This is Coda Radio, Episode 603 for January 14th, 2025. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupiter Broadcasting's weekly talk show, taking a pragmatic look at the art and the business, the software development, the whole world of technology. My name is Chris, and over there sharpening his kitchen knives, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike.
Mesa the Iron Chef. You want really sharp cutlery. Cutlery. Cutlery, thank you. Thank you. I was actually just recently using a brand new set of somebody else's very fancy knives. And it really is something special. It is something. A good knife. You know, my friend OJ told me a good knife gets you anywhere. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, what else can I chop? You know, like, is there anything else you need cutting up?
I'm right here. I got a great knife. Again, a philosophy my good pal OJ also agrees with. So your buddy got a little chop, Patrick Spence, the CEO of Sonos. is stepping down. On their fiscal 2024 earnings call, Spence shared news that annual revenue for Sonos had gone backwards by 4% and admitted that one of the reasons was, quote, we mishandled the rollout of our new app.
This app was touted as a significant improvement, but instead, of course, it was one of these rewrites using SwiftUI, had new bugs, degraded functionality, didn't have certain accessibility features, specifically bad for vision-paired users. And then they didn't handle the feedback very well, and they didn't handle the fixes very well. And so Patrick Spence, old Pat, he's out, and he's going to be replaced by Tom Codrad.
Now, Pat's going to get a little $7,500 a month or something like that, maybe $7,800 a month, plus a $1.875 million severance. And old Conrad, who's stepping in, he gets $175K a month, a month. Plus stock options to run Sonos. And they're going to try to make it better now. This has got to be historically one of the most recent app rebuilds that's gone bad ever. Like, I was also in the Sonos.
You know, the sales funnel. I was on the edge of the Sonos sales funnel beginning to slide into the ecosystem. Oh, I've been there many times. Yeah. And then they pulled this move and I'm like, oh, I'm crawling out of the funnel. Get out. Get out. Get out. Just in time. Yeah. I don't understand.
like i think sonos right like i used to have sonos before i i found the the light of the home pod that apple you know decided to basically abandon i never once in my couple years of sonos usage was like gee i wish the app was different i never cared it's is that just a me thing like i'd put on like you know it's a christmas party you know christmas playlist or you know whatever people over game night like well
You know, Mike, stay a while and listen. You start out with a simple app because you got simple needs and a simple product line. And then as the time goes on and the world gets more connected, you end up having all these wackadoo smart devices that are wireless.
Home entertainment systems and standalone speakers that you promise can do more if you buy the whole ecosystem. And before you know it, the app's got to do like 100 different things it never had to do when you first built it. You know, so I can kind of understand that aspect of it. But what I don't understand, and I'm sure somebody could boost in or in the chat room tell us like.
why couldn't they have kept the old app running in parallel for a while? I know there was some sort of hard cutover, some sort of backend change. Wasn't there some nonsense about some sort of service play too, though? Or is that just, am I confusing two different situations? See, this is, I'm glad I don't know, to tell you the truth, because I did not want to get into all of this. I just, I hate this kind of stuff. When I buy something for my home, like a speaker, a speaker can last a decade.
And I don't even want to have to have a login with a password or a cloud service. I don't want that at all. For something that's going to get installed in the home, you know what I mean? I don't want it. So I'm kind of glad they kind of blew this because it...
It saved me from getting sucked in. But it is kind of wild to see Patrick Spence step down and kind of attribute it to the mishandling of the app launch. When have we ever heard that, even if it's true? Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about it. We should probably kind of... not go too far into this, but I could have sworn I read somewhere there was some like weird business strategy change they were trying to do and the app was the linchpin of that.
Like, this wasn't, you know, their iOS devs were like, let's use SwiftUI. I'm sure there was a little bit of that, because, you know, the allure of the rewrite, but... Yeah, I really think there was something. Some kind of strategy play to not... Because this is the thing. Everybody wants services revenue for the good old stock market. I thought they were trying to get out of just being like a, you know, sell me a dumb speaker company. But I could be wrong. I could be totally.
I'll ask perplexity. I'm sure if you're listening to this and you're shouting at us right now, you're having the answer, you could be listening live and in the chat room. It looks like Sonos Pro is a software as a service that launched in April of 2023 for businesses. And they had Speaker as a service, which launched in 2020. And a TV streaming device as a service. And then they talked about a possible video streaming service.
which is still under consideration. Oh, God. Oh, they have Sonos Radio HD as well. So they have, yeah, they have, well, it looks like they've tried a number of service offerings according to Gemini. Maybe there's other reasons this guy had to go. Yeah, it feels like business model floundering a bit. But having said that, when my inventory of working HomePods is finally exhausted, I'm down to one in reserve. Oh, God.
I probably am going Sonos, unless Sony seduces me somehow. There has to be something out there that can save us. Save us. We can only last on our HomePods for so long. It's been a while. I mean, I got my buddy's worth. As the show is live, Tuesdays generally at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. You can catch it at coder.show slash live or in a podcasting. We would love to have you here. Come on in and join us, won't you? Okay, so Salesforce's CEO made some headlines since the last episode.
when he was quoted saying he's hiring no more software engineers in 2025. They've had such big boosts from AI. This is such an audacious statement that I actually thought it'd be better if you heard it yourself, because then you hear it. From the horse's mouth. So I'll play just a bit of Salesforce's CEO and then we'll talk about it on the other side. Number one, we're doing our business plan for next year for 2025 right now.
And we're not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with AgentForce and with other AI technology that we're using for our engineering teams by more than 30%. to the point where our engineering philosophy is incredible. I can't believe what we're achieving in engineering. And then...
We will have less support engineers next year because we have an agentic layer. We'll have more salespeople next year because we need to really explain to everybody exactly the value that we can achieve with AI. So we will add another probably one to two thousand salespeople. in the short term. So going to hire 2000 salespeople, but no software engineers, Mike.
Yeah, there's a lot here. I'm going to take the simple take first. This is the kind of thing you say publicly so the investors and the analysts hear it in Booster Stock Price. The non-cynical take is, you know, we touched on it. a little i think a little awkwardly last week the plight of junior developers looking for jobs and not getting them it is i i feel and you know in in 12 months or even six months we'll probably have enough data to prove this right or wrong
that there is going to be a less developer hiring or coder hiring, whatever you want to call it. And that's going to be mostly junior devs that take the hit because, I mean, we don't really need to rehash last episode, but... Junior devs are very expensive, tend to leave once they're useful, right? And tend to cause problems, right? We've all, I'm sure everybody's had.
And I'm sure all of us have been the junior dev for the new guy on the team who blows something up. So, yeah, I don't I don't deny Mark Benioff's point that they're. is going to be less demand. I think he's making such a dramatic statement that we're not hiring any coders at all for a year for the benefit of our good friends at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America doing their analysis, right?
I got a semi-hot take on this one, and that's just because I've been watching Salesforce as they adapt to the AI train and try to get on board. And Salesforce came in a little late, right? They came in after Microsoft and OpenAI. We got a lot of attention. They came in after Google. And they came in super strong, overcompensating for the fact that they were late on this. And their CEO. I played it on live streams months ago. Their CEO just was saying some ridiculous stuff.
Just to really try to position Salesforce as just overcompensatingly ahead. We're so far ahead of everybody else. It's crazy, bro. And this leans into that narrative while also... avoiding the fact that they must be suffering financially or something. Because whenever you're over-investing in sales and under-investing in building the product,
That's not a sign that the product is doing particularly well. And you're trying to hire staff that eventually will pay for themselves ideally because you don't have revenue. So they're hiring salespeople. And we don't know what the conditions are on those hires. We don't know if it's, you know. Commission-based, whatever. And I think Salesforce is trying to use this AI excuse, this cover, for why they won't be doing any hiring. And I'll give you an analogy. It would be like if I...
If I shut down the Coda radio program, you and I were like, we're done. And what we're doing is we're leaning into agentic podcasting. And every week we're going to have a curated AI podcast that plays all of the developer related and business. And we're going to scale up and sell dynamically inserted ads into these every couple of minutes, one at the start.
and one in a mid-roll, and one at the very end. And we're going to make a lot more money off that because it's going to have zero cost for us to work on it day-to-day once it's set up. The dynamic ad insertion takes care of itself. It's a bid-based marketplace. And we don't have to sit here and spend our time doing it.
It sounds to the people that are super excited about AI like, oh, look at this product you can create. But what it really is is a desperate company that can no longer afford to maintain its product line and is transitioning to AI-generated slot. One, I love this idea. We should totally do it, right? You could do a whole series, dude, and you just get dynamic ads. A little like inside baseball. So there is Salesforce Alice compatibility.
I've done over the years a number of Salesforce, let's call them integrations. I wouldn't be shocked. So you have to understand that Salesforce was the original SaaS in many ways, but also not in the way we would think of a SaaS today. But it's so not a SaaS in that the companies that buy proper Salesforce, not like their little baby offshoot, know and expect that they're also going to hire a third-party integrator.
And they're going to pay lots of money for that, or relative lots of money, you know, relative to what we think it should cost, right? Salesforce is one of the few... and lots of businesses have this model right microsoft famously used to support their isvs and integrators a lot and now they've kind of they still do but sometimes they try to do it themselves right which is it's tough to compete with the platform vendor
Salesforce has not attempted to cannibalize that market, which I say good on them. I love that. I will also say that what usually happens, at least in my experience, and I think I've done like five or six of these. Out of the box, Salesforce just doesn't work for the customer. It's too generic. It's kind of old, right? Unless you buy the baby version. They call it lightning.
which in a lot of ways doesn't make sense for the enterprise companies that buy Salesforce proper. And the whole idea behind it is you can get an integrator to customize it for you, tie everything together. He bums your uncle, you're good to go. I'm wondering if they're just not going to lean on that. Because you know what? I think Salesforce is like the IBM of CRMs.
but really crms right no one no you know no vp of biz dev is getting fired for hiring salesforce if you're in a company that is at the scale and frankly level of enterpriseness They're big enough to have an HR department. That would pay Salesforce's somewhat crazy rates for what it is.
Because you could buy HubSpot for a lot less. You could buy Close.io for a hell of a lot less. There are vertically focused CRMs for different industries that are also much more affordable and probably make more sense in many cases. So I don't, I guess I agree with you in a way. They don't need to innovate because they've effectively become IBM, right? They're not...
You know, they bought Slack, right? That was their big move. They bought Slack. Yeah, good thing they did, I suppose, huh? I wouldn't say that. For them. What else? I mean, I don't know. I can't really speak to it, but. Yeah. Yeah, I wonder if this works or if the market sees through this and if we are watching the decline of the Salesforce era.
This is not an area I really can speak very authoritatively on. So if anybody has any thoughts, please let us know. I will say Benioff is a master of speaking to what we used to call the tech press. Now I guess are effectively just activists. And the market. So I feel like this is, you know, it's kind of like I don't think he's telling the truth in some significant way. But I also want to say good work, boss, no notes, because I'm pretty sure the outcome he wants.
is exactly what's happening. We're talking about him. I know it was quoted on CNBC. And... All the finance bros in the world love the idea of, oh, God, expensive software developers don't hire those. Also, thank you for mentioning this because I think the other thing is sort of. It kind of subconsciously suggests that Salesforce has figured out how to master AI so significantly that they must be experts. And they're seeing a, quote, 30% productivity boost from AI, so much so.
They're not going to hire software engineers in 2025. We're incredible. Look how we've harnessed this. What? All you're getting is weird summarizations and hallucinations? Well, come talk to us. That's the implicit message. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I'd still like to know everybody's thoughts on it because, again, not a Salesforce guy. Well, that handsome bloke, Lunduk, got a good conversation going on social media around Rust.
and memory leaks in Rust-based applications. And it kind of highlighted a couple of interesting things that I think we could get into. So Brian's video talks about some memory leak issues on the Cosmic desktop around, like, some of their applets and, you know, just... I don't know. I don't actually know all the problems, but I know that there was surprise around that. And it got into a broader conversation that the Rust programming language is often touted for preventing memory leaks.
And that this is why people say we should use Rust in high stakes applications. And well, I thought maybe we should tackle this because I think there's a bit of a kind of a maybe a misunderstanding here at play. Yeah, this is, I mean, one, you know, the software in question is the Cosmic Desktop Alpha.
Yeah, and I think it's like maybe some of the apps and some of the applets and stuff. There is like a GitHub issue that I meant to track down. I'll try to find a link for it. This is one of my hobby horses. And not Lunduk. Lunduk actually did a good job on this.
when russ i guess it is still kind of the new hotness but when it was really like getting all the what do we call them like the the tech you know peeping toms kind of guys right like they write a quick article like impossible to get memory leaks and that's that's not true that never was true the people who work on rust do not and have not claimed that to be true what is true is it
makes it harder to have certain security related memory issues. You put in here, you know, things like null pointer dereferencing, use after free data race is great, like, wonderful. Those are mostly security related issues. Good old boring memory leaks, right? I'm going to use C terms here, but not deallocating an object and creating a zombie. It's totally possible, right? You can definitely do that.
And it was never claimed by anyone who knows what they're talking about that that wasn't possible or that rust would protect you from that. So I actually would applaud Lunduk on this. And, you know, he's got his comedy ways about his jokey ways that he approaches thing, whatever. He understood correctly in his YouTube video that those are two different things, which good on Brian. Yeah, I think the point he's making is that.
a lot of people have conflated the two things. Well, because they're jackasses who have to get a number of words out per week. The funny thing is, is that in the Rust documentation, I'll put a link to this in the notes too, they joke that, oh, you can have memory leaks. They're just...
They're safe. Quote, Russ's memory safety guarantees make it difficult but not impossible to accidentally create memory that is never cleaned up, known as a memory leak. Preventing memory leaks entirely is not one of Russ's guarantees, meaning memory leaks. Are memory safe in Rust? So what that means is, and if I had written that, I would have made that quite a bit more wishy-washy, but let's go with what they say.
You will still leak the memory and you will eventually need to kill the application or restart. In this case, because it's a desktop environment, restart your system, right? But those memory leaks are unlikely. to lead to known security exploits, which is very different than, let's say, a C++ or a C. Yeah, it's definitely not ideal, especially on a memory-tight system. Yeah, but that's a programming mistake. Yeah. Right? This is an error.
that anybody could have made there. And I'm not, I'm not here to be the cosmic defender. I don't really care. I think anybody who's ever worked in one of these languages that makes you care about memory or, you know, shall I mention pointers?
has written memory leaks by accident and had to go in and, you know, you use a, I forgot. I used to do the thing in Xcode all the time to find the zombie objects and clean up memory leaks. I don't remember what it was called. The analyzer or something like that. It was, it's like. a tool like a separate applet that opens up an xcode to who cares everybody's done it it's it's an error but the i think it's actually very poor service to the rust project
Again, I'm not here to be the crap people defender. But if I was – I don't even know what their structure is now because they had all that drama. But if I was like the PR guy for Rust. I would be aggressively reading all these articles and going out there and saying, you are incorrect. We do not protect you from yourself in terms of leaking memory. We make it difficult for you to do stupid things.
That cause, here's my list of security issues, right? This is why the Biden White House and I'm sure the Trump White House are pushing people to use Russ. But this isn't your prophylactic against errors in your own programming. Yeah. Right. Yep. Although. Just pump the brakes right there. I think Cosmic Defender is an awesome title, and I'll play Steel Man for a second. I think we should TM that. To be honest, we should trademark that right now. We are talking about an alpha desktop here.
Right. And we're talking about a pretty tight team of, you know, one or two people working on different things, three or four people when you zoom out and consider theming or whatnot. We're talking about an infancy project here. And so memory leaks. are going to happen and they're going to get tracked down. But I did kind of feel like there was a bit of a pylon.
For Cosmic, not by Lunduk, but by others that then use this as an opportunity to pile onto Cosmic a little bit. I don't know if we need to do that. I do think it was a good opportunity to have this conversation and talk about, you know, writing something in Rust doesn't mean it isn't going to sit there and eat up all your RAM.
Doesn't save you from electron apps that can eat up all your RAM, right? You can still have programming mistakes. And they do talk about that. In fact, I also have a blog post about handling memory leaks in Rust in the show notes. And then another one that I thought was interesting. Memory leaks are memory safe and there's not much you can do about it. Nothing can be done, they say. Nothing can be done.
Ah, I love it. So we'll have that linked in the show notes too. Remember kids, if A references B and then B references A, you're screwed, right? Like that's, yeah, that's a very simplified example. Don't write me an email telling me why that's overly simple. Check out BitcoinWell.com slash Jupiter. It seems inflation is here for years, and I've been thinking about how do I protect my savings or my purchasing power, especially because every dollar counts these days.
Well, that's why I've been thinking about the Bitcoin well. It's a non-custodial Bitcoin platform. That means you're always in control of your keys. Bitcoin has been the best performing asset 13 out of the last 14 years. I challenge you to try to find something that's done better, especially when you measure over, say, a four-year time period. This is how I am hedging against inflation, and I'm doing it with the Bitcoin well. Their automatic self-custody means they're always my Bitcoin.
They're always my keys, your keys in your wallet. You start with self-custody. You avoid having to move later, but you also are not risking their security, their platform. This is one of the great things about Bitcoin. You can hold it. And then when the market gets crazy or the world goes nuts, you have real peace of mind knowing that you have a scarce asset that you own the keys to. And the Bitcoin well has support for on-chain and lightning transactions.
So you can top up your podcasting wallet real quick if you want to do some boosts using the Bitcoin well. And, of course, you can move things quickly and privately over the Lightning Network. They're based in Canada, and they have a wide range of services for the locals, and they're rolling out more and more for us here in the U.S. market, like BillPay. That just went live in the States recently.
They also offer something for large purchases. They're over-the-counter Bitcoin well infinite service. So if you're going to make a big investment, they offer hands-on services like that. So to really wrap this up, when I'm thinking long term, when I'm thinking about protecting purchasing power and I'm thinking about self-custody, I'm thinking Bitcoin. Well, they have competitive pricing, educational resources, but ultimately it's their focus.
on you owning the coins. Bitcoin Well is redefining how you can interact with Bitcoin, letting you use it peer-to-peer the way it was meant to be. Head to BitcoinWell.com slash Jupiter to learn how to get started and support the show. That's Bitcoin Well. .com slash Jupiter. The Bitcoin well. The way Bitcoin was meant to be. Bitcoinwell.com slash Jupiter.
Four score and seven boosts to go. Well, Mr. Dominic, we have some boosts to get to this week. And user 88572303 came in with 10,000 sats. How about that? Let's hear it, good buddy. And User88, if you want to set your name and boost back, please do. For Episode 602, I see NVIDIA going down the road of Intel for at least the past three generations, where the performance comes with a big spike in power usage.
For example, the 5090 has a smaller PCB to make room for an extra flow-through fan to deal with the extra heat generated. They're also using AI hardware to upscale and bolster it to make it look way better than it actually is. Yeah, I think that's something they showed at CES. I think they said they're doing that. Yeah, maybe they're kind of hitting the wall.
They just upped the power usage, I think, right? From 125 watts to 150 watts or something like that. That's okay. Everybody's going to have their own nuclear flame. I hope. Well, Satya is leading the way. I hope. Or at least solar panels that run their GPU. I just think it's bonkers that, you know, one GPU card is probably using more power than almost all my computer setups. Can I sidetrack here? Because actually...
You've really got to set your username, man. 888 here hit something, I think, by accident because he wrote this a while ago. You know, Biden did an executive order this morning. On the AI chip stuff? To build more data centers and power for them. Okay. So this is, I think NVIDIA is just leaning in. Hmm. Hmm. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for the boost. And at 10,000 sets, you are a baller this week. You got it on sale, buddy.
The Immunologist is here with 3,333 sats. The Stargate universe had an okay season one. A great season two, though. There was a lot of potential, but season two... already had a lot less viewers. Stargate is one of the few series that had many seasons without becoming unbearable and even decent spinoffs. It's good old times. I have a theory about why Stargate Universe got bad so quick.
Okay. I'm a diehard Stargate. Yeah, I know you are. One word. Two words. Okay. Actually, they changed their name, but I'm going to use their name now. So one word. Sci-fi. Oh, yeah. That network is like being the professor of the dark arts. Because they don't rein their people in, right? I mean, anybody who doesn't know Stargate, Stargate is like someone got really drunk. Let's call him Mike. He was supposed to go to a conference, but he was passed out in a hotel room.
But during that process, he's listening to an audio book by Graham Hancock. And he's like, what if the Air Force just like did this? The aliens came back. That is the premise of Stargate. So go read your Graham Hancock. Stargate Universe is like, what if we were like a high drama show with intricate relationships? And we're the sci-fi network, so we don't discipline our writers at all. I hate the sci-fi network. I think they're out of business.
If you will allow a little Star Trek diversion. What was that? I love it. You love that. I just love it. I just rewatched Star Trek First Contact. Man, it's really great because it kind of takes place at this peak point in the Star Trek universe. So it captures this moment in Star Trek time that is really wonderful because Voyager...
and Deep Space Nine are both on the air. And so, you know, it starts with Worf and he shows up in the Defiant with a tough little ship, right? And you have mentions to the Dominion War. It's this... It's this interesting kind of period of time in Star Trek. Same with Insurrection also, but more so with First Contact. I recommend a rewatch if people haven't watched Star Trek First Contact for a while.
is good. I think it's the best of the TNGs, and it's up there in the overall Star Trek, but I don't know if it's better than 2 and 6. Let's not be ridiculous. Do you have a favorite Star Trek movie? Is it Star Trek 2? I do. What is it? I also have one that I think is a little overrated. Okay. I don't want to get a phaser beam at full power at me. I think Wrath of Khan is kind of overrated. I mean, I don't disagree, actually. I mean, it's good, but it's screwed up. It's good, but it's like...
It screwed up Star Trek forever. If you look at the J.J. movies, they always have to have a villain. There's always these existential crises. It kind of created this situation where every Star Trek movie had a format they had to follow for a while. yeah so i i really i okay so i i just re-watched the first star trek movie oh yeah whose name i don't recall the motion picture the yeah the film right right uh i i don't want to spoil it but the reason i like it is the spoiler at the end
And I like Nemesis a lot. I know. I know it's, I know. There's something, it's a little plotting. There's some things I like about it. I don't like the whole clone storyline. I just like smashing glass. Yeah. It has that cool crash. Are you talking about the cool crash sequence? No, I think I'm confusing Nemesis and the one you were talking about. The one against the Borg. Oh, yeah, that's First Contact, yeah. That is First. Never mind, I like First Contact. There you go. With the Battle of 001.
Well, yep, yep, yep. And then they have to, yeah, we don't have to spoil it. We don't need to spoil it. I completely lied. I like First Contact. There you go. See, that's nice. Now I have to watch Nemesis to try to remember. Is it Nemesis the Borg 2, though? No. Nemesis is the last of the TNG where Tom Hardy's in it.
He's a Picard player. Oh, yeah, that one's not good. Never mind. Not as good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, our next booster, I'm happy to say he's back, and he's in the live chat today, too. It's Sir Lurksalot. The traders love the vol. With 6,600. 66 sets. It really is. He says, I'm so happy to have the CoderSource. That's our member bootleg feed. I love the JupyterTube. Video always communicates something about personality expression and emoting a little better than audio.
Not as drastic as text versus phone calls, so I'm confident with the live... Oh, I'm content with the live feed. Yeah, I kind of don't agree. So what you really see, I think... I think in theory, you're right. But I think in practice, what you see with people that do podcasts and video is one person's talking and then everybody else, it's like two or three other people, none of them are paying attention.
They're all, like, looking down at their phone. They're looking off. They're just sort of zoning out. I'm sorry. What did you say? Yeah. It's distracting to watch it, and I don't like it, especially somebody who participates in shows. I don't like it. So for me, I don't get distracted by any of that with audio.
He goes on to say, some people like their beef raw and I like my JB raw because I get to feel present like I was there. Like live music versus the radio track. So thank you. This will be a comfy spot to tune into. Plus, me supposed. You supposed.
You can't do that, though, from the Kyoto QA feed. Speaking of the QA feed, could I have one that is only the code early shows that doesn't have the regular episodes? I've had another request for that, so that's something, Lurks, I will start looking into. is busting the QA stuff off into its own feed. I don't have that at the moment. But I'll look into how I could maybe do that.
I think that's a good... Oh, because I see. He doesn't want duplicate. Yeah. Some days I'll boost the sad tale of a broken node. I have a borked email server and the loss of access to my precious sats. Oh, no. But now I've mixified my boxes, recovered my wallets, and on like Donkey Kong we are. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, do Donkey Kong come, or remastered Donkey Kong comes out this week, so. I heard about that. Very excited about that. Yeah, so am I. Do you have to have, like, Switch?
Plus the new thing, or do you just have to have the subscription? No, it's just a regular game release. You just buy it. Okay, good. Oh, good. I'm excited about that. All right. Well, here's a duck. Here's a Duck 2 for you. Thank you very much, Sir Lurkslot. Nice to hear from you. And that's everything above the 2,000-sat cutoff. It was pretty low support this week, actually.
We had 17 of your stream sats as you listened along. Really do appreciate that. We could always use a few more folks doing that. But we stacked 13,380 sats via streaming. And then combined with our boosters, it was a grand total of 33,879 sats. Which when that split amongst the three of us, it's pretty bad.
So I really super appreciate all of our members out there and everybody who boosted in to help produce episode 603 of the Coda Radio program. It was a small team, but a very important team. Thank you, everybody. If you'd like to boost, we'll have links in the show notes. Something like Strike.
or Bitcoin Well, or Fountain FM make it really easy to get started. Just use the links in the show notes, and maybe we'll cover your boost in next week's episode. Just boost throughout the week, and then we'll read it in the next episode. All right, Mr. Dominic, so I wanted to just leave off with Microsoft getting real serious about AI for the long haul. So your buddy Satche wrote a company-wide memo.
And introduced the new Core AI Department, Platform and Tools, a new engineering division to accelerate Microsoft's AI initiatives. Nadella emphasized the transformative shift. in the eye landscape that's happening compared to other pivotal moments in tech history, such as the very emergence of GUIs, the internet itself, and of course, cloud computing, and noting that this change now compresses decades of innovation into just a few years.
Here's a key line that I grabbed from the memo. Our AI platform and tools will come together to create agents. These agents will come together to change every SaaS application category. And building custom applications will be driven by software, IE, service as software. So a new division. It's their AI play for the long haul. They're going to have a div.
which is their dev AI. They're going to have an AI platform. They're going to have teams from Office all work together to build what they say is an end-to-end AI stack for Microsoft's internal use and third-party developers. Jay Parkin will lead this core AI as an executive VP. There's a bunch of other key leaders that are moving in there as well. And the team will optimize Microsoft's tech stack for efficiency and innovation.
Take that, Sam Altman. And advocate an advanced developer productivity. Yeah, so I'm kind of interested. I'm going to their big AI shindig in Manhattan, i.e. New York City, where you get shanked at any point these days. at the end of this month, I think. So I'm curious what they have to show. They always have some little rabbit up their hat.
Does this not just feel like a bit of a defensive maneuvering against their erstwhile son? Yeah, or preemptive arrangement of the decks. So that way, if in a year or two, the open AI deal falls open AI deal. Falls apart. Microsoft can say, look at this brilliant structure we have here. The core AI division has been going for a long time. It's funny. You know what it sounds like? It sounds like an Apple toolkit, core AI.
They took what like Apple would use. That you can run on your Dell Max Pro Ultra. Yeah. And they just decided to name their department that. They used Apple naming conventions. They pulled a Dell for their department naming convention. If I go to New York and they're all. up there in black turtlenecks and jeans and we got a problem. You want to laugh about OpenAI real quick? I forgot to mention this to you in our chat earlier. So, you know, my core product right now is called Alice.
I decided I needed some help generating some, you know, advertising copy, right? Sure, yeah. I run, like, LinkedIn ads and stuff. Yeah. And I decided, because it was opening, it just wasn't working. It was like getting confused. So I uploaded a picture, the Alice logo. Anybody who hasn't seen it, it's a robot that looks like, you know, Alice, right? Because Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It flipped out on me.
we will not it's here's what it said i cannot help you steal copyrighted content now it is partially correct it is copyrighted by me right so This is your agentic custom GPT working for you, Mike. This is the one I pay $120 for a month because it would not accept. And I kept arguing with it that I Alice.
Alice, right? The original Alice, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, is public domain, written by a guy named Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgen. I gave it like a whole history lesson. Probable pedophile, math professor. What you're thinking of is a cartoon film by the Walt Disney Corporation called Alice in Wonderland. The reason they were able to do that is the same reason I can do it because it's public domain. It did not accept that answer.
Which tells me, which I have a theory. This is my Burbank bacon. I think they have special, more aggressive flags for things that are owned by large media companies. Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah, ones that are particularly litigious perhaps. Right. That's exactly what I'm thinking. So let's say what's another Disney property that's based on public domain stuff? Oh, I don't know. All of them.
Just about. Beauty and the Beast was a German fairy tale. You just can't call it Beauty and the Beast, right? Ariel, I forgot what the Ariel one, the mermaid one, is a Nordic story. Elsa. Based on a, I believe it's Norwegian fairy tale of the, I mean, there's a bunch of like Norse stories about ice witches, right? So kind of sh**ty, because one of the main things I like to do with OpenAI and the reason I pay for it.
is you know here's the here's the like hook i want to use right the advertising hook i want to use generate me like five variants of it because i want to a b test right and now it's all pissed off well and it pisses me off when it When it assumes my intention's wrong and then kind of casts like a bit of a – like it's made a decision or a judgment, it honestly makes me angry.
Well, this is actually practically screwing me because I've been tracking this. I've been selling Alice for years now. And the ads that perform significantly better are the ones where I lean into the...
you know, the weird branding, right? Where I'm like, you know, if I could write an ad that says automated, automate your data will, you know, extract, transform, load it into another system, blah, blah, blah, massage it. If I say, feel like you're falling down a well of tears right if i really lean into the the you know the alice of wonderland story it gets more clicks and and more clicks more conversions right that's how that's the whole point of advertising but
For some reason, this ChatGPT model just won't have it. I've got to dance around it every time. It's a huge pain in the ass. Yeah. It's like I spent a lot of money on the branding too. It was a lot of money, a lot of time. I could kind of understand them being extra cautious with the freeloader account. But if you're spending a big bunch of money every month, maybe, you know.
Let off the brakes a little bit. Also, if it were true that you can't call a product Alice because of Disney, you know who would sue me? Disney? Disney. Yeah. Right. It's not really their problem. They're worried about just facilitating copyright issues. Well, because Sarah Silverman threw a fit, right? That's, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I... I'm hoping that Sam Altman has a change of heart and becomes a little more fast and loose. Oh, but you know who was willing to help?
No hesitation. To the point where I wouldn't use some of its stuff because it was a little too copyright. I was like, that's a little too close to the Disney thing. Oh, really? Who? Grok. Grok was down. Whatever. Let's go. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Although it did put, make your data great again. Oh, okay.
You're kidding. Oh, you're joking. You're joking. I'm joking. That's good. That's good, dude. I thought it did for a second. I thought I could see it. I got him. I can see it. Let's talk a little bit about speaking of making things great. Oh, God. I just thought this was a little interesting.
Interesting follow up before we go. I mentioned last week that Google was like the tech company that hadn't kicked any money to Trump's party. And that was going to be, you know, well, kind of obvious after the party was over. Well. Google got in before, I guess, the party starts, so it counts. They have officially donated $1 million to Donald Trump's inauguration fund. Dude, we kind of go to this morning.
Also, the Circle CEO announced a $1 million donation in USDC stablecoins. Oh, I bet that's what the party needed was some stablecoins. That's good. Everybody gets a quarter of a Dogecoin. This party should be the most lit, off-the-hook party ever. What are you talking about? It's going to be McDonald's. That'd be hilarious, actually. That would be hilarious. Anyway, so Google's paid their patents, I guess. Yeah, they did it. Have you ever watched the show The Tudors? I don't think so.
Oh, it's about Henry VIII. Of course, Henry VIII is not a big fat guy like he was in history. He's Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, a very handsome lad. But there's a recurring thing that happens throughout the entirety of that show. King's chilling, wants to throw a party, and people just keep bringing him stuff. Yeah. I think I actually saw Satya in the show. What about Tim Apple? Did you see? Well, Tim Apple was the lord of the orchard.
Yeah, I bet. I bet. All right, Mr. Dominic, is there anywhere you want to send good people before we get out of here? Yeah, go to alice.dev. OpenAI won't send you there. Yeah, I suppose that's very true. You can come find me on Weapon X if you like. I don't know. ChrisLAS? ChrisLAS.com.
The show is at Coder Radio Show on Weapon X if you want. Really, check out the links. That's at coder.show slash 603. You'll find our contact form there as well as our RSS feed. We'd love to have you boost in with your thoughts on what we talked about today. And if you're really feeling crazy, join us live and hang out.
out in our chat room. We do the show live Tuesdays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Thank you so much for joining us on this here episode of Coda Radio, and we'll see you right back here next week.