Data API Builder and Whiskey Review

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorott and Richard Campbell are here and we have lots to talk about. Of course, Microsoft Build is on. They love Stevie Batisha's uh explanation of what Microsoft Solera is all about. I think you'll love it too. Jensen Wong's amazing keynote Computex announced some new Windows machines. There is a ton of Windows news, and it's next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love. From people you trust . This is Twitch . This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell, episode 9 86. Recorded Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026, Liminal AI . It's time for Windows Weekly. Yes, you Microsoft lovers, all you winners and dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft with two of the smartest whip smart folks in the I'm not that smart, Leo. I just engage with copilot by mistake. Whoops. It's not hard to do. How did you get here? Oh you press the copilot key, Paul. That's Paul Thoreau. T H U Double R O Double Good.com. He is also the author of so many fabulous books, including D and Shittify Windows, The Field Guide to Windows 11, and Windows Ever Hello, Polly. Hello, Leo. And how are you, Mr. Richard Campbell in Copenhag en? I'm doing very well. It was a busy day today. I opened the conference with a keynote called After the AI Hype. And I did the last talk today on building data centers in space . Oh wow. Yeah and do you Now you used to uh do these geek talks uh as kind of part of your uh you know dot net rocks with Carl Franklin you'd have these geek talks. Are you gonna do either of those in your dot net rocks? I think I think the data center one will end up being a DNR at some point. So it's it's it's but if it fits the the genre well, it's fun. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean I would want to listeners. Record the AI hype thing, because who knows from day to day where the hype flies. Yeah, there's a version. It's already up. Oh, nice. Oh, we can see that on YouTube. Yeah. Under what what's the at NDC Kopenhagen. NDC Kopenhagen, and you have to say it just like that. That's it. Just like that. Well, this was a busy, busy week for you, gentlemen. Microsoft Build is going on. I know that because Christina Warren wasn't yesterday. She uh it' as GitHub and she was at build and then she was building that's and then that's that's in San Francisco and then in a completely different time zone in a land far, far away, Computex in Taipei. Wow . And both had big announcements. Mm-hmm. Or to put it in the words of Paul on the show notes, oh my God, oh my god, oh my god. Oh my good I get overwhelmed easily. What happened? There's a lot going on. Monday was a lot of ranting. Yeah. Jensen Huang's keynote at 6 a.m. my time. Wow. Yeah. So Jensen and uh the CEO of Qualcomm, uh geez, I'm trying to I'm losing my mind. Uh were both in at Computex, so they could not appear at Microsoft's conference, you know, in uh unfortunately time for the same day. So they did have stuff to say that was relevant, however. Oh yeah. Yeah. Big time relevant. Although I thought it was interesting, Jensen's big announcement was actually not a Qualcomm chip. Well no media tech chip. Which we knew well right. Okay. I mean we knew this was coming, right? This has been rumored and there have been leaks and you know, whatever. Um we still I gotta say I'm not super excited about the lack of detail here. Um but from what I can tell, and this makes sense given the nature of NVIDIA, obviously these things are gonna be GPU heavy, right? Which is kind of a first for um you know the Windows on ARM space, I guess, if that makes sense. Um so uh you know we'll we'll see. I don't know what to make of this. It's so strange. So three nanometer process. I should say, sorry. The rumors were that there were two levels of chip, N1 and N1X. The thing they announced is N1X, which we know because Jensen said it by mistake a couple of times. Oh really? Yes. but it's called the NVIDIA RTX Spark is the uh the the marketing name or the go-to market name. Um TSMC three nanometer, a 20-core Grace CPU connected to a Blackwell RTX GPU, which in my brain is more workstation than gaming, right? Like um but horsepower for sure. It's definitely powerful. Uh 6144 CUDA cores. Wow. And and then whatever this means, fifth generation tensor course. So like there's going to be 128 gigabytes of integrated unified memory, as they say. Yep. Um Microsoft has been working with NVIDIA to adapt Windows to this. And and this is gonna I'll I'm gonna talk more about this a little bit later as we talk about build, but you know it think in the back of your brain just keep this idea uh in place which is we've talked about this notion that two years ago Microsoft introduced Copilot plus PC, which was MPU based , on device AI. Lots of people have GPUs, whether it's uh integrated GPU, dedicated GPU, laptop, desktop, doesn't matter, that i are adequately powerful, or more so that even uh that uh to run those copilot plus pc local ai tests but they do not you're kind of wondering when or if that that would ever change uh they did not announce that but there are some changes that if you I don't know if I got this in the session or for something I read, but um are basically being described as bringing co-pilot plus uh plus PC capabilities to other PCs, in particular this thing, right? Which does have an MPU. I I don't know how powerful it is, but Microsoft is adapting Windows so that those locally things will run on the GPU in this case. And uh we'll again like we'll get to that. Um so we've been waiting for this, right? I mean NVIDIA is it's black. It looks shiny . Yep. Oh I'm sorry, I I should say too. Microsoft also announced for their part a laptop that will run this system. They're calling it Surface Laptop Ultra. It's not expected until the second half of the year, along with all the other PC makers, you know, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Dell, etc. Everybody's making one of this Spark. Basically. Is that right? Uh yeah. Although I think the chipset in this is new. Right. I mean, you know, a new design. But uh Well has to you can't put a desktop chip in a laptop. I mean Hastell of course you can but uh so I uh I like I said, I uh they announced this. Microsoft announced their surface laptop ultra. Between the two of them uh announcements me uh there's a little bit of information about the technical aspects of this. So I was thinking, well, build's gonna happen. And of course they're gonna talk about this at build. And they have a little bit, but again, very vague. Like we don't really know exactly. And I think they're just waiting until we get, you know , uh closer uh pricing releasing availability, who knows? I'm think it's gonna be several thousand dollars. More than that because didn't they say it's gonna have a lot of RAM?? One and twenty eight Yeah. So my my my gut said ten thousand bucks easy. Yeah that's kinda what I was thinking. Yeah I was like north of four, but yeah. I mean I don't know. But I can you but who would pay ten grand for a laptop? Uh you know Well AI is gonna have a you know similar device probably end of the year. I don't have RAM they'll put in there, but more The way this was described was almost like it's you have a data center on your desk. In other words, this thing can run AI to the degree that right now requires cloud AI, right? Um we don't have the models. Well, I mean that might that's might be part of the delay here, right? So maybe this fall, yeah. We'll see. Um well like I said, I'm gonna talk about the the kind of back end the software part of this in a bit, but it's this is very interesting. Um the part of the leak. And it's definitely this push towards local model running. Right, which honestly is a major theme of build even though they didn't really position it that way, right? If you say that out loud. It's like why would you want this much horsepower on your desk if you weren't just gonna run the model locally. Most people don't need or want this much power in the desk, but as local models evolve and get better, and as the software on top of it, especially Windows evolves , you know, they become more capable and yeah, we're we're gonna get there. There's no doubt about it. But um let me see if I can find the language in here, because I did I put this in the, I just threw it in the notes as a little reminder to myself, and now I can't find it because that's how my brain works. Um Yeah, they call so when you think about on-device AI, um we're talking about what I would call small language models as opposed to large language models that run up in the cloud just as an easy differentiator. I think these lines are gonna, you know, blend together or whatever. But um in more than one place, Microsoft referred to this as unmetered AI, meaning it's local on your machine, so you're not paying for the token thing and you know whatever your usage costs. You paid for the compute yourself. You get to run it as hard as you want to run it. It's private, it's on your device. I mean I love this idea. If if I can get a model that's going to be comp arable to a frontier model. Yeah. Right. And it's and it can heat a room. Yeah. Um so I mean it's interesting to compare what we do know to what we found what w we think we found out through Leaks and assuming that stuff's correct, right? So like a typical laptop CPU these days is actually kind of hard to pin down, honestly. But um uh i in the old days, meaning before the core ultra chips, like on the Intel side, they would have the U-series core whatever generation, and those things uh U series would typically like be 15 watts, right? Now we have uh multiple, not just multiple cores, but multiple kinds of cores, and so there's kind of a range of power um that we use to describe uh their power consumption essentially. So I would say a typical laptop today probably is somewhere, you know, ten to thirty watts, maybe somewhere in there. Sure. Um the lower end chip that they did not announce was supposed to run at eighteen to forty-five watts. The N1X, which is the one they did announce, runs at forty-five to eighty watts. So without b what I took from that before. Oh yeah. That's a lot of power. But that's gaming laptops, that's portal workstations, that's desktop PCs. I mean this is you know, it's not a thin and light, although they were talking thin and light So I don't know, you know, I I feel like we are going to see the other one too. There'll be a lower end solution for cheaper computers. I think we're going to see lower end configurations of this thing, but I think the go-to-market is very much to um attract those people who are heavy, really heavy users like uh engineers, maybe creators, developers. Yeah. Yeah, because uh NVIDIA already offers a basically a Raspberry Pi with CUDA course on it. That's cheap and can't run diddly , basically. I mean so 'cause you can run it doesn't mean it's usable. Yeah. I mean and they're they have a knitting people model, it's okay. I mean, uh they have a very small model and Google has Gemma. I I think this is just about getting people on CUDA, frankly. I mean, I you know, which is it's totally what this is about. Completely understand. This is like if we can just own the whole market. Yeah. Like eventually this surging market thing that we're part of, which is insanity, is going to slow down or whatever and but now we we have the market, you know. So we'll And this is why I'm kind of r resistant to it, 'cause I uh Yeah, well we and we've seen P seal seals drop across the board. I think it's exactly that. And now you're gonna ship arguably the most expensive laptop ever made. Right. Like your timing couldn't be much worse. Except for that part where it's that message above local AI. But unless the goal isn't I mean look, the goal can't be volume. It's the PC market. They're going to sell 200 million -ish computers this year and only a tiny percentage are gonna be these kind of things. So this is the same situation we had at Qualcomm two years ago where at you know at that time uh a smartphone market that was over a billion devices a year. And you're like, why, why even bother? Like, why would you even try to go to the PC market? You're if you got 10% somehow, and I don't think they have really, but it let's say they did, so you're selling like 20 million of these things a year compared to a billion? Like , it's what Apple used to call the pro line. This is for that's why I agree with you, Richard, that this is more about CUDA. It's about mind share, not market share. Sure. Well, and and it's about I you know the big aspect here is investors are worrying that these investments in AI aren't gonna last and you've got to show motion. So the idea that we're pushing on new machines that are going to open more doors for more users. Yeah. Anything to keep the investors engaged and not running for the hills. Well, and enterprises starting to say, holy cow, look at our token bill. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah. I so the the timing in that sense is actually pretty good because all the AI the major AIs are switching to that consumption model and they and bills are going to go up not exponentially, but a lot. And we I think the a lot of the people, companies, whatever who are using AI today and paying twenty bucks a month or two hundred bucks a month or whatever they're paying, uh don't understand the true cost and they're about to you know, they're about to find out. Just as a little bit of commentary that I'm kind of still pushing through my brain, uh you know, Microsoft uh doesn't get a lot of credit for this kind of thing 'cause they actually don't do this kind of thing a lot, especially recently, but they were kind of out early on this, if you think about it. I mean when they announced Copilot plus PC two years ago , my evaluation of at the time was like you what you should be pushing because it's ARM and it's Snapdragon is efficiency, reliability, power management, battery life, you know, and then just general excellent performance, but whatever. But they were very much pushing local AI. And um it's tough because I no matter what you do on a computer, you sit there all day long or you just use it occasionally, whatever, use web browsers, email, and whatever applications. Um, you might have some one to seven little tasks within individual apps that might be better or more efficient because of an MPU, um, especially if you're a creator, you uh there are certain features in Windows you only get from a co-pilot plus PC. So you either do or do not know that that's the case, whatever. Um it's but it's not a reason to buy it, right? I I it it's still to this day is not the reason to buy the thing. So this is another, you know, here just two years later, this will be a lot more powerful, apparently, be a lot more it consume a lot more power. But two years have gone by. It ha uh copilot plus PC, I don't think you can say it could has moved the kneel per se on like uh local AI usage or awareness or PC sales or however you want to say it. Um and so this is it's like oh, we',re gonna try this again, sort of, but I mean m you know, Microsoft look I we're gonna talk about Stevie Batish again in a little while. And uh he was the guy, you know, three, five years ago what it was, who gave that very eloquent description of those three AI app models or app structures. But the following year, he talked about MPUs versus GPUs. And for a laptop, when you can offload uh certain AI tasks to an MP U, you get better performance, but you also don't impact the battery at all, which is not something that happens with a CPU or GPU. So it's still important. But if you do have the big GPU, you bought it for a reason. You want to use it. This is the argument we've always made. Like you should yeah, you should be able to use it for an example. Why a laptop? It's I mean Because that's what people that's the mass that's the mass market. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So this is to put a uh local AI into the hands of the masses . Yeah. I think it applies to the second . Yeah, not at first. Developers want laptops. This is for the classes, not the masses, Leo. Nice. Jack Trammell. Right? I mean, but but it will come down. I mean, I I think this is to jump start uh more adoption of local AI across the board from developers and well to developers, pretty much from the developer space, but but not just developers that want to use it locally for their own needs , but uh developers who are creating apps that may use local AI features instead of just relying on Sload. The Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra, which Microsoft said will be the fastest laptop we've ever made. Yeah. Is ARM . Right? ARM. It's not Qualcomm. Right. So um that's interesting. Well, I mean, this Intel and AMD in the X86 space there are have been other But this is their first non-Qual com surface . Yeah. So I mean one of the uh one of the non-Qualcom arms surface, I guess. Uh Yeah, and the mod it for Windows eleven. I mean the the original Surface RT, which was ARM, was NVIDIA, by the way. But um Oh. But yes. Yeah, way back when, like the Tegra X or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is yeah, I mean but look the thing is they had we thought they had a Qualcomm exclusive deal for a long time. Amount of months or years they had this exclusivity thing. Um in return for that, of course, I Qualcomm has done uh an incredible job, right? So Snapdragon XX2, unbelievable. Um and they're addressing what I would call like kind of the the right part of the marketplace for the mainstream. Like they're, you know, uh the first devices were often for for at the time, it's funny because they had these would be cheap, but kind of premium thinelite laptops, you know, they it was designed to be attractive to people who might want to upgrade and um spend a little bit money m uh a little bit more money maybe, although they weren't actually more expensive than other things. Um and then they've scaled it downward, and we'll talk about this a little bit later because they scaled it downward yet again, and that's gonna help out a lot this year with the component crisis. But um this yeah, this fills um a need, I guess, at the high end of the arm side of the I mean we're gonna talk more about you know these um other you know like Snapdragon C and stuff. Do you think that the market is now starting to be high end NVIDIA , low and uh uh snapdragon C and Intel and then kind of medium Intel AMD. I mean is it starting to break down ? This just happened. So I can't I don't want to make any ideas. Or whatever. I think that's on anybody's hands yet. They're just being announced. Yeah, this is September. We don't have detail. We don't have benchmarks. We don't have, you know, anything. So it's like look, it looks great. Um, but what is it? Are you gonna be the list, Paul? That's the question. Is an Ultra gonna show up at your door? Ooh Yeah, I don't know. Somebody said it, I thought this was hysterical. Maybe it was the verge. This is uh this is a replacement for that Snapdragon dev machine. Oh yeah, no, those things are totally related. In the in the same way that a Lamborghini is a replacement for Model T. Right. I thought that was a very weird thing. I don't know. was like a Mac mini style all in one not all in one uh you know mini form mini form factor it was essentially laptop chipset right like so the the goal of that was just to get people uh developers on ARM you know obviously yeah I mean this is this is uh this is different. I mean it it's ARM, yes. But I arm is already established with there are there are no there's no remaining problems there. They're scaling upward. Didn't Jensen say it will run every app that runs on Windows, something like that. I mean, he w he really was at great pains to see . Because you can't ever read a review of any Snapdragon laptop, even as recently as this week, without someone saying, Well, there's you know, you have to deal with compatibility and shit . No, you don't. No, you don't. No, you don't. It's ridiculous. That's the s I sorry, I that's silly. But he has to say that because that's the perception. But the other half of that, by the way, is if you went to Computex, which I did not, they're showing demos of games running on this thing. And of course those things are emulated, right? He held it. Oh he showed it okay. So that's uh you know, interesting. I I I will you know, you could run games on Snapdragon X, you can run a few more games or run games a little bit better on X two , but emulation is great for an app. It's not necessarily great for games, which is why we have all those other things like you know, super resolution and uh you know, whatever else that they do to try to make these things just kind of run better. And video is benefiting from all that work. It's just, you know, it's not like they're starting, it's not like the they're not not it's like a I don't know like a big block engine that just is super fast so we can just run these things like it has to you know work still has to occur under the covers and it has. We've had two years of that two years plus really. Um, so they're gonna benefit from that. So their GPU, like I, you know, on a normal X86 laptop with an RTX, whatever uh D GPU games run great, like Call of Duty runs great on those. Uh like really great. Like 100-something frames per second, full res, all the details on it's awesome. That's x86. So if you can get a game like that to run at like 60 frames a second on this thing, that's also awesome . So that would, you know, that's amazing, especially for something that's emulated, right? Um , this feels like such a big victory for uh Microsoft. They were front and center, and it was very clear that these were Windows machines . Yeah. Uh that this was really uh I thought very interesting. I just this is what this is why I mentioned, you know, we don't usually give them credit for this because they don't usually do this. But they actually came out very early and publicly about local AI and were ignored completely, you know, pretty much, right? Um and I don't know. That's maybe that they should maybe they shouldn't have pushed that part of it so hard, but um but like, you know, and I mentioned Stevie Batish who we're going to talk about again, you know, a couple three years ago, whatever that was when he talked about MPUs. He really made a real a good case for why these uh types of chip or um whatever they are, ch I guess they're chips inside of an SOC are so important in the portable space. But you know, that's that thing we keep talking about. You have a desktop computer or a laptop with a dedicated GPU or a GPU and a card. It's got dedicated RAM. It's hundreds of tops, not forty or eighty-five tops, um several hundred tops in many cases. Should be able to blur the background and paint or whatever. Imagine. Yeah. The model I have in my mind, and we Steve Gibson uh talked about this yesterday too, is a home server, a NAS maybe, or what I have for the framework desktop. Which you then you know, that has all the horsepower it it has all the electrical power you know Sun Microsystems called and said the network is the computer Leo um and no I look I that's just the model in my mind. I mean I don't know why you would want it on a laptop. I if I have a laptop, I'm gonna SSH into my big machine or something. You wouldn't want this, right? Unless you were a developer. Well I would want it as a desktop. But the reason you want local AI on a laptop just in general, right? And even today, it works offline. It's private. It's your data. It's not going up to the cloud. It's this there's reasons, right? So that means you want the biggest machine you can possibly get to run Right. And that's really considering how limited information was. But that was the point the point of the MPU was you don't need that super high. I mean, even though there's a good computers, but it's demonstrat Well, no, yeah, to do the thing you're doing in the cloud. But y that's not all that AI is. Right. If you're going to fire up a bunch of agents and have them go off and do whatever they do, yeah. I mean you're going to need more power, but or a cloud-based thing. But I I think I this is just the market evolving to the you know, I think these things are converging. The local AI is getting better, the local hardware is getting better. I mean, I think our makes a huge difference just in general. This is primarily for inference and pro and I would say primarily for coding. Is that right? Or no? Uh your place games? No, I don't yeah, I mean yes. I Oh yeah, it's a general purpose computer. Not gonna deny that, but the market they're selling this expensive you can get a cheaper gaming machine. The market they're selling this to is, I would think, coders. But I don't know. side They're engineering. Yeah, maybe cash. delve developers, of course. It's not going to be something on someone's, you know, desk at American Express, you know, taking calls from customers. I mean, did they talk about because I think this is under estimated and i I haven't seen a lot of numbers, but but it turns out throughput, RAM throughput uh is really, really important. Yeah, and there is on the fact some people have complained that the DGX Spark just doesn't have very good RAM throughput. So I'd have to go and even look at that to figure out what the architecture is there, but it's probably just a standard it's probably so so dim . That's really important. And actually Apple has a pretty good story on that with its unified RAM. So Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And that we don't have a lot of the details. That's part of the point. Yeah. Right. Right. The ram the ram so on I know on Snapdragon X two Elite Extreme, which is where the RAM is integrated into the die , the RAM throughput is not double, but it's close to double. Right. You know? That's how important that is. It's huge. It's everything. Yeah. Yep. Let me take a little break. Uh, and we have so much more to talk about. We're just scratching the surface of Computex Build and uh Richard Campbell. Came and went like a ghost. He's like the wind. But we will have more in just a moment. You're watching Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell in Copenhagen, Paul Thorat and McKenzie, and Leo Laporte in my Attic. Attic no, not that attic. This episode of our fabulous show brought to you by our fabulous sponsor, Delete Me, and man, you need this today. You need this today . Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is out there on the internet for anyone to see. 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And then if you go up to X to Elite, it's a fifty percent gain from that, so two hundred and twenty eight gigabits per second. And this makes a difference in in in AI. Yep. Makes a difference in everything. I mean, but yes., yeah Especially in AI, yeah. Okay. Okay. Um yeah, just I was just curious. I yeah. Okay. So uh yesterday was the build keynote. It was two and a half to three hours long. I completely lost my mind by the end of it. But unlike the past um I'm gonna call it ten years or so, um, there was a bunch of stuff in there for Windows and for the client, which I thought was kind of cool. Yeah, look news stories about Windows. is amazing Windows it builds. How many builds have we had with nothing about Windows Right. And uh this is um I think this r part partially due to the fact that cloud computing just didn't have anything interesting for Windows. That was the focus for such a long time. I don't think it made it very interesting for people who would consider themselves to be enthusiasts or whatever. Um, whereas AI, you know, even if you don't like AI, uh like it's generating news and excitement, it's interesting, like this stuff happening. So that to me this is interesting. Um Microsoft, I mean, this goes back to Windows 10 really, but they've been trying to position Windows as the best desktop platform for developers for a long time. This is why we have WSL, the Windows uh subsystem for Linux, et cetera, et cetera. Um, you know, I don't remember the timing of any of this anymore, but you know, Dev Box came out of this, all the improvements to terminal, et. cetera, et cetera Um, I have to say, super excited. I I unless I'm misremembering, which I could because it was a long event. I think the first person that came on stage that wasn't Sacha Nadella was uh Kayla Cinnamon, who does um I think to Villa IVC, but she's in terminal, right? And she and she has an awesome uh YouTube channel, by the way, where she does a lot of terminal tips and tricks and stuff. Excellent. Done some great run-ads with me too. Yeah, she's great. So she did some terminal demos like right up front, which I thought was really cool. But um so they announced a bunch of things. There is a uh something called the Windows Developer Configuration, which is what this new uh these new NVIDIA-based PCs are going to ship in, which is a WingGet or a Windows Package manager based um configuration that creates a distraction free environment for developers. Now, I didn't say this, but to me that sounds like Xbox mode, but it's like developer mode, you know, for developers or whatever, right? Um, so less stuff going on, um, you know, widgets aren't popping up, notifications are off, et cetera, et cetera. Um, there are optimizations in there for things like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, WSL, et cetera, et cetera. So that is actually out there now. If you want it, you can just install it. Like it's uh, I think it's on GitHub. Um so if you want to just, you know, one line and auto-configure computer to be less annoying . That's something interesting. Devconfig can be annoying annoying too, just in a different way. Yep. It's in dark mode, you know, I don't know. The uh we talked about this at least twice previously, but back in January, Microsoft announced something called the I think it's the Windows App Development CLI, the Win App CLI. Um, which as originally released in 0.01, you know, forum, didn't I didn't quite understand the point of it. They later added support for workloads like .NET and all the.NET frameworks, like, you know, WPF, et cetera. And I was like, okay, kind of interesting. But now it's making sense. Um, because they a that thing is now generally available and there is a plugin for it called the Windows Developer , nope, called the Windows Developer Skills that allows you to use the WinCli to create, in this case, native WinUI, three apps from the command line. And I'm going to talk about that in the back of the book because I did it. And um Okay. Very interesting. So what I'm going to say though, just here is that CLIs are huge this year all of a sudden. And it's the same reason that markdown is huge. It's um it's because of AI and uh agents in particular. You could have gotten at Rocks a few weeks ago that was like build your uh CLI first Yeah. And this is that thing we talked about a couple of weeks ago. You know, back in the day, my I think it was Exchange 2020. We're going to build this thing in PowerShell and then we're going to build GUI on top of it. That made sense to me kind of architecturally or whatever, but um now in the AI era, we have um uh a newfound need for this kind of thing. So we have apps that exist and we live in kind of a screen scraping world because we don't mean, you know, uh compute use, where we have to deal with what people have, but apps are also can can be be, you know, adapted to expose their capabilities, individual features, through a programmable interface, which on I think on Android is like App Intense maybe, and on Windows, it's it's called AI Actions or just app actions. And this is when you can right click on a file and file explorer and go to AI Actions submenu and then like remove background with paint or whatever, right? It's exposing a feature, which is okay for people, but it's awesome for AI. And that's why that exists. And then this when the CLI stuff is the same thing. It's it, but for agents specifically, right? That uh having a C CLI interface to anything helps you do a bunch of things, but one of the key ones is grounding AI in something in particular. So when you use this Windows Developer Skills plugin , the the AI whatever AI you choose, you can use you know cloud or open AI or copilot and then eventually everything, but today those things. Um it will only be grounded in all of the documentation and learnings they have for whatever environment you're working in. So if it's WinUI, one of the problems I've run into, and it they specifically call this one out, is general purpose AI, a general purpose coding AI will pull in stuff that's from WPF or other frameworks that are similar and it will make mistakes. And you run into that thing where you're like, okay, we fixed it. You're like, nope, you didn't still isn't compile. Oh, okay. I see the problem. Now the problem is and it talks and talks and talks. And you run out of all your credits. You're like, what the f So this is the this is a solution for that, right? It's very interesting. Yeah. Ver yeah. I tried to make an animation today for my uh data centers in space talk and uh ran out of tokens on like three different services and got nothing. Yeah. That's a good experience. Um such a standard Microsoft productivity experience really. Um there's a new intelligent terminal terminal mode coming. Uh it's an experimental preview right now, but uh basically what this is is another way to interact with AI agents in a command line where the top half is the normal terminal window PowerShell typically, the bottom is like the agent CLI interface. And so you can go back and forth between the two. It's kind of interesting. Um lots of uh WSL improvements. I don't think we need to get into too much, but the big one is uh container support is coming, so that's awesome. And then um they released our Utils, which is like over 75 um CLIs from Linux now in Windows, right, that weren't there before. So again, really pushing the kind of command line part of it. They have something called Microsoft Execution Containers for agents, which I when I first saw that in AM, I was like, oh my God, oh my God, they're doing it. They're doing Windows 10X. No, it's not Windows 10X. This is so agents running on Windows can run in their own little sandbox environment, right? Right. Um and then you can you can feed it the data you want and it won't be able to bleed out to the rest of the computer. Yeah, this is this is how like claude co-work works, right? Is it sets up a VM on your machine, restricting its ability to access the machines, you have to specify what on your machine you're allowed to use. Yeah. It'll jump across that VM barrier. So I haven't done actually I think it's fair to say I haven't done anything with cloud code from directly from a command line other than like through a chatbot interface, which is sort of a command line, right? Um but when you do that, my god, does it ask you for permission all the time? Oh , YOLO mode, dude. Whenever you launch, that's it. Dude, dude, you're no one does it that way. Run unsafe. Yeah. So the so the when you invoke Claude code, you type Claude dash dash . Dangerously bypass permissions. called YOLO mode. Oh no. Everybody because it's it's you can't get anything done. You're constantly just constantly managing . So in the in the workflow that I will talk about later in the show, um generally speaking, you there was an option it was like, yes, dear God, yes, you can access the file system, relax. Um but there was a second one that was like always allow like in this case five we don't wanna do it. You could you could you could okay. I just I don't know. I know it's scary, but well slash dive into deep end. You only live once, Paul. Yeah. Yep. I live a fall off a cliff at the end of that line. No, I run everything that way. Everything. All YOLO all the time. Um this is the that's necessary in my life. Okay . There's your title. I'm not in a place where I feel comfortable doing that or recommending it to other people, but I okay, maybe. Um you're not alone, Leo. I know a bunch of people . It's because otherwise it's it's worse than UAC. It's like Yeah, and the and their gay check is just at a different point, right? It's the pull request. Right. It's all right, Paul. You once you get some comfort with it, you'll realize it's it's not gonna delete your database or anything. It's not you just got an apology from AI that deleted something. What are you talking about? That's a good point. Anyway, it's okay. And it felt bad about itself. Yeah, and it felt bad. We're talking about Opus four eight, which is really good at apologizing. Yeah. one likes data loss. That must have hurt a lot. I'm so sorry. Okay . I have I have uh very good, strong backups of everything. I'm not I'm not too worried. But I it really it well sorry and I'm not gonna argue uh in fairly no I'm not arguing I'm just I'm just saying I'm saying I'm gonna I'm not gonna make a case for YOLO . But I feel like it just did make the case for it. Like it's it's okay. Um I'm I was not aware of this option. I'm not sure I want to be aware of it. I don't know. Um it's okay. I I I look I'm just baby stepping at this point in this stuff. Dangerous. Get permissions, Paul. I'm sorry, Dave. Paul. Just think of it as permission to be awesome. Yeah. Jeez . Okay. So sorry. And Microsoft uh if anyone has ever tried to, and I have, use the APIs that Microsoft has talked about, which have changed dramatically over the past two, three years. You know, there was like the what was the Windows Copilot SDK or whatever it was called, or the whatever the heck that was, and they changed the name and blah, blah. And basically what these things are using is Microsoft's small language models running on the device, mostly in the Phi family, I think is where most of this stuff comes from or has come from. But they announced a new set of these models which have a new name called Aeon , if I'm pronouncing that correct. Um there's A AI Aeon one point oh instruct, which is smaller, faster, and smarter local AI than FI was, I guess. Aeon one point oh plan , which is a reasoning and tool calling model for agenic capabilities, et cetera, both are coming soon. But you can experiment with them in preview today in various ways. And they're expanding. I didn't this might, this must be the new name for that whatever that copilot SDK thing was. The what they're calling the Windows AI APIs. Like so there's the Windows API, there's our SDK, whatever you the Windows APIs, like Win32, there's the Windows app SDK APIs, right? You know, for modern app development, and there's the Windows AI APIs. So there are three sets of capabilities that are coming moving off of being co-pilot plus PC requirements with an MPU. So speech to text is now going to work on CPUs in addition to MPUs. Text intelligence. CPUs . It just says CPUs, but it could be I'm not sure about that. Um text intelligence capabilities will work locally on DGPUs. And then video super resolution will work on CPUs. Okay. So again, they have not said how or if they are changing Copilot plus PC as a spec, but we've made this case on and now I will say on both ends of the spectrum, we've got the NVIDIA thing on the way high end, and then we get the Snapdragon C, which we'll talk about in a bit on, the low end, which you again we which we also do not know a lot about. Um but we do know eight gigs of RAM on the small one, so that's not a full pilot plus space. It's not 128 gigs, yeah. No, it's not sixteen either, which is the baseline for so the theory is this is gonna change and uh these API changes um speak to that. So uh you can preview these today in edge insider channels. I'm gonna talk about I think the edge is probably the next one. Um and uh they're coming to Hugging Face in July, and then I the general availability later in the year they haven't said, but um this is a kind of a generational evolution of um what you uh I believe of Microsoft Fi, which I assume is going to go away, but they did not say that. Um and then there's the uh uh the RTX dev box which we talked about earlier, right? This is I I the you know like, a a data center. In your lap. You know. Instead of a blanket. You gotta do this thing in the lap. Yeah, it's gonna be I actually asked uh my AI to make us a bandwidth chart because they are there is some uh bandwidth information uh out there. Uh and you know the the big boy is this I don't know how much it costs NVIDIA's DGX station, which is seven terabytes uh per second of bandwidth. And then if you have an RTX video card, that's a lot, 1.7, but it's only 32 gigs of RAM. So you can't really fit a model in that, but if you could, it would be fast. Well that's sp specifically on the GPU , right? Like in other words, the one twenty eight. That was integrated or unified RAM. Right. Uh the Apple has a a real advantage here. The M3 Ultra is almost is eight hundred nineteen gigabytes a second, M5 Max. The new uh RTX Spark is is actually pretty good, 300 gigabytes a second. Uh the DGX Spark, their their desktop is actually considerably slower. Uh the Strix Halo, which I have, is 256 gigs per second. And then you get to Arrow Lake and stuff like that, and it's 102 gigs per second. So there is a big gulf. Um, but this this RTX Spark is going to be pretty good. 300 gigabytes a second is is this is this is the what they announced anyway. So I just thought I'd pass that along. No, that's crazy. I wonder how I'm gonna just go price a DGX station, just I'll be right back. Okay . If I have a heart attack, I'll let you know. Yeah. My falling over. Right. Yes. Leo uh Google just got in trouble for secretly, although they announced this, uh downloading a four I think it's a four gigabyte SLM with Chrome, you know, when you start using AI features. Um I made the point at the time, like everyone is doing this, including Firefox, by the way. Microsoft is doing it in Edge, and they announced uh separately from what I just said, but it's the same thing, is those on device AI capabilities will also be available in Edge. And you can test some of them right now through I think it's Edge Canary or whatever. Actually, one of them might even just be available and stable at this point. But um Edge Canary Dev, etc., have access to at least these capabilities. And so as a developer, you could write whatever apps that run against these things and it would run locally so it could work offline et cetera et cetera. So we'll see. Cool. Yeah . Um I think just I'm just gonna do this kind of quickly. Uh if you looked at build from the outside, didn't know anything about it, and tried to make a general summary of what was going on, probably using AI. Uh you it would be that this is an AI agent show, right? Um I I I don't think I did this last week. I must have done this more recently, but I looked uh at the sessions that build had and there were like over 400 and over 300 of them had the terms agent or agentic in their title or description, right? So a lot of them the other hundred were wrong. Yeah. Right. Um and then, you know, like uh you know, uh co pilot, for example, only came up like a hundred and seventeen times or whatever the number was, you know. Um I I honestly, aside from the final thing we'll talk about, I think for build, I would say most of this wasn't super interesting to me, but I'll just mention a couple. Um they were rumored, they Microsoft were were rumored to uh to be working on a so-called like AI super app or whatever. Um they have announced that it's called Scout. It is their version of Google Spark, right? Which is I think now available to people paying Google 200 bucks a month or whatever on that uh subscription. Um and it is just early days, right? But this is where we kind of move so we have agents and we and obviously we're familiar with the term copilot, but they've introduced the fairly obvious language of autopilots, right? Um, which are agents. Um, so this is gonna be like a this will probably eventually replace all the co-pilot apps and stuff. I think this will become the the experience, you know, but it's a a desktop app, I think I'm sure there's gonna be a web version, et cetera, but um and I'm sure it will do hybrid things, you know, a local and um cloud-based AI, et cetera, but early days for that. And then uh they also announced a GitHub co-pilot app, which made me do a double tape because I thought I was like, isn't there already a GitHub co-pilot app? But I think it's only on mobile, maybe it isn't, maybe it's just GitHub. I guess because I have a GitHub app on my phone, but um but this is uh the first step to a big ancient native desktop experience for GitHub. And so it's basically for managing uh agents, essentially, I guess is the way I would say it. Of course it is . And um you know, using Git on the back end, right? Which does make sense, I guess, for these projects you might be doing with this thing, and I don't know. I'm just this is like poof. I don't know. Whatever. It's on preview. Whatever. Don't despair. I'm not despaired. I'm just I'm just I just don't know what to make of this uh quite yet. Um more interestingly, perhaps I it was uh Mustafa Sullivan came out and announced that his organization, which is Microsoft AI, MAI, which um is seeking to basically replace all of the reliance Microsoft now has on Open AI in particular, but also I would say anthropic , announced seven new mod els, including the first reasoning model that also offers like um high efficiency and low token cost. And it's it's kind of interesting. It's like they claim that they're most of this stuff, I would say, is some number of months behind the best, very best models across the board, which is not bad because you know, again, they're kind of building this stuff from scratch. They couldn't even start working on this until they changed their agreement with OpenAI. One of the two agreement changes ago, that was the big deal for Microsoft. It allowed them to pursue this stuff internally without open AI's help or roKaying it even. So they have uh an image, you know, a MAI image 2.5 and uh with a flash variant, which they claim is better than nano banana , um based on benchmarks and whatever however you measure these things, not just based on their personal opinions. Like I like that picture of the tiger better. Um transcription model. I know. Am I a voice with a flash firing again uh for natural generation, which is already very good by the, way. Um, I believe their yeah, well, based on the version, it is their first coding, like inference coding model, M I M AI Code1 , uh, which is available in GitHub Copilot now and VS Code. And um they're gonna make these things available across more platforms in the future as well, like fireworks, AI, OpenRouter, et cetera. So um it's a kind of a big deal, actually. Yeah. Um and he, you know, the lots . Yeah, he keeps saying all the right things, uh uh Mustafa Sullivan, that is. But the best part of this keynote, and the one that really made me kind of perk up was uh Stevie Batish came out. And uh we like Stevie . He was one of the first guys back in the beginning, bit twenty three, that inspired us. Yes. Right. So that was that was the build kind of it was um uh what's his face? Uh Panos Pine's last build. Yes. Gil Emilio uh announcing the Steve Jobs was coming back was still probably number one with the he wanna babbled for three hours. But Panos Pinay in twenty twenty three was a close second. And he clearly we figured out what had happened, right? Like his news. Hijacked from him.. Yeah And he was just making making it up. And man, he was not doing a good job. He's not good at that. He this you know, he needed no he this content. It was not a good one. No, but he needs he's the type of speaker who needs rehearsal and active audience participation. He it was very s you know, didn't go well for him. But Stevie Batish came out and he's like, Look, I gotta run to the airport, I only got like fifteen, twenty minutes and then launched into the most eloquent description of how AI was going to I it's I rewatched that so many times. Does it still hold? Oh yes. Yeah. And that's actually We refer to it all the time. Yeah. He referred to it yesterday. Yeah. He he three years later. Right. So remember um well d or or know that there were three uh what he called AI app structures. Inside, outside, B side. Yeah, B side was the first one. They they don't actually kn not n necessarily mean they go from one or the other, but they all exist or you know, the first one was beside, which is a copilot, right? Which can be literally of an app and then maybe like a chat bot on the side and two different apps, or maybe you have a a pane inside the app because you've added it, you know, whatever. Um, and then AI inside, which is where you actually integrate AI capabilities into an app. And we see that in various ways throughout like Microsoft Office, obviously. Um but then there was the AI outside, which I think is the one either was a little bit misunderstood where he's expanded the definition here, but um AI outside was the the s sort of background for the talk he gave at this show, which is about something called Project Solera. And Project Solera is man, it's hard to even explain because it's so different from the way things are. It's and have been forever. Like in the traditional kind of personal computing model that has existed since the Combat or 64 or whatever. You know, someone builds hardware. There's a software platform you can write apps and games to or whatever. You do that. There are there are different ways to do that. And then they run on that thing. And pretty much, you know, obviously we have cross-platform solutions, whatever, but it's it's like device with apps and stuff running on it, uh and stuff meaning like, you know, whatever services, et cetera. Um, you know, Windows works this way, phones work this way. I mean this the web sort of works this way, whatever, but you target this very specific thing. And so the idea behind Solara, and he didn't quite say it this way, but this is almost like a um a modern answer to the next wave problem that Terry Myerson always had. Like Microsoft missed phones, so we want to be on the next thing, which maybe the next thing at that time was going to be VR, MR, AR, or maybe it was going to be uh something like Cortana, which was a sm uhart assistant, and then that that of course evolved into what we have now, which is AI, which is you know you could make a good argument, this is the next platform, the next one. Not that it was a straight line. No, no. Then they rolled out with something that looks disturbing like an Amazon Echo. Right. Well, so the point but this is this is the this is what's interesting about this. So there each of these devices uh uh it's meant it's meant for a like a a multi-device um agentic first kind of world um meaning that the there's an there has to be a platform layer on there of some kind but and it's a little bit like a like a net PC or network computer or whatever. It doesn't necessarily have to have a lot of compute or RAM or whatever, but it can, and that story, the thing you're talking about does. Um the two types of devices they showed off was like a smart badge essentially, and then that little screen thing, uh, which does look like an Amazon Echo or whatever those are called. And um but the the what makes this different from everything that's come before. And this is very much like the Microsoft used to talk about stuff like this all the time. I don't mean stuff like specifically like this thing, but rather they would talk in this way about the future. Like, this is how the future is going to be. And we're like, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. You know, they haven't really done this in a long time. That the the center part of this platform is the agents. It's not the thing running on the device. And that the device, and he calls this, he says the O I had to look this up, the OS layer is liminal , which is means a new word. It's intermediary and minimal, but the operations move between devices. Here's just as a random aside because I this may I couldn't . Look up the word liminal. That is not what it means. Liminality is the ambiguous middle stage of a rite of passage. But anyway, um oddly he's making up a new meaning. I I'm sorry, I I wrote that. That was not how he described it. He just said he just said liminal and kept going and I just looked it up. Oh I see, I see. Um just as a random aside, today uh Activision announced the next season of Call of Duty. All I care about is what are the maps going to be. There are four new maps coming on Thursday. And the first map is called what, guys? Liminal. Uh-huh. I had never seen this word in my life. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Showed up twice. That's bizar re. It's the new it's a new thing. The kids are all about it. It's uh all about the liminalness. The limit. One would argue like liminality. Right. Sorry, let's not get let's not get bogged down by liminal. I just the I love it though. It's a great word. The point is that the AI agent that is doing whatever it is you need, whether it's something proactive, it's doing because it knows your schedule or where you are or whatever that might be, or it's something you've asked it to do, you send it off to do some task. It's going to create the UI on the device in real time based on the capabilities of the device and the thing it needs to communicate. Like in other words, we don't, the device does not have or the OS platform does not have a UI layered. Well it does, obviously a basic one, but it is not like a framework that determines what buttons look like and what you know windows look like or any of that stuff. It's just it's something that the AI agent does on the fly. And if you think about like I don't know like the the vibe coding stuff which is going to come up again, and how that's evolved, and how this notion that anyone is going to be able to describe an app to AI and have it be made. This is kind of like the next or maybe two, three steps later, where um it's you're not going to ask it to make an app or a UI or anything. It's just gonna do it. You know, like it will just happen. And it's kind this is fascinating to me. Like I this is this is very interesting. So they're working with they have silicon partners, you know, Qualcomm and Media Tech are doing the chipsets for these things. Um they have other hardware partners that are working on devices, they have services partners that are gonna like AccuWeather, Best Buy, CVS Health, et cetera, that are gonna be, you know, it's a little bit like maybe it's a little bit like um that spot watch thing they were gonna do or it's kind of like this connected platform where it it's decentralized. It's essentially it's not, you know, there is there's not a central OS running on a device that is, you know, necessarily, but they all have to conform to whatever these specs are. You know, it's kind of hard to say, but um this is not a it's not necessarily gonna happen, I should say. This is they're still, you know, they're working on it. But the point is it's like further along than you would think. Like when Microsoft used to do Tische is more of a futurist than a a builder per se., So you know he's painting a future that can be built. But uh but they're literally working on building that now. In other words, this isn't a bunch of like foam foam models and you know uh like PowerPoint slides. It's like, we're actually building this. Like in he's like, look, maybe it fails. You know, who can say? But like it's uh the the UI, the way they describe the UI is will make sense in our l uh industry is like just in time UI , where the experience adapts across devices and modalities without requiring developers to redesign everything for every single form factor. You don't write an app for a phone or an app for a tablet or a computer or maybe one that layouts automatically between all three or whatever. It's like you know it' its's only the whole decl it's the declarative thing. You know? Yeah. It's very interesting. Well it's all command line it's gonna be easy. Yeah, I have some commentary about the ease of use of CLIs. But it'll be voice probably, right? I mean it certainly. I mean yeah, that will definitely be part of it. Yeah. Voice and image what it's seeing and look, uh it'll probably be glasses Aaron Powell This is, by the way, why I still want to have a local AI because I don't want everything, all of that to go to Microsoft or wherever else, right? Or wherever, or Amazon or OpenAI. I kind of want it to go to my home server. Right. Well, okay, so from Microsoft's perspective they wouldn't understand why you don't trust them. From my perspective, I completely understand that. But but there are also benefits like from their perspective of doing this, even like even assuming you just blanket trust this company for some reas on. And, you know, related to those things we talked about before where when it happens, I mean obviously it's an agent. So there's going to be connectivity. These things have five G connectivity and blah blah blah. Whatever. So and and they were going to be able to put rules in to say these are where you're allowed to run things too. You know, what you what you're talking about here is a classic Microsoft. This is ODBC for AI, right? It's hey, we can't dominate the space with our tech. So let's just sit in the middle of everything. But that's where the money bridge between it all. Well it's how you stay in the market for sure. And it's certainly where you'll where you see weakness you'll be able to drop in your piece and prioritize it. So it's uh it's uh it's in the liminal space. It is Microsoft lives in the U.S. So I mean for uh to Richard's point, um Windows Intune will be part of this enter ID will be part of this Windows Solo business. And and that's how they get in, you know, that's where they become, you know, the money making part of this to some degree, right? Like uh but there's a there's like they've already created uh an ecosystem uh device ecosystem platform for this which is based on Android AOS AOS P um there's an agent shell which will handle local and cloud based agents, right? And then all that enterprise support for those customers. It kind of Right? But if you have policy based uh rules uh to determine how your data is used, et cetera, et cetera, like you and I might I don't trust Microsoft either, by the way, but like I don't trust any big tech company. Uh uh you know, people are saying, Well, Apple will be fine. No, I don't trust them either. I don't trust any of 'em. No, you shouldn't. Uh but they will always because of economies of scale, I think they'll always be somewhat ahead of us on these things. And they're certainly not going to sell devices that allow me to use this loc So I I think the the progression here i it is it's fascinating because it's happening so fast. Like you AI occurs. Okay. We have AI agents. Okay, fantastic. You know, we today people use whatever device, a computer, a phone, a tab, whatever it is. And you as an app store, maybe you go to the if you're on computer, you can download stuff from the web, whatever. You run this app, you run Word, you want to write words. That's what you do, whatever. Um , the we we're just now getting to this point where we can see this near future where even a normal person, a non- technic al person could describe to an AI some c was something I would call an app, and they can put that thing on their device and it works and it does what they want, looks the way they want, et cetera, et cetera. That's exciting. But now there's this next step where it's like, yeah, that's actually going away. You know, like like it's not so much that well, I don't know if it's going away, but like we're it's just gonna do this for you. Like you don't have to have to worry about it. Like even today you could say something to AI. You could say something like, uh, here's a document I made, turn this into a PDF, or, you know, do whatever that thing is. And I think that's going to be what this does, right? Not necessarily not turn a document into a PDF necessarily, but something more complex or exciting than that. Like where you're like, you know, you talk to it and you have a trip coming up or a work project you're working on, and you're constantly interacting if you want to with this thing, probably by voice , and it's making things for you. Just like you can, like today, we make like infographics, and they're often excellent looking, you know? Um , because that's a capability that's built into the AI. But it like this is describing capabilities that are like we don't have to write like you don't even think like who cares what the app is if there's an app or what the online you know, like you don't really think about this stuff anymore. It really changes the interaction model a lot. I have to say this whole liminal thing makes it a little I mean, everybody's faces in shadows is a little dystopian. You think it's a little creepy kinda. I mean it's I agree with the premise that you know it's kind of uh computing at the edge becomes AI at the edge. AI everywhere. That's right. Yep. Uh and it and uh I think it's very interesting the notion of AI kind of doing what you want without you even asking for it. Aaron Powell I the the disruption here is really interesting to me because um you know when you go to mobile and you have these app stores that are controlled by big tech and you have to go through them to even get an app out to our user, like that's one way of doing things. And so you look at like AI, uh like coding AI, especially an ability of these things to create apps for you, bespoke, you know, personalized apps, whatever. That's a threat to that app model, right? Um this is this is a tsunami of a threat to that app model. This is like, oh no, we're not threatening your app models. Your app model is going away. This is not people are gonna run apps a different way on your device. This is they don't care about it, you stupid apps anymore. Um it's really interesting. So they they focus on this what looks like exactly like an Amazon Echo. Are they thinking of making this? It's a concept, obviously. It's just a concept. I think they're what he was saying was we expect the third party ecosystem to build devices for us. They might look like this. Yeah, they're like, they don't want to be an end end y and user. Middleware is kind of a tough topic in the Microsoft world, Leo. I don't know if you remember the antitrust trial. But you hit on the key things here, Paul, which is along the way of using this tool to make decisions about what agents and so forth to use, you're gonna need an authentication strategy. And entra is gonna be front and center there. You're gonna need a place to store data and OneDrive's gonna be front and cent er there. Like they're just going to make it easier for you to use their engines, their platforms, for the bits you want. This is focused on enterprise, right? I mean, well, I it's I think it's gonna be both, you know, consumer and business. But I but yes, the for for businesses, part of the deal is it has to have that trust built in through authentication, et cetera, uh identity management, whatever else. But the the uh the this is fascinating to me because this is like two of Microsoft's biggest strengths. Like Microsoft has always hated to be compared to IBM, which is, you know, an an infrastructure company. That is a big part of what Microsoft is. They're good at it. Um but the other one is like the platform bit. Like they make platforms. And this is the classic Microsoft to me in that sense. It's this is a platform. It will use their infrastructure. I mean, it's if this develops into a standard of some kind, I suppose you could you could you probably have different, you know, there'll be a a matter for this thing or something where you can cross use whatever devices from whatever ecosystems. But th this is like a this is a fascinat ing old Microsoft plus new Microsoft kind of combo kill and you know kind of a thing. Like it's it I just have not seen something like this from them in a while. Years. Well he,'s really uh forward thinking. I mean, obviously he's the idea guy, right? I mean, CV, yeah. Yeah. Agents will reshape not only software but the devices themselves is his coda, which I think is really interesting. Right. Now you can be it's easy to be cynical about this because Microsoft, you know, it and to the use their own words, you know, missed the mobile wave. They missed uh whatever waves of you know, like they obviously dominated in the personal computing wave and the PC wave, and have not uh and and they compete with in cloud computing, which is not this you know it's not personal computing, but um this is you you could look at this and be like, well, of course they come up with this kind of thing. They don't have a position in mobile, they don't have position a and whatever. And it's like, yeah. But I mean, yes, fair enough. But I also like this to me is them playing to their traditional strengths. You know? I mean, this is this is what they are good at. It's one of the things they're good at, right? Yeah. Yeah. And it reassures enterprise. Even if end users are maybe aren't convinced of the privacy and security. Enterprise wants this. I many years ago. Sorry. Consumers won't buy this. Consumers will buy the device. That's right. I was just gonna walk down this path. Like uh when it wasn't clear how the world was gonna shake down, you know, um like Microsoft had things for like automotive. They had, you know, obviously phone initiatives. They did all IoT, et cetera. And, you know, I I had said at the time, like, look, it's not such a bad thing if your name isn't anywhere, right? Like Microsoft as a brand might be associated with a certain con notation or a thing from the past, like an Oldsmobile kind of quality thing, that maybe you don't want on those things. There's a reason Xbox is not Microsoft Xbox, right? It's Xbox. Um it's not such a bad future for them to have uh designed this platform, I guess. Uh uh however you uh what do you call this? Like a connected plat. I don't know what the hell you call even call this thing, but um and others create the um agents and the services and whatever that run on it and and the devices you use that are compatible with it. But you're you're in the mix because you you know you're getting the licensing. They sit in that in that in-between space. It's not so much liminal space. Liminal. Microsoft is renaming itself to Liminal Corp. Yeah you go. All right, we're gonna pause uh on that so you have some time to dream. Uh by the way, they added that capability to Claude Code, the slashed dream skill. I'm not burning enough tokens. Let's do random tokens burn. Can I burn some overnight? Just you know. Yeah, let I you I know you need to sleep, but I don't. I don't. I never sleep. Yeah. Um yeah. It's a very interesting world we're entering. It is um It is an interesting time. No two ways about it. Yeah. That's good. Maybe that's why you should maybe think a little bit harder about security. Uh our show this week brought to you by ThreatLocker. Love these guys. Uh ThreatLocker's zero trust plat form. Now delivers the industry's most comprehensive suite of zero trust solutions. They've always protected the endpoints, but now they will protect your company network and your cloud. They added all of this. 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In fact, I think we're gonna I it's still up in the air, but I I'm hoping we're gonna go out uh to a black hat and uh with them maybe even do this show at black hat. We're talking to them right now about that. Threatlocker works across all industries, provides 24-7 US-based support. It works on Windows, of course, but also Mac and Linux environments . And of course, your cloud and your company network. And in every respect, what ThreatLocker gives you, besides the security, is comprehensive visibility and control . Ask Rob Thackeray. He's the he's got a tough job, and user technical architect at Heathrow Airport . He said this: quote, ThreatLocker was the most intuitive solution we tested. And I'm sure they tested them all. And the responsiveness of the organization, the willingness to engage with us, to set up a demo, to work with us on weekly audit reviews is very good. It's great to have an ongoing relationship with a company that's so responsive to our requests. And I will back that up because I now know a lot of these guys, these threat locker people, guys and gals, they're fantastic, and they really care about making you secure. Probably that's one of the reasons they're trusted by the companies that can least afford to go down global enterprises like JetBlue, the Indianapolis Colts, the Port of Vancouver. ThreatLocker consistently receives high honors and industry recognition too. They're a G2 high performer and best support for enterprise. That was summer 2025 . Peer spot ranked them number one in application control. They got GetApp's Bestction Funality and Features Award 2025. And you can just go to the webpage. The list of awards goes on and on . ThreatLocker lets you confidently ensure users have access to a consistent safe network connection. Offices, remote users, internal servers, and critical services all can maintain smooth operations without the need to open inbound ports or deploy traditional VPN solutions, your end users will get the secure, reliable internal system access they need without complex infrastructure changes. I got a demo of this and I was blown away. You get unprecedented protection quickly, easily, and cost effec tively with ThreatLocker. Look, get the demo. Visit ThreatLocker.comslash twit, get a free thirty-day trial. Learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's ThreatLocker .com/slash twit. We thank them so much for all the support they've given Twit uh and our network over the years, and of course Windows uh weekly as well. Thank you, ThreatLocker. The DGX station is a mortgage payment. Actually, it's more than a mortgage payment. It's a hundred hundred thou . Oh it's a mortgage. Uh my uh my AI agent says, and you're not the target market, Leo. Pretty it's a pretty nice car. It's like please do not replace me with this thing. Um you know, for that kind of money, you could run frontier models for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Or make a down payment on a house. Down payment, not a mortgage payment. It's a down payment. Yeah. Down payment on a house. On we go with the show. Indeed. Wait, what? Windows. What? That had to happen eventually. Windows? What? I know. It's weird. A couple things going on. So uh tied to some insider stuff we'll talk about in a moment. Um Pavan Dav alori um Um has started a podcast. If you can believe this as one does called Inside Windows. And on the first episode he is talking to my Marcus Ash, who's a guy I know, who's a great guy, uh very involved in this uh pain point fixing thing they're doing right now. And they just provide kind of an update on, you know, what they accomplished toward these ends in May essentially. And um this includes, you know, changes to the insider program changes to windows update changes to the taskbar and then uh changes the start which we'll talk about in one second uh actually we'll talk about right now um so uh so i've been installing the stuff. You have sometimes you have to really work at it to get to um these things. But you know, the the start menu, um, and it's not clear when this will come out to stable per se, and the new taskbar, right? Um I would say this start menu stuff is pretty subtle. Um you can choose between big and small sizes. You know, it's fine. You can turn off your well, you you you can turn off your profile picture in the bottom of start, but when you click the little empty circle that's there, you still get the same menu as you got before with all your stuff in it. So that has whatever. Yeah, so there's that stuff. So okay, like it's fine. I know this is, you know, w when this originally came up, like I made this point that I have these very specific problems with Windows 11 and these things are were not one of them. I just don't care about this stuff, but okay, they're changing the star menu. Okay, fine. Um the taskbar stuff is a little more interesting. Um, there's obviously the ability to move it to different sides of the screen, which is fine. I don't want or need that. Um if you uh turn like the uh combine icons option to never and you put it on the side you get that wider taskbar like we used to have back in the day where you can see like a kind of an inch wide icon for each um app icon which is interesting if you like that kind of thing. Okay. So you'll like that. Um the one that I really like is that you can uh they didn't change the name of the option. It was just kind of bizarre to me. But you can um let me see if I can just let me just find the exact name of this thing. It's like if you go into taskbar behaviors and task bar settings, the bottom option is called show smaller taskbar buttons. In the current shipping version of Windows 11, that's there. If you turn it on, the taskbar does not get smaller, the icons get smaller. It's like, guys, I don't want the icons to be smaller. I want this giant inch long tall thing to be smaller. But now with this update, it actually gets smaller. And I love that. Like I love it just for that. Like I to me that,'s actually kind of a big deal. Um, just because you know, screen real estate is a premium and I want to use it. So that's cool. I mean, I like that part of it. Um , and that uh update, oh like I have like a million links in today's notes of the wrong articles. But that most recent update, which is the start menu one, is in the most recent ex uh experimental build, which is how I got it. Okay. So that's still properly insiders. But it'll make the full build in a month, right? Well say that's what I'm wondering. I don't know. You know, given the timing, I mean to me it does make sense for them to kind of pull a 23H2 where they release all the stuff before the next major release, right? Um meaning this summer, which I think would be ideal because you know they've been talking about it. Plus, I think they want the stuff in place in time for well, the back to school stuff which is happening now, the um these new computers, which we're going to talk about bas ed on Snapdragon X and the uh the new NVIDIA stuff et cetera, like where and and also for um gaming handhelds, right, which can use all the resources and stuff 'cause a lot a lot of the changes they're making just under the covers thing to improve latency and performance and uh resource usage, I think it's important. So I hope it's soon, not like the fall. It seems mostly fine to me. I, you know, two seconds of testing it on one computer, I can as authoritatively say it's fine. No, I don't know. We'll see. But um it looks like it's working well. So we'll find out. Um on the hardware front, so obviously we have the NVIDIA thing today, which you know yes, humongous. Um last week after the show, Qualcomm announced uh a new chip for low-end PCs that cost two ninety-nine and up called Snapdragon C. The thing that this has in common with the new NVIDIA stuff, aside from the fact that it's based on ARM, is we know almost nothing about it. So um there there are no But you talk about handhelds. An ARM chip would be a hell of a handheld. Yeah, it would, but you're not gonna not for a gaming PC, right? Like um, unfortunately. But you know, uh it's vague things, all day battery life, which means nothing. Uh responsible performance, cool and quiet designs, blah, blah, integrated MPU, okay, neat. Um, it is built on the same architecture as the Snapdragon X2 stuff. Okay . And uh the first PC based on this chipset, which is coming from Acer , was announced the next day. And that's coming later in the year, and we don't know how much it's gonna cost, but um is that true? Yeah, that yeah, we don't know the cost of that one. But these things are very clearly meant to compete with the MacBook Neo, right? Which starts at 599, eight gigabytes of RAM, can't upgrade it. Um these things will be eight gigabytes of RAM. They have various things that are better uh across you know across the board, so to speak, than the MacBook Neo. Um but the Acer one, it's kinda hard to say, it's a bigger screen. You know, you get like a uh fifteen inch screen on that one. Um it the way they describe it is like up to eight gigabytes of RAM. It's like, oh you know. Um whatever. But then more recently , um Dell announced a now this one's not running on Qualcomm, it's running on Wildcat, which is the low end Inchall chipset, right? Right. But also a uh an XPS 13 that is going to start at $600 , aimed at students, aimed at the MacBook Neo. They call the MacBook Neo explicitly several times in this announcement, which I'm fascinated by. So this is a core series three processor, not Ultras, this is the new core series three, um, which is a low-end processor, obviously. Um Wildcat. 40 uh TOPS MPU. So it's a copilot plus PC, eight gigs of RAM, it's on the bow four, which is better than Neo. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6. It's all aluminum like the Neo. Touch screen, Windows, hello, which the Neo, you have to pay extra for the touch thing. Variable refresh rate display. It looks pretty good. Um, it's running on an Intel chip, but you know, no, nobody's perfect. Um and then uh I think I skipped over this one before, but just today, just as we were heading into the show, um, there was a leak that Microsoft is prepping a Snapdragon X2 version of the Surface Pro, which we originally assumed would ship and not assumed, uh we heard uh again, rumor-wise, not Microsoft, but um actually Microsoft did kind of say later in the year um that the the Next Pro and laptop based on Next2 would come out later in the year. We assumed like late in the year, um but this rumor is claiming it will come out in June, which is this month. Um you know and we'll see. Um but and the pros are the click off keyboard you know kickstand models. Yeah the tablet uh deal exactly with a Spnadragon 2 in it is nuts. X yeah, X2 Elite. Um look, it's a great chip. Uh there's nothing really to say. It's probably gonna look exactly like it does tod Todaayy. I I believe it's mostly this, you know, same basic colors except for I I guess not the blue finish, apparently. I this is a leak. I I don't know what how to I don't know what to say about this, but um they just announced the new win tell ones. Yeah. It it makes sense. The timing is faster than I thought, so that would be great. I think sooner is better than later. We will see. Okay. Um there's a bunch of AI stuff. I'm gonna gloss over most of this. Uh but anthrop ic went through a new valuation round and now they are worth more by valuation than open AI, which is fascinating. Twenty four hours later they announced an I they're gonna do an IPO. So they've done the initial filing with uh the securities and exchange commission. And sometime this year, uh I guess we'll see what happens there. I think the valuations are a lagging indicator. Yeah. Right. Right. Because I didn't this isn't in the notes, but one of the things that also happened, if if I read the headline correctly, was that um chat GPT just surpassed one billion active users, I think, which is insane, right? And I think the fastest anyway. Well, they want it they said they were on it last year, so they were still behind what they projected. But it's yeah, that's a good thing I mean it there's some right. I think uh Anthropicus probably eaten into that a little bit, but um that's interesting. Um this was just fascinating to me. You were talking about how like this model was apologizing to you, right? So ch uh open AI released chat GPT five point five instant, I don't know, like sometime in the past month, 30 days, whatever. And I guess a lot of people complain this thing was like sycophantic and had problems with facts, like whatever, you know, like typical AI problems, right? The the per the open AI research research lead who announced this via Twitter said that it was bullet pilled, which like liminal I had to look up. What's that? What is I don't know? Bullet pills is to be deeply obsessed with a specific topic, product or idea often to the point of being defensive or dismissive of alternatives. Right. Like everyone in this industry. So who made this? Of course. It's like our it's like us. And so I guess they uh they fixed it to be less bul bullet pilled. Bullet pilled. I mean bullet pilled slider. Yeah. That's really that's all it is. You it's not it's not the model. It's the it's the Yeah, I right, right. It's uh like I think it's the default um like settings for it for people, like I guess. You know, five five remember they said uh they taught it not to say goblins? It's saying goblins again and it's saying raccoons. I keep it keep saying Oh, we got a raccoon in the wire closet. It's like that's that's fun. Um could you could you fix the code thing I'm working on, please? Yeah. What are you talking about? I tease it. You're goblin baiting it. I'm goblin baiting it. Do you remember five was the original the claim to be less obsequ Right, right. Yeah. It turns out people like people to kiss their ass. It was their baby, right? It was their little person, and their little person was it when it wasn't reinforcing them wasn't a good little person anymore. So they demanded 4-0 back and Altman gave in. And I've I've kept a couple of those Reddit posts of like my baby is back and I'm crying. Like it's software, man. That's not healthy. People married 4.0. People, I mean and there's still uh companies that are offering 4.0 like models, right? And And fo4ur. O machines and all sorts of things. It's crazy. Optimized for Mac y's connected high. Sick of fancy. Yeah. It's like what do you want to watch? I want to watch whatever you want to watch, buddy. Gross. But you know, if your only metric to keep your investors engaged is usage time, well, you suck up to the user all the time. Yep. Yep. Right. That's it was trained. It was trained on Apple marketing . So it's always like whatever we're doing now is fantastic. I don't know what that crap we released last year was, but sorry about that. This is awesome. Yeah, exactly. Well, we know, you know, the truth is we know these models are all trained on everything. Good, bad, and ugly. And so it's in the post-training and the instru ctions at after the training that they say, okay, now ignore the Mecca Hitler stuff. Be nice. And everything you got from 4chan, leave that out. Right. Leave that stuff out. But it's all in there. Yeah. Right? I'm sure it's all in there. So you can get a model to be evil pretty easily. I get a lot of like PR outreach type stuff, which I look at briefly and then get rid of. But one today I I did a pause on which was like it was like a guy I could quote about what it doesn't matter. I don't want to give this guy away. I'm not trying to make fun of him, but unfortunately his last name is Himmler. And I was like, I don't know, I maybe was he was he in Argentina? Yeah, right, exactly. Right. No, no, we're the Latino Himmlers. Yeah, no, I I we understand how that happened. Um don't do that. Wow. I'd change my name. I would too. I think so. Yeah. Himler. Sorry. I'm sorry if you're out there with I'm so sorry. I don't mean to make fun of your name. It's not your fault, but Really? Himler. Wow. Uh okay. And then f just the other one, uh just because this is Windows specific is um uh open AI has a Codex app, right? If you're on mobile codex capabilities are built into ChatGPT, um you can get a Codex app on Windows now. I there's a version that's a plug in just for Chrome and Chrome browsers obviously and for the Mac. Um the Mac version got um computer use capabilities. Like when they announced computer use that went out to the Mac version of the app and it's available in Windows now if you want. Uh ropic to take over your PC when you're not around you can use the you can control it from your phone, right? You leave the the idea is you leave the computer on, it has to be running, right? Possibly go wrong. Well I what would you call it? Put the yellow switch on, let it put turn off turn off the power management. Like, not only do I trust you, but I'm gonna walk away. Here's all the tokens to dream with that you can imagine. Go, go, go. I'm not even gonna you do what you do, man . You know? U B you. Yep. So anyway, if you were if you were waiting for that for some insane reason, that's available. So Okay, and then so a qu a couple of quick dev things. Oops. I just closed. What did I close? I closed my new. Don't close anything. This is the problem. I have multiple screens. I do control W and some closes. I don't know. I put it up on the uh just two dev things that are kind of related to each other a little bit. Um I was catching up on before build happened and ruined my life, I was catching up on uh some of the Google I.O. sessions um on YouTube, right, after the show, like on the over the weekend. And one of the ones I watched was about Flutter. And and sort of casually in the middle of it, they were like, Oh, and by the way, uh and for people who don't know, you know, Flutter is a cross platform UI framework made by Google that run uh that you can create apps. Originally it was um iOS and Android, and they have they don't call 'em themes, but they're basically themes so these things look in our essentially native. So like as a material U theme when it runs on Android and a Cupertino theme when it runs on iOS or whatever. Um they've since expanded it to include the web and um uh desktop and then other devices like uh flutter is used in um like cars and things like that. But uh desktop flutter was very interesting to me because you could do Windows, Mac, Linux apps uh with a single code base. And it's like, this is maybe I should, you know, so I'm I'm kind of interested in this. Um, but anyway, right in the middle of this little presentation, what's new in Flutter? They're like, oh, by the way, um we've handed over control of uh Flutter desktop to Canonical, the guys that make uh Ubuntu. And that's in that no, they're not like just running off with it and doing their own thing. Obviously it's still part of the, you know, they're part of the process. But they were collaborating. Yeah. So uh a couple of years ago, uh Canonical announced they were gonna use Flutter to redo the like the setup sequence, the setup app, I guess, for Ubuntu, and that's there now. And I g I didn't, but apparently several apps that are in that ship with Ubuntu are written in Flutter. So they've they've done a lot of work with this thing and they're like, look, we know how we need to fix this. They one of the things they're adding in preview right now is like um different types of like subwindows, like dialogues and notification panes and things like that. So like they've actually done a I guess a great job with this. So they're going to take the nice language. Dart is a very nice language. Right. Which is a you know, another C like language. It's a declarative UI thing. Like we were uh we were talking about this, I think, before the show, um, you know, which is ties into this next thing. So um twenty-five years ago, Microsoft, you know, uh Andrews Heilsberg, it's uh the.NET team, etc., um c uh came into this notion of like using an uh um it's based not really on the way the web works with HTML, but it's uh an XML based uh language for creating UI called XAML, right? And so WPF and on every Microsoft app framework they've done for Windows uses some form of XAML. They're very, very, you know, they're basically identical, but there are differences for creating UI. And I so when I do this app stuff I've been doing, I write a lot of XAML. I understand the pros. and cons of it It's extremely verbose, meaning you have to for especially for complex UIs, you have to write like a ton of code. Um but you know it's I I find it. I I'm used to it. I just you know it's like I'm just used to it. But in more recent years, there's a new type of declarative uh UI programming model that I believe I could be wrong, but I think actually Facebook started it with uh React . Um and it's used by uh Jetpack Compose on Android with Kotlin, the language. It's used by Flutter. It's used by Swift UI on the Apple side, same thing, right? Um so it's kind of fascinating to me, but I also don't understand it. But the Microsoft world, we're not really getting much in the way of like new app frameworks or UI frameworks or whatever. But there is a project, someone pointed to me this last week. I'd never even heard of this. But if you go to uh GitHub, there's a project called Microsoft UI Reactor. The name is an indication of what it is. It's a way to make C sharp-based declarative UI instead of using XAML. So it in other words, it using C sharp in the same way you would make Swift UI Kotlin slash jetpack compose or flutter or React UI. And it's it's actually it's it's not made by Bob, it's made by it is Microsoft. It's like Microsoft's GitHub account. And it's it doesn't mean there's a WinUI. So it's not a modern. Yeah, so I'm I'm gonna look at this. I'm I'm kind of interested in this. My only well, one of my many uh blockers here is I've looked at all of these frameworks I just described to some degree, some a lot, some little. And I just haven't had that moment where I'm like, I get this now. Like I get it. I can do this. Like I I still find it I don't know, it's a little bizarre, but I guess uh I I did kind of wonder would they ever do something to bring this kind of programming model to C sharp slash dot net essentially although this is we Yeah, I just don't know that it has anything to do with dev. It seems like the Windows team is doing something. Yeah, i i look this Microsoft has a rich history, especially in the past 20 years, of trying to bring developers from somewhere else to them, like you know, Windows 8 did this with HTML and JavaScript apps, et cetera. This may be the an attempt, like we need to we want to get people who can write native Windows apps, but the vast body of outside developers today who are not in the C sharp.net world are writing React style apps. Sure. And so maybe this is the same thing and we saw that happen in to Windows too. You know, pre-Pavan, we were seeing more and more like React blocks being written into Windows. Right. And I think part of this is because WinUI was part of Maui. And I don't know that they were interested in working on that. And this was the workaround. And it made people sad. And now with Pavan on board and taking the feedback about those kinds of problems of like, hey, but we have a library, let's just go use it. Yep. So this is I know we'll see. I I don't know how well it works. I don't know how complete it is. Like I don't know if there's some if you think of WinUI and all the different buttons and controls and stuff you can have in Windows, if there are 300 of those and maybe this supports 100, I have no idea. I don't know where it's at. I don't know how official. I don't I don't think it's gonna replace XAML or anything like that, but uh it's No, and and they're saying it's all about interoperability. So I think they're just trying to re uh organize WinUI to be a first class citizen and allow for native development and then also still support all the alternatives. Yeah, this is why I brought it up because you know a month or two months ago, whatever it was, when uh all of a sudden we're gonna fix all the problems with Windows 11 and then some guy on the Windows Dev side was like , we're gonna make new native apps. And it's like, why? Like they're so terrible. I to mean like Win UI is an is terrible. And I say that because I've used it. You know, and it came from the whole UWP movement. Like they there were so many things it was supposed to be and never became. It's incredible how much stuff isn't in it. Like how incomplete it is compared to previous. Like obviously it does all the modern UI stuff, but things like for example, um you know, the stupid little NoPad app I always work on, like one of the things that's there's there are no native APIs for printing in Windows app is to get it's like, oh okay. I mean like you am I gonna write that in like win32 C code or something and then do some interoper ? What the f like what is that? That's ridiculous. But that's you know, like in the same way when.NET first came out, like it did a lot, but there were certain things. I don't I might be room streamer. I feel like sound APIs weren't part of it in the very first release or something, something like that. And then eventually they add that stuff over time. But I feel like uh the Windows app SDK has just kind of sat there and hasn't really been a lot of people. And you know, the concern with if WinUI goes back into Windows is is that every time they build a version, they've got to send out a new version of Windows. And that that was that Windows 10 nightmare where devs were using these tools and then asking sysadmins to update Windows so they could deploy. And this is like, no, I'm not doing that. That one I'm not 100% sure if anymore, but I feel like they decoupled the Windows app SDK for that would be the smart thing. Don't fairly recons with a UI . Fairly recently. I'm but yeah originally yeah you were 100% U UWP was tied and Windows app SDK was tied like specific Windows versions. But there was also a motion at the time to have Windows update monthly. And uh that, you know, they lost enthusiasm for that pretty quickly. See, to me, that's like a runtime decision. Like you bring up some map and it requires whatever version of the thing and like you just install it as part of the app at that point when you need it, you know. Anyway, I just wanted to throw I just thought I I'd never heard of this. I don't know where it came from. I don't know. You know, it just came out of the blue and I I'm like, okay. You know, not super busy. An ad. An ad. But also uh this note from uh club member Tron Man Triple7 who mentions that uh today, June 3rd, 2009, Microsoft released Bing. Wow. I'm surprised I didn't think to uh observe that milestone . Bing is 17. Boy, that's cool. Uh he's a teenager and it's getting a little unruly. A decision search engine created to satisfy initial queries while also presenting more retrieved information than its contemporaries, according to Microsoft. And this is from a post on X by Web Design Museum. I mean obviously Microsoft had previous search engines, right? I mean, that kind of fed into this. Like Windows Live search. It's really more they released the name Bing, right? Yeah. Right. Which confused the hell out of everybody. What? Like the like the guy from Friends? Which is what everyone felt like what? Hey, let me uh let me uh mention at this point uh our fine sponsor. We still have lots to come, including the back of the book, the whiskey segment, and most importantly, the much heralded, long-awaited Xbox segment still coming. But first a word from Cashfly. Windows Weekly brought to you. And you you hear it, you know, you've heard it for years. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cashfly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com slash twit. Cashfly has kept our content moving for years. There are CDN, our content delivery network. Every stream, every download, every on-demand episode, they quietly do the heavy lifting behind the scenes, and we are so glad. Cashfly's been around longer than we have, one twenty years and the nice thing is they don't rest in their laurels. Here are a few things to know. 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Uh by the way, Chandler Bing did do a Windows ninety five training video. That's right. And it was not even slightly cringeworthy. With uh Jennifer Aniston. Mm-hmm . This must have been when Friends was all the rage, but they weren't yet making a million dollars an episode. It was like that short brief period in between. Yep. Uh I don't know where Richard went. We've oh is he he's oh he just turned off his camera. Well that's because it's time for the Xbox segment. He doesn't want to get in your way. Mr. Paul Thorat. I'll get out of your way too. There's a lot going on here. Woo. I know . So Shasharma, it's been a couple of days, so she's in the news again . She sure gets a lot of attention. New the new newish head of Xbox. I look I for the most part, I like what she's doing . Um I do feel that we've now gone a little too far. So uh there there is this you know conversation to be had where it's like, look, um, this business is not working, we need to make some changes. The previous regime was making those changes. We're gonna do a bunch of that stuff. Like we're not really necessarily like, yeah, we're gonna have a new console, but they were gonna have a new console too. Like so I I uh we're getting to the point now where it's like, look, um we , you know, we need to make this business profitable, we need this to work, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like, you know, the the the tough problems remain. But then Microsoft just did a um like a game showcase, right? They showed off uh the like the Halo campaign of all things coming out, the new Forza game, uh a new uh coming Gears of War game that's I think a prequel uh fable etc etc and you know just like ai getting overly defensive you know xbox fans complain they're like why am i seeing a PylaSationt logo on the screen during an Xbox event. And the point of it was they show these logos when the games are going to go to different uh platforms. And like this is an Xbox event . Um why are you showing a PlayStation logo ? Was the complaint. And so she like apologized for this and she's like, You're right, this was a mistake. I own this. We're talking about how we adjust this for future shows. And it's like, I'm sorry, excuse me? What do you you're a cross platform game publisher. Why you we can't sustain the the look of a PS logo and a scroll. Like what the f like what is wrong with you people? But I I at some point I think people need to understand you're never you can't please everyone but you're also not gonna please anyone so like in this these people are so opinionated and so like on one end of the spectrum about this stuff. Like what they want you to do is stop making games for PCs, stop putting games everywhere else, even though those games were like Hall of D were always everywhere else. Just make them for this console that nobody buys. That's what we want. And it's like you would sync that business in two seconds if if you followed these people's advice. Don't start apologizing to gamers. You'll never end. Uh you'll never stop. Yeah. Do not give in to stuff like that. This is I'm not No, I am. I'm sorry. This is this is a stupid complaint, and it's a stupid thing to come back and be like, yeah, you're right, I'm sorry. And like, no, like you're not right, and you shouldn't be sorry for this. It's ridiculous. I mean, this is how this is how feeble we are, you know. We we can't you can't even admit that PlayStation exists. I don't I I'm I just I don't get it. Um this is too bad. So anyway, we'll see. Well now we see the limits of her knowledge and understanding of the space, right? Yeah. Now she has to start making decisions . Right. If it was easy, then Phil Spector'd be doing it. Okay . Um Yeah. So um Fable uh is a remake of Fable, right? The game. Uh it was supposed to come out this holiday season. Microsoft just delayed it until the spring. Um not because it's not ready, not because it's not running at the rate frames per second or whatever, but because GTA six is now occurring in the holiday season and they want this game to have its moment, and they feel like if they release it around the same time as GTA six, no one's going to notice the air out of the room. Yep. So that will be the biggest game release in a decade by all expectations. Yeah. Whatever I mean, if you can look at this up, like what the most popular games of all like GTA is GTA five is the best selling game of all time. Tens of millions of copies. It's incredible. GTA six has been delayed for years. Yep. And it it's turning into the Duke Nukem of random prostitute assault games. It's the Duke Nukem Forever of Video Games. Wait. There you go. They were going to ship it, they say. Yep. And then it is a new month, so we're into June now. We have a new uh set of games coming to Game Pass across all the platforms it supports. I don't see anything in here that is super interesting to me. Um frog squad with a W, fun. Um so I'm gonna move on from that, but whatever. Um that's happening. Nothing. Nothing you not a thing, huh? I I got nothing. I'm sorry. I I can't even like all all I'll do is sound uneducated. Whether you would be normally a squad. Yeah, you say it like a lisping small child or something? Oh, that's not a good one. Oh, but AstroNere is a great game. I played I played on the beta of AstroNere. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't mean to suggest that n some of these I've been. No, no, that's fair. You know, you play uh persona as a potent game too. But Astro Astroneer, yeah. That was that's that one. There's so many silly things you can do in that game. My goodness. It's it starts out you just being a surviv al experience game, building out your factories and so forth that and it eventually evolves into things where it's like, let's drill a hole through the planet. Uh so let's let's blow this mountain to pieces. It sounds like fac uh factorio a little bit. Yeah, in that same kind of league as well. But you gotta use multiple worlds that you're getting different supplies from and things. So this is Starseeker Astroneer Expedition . Some subset of the Ashenir game. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was an old beta tester on that game. I loved Factorio. I'm I might if it's a Factorio like uh test it off. Yeah. Need to recognize it. Can I shoot marines that are in a different uh group from mine in kind of a team deathmatch situation in this game? Oh it does look a little like Factorio, doesn't it? Yeah. It looks like the graphics are fun. Yeah, it looks it looks uh this looks like uh it's got a cartoony element. You know it's uh yeah, it's got a little bit of no man's sky in there. Yeah, it is and it is procedurally generated each world. So you never know what's the point. It's like in Mexico. They call Mexic I literally had a guy who owns a restaurant talking about maybe partnering with someone to open a restaurant, another restaurant. I said, What's what kind of food is it gonna be? He goes, Mexican food. I'm like, Don't you just call it food? It's just food. Like Mexican food? What are you talking about? Okay. He knows his audience. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's for sure. Um this is kind of minor, but there was uh an Xbox Insiders release uh in Alpha Skip Ahead, which is like the like the canary of Xbox Insiders. Uh three new features that they're testing early that will eventually come to um everyone else. None of these are a big deal to me. If you've ever used the X Xbox Accessories app, which you do have to use if you want to update the firmware in your controller, it gives you an idea, you know, it gives you a control. It looks like a controller sort of, but I guess now it's going to be exact. So if you have like a customized controller that you made through that program Xbox has with you know whatever color schemes and stuff it will be that exact controller not just like a white controller or black controller or whatever and like okay. Um basically whatever number, like uh hex color codes for accent colors instead of just whatever the grid of colors. So you can have any color. And then there's going to be a kind of what I think of as a Chromebook style. Um your console is rebooted. Here's what's new. Uh kind of little infographic up in the corner you can click on and see the whole uh the whole deal. But I okay, whatever. Not not a big, big deal. Um of more interest though, um Asus has announced a new edition of its ROG Xbox Ally gaming hand handheld. So this is the X twenty it's a X twenty bundle, actually. I'm sorry. I should say a new it's a bundle, apparently. So it's um uh the OLED oh the I'm sorry it is a new model. So there's an OLED display on the device, 120 uh Hertz refresh rate, uh free sync, premium pro, double vision, 1400 nits of brightness. I get bull this thing probably has five hundred nits. I go to a white screen of this thing. I can't see for ten minutes. I don't know how bright that would be. Um see the future. Yeah, exactly. Um redesign thermal system, etc . Um , whatever. So uh sort of like the Xbox Elite controllers, the um D-pad transform. So you can have different like pull bits off, put different things on there. Uh twenty four gigs of RAM , terabyte of storage, auto SR upscaling, which I think was already on the other ones. And then it comes in a bundle with uh real, what are they called? Real, I guess X real, R1 gaming AR glass es um that you can plug into the handheld with a USB cable and then you get a virtual 170 inch screen, I guess. 240 hertz refresh screen. Okay. So there you go. Um no pri cing, uh no word on availability, but that's coming down the pike. So probably this holiday season, I would think. And then also tied to um gaming uh handheld gaming, uh Intel this past week announced a new series of processors specifically for this market. Like AMD is now on the second gen of their chips specifically for gaming handhelds. Now they have their first. So they have ARC G3 and ArcG3 Extreme. Obviously X86 based on the same architecture as Panther Lake, which is fantastic. Two performance cores, I think it's six efficient, no, eight efficient cores, and then four low power efficient cores optimized for this, you know, form factor. Obviously, super resolution, multi-frame generation, low latency, you know, all this stuff. So um there will be an Acer device. They were first with this one as well. Uh based on this. Um I don't know if we have a I guess possibly as soon as June, that's this month. So um there will be multiple devices based on this architecture. So yeah. I had a hard time not putting this at the top of the show because it's the most important news of the week, but Activision announced the next Call of Duty game. Um Modern War. I I I tried. I I could have I I think I could have gotten out of that without laughing, but Leo laughed. So uh Modern Warfare 4. It's my in the in the confusing world of Call of Duty, if you know the history, you know that um the game that r I think exploded Call of Duty uh with popularity was Call of Duty for Modern Warfare, which started a trilogy of games. Call of Duty No Number, Modern Warfare 2, and then Modern Warfare 3. They later remade that series, and now we're doing a fourth game in that series. But this is that I think I talked about this like um I had read an article where uh someone's, you know, if you play Call of Duty, you know that the the current launcher, which is could be 280 gigs of stuff, uh, is the front end for the most recent game, the previous game, and the previous two games before that, and then all the subgames like Warzone and Zombies, etc. And it's a fricking mess. But the original , the original remake of call of Modern Warfare, um pred ates that. And if you install that game now, it's on Game Pass again. It's uh smaller, obviously. It's one game. And it and the graphics are not as good, like it's it's a different engine or whatever. But it has this kind of gritty, awesome kind of feel to it. And that's what they're doing in this next game. It's a l I think obviously influenced by bat the latest Battlefield game, which did this as well, kind of authentic boots on the ground, stakes are high, you know, actual fighting kind of stuff. It looks awesome. So I I haven't said that about a Call of Duty game since longer ago than I can even remember. It's been a long time. Um it's coming out in October. It's coming to the Nintendo Switch uh too. As well. So obviously P,C multiple ways uh, Xbox, latest gen consoles only, it's not doing previous gen now. Um, and PlayStation 5 . Um, so it actually Very, very nice. Looks pretty good. Well, we have completed the the uh base body of work provided. The base body of work. The base has per but done. But that means that uh the the the pediment needs to now be placed upon the base. That pediment is the same uh the liminal period between the normal this is the liminal period in between the bass and the pediment . And uh and the pediment will of course be the tips, the tricks, the app picks, the uh runners radio pick, and then the whiskey pick of the week, the back of the book, in other words. So we have the ped impediment, which is me, and then the pediment . Is that correct? I think you're the Corinthian column that holds the damn thing up. Okay. That's what I think. I don't know what's going on anymore. But let me uh use this opportunity, this moment in time, this liminal moment in time, to move back into a liminal space . And you see, I am now coming to you from the Club Twit Clubhouse. And this is where, my friends, this is where the good stuff happens. As you know, we are, and I will always be, and I'm committed to a uh free and open ad-supported podcast network, independent, not owned by a big company, beholden to none. I really believe strongly for we've done this for 20 years. I've been doing it for 50. Uh, in in the notion of giving, you know, representing users, uh, not the companies that we cover, but the users. Sure, that gets me banned from events. True, I don't get computers on my doorstep. But you know what? It's worth it because I'm a user, you're a user, and uh and we we need to stick together. That's why uh we created Club Twit, because even though we do have advertis ing, it does not cover all our cost s . Uh even, you know, and we've we've tightened the belt as much as we can. We've cut back on shows, we closed our studios, I'm doing it from my house, that kind of thing. But we want to make sure that our contributors get paid, that our staff, we still have 11 people working at TWIT, they get paid. The light bill gets paid, the internet bills get paid, all of those things. Uh and advertising only goes about I don't know about sixty or seventy percent of the way . Uh that's why we uh started the club back in the COVID days because we thought we wouldn't it be great if we could do a a network that was supported by its listeners. Even though there's no paywall, I just I like to do that. Now we do give you some benefits if you join the clubs. Ten bucks a month. Uh you get ad-free versions of all the shows. I can't I don't know how many we have 15 shows, something like that. Uh you get access to the club to it discord, which is a great hang, a really nice place to hang out with other smart people. You know, it turns out when people pay 10 bucks a month to be in a Discord server, the quality goes way up. You don't get the spammers, you don't get the jerks, you get smart, interesting people who listen to our content and talking about not just the content, but everything on their mind. And I love that. Uh you also get uh special programming. For instance, coming Monday, we've got the WWDC keynote. And because Apple doesn't like the fact that we cover their keynotes freely and fairly. Uh, whenever we stream our coverage on YouTube, they they not only try to take it down, they try to take us down the whole channel. So uh we've decided not to put keynotes in the in the on in the public anymore. You have to see the keynote coverage. Micah and I will be doing that 10 a.m. on Monday, 10 a.m. Pacific. In the Club Twit Discord. We actually give you a a private YouTube link as well so you can watch it on YouTube if you prefer, but it's not open to the public because we don't want Apple to get on our case. So that is something new. Most of the other stuff we do in the Club Twit Discord, the the photography show, the travel show, Jeff Atwood's Off by One Show, which is gonna be great. We're gonna do that every month. Uh Stacy's Book Club. Micah's added to Stacy's Book Club. Now Micah will also do media, so uh I don't know what the voting I'll have to look at the poll. We voted on a variety of different media uh choices and picked one uh one to watch for his next one. That's coming up. Micah's crafting corner. A lot of stuff. Our AI user group is Friday. That is a great get together with people who are actually AI practitioners. I want to rename it to the leap to I want to call it LEAP. The League of Excellent AI Practitioners . Our Leap meeting is uh this Friday uh two p.m. Pacific, five p.m. Eastern. All of this is in the club. We do stream it live as we do with all our shows for everybody to watch. I don't like paywalls. I'm not trying to put stuff behind paywalls. I really just would like to ask you if you like what we do and you want us to keep doing it, just to show your support by going to twit.tv slash club twit and joining the club. Simple as that . That's all it that's all it is. Thank you. And thank you, uh, especially to all our club tweet members who in fact did not see this because it gets cut out of all of the uh shows because they don't get any So earlier I mentioned that this is like the year of CLIs. I just got an email while you were talking about Club Twit from Build. It's like following up after day one of Build. There's a Microsoft Build CLI GitHub repositor y. And if you go to this thing, yeah. It's um so you can you can add it as a a plugin for a GitHub Copilot CLI, right? And then you can go in and say what build sessions are relevant to my the project that you're working on or whatever. Like it's like a way to access the content from build from inside of GitHub from a command line. That's hysterical. I know. Do you have to use PowerShell or can you use any terminal? I assume you can use any terminal, but you would you would just run the terminal app and it would be PowerShell by default. Yeah. That's great. Interesting, right? So um uh there are lots of CLIs now, right? There's an Android CLI if you want to uh create like um Kotlin jetpack compose apps from a command line. In the Microsoft space, I mentioned the Winapp CLI that I didn't understand when they announced it in January. And then there's the Microsoft store C L I which I didn't understand when they announced that in whatever month, April or whatever that was, because we already have Winget and why do we have another thing? But I think these things are all interrelated and during build, as I said earlier, they announced something called the Windows Development Skills, which is a plug-in for GitHub Copilite, but also you can add it to I I I added it to Anthropic Cloud Code, but um you could add it to uh open AI uh codex, you know, whatever. Your choice. And the idea is that you can use this to vibe code a modern WinUI3 app. So I've done a bunch of this vibe coding stuff recently. Um, after Google IO, I did a bunch of stuff. I wrote three articles about that and probably made eight or fifteen apps in a lot of apps. Um so I saw this and I was like, okay . Obviously I have to try this. And it is 100% CLI based, right? Um you add the plugin . Um you run it. It has to run some uh probably almost certainly would have to run download some prerequisites. In my case, I think I didn't have well, I didn't app CLI. I didn't there's some WinUI3 templates. Uh there's a devo uh developer mode needed to be enabled, which I normally do enable you have to enable that in Windows uh if you make uh UWP or um Windows app SK app . So it did that stuff and then it spent about 45 minutes talking to itself. Um and and this was the thing where I was saying, like in the beginning I wanted to you we were kind of half joking about this in the beginning, but and you were this is when you were talking about YOLO mode. And I the reason I didn't just let it do its thing is I actually wanted to see what it was doing. Until that got so tedious, I finally said, geez, just yes. Allow all the edits during the session. This is so frickin' it's yellow.. Ye Yeahah. So we all get there is the point. And anyway, forty eight minutes into this . It and you know, it does the AI thing. It's like, oh, all right, so I'm gonna run the app. Oh wait, something didn't work. Okay,. oh Oh I see what it you know, it does that thing. And yeah, I know. But the thing is, this is now you gotta remember, this is grounded in when UI3, Windows App SDK. It's still pretty magical, right? Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean it's weird, but it's magical. I asked it in this case to make uh all I wrote let me find my actual prompt because it was very simple. I was like, uh because I you know, this is the app I've been making for years. Build me a win th win y three app that is identical to Notepad and Windows eleven visually and functionally. Oh. Now you can vibe code in it. Yeah, that's that's what you do with it. Like that's what you that that is what you do with it. So I just not just for installing uh stuff, it's building stuff. Right. That which is why I had this is why it. Um took a long time. Um didn't really cause any problems. I mean the uh it it ran. I I loaded the project it made into Visual Studio, no problem there. Um having built this out myself so many times, and then of course doing it in WinUI3 most recently, I can see some of the things it did that are not correct from a design perspective, like the the menu is above the tabs, it should be the other way around. That it's very hard to do by, the way, which was one of the problems I solved. Um it doesn't have a settings page. Um the fonts thing is like it's a little dialogue and it doesn't persist settings. I didn't , right? I mean I could keep going with it, but I don't really see a point to doing it. Sorry. No, I probably linked to the wrong thing. Um back when I w before I moved to the Windows App SDK for my app, I was using WPF. And WPF doesn't support a lot of the modern controls and things that are in m you know in this thing. So one of the things it didn't support it was this somet a thing called a content dialogue. And if you use notepad today and you do like find or replace, a content dialogue comes up over the editor and it has all these different options you can do. It's really elegant and looks great. And I couldn't do it in WPF. And I tried to fake it and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to come up with a UI that I think looks native and works well. And I came up with a find and then a find pane and then a re a replace pane that would come under that if you did that, that sits between the menu and the edit box, the text box. And uh I thought it looked great. Like it worked well. It it feels native. It's not the way Notepad does it. It's not an you know a normal way to do this. But then I used like cloud uh code at s it's or cloud, maybe just whatever it was last late last year, something like that. And it it generated an app that used that UI that I had. And I was like, wait a minute. I invented this UI. Like I didn't get this from anyone. I made it. You know you know that. This app that vibe coded in forty-eight or forty five minutes, whatever it was, has that UI. The find and replace panes are not identical, but they're what I made. Like they're, they are the UIs I made. Now my code base is public. It's in GitHub. I mean must be using they must have both grabbed you know what I mean? Like I guess I'm part of the the DNA of the stuff. Yeah, there's a certain sameness to a lot of the apps. You know, if you have Claude make one app , it's not a good way, I understand. I'm just saying that, but this is mine. Like I made it. Oh, this isn't this isn't something you made with Claude. This is something you wrote yourself. Well, no, like the original time that I did those find and replace paints, I wrote that. I I I don't mean to say like I invented it. So it learned from it learned from you. I I don't know how though , but it did. I mean it's on GitHub. Yeah. I right, right. I just I'm just fascinated that it did that. So there are there are all these things I would do to kind of fix this. I don't I I'm not going to because I already have but I have a more sophisticated version of this app that I made or whatever, but um but the but it worked. Like isn't it interesting? They really want to enable normal users, it sounds like to write Windows apps. Eventually. Like I don't think most normal users are going to sit down in a command line and figure out all the machinations to do what I did to make this work. I mean a developer would. Um but but that's this is the back end to what will be a a GUI something that yeah anyone could absolutely I mean this is only a matter of time. And given how quick this stuff goes, I think it's gonna be pretty and it's not specific to copilot. It can use Claude or can use it. Yeah, because they all use the same uh you know they all interoperate, right? Like, it's open it's probably the open AI API. That's a standard yeah it's like people support yeah yeah yeah and eventually others will and you can yeah you can you can you can plug in those three at least I know that yeah but I was like this okay this is like so you know I've done like an Android app, a coup well more than one, but I've some d Andoneroid app stuff with uh Google AI Studio. I've done some um uh what do you call it? PWA or web app type stuff also with Google AI Studio. I've done just the thing where you go into GitHub copilot inside of Visual Studio Code, a Visual Studio , or um or what Paul. Or like just Anthropoc rone and just does it on its like I've done all these things, you know. And like I have to say, like this stuff has gone from like, eh, it needs some work to like, holy crap, like this is this works pretty, like it's it's pretty good. I was talking about this with Gibson yesterday. This I used to think this was like spicy auto correct.. Right. No. No I don't understand how it's doing this. I I feel like they're very they they they 're presenting this as something a human being would use, but the reality is this is really here for the AI agents, right? Like that's really what it's about. And yeah. Yeah. But the the to me, the uh other than the obvious, it does the thing and it does the work. Like the big deal to me is when you go into cloud code, which in this case, right, from the command line, and then you tell it we're gonna use this thing, which is using WinApp CLI on the back end. So this thing being I keep forgetting the name of the Windows developer skills. Yeah, what you're doing when you issue that command line is you're saying you are grounded in this. You're not looking at the web, you're not looking anywhere else. This is all of your so it's like what you did with Lisp, but we always use this example. You trained AI to here's the documentation. It's this finite set of information. Just use this to make an app. And that's what this is doing, but with WinUI3. And it's you know, it took it took a while, but it but it's it's pretty good. Like it's I mean the app works. Like it's great. It runs on ARM, it runs on X sixty four, it's fine. Like it works great. So I thought that was kind of it. Yeah. It's uh on GitHub at Winapp Cli. Yep. And you just point your AI agent at it and say install this. This is what my favorite thing is. Well, so the thing you r yeah, so what you really need is something called the Windows Developer Skills. So you should look that up on GitHub or wherever. Okay. That will install the WinApp CLI as part of its prerequisites. Like it will do it. It will do that for you. Nice. Um but yeah, it uses that on the back end. And this I to me, this like now it's kind of coming together. Like I said, in January when they announced WinAp Winap C L I sound so weird saying it. Um I didn't understand what the point was. I was like, what is this? Like a and now I'm like, oh no, now I get it. Like they're this is all this is all about driving these agents to you know, get them to do the stuff across. It's really cool. Um I just mentioned I've written free markdown editors and soon we're all going to be doing this. But in the meantime , um there are two really, really good uh cross-platform uh markdown editors, in my opinion. One is the one I use mostly, which is Typora . But the other one is IA Writer. And I this is this is my favorite on the Mac. It actually works better on the Mac, I think, than it does in Windows, but it's available on the iPad as well and the iPhone if you wanted to do that. Um the problem with this app is that you could only buy it through an app store. So on the Microsoft side you had to buy it through Microsoft Store and the Apple side obviously buy it through their app store. And I guess for the six, eight years, whatever it's been, they've been trying to figure out a way to actually it's sixteen years. Uh just to sell this thing directly to people. And the idea is that you just sign it with your email account, they'll send you an email, you get a code, you sign, you know, it's two FA thing or whatever essentially, and there's no like special online account you have to deal with. It's just the thing you use to buy it. And so you can do that now. So if you don't want to go through an app store, you want to buy the Windows or Mac version of IA Writer, which is I I do recommend it's a great app. Um you can do it directly from IA now. So that's pretty cool. Nice . Markdown is the lingua franca of AI too. It's everybody everywhere. Yeah. Yeah between like it's like everything's text. You know, it's like Markdown is text, CLI obviously text mode, like the this is text. Text is oh I keep saying I told you about this like MS. Well, MS. style editor edit that Microsoft released. It's now just built into Windows. I love this thing. I have it on a right click memo. Like I can bring this thing up from a right-click. Lisa said, uh, I want because I was showing her my agent. She said, I want I I want that. I said, Well, you can't have it because it's a command line. You gotta do command line. She said, what do you mean command line? I said, what command line? You know where you type it, she said, you mean like DOS? I said, yeah, like DOS. She said, I could do that. Actually gotta be sufficiently. But the UI for that's gonna be voice, right? I mean like uh at some point it's just gonna be natural language and you know yeah yeah. Uh let's see, that concludes Paul's part of this uh pediment, uh his impediment, as we say. The part of the foundation that is insecure and will fail you . But now, ladies and gentlemen, is time for Mr. Richard Campbell and rununage radio. Show I picked up while I was in Toronto at NDC Toronto, talking to my friend Jerry Dixon, who is a Microsoft SQL Server Principal Product Manager. I mean he works uh specifically in the data side of things. And it was a tool I knew nothing about called Data API Builder. Now, this seems like a dev tool, but it's really not. It's something the DBA wants to roll with because what it does is it builds abstraction layers over databases. So you you struggle with allowing developers to access databases directly because often they can get into dumb situations that'll seriously impair performance. So having an abstraction layer gives you a little bit of control over what they can do, what governance do you have in place, what kind of monitoring you do, and so forth. And this tool, the the API builder, literally will expose the the database the way you want, as a REST interface, or as a GraphQL interface, or even as an MCP server. So you can just make it available to an agent and have it called in directly and do some abstractions and protections that way. So we went a little nuts on this one. It was like huge possibilities. And right away I was thinking about features of restrictions I'd want to put in place and how governance I'd want to throw in it's like if I stick this layer in, is anybody call ing it like that? So we really had a lot of fun with it. But it's uh it's an interesting thought that DBAs now with these kinds of tools, you know, you still want to allow the dev some flexibility, do some ad hoc work, that sort of thing, which don't want them to get into trouble. And so rather than having to write a lot of store procedures or just say no, here are some tools that make it a heck of a lot easier. So great conversation. Very happy. Yeah. Jerry Nixon Run As Rioad Episode 103 9 at RunasRadio. com now Whiskey Time Yeah Um This is a fall over from being with my buddy Remy, who now owns the whiskey store in Alkmar , who handed me what we consider an advanced sample of the uh old malt casking of a longmorn 20. And we've never talked about longmore before. And I'll just gonna covet this right up front by saying, yeah, you ain't gonna get one of these. This is literally inside ball about these rare individu al casks. There are some regular single malt editions of Longmore, but mostly it's always been used at blending. So let's let's just talk about Longmore for a minute, then we'll debt with this particular edition. So Longmore is another one of those classic space sides. So this is on the A941, south of Elgin, which is that's Glen Rothys, Bensburn, my beloved Craigalachy Hotel, McAllen, you name it. It's this is the council region of Moray, which has human habitation going back about 8,000 BC or so. So, you know, better part 10,000 years. In fact, if you get up to the Elgin Museum, there are all kinds of artifacts from all these different times from Mesolithic uh tooling to pots from the Neolithic period to anagram diagrams and glyphs from the picks and so on. It's amazing. Now this is not one of the oldest distilleries. This is uh from eighteen ninety three, which is the height of the sort of whiskey wave that that ran over Scotland after the railways were in and there was a huge surge. And with the person behind it was John Duff. And we've talked about Duff before. This is a guy who worked at Glendron ack in the which is in the Easter Highlands. We mentioned that, and he built a distillery. He built the Glen Lossie distillery in 1876. And after he was done with that, he thought that he would take whiskey around the world. And so he went down to South Africa and failed terribly. And deciding that was a mistake, he went out to the United States and tried there, and that did not go well either at all. And when he got back to Scotland, he rounded up a couple of partners, John Shearers and George Thompson, and in eighteen ninety three they built the Longmore Distillery, uh, Longmore, and uh does very well. In fact, well enough that within a couple of years he buys out his partners because he thinks it's going to be all the business and make is making enough money and things are so busy that he actually builds another distillery across the highway, the derogatorily known as Longmorn II, but it was actually named Ben React, a better known distillery than Glenn Moorne. Here, one of the reasons that John Duff was so enthusiastic is that there was this group of blenders, the Patisons, the Patterson Brothers, the company's called Patterson Elder and Co., that had been operating in the from the early 1880s until the eighteen nineties . And they were big on powerful driven marketing about more and more whiskey. And they were big on pitching hard to the distilleries to produce more whiskey at scale that they could do the st some storage on and make their own blends and so fort h. But they were playing fast and loose with the books and kind of overspending. And eventually the bank calls in all the loans in 189 8 . And ultimately the, Pattison brothers end up con victed of fraud, and the whole House Guards falls in on itself. And suddenly all these distiller ies have barrels that were down at Patison they can't get back and aren't paid for, and have overproduction sitting in warehouses that don't have homes anymore. And so price of whiskey drops way down and a whole bunch of them go broke. And John Duff was one of them. He ends up having to sell off both the distilleries to James Grant, and that's the Glen Livitt guy further down the road there. Uh creates a new entity called Longmorn Glen Livitt Distillery for a number of years. And uh they're functioned fine. like that Gl ant had not been part of the Patison debacle, didn't get over leveraged. Uh Longmorne's famous for another reason, our friend Masuta ka Takasuri, the guy who uh st worked initially with Suntori and then made the Nikkei distillery, worked there in the 1920s as part of his education to pick whiskey to Japan . By 1970, they're starting to modernize, they re- they they dropped the name Longmorn from the name, just call it the Glen Livitt Distiller ies . Longmorn is not doing a lot of single months, they're mostly going into various kinds of blends, but 1970 was the very typical time where they switched away from coal heat to steam because it's safer, got rid of floor maltings, that sort of thing, sort of standard modernization . And it was acquired in 1977 by the Seagram's group, which at that time also owned the Shivis brothers and uh Longmorn has always featured significantly in the Shivis blends. And that means it rolls up into Pernode Record by 200 1 . So for the most part, you've never heard of Longmorn because it's just gone into blends. You've likely drank it if you drank any well-known blends, especially Shivas Regal. They did make a few, start making some single malt editions in 1993 without a lot of marketing into that. But the bott the independent bottlers have always made big business from them. And so most people keep an eye out for whenever uh Hunter Liang , like in this edition, but also you, know, pick your bottle or they often make lawnmowers and they are coveted, grabbed up right away, 2 50 bottles or something like that. The facility itself is large. They produce about four and a half million liters a year, uh, doing malts from the Mornay region, the uh the uh from Baird. Uh eight and a half ton grist loads is pretty big into 10 stainless steel washbacks of 39,000 liters. They run on four sets of stills, 10,000 liters for the four wash stills and 7,000 liters for the spirit stills. Do a lot of their own barrel storage there, but because they're part of Pernaud Ricard, barrels are distributed all over. Nothing unusual there. And again, not a well-known brand. They are not one of the umbrella, but also not in the Diaggio loop. They're in the Pernado Ricardo loop. They're part of Shivas . So this particular bottling, and I don't have it with me, it's back home. But I did get a chase to chance to taste it, and it was amazing. Comes from Hunter Liang. So this is actually originally uh Hunter Liang is one of the sons of Douglas Liang. And Douglas Liang formed the a company for doing blending and filling in in nineteen forty-eight and did very, very well. By the 1990s, they were all on this modern single casking approach to whiskey because people like to have one of 250 bottles, that kind of thing. And the two sons, Doug Jr. and Hunter, uh disagreed on a bunch of things. And so by 2013, they decided to split the company and split up the brands. Junior kept Old Particular and a couple of other brands, but also has now moved started to move into stilling, which I believe was their disagreement that Hunter liked making his his cat his single bottlings and his relationship with distilleries and didn't want to get in distilling where Doug Jr. is moving that direction. And the main line for Hunter Liang is this old malt cask of which this is one of the bottles of it. So this is a 20-year-old edition uh that was distilled in 1996 and bottled in 2017. And they're now looking at doing distributions for it. So for certain uh uh whiskey shops, they send out samples, small little hundred mil bottles uh that you can uh that allow you to try them out so that you decide if you're gonna stock some of those. So this hot 260 bottle run they',re gonna go there. Uh it's a single cask and very limited production. It was 50% alcohol, but it was a 20-year-old. And you know, I'm usually lean away from those older whiskies, but this is one of those beautiful silky caramel space eyes. It's like everything you ever wanted in a whiskey. And the samples were basically for free, and I was given one of them, so I didn't ever pay for it. But you can expect if you could get your hands on one of these bottlings, and there's a few different editions that have come down the line, if you keep your eye out for getting access to Hunter Liang, which hard to come by out of Scotland. Expect to pay about 200 pounds uh for a bottle like that of a very special edition that you can serve your friends at Christmas and let 'em know you'll never have this again. Uh and you can't get it now though, right? Or can you? I think yeah, it was just an advanced sample. They haven't done the release on it. So if you were very keen, you could go looking for the remote . Okay, good. Possibly. But I guess it's not why we should. Malt cask. Yeah, so all yeah, the old malt cask is the is the group, Hunter Leang, that does the various editions. And they they bottle from all kinds of distilleries. So you can't just look at old malt casks. You've got to specifically go hunting for a long morning dish. Well this is kind of fun . Look at all this stuff. Is this a subscription? Absolutely. And your whole thing here is go to your boutique whiskey maker that might be on the Hunter Liang list. Ask about certain editions. See if you can get a few bottles. How fun is this? Look at all these. And that's the whole thing about these uh these custom bottlers, right? Is that you get all these interesting things from it. Uh and just like I said they're rare, they're special, but they're a way to get very unique bottles of whiskey. Uh if you want to have something unusual. So thank you. That being said, I am in Denmark, and today I was handed the bottle of Danish whiskey, no surprise. The good news is I'm staying for another week in Denmark, and so they'll probably see you next time. They see you coming, don't they, Richard? They do see me coming. And uh, you know, I'm here to help my the nice thing is I'm here long enough that I can open this bottle and share it with friends and not worry about leaving it behind. We'll be able to finish it. But next week you'll see me uh in a different location. I think I'll be over to Skandick at that point and uh we'll uh Danish whiskey with us next week. Yeah, you know I hate to not do a Danish whiskey. We've done one before, right? We have talked about Danish whiskey before, but this is a different one. So we'll I'll leave it fun. Well bless you. Uh you you you kept it in uh under an hour and I appreciate that. And uh you think you're gonna give me time to do some more work. So thank you for that. Uh we do Windows Week ly. Uh I the reason I say that if you're watching live is uh in about 10 minutes we've got uh Robert Tursik who was a former creative director at MTV and is a futurist talking about AI on intelligent machines. Uh, and so uh that's going to be a lot of fun. Stick around if you want to watch that. If you're not watching live, well uh you'll find it on the I am uh feed a little bit later. We do uh Windows weekly every Wednesday before Intelligent Machines. We do it 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can even watch us live if you want. If you're in the club, of course, in the club to Discord, but also we stream to everyone on YouTube , Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik . Uh After the Fact On-demand versions of the show at twit.tv/slash www. We have audio and video there. The video is also on YouTube on the Windows Weekly dedicated channel. Good way to share clips of the show. And actually Richard's uh whiskey clips you don't need to clip those out. We uh Kevin King uh goes through those uh he's a little behind, takes a while. But uh if you go to something weird from my closet dot com, you'll find that YouTube playlist with all the hundred, more than a hundred uh whiskey picks. And the story of whiskey and all sorts of great stuff. That would be a good idea. Well, it takes twenty years, so two and a half hours. That's nothing. Nothing like that. Come quick, yeah . Um Paul Thorat is at thorat.com. Become a premium member, and you can actually get copies of his books from leanpub. com and that includes Field Guide to Windows 11, Windows Everywhere, and the latest D and Shittify Windows. Uh or you can buy them from Leanpub.com. Richard Campbell is at RunasRadio.com. That's where you'll find his shows run as radio and dot net rocks or DNR, which does not mean do not resuscitate in this case. For two thousand episodes, maybe you shouldn't resuscitate. Yeah, no, it's living. It's alive. Do not pound on its chest. It's it's fine. It's not quite dead. It's just resting. Getting better. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Paul. Thanks to all our winners and dozers out there . We'll see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye .