by the Dutch engineer that was working in the area during the development of the railway, which the Walkers were investors in, and famously further to the north here is the Tay River Tail Rail Bridge, which had a collapse in the 1800s as one a great story, but a little off the beat for this particular one. The current family that controls it is the Cuthberts. So grandfather Cuthbert actually was a sharecropper for the Walkers, but in 1984, the sons, uh Ian and Francis , uh, were able to buy the property. And so they are the fourth owner in 700 years or so. And it is about a thousand-acre working farm. So they rotate crops of barley, potatoes, carrots, and broccoli, but they also work beef cattle as well. So synergistic farming , very normal. And it's important to remember that these guys are primarily farmers. And so they do have barley as one of the rotational crops. And they sell most of that barley to whiskey makers, mainly Edrington. So that's McAllen in Highland Park. And as is noted in one of the pieces I was reading at the time, back in 2005, they were selling barley at about 70 pounds per ton . And so there was this idea that, you know, we could make that barley more valuable by making it into whiskey. And so to make more money on barley, they started they applied for a license to be able to build their own spirit uh production facility of distillery out of some old vintage buildings in the area. Uh it took 'em a couple of years to get that license, but they got their first spirit make in two thousand five. So of all the barley they produce, they only keep a hundred tons for themselves , which they send to Chris Maltings and Aloha to do the malting, which means they get back about 80 tons of malt. And they use that over the course of the year because they don't make whiskey all year round. They're farmers, but there is a couple of periods after the barley harvest. So after they do two harvests of wet barley a year, a winter harvest and a spring harvest or a summer harvest. And so from November to February they make some whiskey and from June to July they make some whiskey. Otherwise, they're just farming all the time, which is much more the like the way the farming that bar barley-based whiskeys were made 200 years ago, you know, in the 1800s. Two harvests a year in between you make whiskey to uh do that. Uh Francis Cuthbert is the is the whiskey maker of the brothers. The Ian is quite a bit shyer, and he's very quotable. And I will quote him here when he says, uh when it comes to distilling, there are three of us doing it: me, myself, and I . Who taught me? I think it's just genetic. All Scotsmen have it in them to make whiskey . Uh, so his approach, this is a very small facility, is remember, he's got 80 tons of grist. He loads a ton at a time into the mash ton with a copper top on top. They take water off the well that comes through that water tower to make a very clear wart. It's part of their design. They use a pair of 7,500 liters stainless steel washbacks. That's tiny . They do a 72 to 100 hour ferment using dried yeast, no cream yeast here for those who are squeamish. And then off to a three thousand liter wash still and a twenty seven hundred liter spirit still. Those are stills from Forsythe. Virtually everything else in this whole facility was made locally, but the stills do come from uh Forsyth. Basic Roths. Nice. Yeah . The spent grain is then given to the cattle as a high calorie feed. Even the spillings and so forth are not bad fertilizer. They also use that on the ground as well. So nothing is wasted . Everything was made from the farm. Everything goes back into the farm. The place must smell like whiskey, though. Well, for a few times a year, every year. But tell me the downside. Uh, New Make comes in at about 75% . Of course they fill at 63.5% because they're filling bourbon casts and they get their bourbon casts from Heaven Hill. They also have some sherry casts and they have all their dungeon storage on site. So as I mentioned, uh they started in 2005 . They did not make their first bottle until 2018 . Because they're not in the business of trying to make money off the whiskey per se. Uh when uh when uh Cuthbert was asked about that he said why'd that wait so long? Because I didn't think it was ready. And so yeah, he they kept laying up barrels every twice a year and it was only when they got to over twelve that he finally decided to do a bottling. His first bottling , uh in twenty eighteen, was t only two hundred and fifty bottles at cast strength, and you had to enter a lottery for the opportunity to buy one at 200 pounds apiece. And it disappeared very quickly. So this, uh, they do all their bottling through uh uh an external bottler, uh Barry Brothers, Barry Brothers and Rudd. And so that's what this is. This is bottled by Barry Brothers. And this is their 2012 edition. So this was distilled in 2012, bottled in 2026. And I think it's already gone. Although in this case there is uh thirty four hundred and seventy-five bottles. So the production's a little bit bigger . So then this actually comes from five first fill sherry's hogsheads. These are Al Oresso and Pedro Yemenis. Seven first fill Heaven Hills barrels. So that combination of twelve barrels produces the thirty four hundred and bottles. They actually did the distillation on December twenty-fifth, twenty uh twelve. Like Christmas time? What's that when she do for Christmas Day . Christmas Day, I distilled whiskey. And then, you know, 13 years later, I put it into a bottle at 46% and sold it for a hundred euros. Very reasonable. That's about $115 US. And I've already had a couple of tastes of this as a toast of soma. The color on it is spectacular. But that's of course a sherry casking, so you'd expect nothing less. I defy you to think this is a lowland. It could be a spay. It's big and rich and sweet and clear. It's just perfect. And it's um not exported in any way. You have to come to Scotland to get this. Um, Barry Brothers is a is a great producer. They do a lot of custom bottles and so forth. But in the case here, you're talking about a single farm estate whiskey bottled through a bunch of pros. Uh only certain even here in the Netherlands, there are 10 stores that carry this. And one of them is the whiskey shop in Alkmar . It is both a combination of the craft distilling wave that we've seen and the oldest school whiskey you possibly imagine. Barley grown on a farm sold from the farm, essentially. And uh it's a delight. I love that this exists. It's hilarious it is called Daft Mill. But uh it's just It's the real deal. It's the real You make a trip to Scotland, you pick up you got a friend who loves whiskey, you gotta get him one of these. It's gonna be a pain in the butt to find, but if you find it, it's going to be so special because it's in a time of these ultra-industrialized whiskey producers at massive scale, these guys just not that guy. They're farmers. And for a hundred tons of the grain they make a year, they put into barrels and once in a while make a batch. Maybe once a year. That's all they do. Yeah, I mean this is you don't get rich doing this if you make three hundred forty one bottles a year, uh even at a hundred fifty. Thirty five hundred bottles a year. Yeah. So and then a hundred and then the retail's a hundred dollars, so a hundred pounds, so that's thirty-five thousand, of which they're getting maybe twenty percent of that. So no, it's not a huge amount of money. No. Um it's just another element it's worth more than what it would be just sold as grain. So they are making some money. But it's uh yeah, it's lovely. It's still lovely that it exists. It's just once again, I'm educated. I have a moment where it's like more than one way to make whiskey out there. And some of these ways are the old ways, they're making whiskey like it's eighteen twenty-six again How cool. Daft mill. You can't get it, so don't try. Yeah, well, but if you ever get a chance, if you're ever in the right place, get somebody who's Karen Berry Brothers, look for it. This single farm estate, it's very special. They make a cast strength that that will be only like a hundred bottles. Those are much harder to find. But this is their main release each year, the winter release. And it's beautiful. Perfect. Perfect in every way. Thank you, Richard. Richard Campbell, run as radio dot com . Uh where do you go from uh the Netherlands? Where do you go next? Going home tomorrow for a week, then I'm back to stalk. You slacker crazy. But uh but the week I'm home, I get to go talk to two different high schools, so I'm really looking forward to that. See, I would be looking forward to crawling under the bed and falling asleep for a week. But you know, we're slacking for a few minutes. But uh compared to Richard Talking to kids about AI, you only get to do this a few times a year. It's really, really important. I hope they don't boo you like the college crowd has been booing people like Eric Shaw. Am I right? Anybody cricket? Not that guy. Not that guy. And if you know, if I were those kids, I'd be very, very interested in what you have to say because there 's a lot of uncertainty as they end up the world. And I want to hear what they want to say. You know, that's all one of the reasons I'm up there is to see where they're at. What do they see now ? Right. Yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you, uh Paul Thurott. He's at Thorat.com. Become a premium member for all the goodness. Uh T-H-U-R-R-O-T .com and his books are at leanpub.com. Of course, if you're a premium member, you can get all the books as part of your membership, which makes it even more desirable. And uh together they form the dynamic duo of Windows journalism every Well I know I'm dynamic. Dynamic as heck. One of us. Every Wednesday at uh eleven AM Pacific, two PM Eastern, eighteen hundred UTC. You can watch us do it live if you want, if you're in the club, of course in the Club Twit Discord, but also YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. After the fact on demand versions of the show at twit.tv slash W W There is a YouTube channel dedicated to the video, or you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client to the audio or video or both and get it automatically as soon as we're uh done of a Wednesday. Thanks. John Ashley.ill Fing in for Kevin