ChatGPT 4.5 Unveiled and My Experience with it! #1803

Lead story for Thursday, February 27. Yes. February 27. Chat GPT 4.5. Today, OpenAI unveils GPT 4.5, its new AI language model, promising enhanced writing skills, better knowledge, and a more refined human like interaction. Despite impressive upgrades, OpenAI emits 4.5 isn't groundbreaking, but it's optimized for more natural conversations, practical problem solving, and reduced hallucinations.

Available first to ChatGPT Pro users, it's soon rolling out broadly including on Microsoft Azure platform. As we get into this article tonight and the launch of ChatGPD 4.5, this has been long anticipated. We knew it was gonna be coming here in the next few days. And, of course, it popped today. And, should not be surprised that this is out, but I think people are gonna be a little bit surprised that it's not as rich of a model

as they were expecting. And although they have removed from their website that it it's, they were saying it's not a Frontier model, but that's been removed. So I don't know if they've reversed course. Now what's interesting is I've been playing with ChatGPT 4.5 excuse me, ChatGPT Pro since Tuesday. I believe I picked it up on Tuesday. I was thinking about it, and I decided to do a one month free trial. And I could talk quite a little bit about Pro already,

but it's kinda funny. They dropped the o one model,

yesterday. And, the o there's an o one and a o one pro. And I will say that based upon working in these models, especially the reasoning models, recently, the o one pro. It's just super, super fantastic from a, from a a a reasoning model. We were building scripts, and, it basically it was taught teaching me as I was basically, I said, I wanna do this type of a script, blah blah blah, gave it a whole bunch of parameters. And it said, what did I miss? And it asked me eight questions.

And I gave it the eight questions, and it produced the script. And I took the script and spent about an hour editing it, adding a few things, and really nitpicking it to death. And then I went back, and I had another script to write. And I said, okay. I'm gonna we're gonna write a new script, keep all the parameters of what we talked about in the previous script, based on what you what we've talked about so far. Do you need any more information?

And it basically asked me three more things, and the script got better. So now I'm up to my third script in that chat session, and it's gotten, I mean, absolutely fantastic. And it literally probably saved me either model. The pro model or the plus model would have probably saved me twenty hours of work at a minimum, to write scripts in the way that and, again, I put a lot of information in. I spent about thirty minutes explaining what I wanted, And, it did did very well.

So folks over at Engadget are saying that this new 4.5 model is better and and more natural conversationalist. But, again, I've I've used it once tonight. And because I am on pro, so I've I've got access to it. And what I end up finding out, the GPTs are tied to GPT four point o turbo. That's what the GPTs are aligned to. So I asked it to switch to the 4.5 model, and it told me it couldn't.

So what I asked it to do is provide a podcast opening summary from the article, provide a Yoast keyword, you provide a 28 character summary and suggest a title for the podcast episode. And, I cut and paste in a couple of the external, g chat g b t 4.5 announcements from sites that we're gonna have in the show notes tonight. And I will say that the opening summary, not extraordinarily better than what I normally get, but I got this without the GPT, and I got it all right the first

time. Got me summary, give me a suggested title, suggested keywords, suggested Yoast summary. I asked it to create a couple pieces of of art, and it did okay. It's a little bit different than what the of course, they're not talking about the model being better, but in creating art, but this was it still got weird stuff in text that hasn't changed. But, overall, just using it one time, here in in show prep, again, jury is still out

on how this 4.5 model is gonna be. So they say they need to put on another hundred thousand NVIDIA GPUs in order to release it to the plus customers. So that's why it's a delay. I'm only four or five days into using Pro, maybe four days. And I'm trying to in my mind, because it's $200 for a month. So I'm trying to justify, and I'm gonna work real hard at it to see if and I'm gonna be doing AB testing for the next month on everything that I do that where I use it.

One thing, I've got a big project I'm working on, and I'm using it for research. And I've started out with this research project, and it came back and gave me 20 questions. It said, hey. You need to give me these 20 questions. Answer these 20 before we go to the next step. And I thought, wow. Would have never done that before. So and that was using the o one pro reasoning model. So, I will see how this progresses, and we'll see how this 4.5. I'm sure

we're gonna hear more stuff. But it those of you on plus, you're gonna have to wait for this for, for just a few weeks. Okay? And even Jen got the article out on g and c already, so, the g p d 4.5 is, announced on, on Geek News Central, of course. So, definitely consider that. I will get into the rest of the stack here in a few minutes, but I wanna welcome you to episode 1,803. Of course, I'm your host, Todd Cochran. A shout out to our incredible sponsor, GoDaddy.

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in in a big, big way. Hope you're all doing well. I've had it's been one of those weeks. Actually, last couple of weeks, just been my head down on the grind or my nose down in the grindstone, cranking through, just an incredible amount of of work. And, so everything's everything's good. And then, next week, I'll be back with you. No show on Monday.

But I'll be back with you, next week, Thursday, from The Philippines. I'll be, transitioning, and I'm gonna take a couple of days off. I've been running hard here really since I got back. And, so, just one show off, but I'll be back, a week from from Thursday. So, again, thank you all for your support and and, of course, we got a lot to talk about, in the stack today. You know, one thing I have been doing, and I don't know about the rest of

you. Every once in a while, I get in the in the mode of shopping on eBay, and it's usually for retro gear. And, you never know if the shipping's gonna be free, how long it's gonna take. I had one item here recently that just took a a long time to get here, and it annoyed me, quite a bit because I had some stuff. And if I got it, I'd been able to get a a week's worth of work done, but instead, it just arrived. And so it's gonna have to wait until I get back.

But they're saying shopping is gonna get easier on on eBay. And to be honest with you, I find a lot of pretty good deals over there. I found something I've been looking for for many, many years. I found a I guess, we call it a relic. I found an a navy chief, Insignia, that was from the very, very early days of, I paid a premium. I paid about $70 for this thing. Just one little itsy bitsy chief anchor, but it's, you know, from very, very late, very I mean, like, maybe 1900

or something like that. So, I was jazzed to get it. I knew exactly what it was when I saw it. But, you know, that that was actually an easy one. But they're adding a handful of new features that come as a sigh of relief for those of you that are hunting for local deals. Now, well, there's not a lot of local deals that I find in my area because I just I, you know, live in rural America.

And if you live in a big city, you know, the online marketplace says it has used AI to streamline its fast seller network based on factors like business history locations and shipping options and try to find you items that you're looking for that are closer to you to save you money. But, again, you may not find the item that you're looking for, but this is what says what they have implemented over there and, again, anything that's gonna help is gonna be,

is gonna be good. I think, the one item I ordered was no shipping, and then some other stuff I've had has come from a long ways away. And it was quite a bit of shipping, but I I wanted it pretty bad so it it worked out. A lot of people are being forced to come back to work. Of course, a lot of government workers are being told they could

come back to work. And, of course, being in the office again in a federal, as a federal employee, you know, you're back on your your government computer and all the things that go along with it with the network. And I'm sure some of that's been going on from home as well if you've had a government computer at home.

But, companies who sell workplace monitoring tech and, if you look at what they offer, you would think that the average American worker was a renegade poised to take their employer down at the next opportunity.

But at the same time, nearly half of US employees admit that admit to time theft, biometric readers for enhanced accuracy, quote, unquote. But a new wave of return office mandate has arrived. We know JPMorgan, Amazon, not to mention, again, what we talked about on the federal side. But there's going to be a lot of analysis on people's productivity. The economy is is is been pretty bad in my opinion. So companies are hiring less, so there's a trend towards productivity.

And I'll be honest with you, AI has really changed the productivity of me considerably. And to the point where the person I hired to be my EA, I have her doing a whole bunch of stuff now that we would never have gotten into unless we had AI and some of the stuff that is available. So the expectation amongst CEOs is that's going to eliminate a lot of jobs. I feel it's gonna make companies more productive. Now if you were productive before AI,

it's just gonna put that on hyperdrive. Matter of fact, this afternoon about about 04:00, it kinda hit me. I was like, we work on a sprint method, and, normally, I take on five to 10 task. And we have stuff in reserve that we can pull up. But I'm I'm ahead. I'm ahead on all my tasks to get done by next Thursday by 35%. Some of that was AI driven for sure.

I I would have I would have not assigned myself to do four of the things that or three of the four things that I gave myself as a task if I knew I didn't have AI to help me. So I'm asking my team members how much efficiency are you getting out of this. And from time you know, and I'm like, I've noticed we had planned on doing, certain number of projects in this quarter, and I have it all planned out in the backlog.

But I was given each, of the team members assigned to that one of those tasks per two week sprint. And now I'm seeing all of the team members dragging a second one up, and it's a considerable amount of work. So it just shows me the productivity is is just increasing in a good way. But, again, I don't wanna be in the business of tracking. If if we're getting the assigned work done in thirty hours, great. Now I don't wanna get to the point where I said, oh, we look what we

got done in thirty hours. Now I can throw on 10 more tasks. And, you know, I did that myself this time. I've added a couple of tasks because I know I'm not gonna be done. But I feel a lot of companies are gonna be really looking at productivity of of workers when they're in the office. They have more control. They know that there's none of those little things running to move the mouse, to keep you logged in, and a variety of other trickery tools that can be used. So what do you feel?

Do you feel that having gone back to the office that there's more spying happening on you? I'd love to hear your comments at [email protected]. Geek news at g mail dot com. Amazon, of course, has a new AI powered Alexa promising to be your best friend in digital world for a monthly fee of $19.99. I think they're dollar late a a day late and a dollar short. I don't know how many of these I'm going to need. Auphonic, they've come out with a new model. Grok, come out with a new model.

So I don't want anything ordering anything for me. And it's interesting. What are they gonna do with this? It's where it's doing speech you're doing speech is is speaking back. So I what what can it do for me for $20 that's gonna increase my productivity and save me $20? That they they didn't they did not say that. They just said it's gonna be good for you. Well, give me some demos. Give me some give me some reason to make the move here.

I know some of you are gonna go wrinkle your nose here, but, Elon Musk says Verizon network not working as FAA switches over to Starlink. So a lot of this stuff was going on before the, studies were going on before the election results. But it's not for the whole FAA. It's for a few remote areas. Two years after Verizon secured a $2,000,000,000 contract to upgrade FAA's IT infrastructure,

the agency is switching to Starlink. In a late night post, Elon said Verizon network was faulty, asserting it was a safety risk. Well, of course, has Verizon replied to that? The post follows confirmation from the FAA on money that STARLINK cameras had used to assist air traffic controllers at at two stations in Alaska. The FAA FAA said it had long considered using STARLINK tech to increase safety in remote areas.

So, last week, he approved the shipment of 400,000 STARLINK terminals for use by the FAA. Administration confirmed that one terminal is already being used for testing at the FAA's air traffic control lab in Atlantic City. The apparent shift comes two years after rising again was awarded this contract. So it's unclear that the FAA's use of Starlink terminals will complicate the administration's contract with Verizon. But here's the thing. If we need keep the Verizon stuff.

The Starlink stuff is cheap. Just do a a backup to a backup. That's what I got going on here because nothing is perfect. Not even Starlink is perfect. It rains hard. It drops. You know? That's the fact. It's and when you need communications in the FAA, you need it when it's raining and the weather's bad.

If the satellite can't see through the weather and can't connect, it's no good. So there's it's not a one size fits all. And that's where my point to point system comes online and does, you know, serves as a backup. So, you know, the best thing is let's get fiber. Let's get fiber into these areas, get them on wired, hardwired, high speed one or two gig Internet. Why is it so hard? The rest of the world is getting wired and we are what?

You know? We talked about this many, many times on this show. So seems that with all the money we spend with the FAA that they would have, like, they would have some bandwidth. Wouldn't you think? But it's the government. It's the government. Who knows? Of course, they don't talk about the setup or anything like that. That's for sure. Kia's EV four will be the first electric sedan that'll be available in The United States later this year. Kia will also release a

hatchback version in Europe. So I didn't know that they were this late to the electric car game. So, again, Kia's launched the EV four, The twenty twenty five k EV day in Tarragon, Spain, the company first unveiled the EV fours at CompT at CES last year. Buyers can choose between a 58.3 kilowatt and 81.4 kilowatt long range options. The long range sedan being able to run to 391 miles on a single charge. Meanwhile, the,

the standard battery can only go 267 miles. Have we got a price on this thing? Let me look. Yeah. They don't they did not announce a price. So $50.60, how much, you know, 70,000? How much how much is this thing? So, knowing key, it'll be cheaper, but, you know, at what price? Again, this is the big problem with these electric vehicles. New York City's Metropolitan Transitory.

Listen. This is a cool one. Google successfully tested tech that uses smartphone sensor sensors to detect subway tract effects. The four month experiment where they mounted six Google Pixel phones on a on four a train subway cars that were traversing Manhattan, Queens. The phone accelerometers, magnetometers, and gyroscopes, and external microphones collected 335,000,000 sensor readings and twelve hundred hours of audio data, which were then processed

through 200 prediction models. The system identified this is amazing. Ninety two percent of defects were confirmed by human inspectors, including broken rails, loose bolts. The goal of the project is to find issues before they become a major issue. Yeah. I think a broke rail would be a big issue. Following the trial, the MTA plans expand to a full pilot where Google will build a per a production version for track inspectors. So just listening for vibrations, seeing what's going on with gyro.

It's amazing. They run over something. They know what it sounds like. I've got a friend who was, an engineer for years, and he could tell me if there was a he said I could hear the the track change. I knew there was a problem. Could hear it. And he's in the locomotive. I'm like, wow. Okay. It's kinda like flying. Flying is a a large, a large a lot of it suit you know, you feel something in your ass before you feel it in your head. This is a real interesting,

security breach. And the reason why is there was, 3,300,000 have been infected in an employee screening firm. The hackers stole DISA data. Now I don't know what DISA, American employee screening company, Odisha, has confirmed suffering a cyberattack. But listen to this. It happened back in April of twenty four, and they're just announcing it. Why so long? Why so long? That's that's that's that's a lifetime. It really is.

Hey. It's being rumored that the iPhone 17 Pro could come with a 20 excuse me, with 12 gigs of RAM to help it power through AI tasks. 12 gigs? Only 12 gigs? That's it? 12 is that kinda it's gotta be a typo. The current models run eight gig. They're gonna have to up them to 12 gigs. Okay. I didn't know that. So the phones now only comes with eight gigs of RAM? That's pretty incredible. So, yeah, may have to go to 12.

So they'll have to spend a whole 3 more dollars to put a little more RAM in to run the AI stuff on the iPhone 17. What say you? Alright. How many of you are audiophiles? Well, you know, I'm a big ACDC fan. So when I saw this Hell's Bells project ACDC turntable, it just left me thunderstruck. I

was like, well, what it is, it's it's really has nothing to do with ACDC. But this is how the guy got me click baited here, you know. And I'm looking at this turntable. I'm like, oh my god. Look at this thing. You know. And then, of course, as soon as you, as they start talking about, those of you that are quote unquote, hardcores, I knew the price was gonna be crazy. See here. What would be The US amount? $1,450 for this bad boy. I'm sorry. I will,

I will not be upgrading. I love vinyl, but, not that much. Project started making turntables in 1991, and, so this is not their first walk in the park for the high end stuff. For something's going on here, I must got the heat up because it's warm. It's warm here in the studio tonight. I don't know what the deal is, but, the temperature is up for sure. Android phones to drive mobile sales in 2025. IDC is saying that smartphones to increase by 2.3% this year compared to 2024.

So but it's gonna mostly be driven by, purchases in China. IOS is gonna decline 1.9%. Now here's the thing too is, you know, we're gonna have some tariff situations going on here and price of stuff is gonna go up. So, you know, I've got a phone that's less than a year old. So I, you know, I have no need to do an upgrade. But, once this tariff goes in, new stock coming in is gonna get whacked. So, so we'll see. Amazon is going to unveil new a l e x a devices in the fall. Now why in

the fall? They made this AI announcement. So what does this really have to do with anything? It's again, appears to be tied to this chatbot stuff. But I guess the current versions will work. Okay. So if you pay for Prime, you're gonna get the this this AI stuff for free. That was not said in the other article. Amazon will start charging a l e x a customers first time when the new Alexa Plus starts rolling out next month. Users who want the latest capabilities can pay $19.90 a

month. Members of Amazon hundred and thirty nine year year prime program get the update for free. Is that what Prime cost these days? It just bills on my credit card. I don't even pay attention. I it's you know, it I paid for itself in, you know, a month. So, well, celebrities are going to the stars, literally. Katy Perry will fly to space during Blue Origin's next crewed mission that Jeff Bezos owns space companies and now

it's a pop star. But we'll join CBS host Gail King and Bezos' fiance Lauren

Sanchez aboard the New Shepard rocket this spring, marking its eleventh human flight. So what this tells me per se, sending his girlfriend and who else is who else is gone? The crew will include research scientist and activist, Amanda and Amanda Nugent. Sounds like a lot of ladies are going. Film producer, Carrie Anne Flynn, and former NASA rocket scientist Ayesha Bow. So, yeah, this sounds like an all lady crew. So, well, that's, a bit of a I wonder if Bezos is paying for this flight himself.

I I just wonder if those other folks have paid the, paid the fare, or are they doing this as a publicity stunt? Apple has overhauled the child account setup

and adds new age assurance. They said it's implementing the new feature that is designed to make children safer, including an updated age rating system, a simple way for parents to set up child accounts, change to what kids see on the App Store, and the new API that will let developers confirm age range to deliver age appropriate experiences to kids. So the changes outlined in the new helping protect kids online white paper that is available on Apple's developer site. So,

anything that we can help protect kids is good. Oura ring, I know a lot of people are I I I met someone recently. They had an Oura ring, and he swore by it that he took let him know when he was getting sick. And I thought that was pretty incredible. But, ladies, the Oura ring is now gonna be able to read menstrual cycle changes to help women tailor their health habits. So, what specifically have they done is the the latest feature helps your ring recognize your cycle.

Your writing score now factors in psychorrelated shifts like heart rate, temperature, and HRV changes. What's HRV? Aura is launching studies to dig deeper into women's health and improve cycle tracking. So the company knows that thirty percent thirty five percent of users with cycles won't see the readiness score dip during the luteal phase anymore representing eighty one percent in drop in cycle related score change. Oh, there's some words there that I don't

know. But they're also expanding women helping with a fertility window in cycle insights using your body's data pinpoint likely fertile days. So, for those of you that you are tracking this closely, the Oura Ring might be for you.

Samsung slimmest galaxy s 25 edge tip to be launched soon. So what you need to know, the slimmest Galaxy phone is expected to be coming on April 16 and a wider availability of the handset expected in May. The device should be significantly slimmer than the s 25 Trio and likely be placed in the standard Galaxy s 25 and Ultra in terms of pricing. So is this something special? I I guess it's edge tip. That means it's super, super thin.

You know, when when phones get too thin, I just worry that they're gonna get I'm gonna break them. You know? I want I I don't mind a phone being a little thicker. I I really don't. So,

here's another article that talks about FAA Waste canceling Verizon contract. Interesting. DoorDash is gonna pay 16,800,000.0 to New York delivery workers after misusing their tips. DoorDash used customer tips to pay workers wages, but it must give that money back. They, you know, that's so dirty. It's really, really dirty that they're doing that.

Because specifically on DoorDash, I will always if, okay, if my order's small, I will tip a little bit more because I know they're not gonna make very much. And I tip more because they'll oftentimes, you won't get stuff if you don't tip. Alright. That's just kinda how DoorDash works. And the and these these a holes at DoorDash were keeping the delivery workers tips. So I'm glad that they are have to pay restitution here.

And they're gonna pay up to additional 1,000,000 administrator costs to help make the payments happen. Some workers expected to get several thousand dollars, others as much as $14,000. In today's world, $14,000 will buy a lot of eggs, especially in New York. You know how expensive it is to live in that city? So dirty. So dirty.

What we know about Waymo's twenty twenty five expansion plans, Waymo's Alphabet autonomous driving center has been rapidly expanding its self driving robotox taxis across The States. A Pew Research Center found from, from 2022 found that 45% Americans would not feel comfortable. I don't think I would yet. So where are they going? I thought we had something on this recently that said where they're expanding to. Los Angeles, Austin, San Diego, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Tokyo.

Meanwhile, Cruise has hit the brakes. So that's where they're headed. So big, big major cities, of course.

DIRECTV, they're still in business? DIRECTV launches Genre Pack, a more affordable way to get channels you actually want. Pricing starts at $35 a month. So you can get your an entertainment package, a sports package, espionage package, a news package. Very, very curious. You know, we've I've always said I don't need sports. Sports is $69. Entertainment's 34. So what's on entertainment? FX, HGTV, A and E, Discovery, Bravo, Food, Disney plus, Max, Newses, NBC, Fox, CNN, Newsmax.

I get Newsmax and stuff other places. So the entertainment pack looks okay. Thank God. Just break it out. They have to do something. Right? They have to do something. Digital TV is just completely reshaping everything. Do you really care what the shape of the universe is as big as it is? I don't know if I do, but mathematicians are using topology to study its shape and everything in it. It's big. I can't touch the side of it. I don't I look up. I can't see the end.

I'm this is not something I'm worried about. But I'm thank God there's scientists out there that do this kind of stuff, to be honest with you. We'll see what they figure out. Now here we go. A house hearing is debating ways to improve Artemis. I've got a solution for it. I really, really do. Of course, this would really piss people off because, you know, there is a definite, conflict of interest here, but send Doge over there and have them cut this thing.

Two government officials had offered conflicting advice to a house committee on how to change NASA's Artemis lunar exploration campaign, but agreed that a return to the moon was a prerequisite. Scott Pace, former executive secretary of National Space Council, called for an early off ramp for reliance on space launch systems while Dan Dombacher, former deputy assistant administrator for exploration at NASA, said it was doubtful SpaceX Starship could land humans on the moon by the

end of the decade. Where has this guy been? I Nancy, where where are we at right now? Twenty five? I don't know. They call it SLS a primary concern for NASA's current Artemis architecture because of its expense and lack of reusability. It's time to reconsider alternatives. You know, Musk is about ready to land that, well, if they don't blow it up tomorrow, the, first second stage, they're gonna try to land, after this test, maybe.

But they criticize the reliance on Starship for landing humans on the moon. NASA's current plan to return people requires approximately 35 to 40 Starship launches to first demonstrate the capability on an uncrewed mission. Well, they're already at seven. They're gonna do eight tomorrow. So, you know, and they're ramping up the speed here. Do we really need 30 launches to have a proven system? You gotta go to the moon a couple of times, I think, unmanned. I don't know. We'll see. But

we definitely want don't wanna take a Boeing spacecraft to the moon. You know? How how do you go get those folks there? Of course, it could happen to SpaceX too. Now as I said, I'm getting ready to go to The Philippines, but there's a little bit of news out in The Philippines. Ancient seafarers in Philippines and ice ISEA built sophisticated and mastered deep sea fishing forty thousand years ago challenged the view that Palaeolithic technology was limited to Europe and Africa.

Will you consider how The Philippines is? The Philippines is just a bunch of islands. I mean, if anyone was going to, master the water, they would have. So, anyway, they've, this is in Scitech Daily. So link is in the show notes. You guys can can check it out, but it's been making the rounds in some of the groups I'm in where people are chatting about it. Australia has banned all Casper ski products on government system citing unacceptable security risks because pry, surprise, surprise.

Following United States, Australian Government has banned Caspi Lab products and web services. After considering a threat and risk analysis, they've determined that Caspi Labs products and web services by Australian government entities pose an unacceptable security risk Australian government.

They say, I've also considered important its need for strong policy signal to current infrastructure and and other Australian governments regarding unacceptable security risks associated with the use of Kaspersky Labs. Don't worry. The war is gonna be over here shortly, and when it is, it's all gonna be good. You guys can all start using those products again because we're all gonna be friends as soon as the war is over.

Instagram apologizes for flooding users with disturbing yeah. A little snarky. Instagram apologizes for flooding users with disturbing reels. Well, what I wanna know what kind of reels did you get. Disturbing reels must mean you got some porn. Is that what you got? Or corn? I guess I yeah. I can't say that word. I have to use the word corn now. I just ruined my my, YouTube livestream. So, what were they? Oh, they were seeing yeah. Hex, violence, and other disturbing content. So okay.

I I didn't know that stuff was even available on that platform. I thought all that was banned. Verizon's offer discounted Internet with extra perks to its mobile customers. It carries offering home Internet a free perk when adding to an existing mobile plan, if you can get it. Verizon has been slowly growing its five g home Internet base alongside its LTE and FiOS wired fiber Internet, and it's offered a discount when signing up for both Internet and select mobile plans.

So So you get a discount of $15. So woo hoo. There's a there's three dozen eggs. Stripe's valuation has climbed to 91,500,000,000.0 in secondary stock market. The company's nearing its peak valuation of 95,000,000,000 from 2021. So, I use Stripe, for my personal business in doing the podcast awards. So I don't always like the percentage of money they take, but just like any other place running a credit card. So a CNET survey says 43% of Americans use a VPN.

I I man, when I am not here, when I am where I'm going, man, if I'm doing any business, I'm on a VPN for sure. And, I'm not using it for streaming content. I pick a VPN location in The United States, accessing bank bills, you know, stuff from my company. I'm on a VPN. Now if I'm just watching YouTube, I don't care. But, I I'm heavy, heavy VPN user. So,

some sites now can detect if you're using a VPN, which which kinda blows. It defeats the purpose of, you know, using a VPN to get to your banking account. And believe it or not, my mobile phone has less problems connecting to stuff than my computer does. My mobile phone seems to be able to have no issue logging into my bank using a VPN, whereas my computer on a VPN, sometimes I can't get into my bank. Venus Williams, the tennis star, is, backing a French startup that rewards you for walking.

So, it's called what's the what's the name of the app? WeWard, w e w a r d. So WeWard is a free app that offers real world rewards for walking. It tracks your steps and lets you earn points, which can be a change for gift cards and so forth. So interesting. I know when I'm not here and it's warmer, I try to do at least 10,000 steps a day. I don't always get them in, but, that's my goal.

Google Pixel Watch three potentially lifesaving pulse detection feature finally gets cleared for launch in United States. The feature's been available in The UK and other countries since 2024. So, again, Google has confirmed this groundbreaking loss of pulse detection feature unveiled. It's finally come to use in The US. So, this loss of pulse detection is industry first that can detect when your heart stops beating,

alerting emergency services and people around you. Events like a cardiac arrest, respiratory circulation failure, overdose, and even poisoning can trigger loss of spot a loss of pulse. So, hey. This you know, if it if it the thing is you lose your if your

heart stops beating, you're truly on the clock. The reaction time has to be pretty doggone fast for someone to get CPR going for you to save you. So, I'll be interested in seeing case studies come out about this. Probably works great for couples that are living together. Once heart stops beating, the spouse would get that notification. I could see where that would work good. But if you're a single guy living in an apartment or living in a loft like I am, I might be a goner.

UK blindsided US intelligence by asking for Apple's backdoor, a violation, of course, of Americans' privates and civil liberties. The director of national intelligence is investigating. We talked a little bit about this, but people are not happy and it's getting more attention. So, we'll see if they do anything. The FBI says North Korea hacked BY BIT, b y b I t, and details $1,500,000,000 stone. Yes. 1,500,000,000.0. The Bybit hack, went after a, a crypto holder of Erytheum. So wow.

He's don't know who to trust. 1,500,000,000.0 in crypto. Bybit, b y b I t. So I don't know. Is that a is that an app? Bybit, which claims to be the world's largest the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange, has launched a bug bounty program in an effort to recover the stolen funds. Well, good luck. Offering 5% of the recovered amount to the entity that manages to freeze the funds and 5% to those that help trace the funds. Good luck. Good luck. Store your crypto on your own device.

Get yourself an external storage unit. Google updates personal search excuse me. Google updates people's search finder tool, making it used to remove personal information on search. Results about you can help take down personal data.

I do a lot of clearing of data every, like, six months or so. And, there's a lot of services out there that are now scraping and getting rid of stuff too. Have any of you guys used any of those services that remove your private information? Blue Sky. How many of you have a an account on Blue Sky? Geek news at g mail dot com. Do you have one on Blue Sky? Is it is it any good? A comprehensive analysis of the platform

provides insights to a structure. You know, I don't take this the wrong way, but I think that's where most of the people that got pissed off at Elon went. Right? And is it all Liberals on Blue Sky, or is it a mixed crowd? What is it? I don't know. I see just about every persuasion of people on on x still, although some of the stuff on x can get a little crazy. You know, let me know. Let me know what, what you're seeing on Blue Sky, but the study says it's got about a kinda normal

audience over there. I just don't want another social media channel. I really don't.

I just don't want okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna bring at the end of the show here. What I want you to do, when 4.5 comes out, let me know what you think about it. You know, give it a run yourself. Play with it. Again, few weeks for the plus users to get it. Try the o one now here's the thing on ChatGPT. If you're paying for plus, there's a new reasoning model called o one. You only get 10 uses a month.

So please study up on how to use the o one reasoning model because you could use up 10 uses just to figure out kinda how to to work it. So watch some YouTube videos or whatever to how you use the o one reasoning model before you start using it on your $20 plan. Don't waste your your prompts. It's very, very, very, very powerful. So use it wisely for something that you

need to do heavy research on. Again, you get 10 queries, and I can usually get all my stuff done in two to three queries, sometimes four. So just watch a few videos on how to use the reasoning model. So, again, I'll be back with you next Thursday. And, we'll be from the studio in The Philippines. And, I'll be over there a couple of months again and, back and forth. So we will be doing video then. I got that all kind of figured out. I'll be using OBS.

And, so I feel like I've like, this is a second try to get this right. So we'll hopefully get it locked in and, we'll be here having full video and audio for the show. Most of you don't care, but you'll get it by audio and that's fine too, which is okay. [email protected]. Geek news at g mail dot com. Of course, I'm at geek news on x. Don't forget about our sponsor, and thank you for your ongoing support of GoDaddy. And if you're not an insider oh, by the way, we forgot.

Let me go back here. Back here. Back here. Back here. Load this. I wanna thank Kirk Corless for his $5 Ohana donation and Curtis Parish for his $5 Ohana donation as well. We'll get to the streaming stats on the next show because I know we had some boost come in. I saw that. Some of it was for new media shows, some were for this show. But, look at the Blueberry channel. Also, I'm doing a bunch of interesting interviews,

starting to go loose. So I'll link the Blueberry YouTube channel in my show notes tonight. Go over there and follow and subscribe. Learn about what I'm doing behind the scenes in podcasting and, look at the other side of my life, besides the tech show here. Everyone, thanks for being here. We'll see you, a week from today.

Be safe out there. Take care. Bye bye.