May 19th 2025
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Wow, what a fun show. Some kind of classic TwitCast members Will Harris is back, Harper Reed and Devendra Hardewar. We will talk about so many things Grand Theft Auto 6, the new trailer is out, but the game won't be out for some time. How Finland is using AI to heat its houses, and are phones getting thinner for a good reason. All of that and more coming up next on Twit. Podcasts you love From people you trust.
00:41 - Harper Reed (Guest)
This is Twit.
00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 1032, recorded sunday, may 18th 2025. Cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape. It's time for twit, the show where we cover the week's tech news. We are gonna have some fun this week. Let me introduce our panel from the uk. Are you in oxford? Still will, harris?
01:16 - Wil Harris (Guest)
not in oxford, but in london and london calling. London calling it's. Uh, it's 1030 at night. We're tired but we're excited for the week's tech news.
01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Say this is London speaking Instagram's Will Harris, will, it's been so long. It's good to see you again. Wonderful to have you.
01:37 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's a pleasure to be here. I will give myself a plug for Instagramcom. Will Harris, will with one, l Harris with two r's and one s is there something special?
01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you do there.
01:48 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Oh, if you want to see um what I cook, it's fantastic.
01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's better than what you eat, I guess, although you do probably eat what you cook. Oh yeah, there's lunch. You didn't make that, did you?
02:03 - Wil Harris (Guest)
No, I had a lovely weekend in Saint-Tropez last week.
02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh.
02:08 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Saint-Tropez Ordered the eggs with all the truffles.
02:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who's this beautiful lady you're standing there next to? Is that a secret?
02:18 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Oh yeah, we won't mention her. She's very offline.
02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're wearing Harper Reed's glasses, ladies and gentlemen, also with us. She's very offline. You're wearing a Harper reads glasses, ladies and gentlemen, also with us. Look at the glasses. Harper read, harper, always a pleasure to see you. Harper read is a technologist, entrepreneur and hacker. So many different places you might've seen him from, including when he worked at PayPal, worked at brain tree, worked for the Obama second Obama campaign so nice to see you, paypal. Worked at Braintree. Worked for the Obama second Obama campaign so nice to see you, harper. His new bit is 2389.AI and AI. What is it? An AI business?
02:53 - Harper Reed (Guest)
We're making agents.
02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Agents.
02:55 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah, we just picked our favorite part of Pi and went on from there.
03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what that is? 3.1415238. Wow, that's impressive.
03:09 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's not. It's not.
03:13 - Wil Harris (Guest)
We just used our birthday months in ascending order, and the great thing that Harper and I have in common is that we both worked on the Obama 2012 campaign. Harper orchestrated the whole thing and I just made the phone calls but you didn't vote, I hope, because that would be wrong.
03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, great. Now, if you thought that was good, here comes Devinder hardowar to round the panel out.
03:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Senior editor at Engadget so nice to see you, happy to be here. I did not work on the Obama campaign okay, I wish. I did.
03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I voted for him, but I didn't work on it. Actually, only one of the four of us is a comms liability. I'll let you figure out which one, but we like comms liabilities on uh on this show. All right, we were. We're going to get to some news, but uh will. Harris said have you seen the gta6 trailer yet? And I hadn't. So actually, the first frame is the thing that matters. Uh, coming 2025, that's this year is it no?
04:20 - Wil Harris (Guest)
so it's coming 20. So it's coming 2026.
04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I'm looking at the wrong trailer. That's why the wrong trailer.
04:28 - Harper Reed (Guest)
This is the second trailer, so they changed.
04:31 - Wil Harris (Guest)
They changed the year and what's been really exciting is that you know GTA 3, 4, 5 and 6 all released in the time that it took uh us to go from gta five to six. I think I'm right in saying that. So we had we had four gtas in the time.
04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's taken us to go from five to six and it looks absolutely fantastic you know, what I love is is that this, this franchise, has gone from being every parent's nightmare to mainstream totally mainstream.
05:11 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I remember buying the, the very first gta, um, you know the top down, sort of 2d sort of thing, and your parents were probably terrified about that uh, if my parents knew about it, that would have been surprising. Um, but it's, it was. It was an incredible experience, and we've just found out that gta 6 is going to come out may in 2026, next year. What's wait a minute.
05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't show this part. There's some, some love, love making. Oh no, that was brief oh, wait a minute. No, it's not holy cow, I'm gonna geez louise. How sexy does this? Oh my god. Okay, I'm gonna stop right now.
05:51 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Oh my god what's interesting is that most of the games industry has been having a sort of vaguely epileptic fit over. We cannot release any serious game, that we've got um in the gta6 release window and everybody expected gta6 to come out in this month, this month well, no, they expected to come out in december 2025, like christmas. Christmas 25 was going to be okay, and so everybody pushed their games, and now it's going to come out may 2026, and so half the industry is going holy smokes.
06:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's crunch and get everything out by christmas so is it really going to be dominant that dominant when it comes out next year?
06:37 - Wil Harris (Guest)
oh yeah, I mean it's going to be the most successful entertainment franchise of all time. I mean davindra will be able to say um, you know, the largest uh more than mission impossible the largest film franchise, is gonna have nothing on gta6 right probably.
06:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean that that's the thing. And also there's like thinking about how much it's going to cost too, because everybody's talking about game prices now of several titles are like priced at 80, especially stuff coming into the switch to um. There were rumors that it could cost a hundred dollars, like they could just do that. There will likely be premium editions, like they do in games now, so you could probably they'll have the normal price, but also 100, 150, maybe even more, because it's rockstar, they could do whatever the heck they want and people will pay it. So yeah, it's gonna be a big deal. It's a big big deal could do whatever the heck they want and people will pay it. So, yeah, it's going to be a big deal, it's a big big deal.
07:28 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I mean, there's an interesting question right, Devendra, which is when you go to the cinema you have, you know, you sort of got one cinema prize ticket. Sorry, theater for our American friends, we know cinema.
07:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We hear that word.
07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a?
07:45 - Wil Harris (Guest)
film, you might have a slightly higher price for the sort of 4k imax. Yeah, um, but with video games you can have the sort of basic game price, the basic game plus the basic game plus the artwork. The basic game plus the artwork plus the, what do you think is going to be the max price? I mean, would you pay 200 for the ultimate?
08:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
some would probably some people would, and the thing a lot of game makers do is that they okay, you pay a little more. You pay 30, 40 more. You get to play the game several days early, a week early right I could kind of see rockstar doing thing where I'm like, hey, this is the premium tier one, you get it a week or two early.
08:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we don't know how long has it been since the last Grand Theft Auto came out.
08:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't have the exact date. It's been a while 13 years, a long time. I used to work at the Game Press when that came out, so it was a long time ago, that's Benito five came out, says keith, and they they didn't need to release a new one because they've had grand theft, uh auto online and that's been printing money for rockstar and that's it. Like they, they did, did not have so much on the single.
08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do want to compare it because mission impossible eight is coming out this week. You reviewed it. We'll talk about your review, and this is not an entertainment show, but it is news mission impossible.
09:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They estimate there's ai, there's killer ai in mission impossible. So it's a tech teching, oh oh cool killer ai like ai that's gonna kill humans yeah, they, uh, they went full sci fi and I think it was a huge mistake for the franchise. It's called the entity the entity tom cruise has to fight the entity, everybody. Not specter, not smirsch the entity. The entity has taken over, it's going to take over nuclear arms, it's going to destroy the world.
09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've gone full world ending. Actually, this is better, because we used to have to find an ethnic group and that became problematic. Right yeah, everybody hates AI. So sure, everybody hates AI. Ai is like an easy yeah.
09:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Sorry, harper. Yeah, harper's big into it.
09:48 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Harper loves AI and easy, yeah, sorry, sorry, harper. Yeah, harper's big harper loves ai. I love ai. I just got off the phone with a friend who was asking how to use ai in their product and I said just remember, there's diminishing returns to admitting that you use ai yeah, used to be the.
09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like blockchain for a while, and now it's just like so mission impossible. The finalckoning we can but hope cost 400 million dollars to make. How much did Grand Theft Auto 6 cost to make you think? Do we know?
10:13 - Wil Harris (Guest)
uh, a bit, a billion plus, a billion plus. But if you think of, you know, a hundred million copies at 60 bucks a pop it doesn't take long to get your money in yeah, I believe it was.
10:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Force awakens still has the highest budget lead 533 million.
10:30 - Wil Harris (Guest)
That one, yeah wow, if only they'd made a decent. Let's not get into.
10:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is an inverse relationship, I think, between the cost of a movie and the quality of a movie. That seems to be the case, but I don't know. Devendra is the the film podcaster, so it depends.
10:46 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We've had a lot of great big movies that cost a ton and are great, like the dune movies.
10:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love those movies, anora won the best picture and it cost four million dollars to make. It cost a couple quarters. Yeah, basically the brutalist which I think should have won. I really liked six million to make. Yeah, and that looked like a big budget movie. I mean it looked like a great movie, yeah. So, uh, I don't know if you I don't, I don't know, okay, so here it comes grand theft auto next year.
11:13 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Everybody rush your games out this year yeah, I mean your games out this year, because may 2026 is just going to be the grand theft apocalypse.
11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm going to book you now, will Harris, the night before the game comes out. How dare you. We can have a release day party. What do you say?
11:36 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Next May, I will be. Do you know what? If there's one thing I know about Grand Theft Auto, it's that it's all about crime, booze and hookers, and so I'm all in for the release it's much like your lifestyle, isn't?
11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it will uh, I'm here uh, all, right now to the tech news, although I think you know, really, this stuff is rapidly becoming like it's more than just, you know, fun and games.
12:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's, it's big business, it's amazing business like, yeah, and we talked about being normalized. The people who grew up playing grand theft auto are the grown-ups now.
12:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, that's right, normalized, you know? Yeah, yeah, because this was the one. I mean even even I remember the, the internal debates should we let him, should we let henry play grand theft auto? You know, I think we decided it was okay, but uh, it was not an obvious choice.
12:32 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah well, that was back when grand theft auto had a box and you could go and physically pick up a box off the shelf right, that's how long ago that was kids.
12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to go to the store to get our video games. All right, have you used grok? What do you think of grok? Harper reed, are you a grok fan?
12:52 - Harper Reed (Guest)
this is elon musk's ai, which now owns twitter, incidentally I have not spent a lot of time with grok, it is. It seems to be fine. I'm just mostly what I'm doing is a lot of code and I didn't have access to their API for a while so it was kind of it didn't really matter to my world, but I have a lot of friends that say it's pretty good.
13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
After you came on the Intelligent Machine Show, I started using Cloud Code, which is a command line interface to the Anthropix Cloud, and it was, it's incredible.
13:22 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's wild, and so I, I think Grok is. I mean, it seems fine, um, well, not. The caveat there is that it is hooked to Twitter, which is like which is which doesn't seem like.
13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like that doesn't seem like a very stable place for a lot of fine we learned a lesson this week in how the instructions that are given after so there's a series of processes that happen. Before you get a chat bot online publicly, of course you have to train the large language model. That's very expensive, takes some time. Then you fine-tune it, um, recently they've also added uh reinforcement learning uh to it. There's all sorts of things. There's also human written instructions right to the ai, where you can do this uh to your you know, before you talk to chat gpt, you can say hey, knock off the sycophantic nonsense, be straight with me, um, but but but also the companies do this in a somewhat more invisible way, and I think we learned this week that the instructions that are given to the ai can be problematic.
14:27
Grok for a day. Every time, no matter what you asked, it would launch into a, a tirade about the white genocide in south africa, which happens to be an elon musk and and, by the way, president trump hot button. There is, and we should just let you know there is no white jet site going on in south africa, but there are those who believe there is uh, including elon musk, who is a south african um, he's not for connor, but he is.
14:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He is of. You know, he's not a bower yeah, but he's.
15:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's a white, south african, let's put it that way and grew up in apartheid uh, they just want to make it happen again.
15:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Let's bring that back everybody.
15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what grok wants grok admitted that on friday my skepticism about holla, about uh, oh, I'm sorry started with white genocide. That was fixed. Uh, grok said. On may 14th at 3 15 am pacific time, an unauthorized modification was made to the grok response bots prompt on x. The change, which directed grok to provide a specific response to a political topic, violated xai's internal policies and core values. We've conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance grok's transparency and reliability. I think it's kind of it's either an employee who just wanted to do what elon would like him to do or elon went in at three in the morning, yeah, and said fix it.
16:17 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Either fix it or do it himself compliant in such a way that either shows that the people who are managing it don't understand how it works which is one way to look at it that you can make the AI say what you want it to say, but they're not being so I don't know the right word. It's just not being done very well, or it's just like truth lends itself. It has a tendency of coming true right, like so. It's just really funny because you see people saying you know why is Grok leaning left, you know? And then everyone gets all into it, oh can't lean left.
16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, heaven forfend.
16:57 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And it's very funny when Grok is like well, I went and looked at sources that are good and it mentions all these news sources. And then the responses like well, those are horrible news sources, you know, and then they wanted to look at very specific news sources and I think there's a couple interesting things that I keep taking away from this one. Like, we all have our silos that we participate in, and if you're just generically addressing the internet, that might not pick your silos.
17:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the first thing, but the second thing is this really funny thing which is just um, it just doesn't seem to do what elon wants it to do it's hard to control, which is interesting I love that yeah, one user, uh, on x, asked grok to quote speculate as to which figure associated with x has poor self-control, sleeps late and is likely to have the requisite access and has particular views on south african politics. Grok said well, if I had to take a wild guess, I'd point the finger at someone like Elon Musk tampering with my prop isn't something a random intern could pull off can we come up with the portmanteau of runaway?
17:58 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I, run away I run away run away.
18:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I, oh, that's a company name, somebody's gonna take that name, uh. But this reminds me. There is that story about uh, what, uh, what elon musk did with his mclaren f1. Right, like, what did he do with his f1? He, uh, he totaled it, he flipped it and peter teal was in the seat with him, like he could have had a far.
18:19
There's a whole story about this, but he was showing off. He's an idiot who has no clue how to drive a supercar. He floored it apparently and like major accident happened. They both could have been wiped out easily. This is the same thing. This is guy who is now has all this command of this super powerful sort of unknowable thing. Um left his own devices.
18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stupid things happen we should mention that happened in 2022. It's not like breaking news. Yes, and he. By the way, it was a one million dollar supercar, which he managed to sell anyway. So, uh, there you go, um find out just just on the same topic did the tesla the new tesla coupe ever ship?
19:13 - Wil Harris (Guest)
you mean, uh no, I don't think so. I mean it went cheap one or the fancy one because we had. We had the original tesla coupe, which was the sort of lotus with the, with the battery stuck in it yeah yeah, and then there was the one that was sent into space and I know there's the 2026 roadster oh well, it was 2024 roadster at least. Well, it's now 2026.
19:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like gta.
19:32 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, it's like gta, by the way, do you?
19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really want a car that can go zero to 60 in less than a second? I don't think so.
19:41 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I really liked the original roadster though it was cute.
19:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I loved that little car. It was a Lotus, it was an electric Lotus is what it was.
19:47 - Harper Reed (Guest)
But that's not bad. I think that's great. I want an electric. I would love a little Elise today. That is electric.
19:52 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, one of the most fun days of my life was Leo. No friend of the show, rob Llewellyn oh yeah, bobby. The show rob luellen oh yeah, bobby yeah, love him. And bobby um borrowed a one of the original 2012 roadsters and, uh, we hired a um an airstrip a private airstrip in uh in oxfordshire, and all we did was drive this 2012 roadster as fast as possible. Oh, fun, this is fun. Well, and it was. Uh, that was a good afternoon. But I would love to do the same thing with uh, with the 2024 stroke, 2026 roadster, but I'm not sure it's ever going to exist meanwhile grok has gone from talking about white genocide in south africa to saying the holocaust.
20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe it didn't really happen another elon musk thing.
20:51 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's great it really cracks me up. This is just. I just, you know, someone is piping this stuff into some system prompt somewhere, and I promise that there are probably ways. I don't know because I don't have control of something like this, but I'm guessing there are ways to do this where it doesn't immediately get caught by everyone on twitter.
21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Slash the press right just for long enough that it can. You know so, but what it? So? The only reason I mentioned this I mean, obviously it's an error and they fix it, but it just shows this is there's a certain vulnerability that these ais have to these system prompts right, oh, yeah, yeah a certain vulnerability that these ais have to these system prompts. Right, oh, yeah, yeah, and they should probably be kept locked under lock and key I don't know.
21:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The bigger problem is that we even the people building these ais, do not. These things are kind of black boxes like we. We have made these like wonderful algorithmic you know uh machines, but tweaking them is all a little bit of like dropping a little bit of you know something in the algorithmic potion and seeing what happens, and we don't have a full understanding of it, which is why I think it's insane that Microsoft and all these companies have just like bet their entire business on these things. It is absolutely wild. We're in the midst of Computex news. We're going to see a lot more of this stuff coming soon this week, so Computex is a big Taiwan PC show.
22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Normally it's about PCs. You think there'll be a lot of AI stories.
22:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh yeah, ai PC is the big thing. Jensen Huang has a keynote later tonight, so I'll be up late.
22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's later tonight. Huh it's yeah, yeah.
22:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So news is happening, but it's just wild. Like these, these black boxes, and we are pouring so much hope into them. It is wild how far these companies are betting on them.
22:37 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Well, the other thing I think about CombiTech is always that it's all about the chips. It's literally the chip manufacturers. All the chips are manufactured out there, so it's about what you do with all the chips, well, out there, so it's about what you do with all the chips well, and today it's ai.
22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, they're calling this ai next. I mean it really is. Wow, it's an ugly website, I gotta say to build on.
22:57 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Uh, what davidra was saying, though. The other thing, besides just the black box, which I've always thought was a hilarious problem in ai, especially when I did have a Tesla and I was turning on the auto driving and just thinking I don't think the engineers know why this works. I love that part of these things, but the other thing I think about that this grok situation tells us is that we don't actually know the system prompts that are being used for any of the models. You can do all this like work to try and convince it or coerce it to spit it out, but we don't know the various prompts that are going that it's interpreting our requests for and in that regard, you know, like we don't know, open AIs. They might have all sorts of wild stuff in there that we would maybe agree with or disagree with.
23:38
We don't know, we don't have a way of knowing, and the one thing that Grok has done and Twitter slash X has done is, when they get caught with something like this, they immediately say oh well, we'll put this on GitHub, we'll show you the system. That's what they said, and I think that's a good step, because I do think, if you're relying on open AI or a cloud or anthropic or whatever it is. It would be nice to know what conditioning or what kind of manipulation they're doing with their LLM outputs that may change it in your favor or against you, like we don't know. Like, for example, if you're anthropic, you could be looking, you know a la what Uber did back in the day. You could look at IPs and every time an OpenAI person uses it, you could, like you know, make it way better. Or, like you know what I mean, like you could just pipe in, you know, or do all sorts of nefarious things if you were in control of that system and so the fact that we don't have transparency.
24:34
I think that's really interesting with this is after training, right?
24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so you've done the llm training, you might even done the reinforcement training, but then there's a system prompt that is normally opaque, that really conditions it, like when Sam Altman said oh, we're sorry, we made it too sycophantic.
24:51 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Exactly that prompt exactly is correct, and we don't know if it's just to the system prompt. There could be multiple layers in there. There might be other models that are helping design that system prompt. There's lots of variables within this and they're all about, I would guess, some amount of growth. Hacking as well, like creating a response that also compels the person to make an e-commerce purchase that is, a subscription is also part of this. We can't forget that there's still capitalism baked into this thing, and I don't mind this. I'm not saying we should get rid of this and I need raw model output into my brain. I'm more saying I find it complicated that we don't know exactly what these things are saying, and so it's just very left-leaning LLMs that are right-leaning, llms that are academic-leaning.
25:51 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Do you think we're heading to a stage where we think of LLMs as being a sort of arbiter of authority, but in a modern world where there's no real consensus on authority and a world where there's no real consensus on authority? Are we actually heading towards a world where NLM is what you want it to be?
26:13 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think maybe I mean you could probably create a custom GPT today on ChatGPT that only responds with things that are more right-wing, talking point friendly, like I'm sure you could do this, which is kind of the same idea. What I think is interesting and I think about this a lot and I'm involved in a couple organizations that do a lot of fact-based things and typically this is like peer-reviewed papers and whatnot, and one of them had this conversation that I thought was such a fascinating conversation. I think about it all the time, which is what happens when facts become partisan. If you're trying to posit some argument and you've done all of the steps to make it a real argument peer reviewed, done all the things that you are required to do to like posit this very complicated argument but one of the facts.
26:56 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Do you mean alternative facts?
26:58 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Well, I mean for sure, but this idea that maybe some facts are going to have a partisan leaning, and it doesn't matter what it could be. We could be talking about something completely that seems really innocent, or something as complicated as a climate change, or whatever it might be. But what I find fascinating about this is this guy said you know facts have an inconvenient history of coming true. You know facts have an inconvenient history of coming true, like, like you can say they are, they are. I don't agree with this, but like over time it will, it will, it will lean towards the fact truthiness, and I think that's that's a really complicated thing, for a lot of this and I think that's some of the things we're seeing with Grok is like they're trying to make Grok have a very specific viewpoint and the technology is not letting that viewpoint hold for better, for better right is the solution of this running them locally I mean, I don't know what, what.
27:57
What does the solution mean in this case? That that you want to make sure that your viewpoint is upheld by the I guess.
28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So right, I want to write the system prompt. I right, I want to write the system prompt. I don't want him to write the system prompt.
28:08 - Wil Harris (Guest)
The solution right, is that we come up with an objective set of facts for the real world.
28:14 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Does such a thing exist anymore? I don't think, as human beings.
28:16 - Wil Harris (Guest)
We can all agree on an objective set of facts for the real world, right, right.
28:21 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Well. So you saw this already. This is already kind of litigated by some of the local model stuff where you would see they would release, like you know. Here's an example If you go to Hugging Face and you search uncensored, you're going to get a lot of not safe for worse stuff which is not you know, which doesn't I'm not really talking about. You also then get like Lama 3.2 uncensored, like the point is, they're trying to un, they're trying to jailbreak it which I think is a misnomer, a word, it's the wrong word for it but they're trying to remove the like, uh, puritanical training or whatever viewpoint they have on this thing. And just right now I've just did it. There's there's 2100 results for uncensored and probably most of these are probably trying to look at porn, but a few of them.
29:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, some of it's like Deep Seek. We want to allow Deep Seek to talk about Tiananmen Square or Uyghurs Well.
29:10 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Deep Seek did talk about Tiananmen Square out of the gate. That's how hard this is. I think A lot of this stuff is just really tricky and so you see, like Wizard LM7B uncensored. And the point is that people don't want to have Facebook or whoever started this or whoever made that model. They don't want their kind of perspectives baked into the model. They want the raw output as much as possible, and I think one of the reasons is is they're finding that and this is my like beef with Gemini in general is like Google has made that model so hard to use that every request I have it's like I can't do that. I'm just an ai assistant too much.
29:49 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Safety is bad too, and I think there's this, this point, between these two points that we're we're slowly finding our way can I challenge you on that, which is um, do you think we do actually want the raw output and we do actually want the objective sort of version of the truth? One of the reasons that anyone does?
30:10
one of the reasons that we pick on newspapers, that we pick on media in the UK we want confirmation if we want, you know, one particular point of view, we pick the garden. If we want another point of view, don't? We want our llms to reflect our own personal biases and our confirmation bias well?
30:30 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think that's what's happening with grok now. Right, that's the exact thing that's happening is that you know someone at grok whether it's elon or some you know employee or some automated system um is trying to make Grok act a certain way because the raw model output is making it act a different way. Like. This sounds like a standard business process. It's just they're trying to promote white genocide or whatever wild thing they're trying to promote and that's not standard. And so I think, like the question is like is open AI trying to? You know you could imagine this being used in advertising, right? So you're a big model company and you want to put retargeted ads into your prompt responses. So I say I'm trying to find a restaurant in Chicago for tonight for a party of six, and it uses my retargeting cookie to just throw in whatever ad you know, whatever restaurants I looked at prior to recommend that within the response. You know that sounds like a rational way of doing the exact same thing.
31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just about advertising instead of some like political fiction well, and this is why it's an eye-opening moment, because I think a lot of people don't understand how easy that is to do and most of the time these aren't going to be prompts saying hey, you know, I want you to espouse a political viewpoint or I want to get, want you to get white genocide into every answer. It's mostly going to be commercial. Just as you say, they want to create stickiness, they want to create revenue, but it's important to understand that that's happening. Um, did it happen when in search results, or were search results ecumenical?
31:58 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I think what we're seeing is that search results are increasingly you know and we don't like it, you know and we don't like it Commercially biased Right and we don't like it, and one of the most interesting things that we saw from GPT last week was a whole bunch of partnerships with commercial providers where they were trying to decide how commercial results would show up in GPT. Right, because I think a lot of people and I would include myself my, my default search engine now is not google. I'm not going to google to ask something. I'm going to gbt to ask something. Yeah, and how you, how it's a business, I insert myself into. That transaction is a really interesting point of view and, um, personally, you know, I, I want the, the business that's going to most promote white genocide, that's the that's what I'm looking for.
32:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use perplexity for this, but I'm very concerned because the ceo of perplexity, arvon s, said oh yeah, we want to target ads. We're going to do a browser and you better believe it's going to target ads and collect as much information about you as possible.
33:19 - Wil Harris (Guest)
But I think there's a really interesting question of Ofcom in the UK, which is the communications regulator here, about how page views to you know, historical publishers, you know the sort of authoritative publishers here were down 40% because Google was AI summarizing all the answers to the questions. And I think the next question is how do you, as a publisher, interact with ChatGPT? Because if ChatGPT can give you all the answers, why would you bother publishing anything?
33:58 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Well, it's funny that this is happening to the search engines and to the publishers, when they did this to classified ads and newspapers. Like it's a cycle, it's like the cycle of life, right.
34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It goes round, comes round.
34:10 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And I don't mean this as this is good or bad. I just mean that like it was. I find there's a funny thing with AI right now, which is we had no issue with doing this to newspapers. We were like, great love it Newspapers, they should die. Look at our new ad platform. And now, in 2017 to, let's say, 2021, our assumption was that us tech people are going to displace truck drivers, warehouse workers, et cetera, and we had no issue with that. Maybe some people were like you know, you know, wringing their hands and saying, oh well, it's going to be de-skilled, we should probably do some training. But when the AI comes for us, suddenly everyone's like wait a minute, let's, we got to hold your horses Like let's, let's slow, slow down, slow down. And I and I I find that ironic because no one was willing to slow down when it came for other people- First they came for the newspapers and I didn't say anything because I wasn't a newspaper.
35:00 - Wil Harris (Guest)
A little too soon here.
35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, too soon. Okay, all right, I have to take a break. Will harris is here, get out, get. Do you have headphones? Will, because I think you're missing. Some of this stuff is getting cut out by, uh, your open speaker, so put some headphones on, will? Will harris is here. Instagrams will harris w-i-l-h-a-r-r-i-s. Also with us. The wonderful harper reed from chicagoland, technologist entrepreneur, hacker and balloon maker, harperblog harperlol. And, of course, his new startup, 2389.ai. And from engadget, senior editor, the wonderful davinder hardwar, couldn't have a better panel. I am thrilled to have you. We've got lots more to talk about coming up in just a little bit.
35:45
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37:14
But one more thing happened in the united states of america. The uh, the apparently, the uh. Apparently the US Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress said you know, ai training should not be considered fair use. This upset certain members of the administration. The president fired the Librarian of Congress last week. President fired the Librarian of Congress last week.
37:43
Then the Register of Copyrights over the weekend last weekend, sheriff Perlmutter probably at the behest of Elon Musk, whose grok AI likes to, you know, in fact all the AI billionaires say, hey, we should be able to read anything we want. That's fair use. Two new people were assigned those jobs Paul Perkins and Brian Neves, of course. When they showed up at the copyright office inside the Library of Congress, capitol Police shooed them away. Thing is and this is a story from the verge elon musk's apparent power play getting those people fired backfired because the two replacements are even more anti-ai um, and don't like big tech either this is such an interesting question here of if I read every book known to man and I use that to you know improve myself.
38:52
That's not, um, that's not a an infringement of copyright no, in fact, in the united states it's uh protected by the first amendment. Is your right to read?
39:05 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Well, in our country it's just called education.
39:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't have a word for that, but that's the question is when a profit.
39:16 - Wil Harris (Guest)
If you do it systematically for profit, for a as a machine, yeah, how does it work? And isn't that one of the reasons that Open open ai was set up as a non-profit in the first place?
39:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't think that was I forget.
39:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If that's one of the reasons I think they were more concerned that Google and others like the big companies, would dominate and they wanted. They want Elon and Sam, who started the company uh, wanted to be open. They had a TIFF. They decided neither one of them is pursuing anything open with Grok or OpenAI.
39:51 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I mean, neither of them is actually reading any of this stuff, right? That's the point.
39:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When an AI quote, reads or ingests text, it tokenizes it. It doesn't keep a copy of the text. I don't know mean this is a. This is a very fundamental question. I can understand why, uh, ai companies weren't pleased with this. By the way, it wasn't, it was a pre-publication.
40:15 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It wasn't actually published this report, but they were concerned will I come back to the idea that you know, we think about the history of human literature and the history of, you know, all the writing that has ever been made the novels, the nonfiction, all these kind of things. And last year there was a big auction for a company called Simon Schuster, oh yeah, which you might have heard of, is the the second biggest publisher after penguin ran.
40:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's only three now, pretty much right. There's random house penguin, random house simon and schuster burtelsman, who's the third?
40:55 - Wil Harris (Guest)
it's some and the other one, yeah, the other um, and simon and schuster was owned by viacom and it was such a sort of minority part of viacom. The viacom said you know what second public of minority part of Viacom? That Viacom said you know what Second biggest publisher in the world we can't be bothered to-.
41:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Too small for us.
41:10 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, and they put it on the market to sell it. And Facebook didn't buy it, but they were the second preference buyer and the only reason Facebook wanted it was to ingest all the text and make it into a propriety part of their model. And you say you've got 100, 200, you know Jane Austen, shakespeare, all this, you know, history of publishing is really the only use now is to train AI models and they were prepared to pay 40, 50, 60 billion just to have a bit of text that nobody else would have. And you think well, that's the value of literature. Now the value of literature is to train models to be better, to feed the machine.
42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not sure I like that. This is such a difficult thing because, on the one hand, I think AI needs content. I mean, you don't? Sam Allman asked this question Would you want an AI that's trained only on public domain content?
42:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's Sure, I mean it's a AI needs content because it's the assumption is that we need ai. Right, and do we?
42:32
I think it's a great toy it is a really useful thing in some respects. I love using it for transcription and things, especially when I could run it locally. But there is such a big tech assumption that, oh my god, everybody wants this stuff. But I don't think that's necessarily true. There's an article going around about how Satya Nadella uses Copilot and it's the most like alien thing in the world, like he is, he said he listens to podcasts, but apparently he doesn't listen to podcasts.
42:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He loves podcasts.
42:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But, yeah, Copilot has to summarize them for him.
43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He doesn't actually listen to them.
43:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He doesn has to summarize them for him and also actually listen to them. He doesn't actually listen. So it's this whole offloading of human intelligence and capacity that's all. Ain't nobody got time to listen to those things yeah, just give me the to all the listeners here give me the top line, but that's a very ceo thing, right the worst version of that is absolutely the um, the email summaries that you get via Apple.
43:23 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Quote unquote intelligence, I mean the least intelligent thing you ever.
43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually leave that on Cause it's so hysterical.
43:30 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I love it, my, my my father-in-law died last year and I just got this email saying father-in-law dead funeral this date. Wow, Cheers.
43:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It did, do it, it did what it, it did what it said on the tin, though, yeah, summarize, summarize email I.
43:53 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I find this all very interesting because I read the the the sacha it was this it's the the description of his work day, and I thought this sounds perfect, and I think one of the things that I'm noticing is that, if that all works, that sounds like a very efficient way of consuming all of the information that you might receive as a CEO of one of these gigantic companies. Like I can't imagine all of the nonsense that's being spun towards you, and if you can put that through some layer of automation, then great, because prior to this it was put through a layer of people which we know are somewhat infallible, have political schemes, et cetera, and the AI is obviously we just talked about the AI yeah, doing the same thing, it's the same thing.
44:42
But I think if you are the one building this thing and you are like I trust this thing, you're probably going to trust that thing more so than me. Like, well, if you had me summarize your emails, it would probably be way worse than Apple's summarization right now. Like, if you, if it, if I was the one that like texted you every time you got an email and was just like I read the emails and like it would just be be way more terse. It would be worse in every way.
45:05
And I think there's this delta that I'm seeing right now, which is some people are thinking that their experience with AI which most people are using crappy products that do bad jobs of things is the same as these very Microsoft probably has built a very robust suite for their CEO, using 100% of all of the technology and people that they probably could, including the best models that none of us have ever seen. Like I'm guessing it's pretty good. I'm guessing also that he may not know that that it's better than what other people are seeing, in the same way, that I don't know anymore what it's like to program with my fingers. Certain people are so far into the shit, so to speak, that we can't see outside of it. We don't know what it's like anymore, and it's complicated.
45:55 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, I will challenge you a little bit on that, harper, which is, until we all have access to a version of an AI assistant that understands us better than almost we understand ourselves, then you're just getting an inferior experience. I, you know, I have got AI assistants. I've got, you know, siri. I've got Copilot. I've got all these things that are very, very, very, very, very generic. Right, I have had actual human being assistants that know exactly what I want, how I want it, when I want it, in the exact format that I want it.
46:37
And until AI can replicate that for me, until it can replicate the best version of the best assistant I've ever had, who knows exactly when I'm not available after lunch Because lunch has has has gone very, very sideways. You know it's it's not, it's not going to work. And I think that the I'm sure Satya, you know I read that thing, you know it's it's not, it's not going to work. And I think that the I'm sure satya, you know I read that thing, you know the satya nadela, you know here's my, you know my day and here's how it. It seemed kind of sad, it's very sad. No, there's no human interaction in it and it's like it's all about being the most efficient, productive. You know how many dollars per, you know, per physical kilogram can I get out of you? It's, there's no fun in it, right?
47:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's what being a CEO of a tech company probably is like.
47:40 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Right, that sounds pretty terrible, but let's think about it slightly differently. What if that was your day? But instead of having to deal with a lot of people that worked for you, you just hung out with your friends and just off that wouldn't be fun either.
47:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What?
47:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
that sounds perfect for me.
47:55 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I just I would love to.
47:59 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I don't mean the ais are your friends. I mean that you're just hanging out with your friends real friends, real friends and then just hanging out with your friends Real friends, real friends and then your phone is just like yeah, I read all those podcasts, they're not very good. You're like oh great, cool Anyway. So Will you know your round's up or whatever? You know what I mean. Like, I think that I think that's also terrible.
48:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There are all these stories about how the college kids are using AI for everything, for all their work, and I'm thinking I was a philosophy major so I spent a lot of time learning about useless.
48:30
But you know, what they also taught me is like how to think, and we are losing the how to think of it all and we're just like watching this thing, this whole tidal wave, coming right at us. Right, it's sort of like, yeah, when I was I'm a millennial technically graduated in 05, in 2005, right before the financial crisis. But everyone in my era and the people who went to the workforce around the financial crisis era, there were a lot of things they didn't fully know, because the schools didn't quite teach us how to properly write a resume, how to like actually engage and do the whole. Like this is how you get a good job, this is maybe how you negotiate, like how to live. That part didn't really exist and now it's like it. It's almost like a whole generation is gonna be raised on like not even having the, the other thing you do in college, which is just sitting and thinking creatively um you know, but don't you think that the don't you think the point of um?
49:23 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I always think that. I always think I, I learned, um everything apart from what I actually studied at college. Right, I, I read law, and I know nothing about law, but everything about studying and um, and the thing that I always think is it taught me how to um, how to apply the principles of reasoning and the principles of learning to any particular topic. There you go, and aren't we heading towards a place where knowledge itself, you know knowledge is obsolete. I can get any piece of knowledge of anything in the world at any point.
50:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That already happened just just by googling it yeah, right, that was.
50:08 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, that was the um, that was the ipad, that was the hitchhiker's guide. Right, as soon as you could um, skin your ipad with the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, uh, wallpaper, you were, you were away to the, you know, away to the thing. What you actually need to know is, um, how do I distinguish between what's real and what's fake and what's? And what do I do with this stuff?
50:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what do I do with it, right, yeah, yeah, um, by the way, the piece is in bloomberg with satchin adela. Uh, he says he has uses up to 11 or 10 different custom agents vanity fair called it. He's talking back to his radio. He has a. He has, uh an llm driven bots to summarize messages, prepare for meetings. He uh, he has uh the. He actually copies podcast. He doesn't listen at all to podcasts. He copies the transcripts into Copilot during his commute he listens to AI summaries and has back and forth conversations with the voice assistant.
51:14 - Harper Reed (Guest)
How likely do you think that some of these agents are just a whole bunch of Microsoft employees that are suddenly like oh no, I've got to do this again, such as in the car, quick, oh no, I've got to do this again.
51:23 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Such is in the car, quick. I used to always have a mantra whenever I worked as a big corporate, which is is this an algorithm or is it a set of interns? Yeah, and I love it. I love that.
51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How can you tell the difference?
51:38 - Harper Reed (Guest)
If you'll bear with me, I have a wonderful story about this, about interns. This is one of my favorite stories. It's like a treasure of mine I'm going to share with you. So I had this person in the Obama campaign come to me frantically saying this report broke. It runs every day at 4 am and we absolutely have to have it. I was like perfect, I know how Cron works. We have a whole team of engineers who know how Cron works. We can fix this report instantly. It'll be very easy.
52:02
And I was like it's very important. I'll dive right in myself and I jump in and I started interviewing all the people trying to figure out how this report is generated and it comes from this very specific database. And I started interviewing more people about it and like what does the report look like? Okay, so turns out. The problem was is that every morning at 3.30, an intern woke up, ran a SQL query, put the SQL results into a spreadsheet, took a screenshot of the spreadsheet and then sent that to the person who needed the report. And what had happened is, for the past couple of days, the intern did not wake up. They were asking me not to fix this or automate this. They were literally asking me for another intern that was more reliable, and it was like this very funny lesson where I was like there's so much I could do to fix this, but the fix was actually just finding another intern.
52:50 - Wil Harris (Guest)
And then we found another intern.
52:51 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah, we got a better intern. That person got up at like 315 or whatever and got the report done by four and sent it. And then we never heard about that report again and it was. Everyone was happy. But the other part about that, the report was actually a TIFF, because this was like 2011, 2012. It was a picture of a spreadsheet. It was a picture of a spreadsheet.
53:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
In the worst format possible.
53:11 - Harper Reed (Guest)
In the worst format possible.
53:12 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It was just PNG if he was.
53:14 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And my brain at this point is just like collapsing in on itself, thinking of like Harper, it'll be okay, it's fine, because it actually was fine, like that's actually one of the biggest lessons.
53:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Couldn't you have replaced that intern with a cron job?
53:28 - Harper Reed (Guest)
You could, but then you would require a tech person to maintain it, and there were a billion interns and literally millions of interns sitting there waiting to get up at 3.30 and hit the OLAP cubes to get the report sent to so-and-so.
53:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they felt very happy. It's really a lesson for interns.
53:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
For sure. Wake up. Why did it have to be an image? That's my question.
53:48 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think it was an image because Easily attachable to an email.
53:52 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Great question.
53:53 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Sure, great question. I think that's what it was. I think it was easily attachable to email and probably the client was somewhat flexible. They're probably in Excel or in Tableau or in some sort of client to hit this database, and screenshots are very easy to teach Command shift four.
54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's all you need to know, kid.
54:13 - Harper Reed (Guest)
But it was very funny. I remember doing this and just thinking like Eureka, I'm gonna seem so smart. And then it was less like Harper, this is a people problem. And I was like oh fine, oh okay, people, yeah, people problem.
54:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I was like, oh fine, oh okay, people, yeah, they're so hard to automate. All right, we're gonna take a little break. Harper reed is here. It's great to have you. Harper from chicago, devinder hardewar from the what the bay area, I want to say no no, outside atlanta way on the other.
54:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm never gonna go west coast, that's, that's right, always on the east coast outside atlanta that's, that's east bay and from from London, england.
54:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
jolly old Mr Will Harris.
54:49 - Harper Reed (Guest)
East Bay.
54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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56:19
We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. If you were worried, by the way, about all that energy used by these uh ais, you might be glad to hear about, uh, how they're solving this in Finland and Sweden. They're pairing computer processing facilities with district heating systems so that the waste heat, for instance in Finland, generated by a 75 megawatt data center five kilometers away could could heat finish engineer Avi Kirby's hot shower. Kilometers away, could could heat finish engineer Avi curvy's hot shower. The data center has provided heat for the entire town of mantasala in southern Finland, the equivalent of 2 500 homes two-thirds of their needs cutting energy costs for residents and, of course, helping to blunt the environmental downsides associated with power hungry computing infrastructure. Unfortunately, we are building our data centers in arizona where there's no need of heat and there's not a lot of water either, to call them yeah, great idea guys yeah this is why we can't have nice things right, we should be building everything in sweden and finland.
57:34
It reminds me, do you remember there was a Bitcoin Miner that was also could do dual purpose as your heater in your house.
57:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's my gaming PC in the winter.
57:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly exactly, you know. Yeah, my studio's up in the attic and there's so much equipment in here I don't, yeah, I have to actually leave the windows open because it gets so hot it's beautiful it's a wonderful thing. Uh, I don't know I threw that in so we needed some good news about ai to throw that in uh, the best good news there.
58:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It gets like uh, bad news, made good right yeah, yeah, bad news made good.
58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you we were talking about, uh, anthropics clawed that's the, the coding engine. Uh, you like to use harbor, your claw. You, in fact you. You turn me on to claude code, which is their command line version were talking about, uh, anthropics clod that's the the coding engine. Uh, you like to use harper you, in fact you. You turned me on to clod code, which is their command line version of that open ai just launched their ai coding engine codex in chat, gpt. I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it or not I have.
58:28 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I have I spent a bunch of time with it yesterday. I find it very compelling, but it works. Different than how I currently work and I think this is an interesting this is kind of bringing up. One of these things about AI that I think is fascinating is we don't yet know what the user experience looks like, and so each of these companies is taking a swing at a slightly different experience. In this case, openai has done this a couple of times with Operator, and then with now with Codex, where they have what looks like a computer that you're interfacing, not necessarily via a traditional computing interface.
59:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is actually. It's a computer in the Cloud, I think Runs in a sandbox virtual computer in the Cloud. I love this. What are we coding today is the front page prompt so it works very well and excuse me for my ignorance.
59:22 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Is this what is called vibe coding?
59:25 - Harper Reed (Guest)
oh, I don't know if we have even time to get into this. Well, this is like. This is like my. This is, this is my bread and butter at this moment. I love, love this. My vibe coding is all I do. I'm vibe coding somewhere, not here, but at my house. The computer is vibe coding itself.
59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's doing it right now and you don't have to touch anything.
59:44 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I just want one of those birds, like Homer had. What are they vibing?
59:49 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's better than an intern, it's so good Will I think they call it vibe coding from like five different perspectives, so I'll talk about the two or three that I think.
59:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First of all, andre kapathi was the first to use this term. It was my sense that it was coding without actually typing any code. You're doing using, you're passing the vibe of what you want onto the AI and the AI is generating the code although when Carpati was talking about it, he implied that it was a qualified, experienced coder who was doing this, not somebody who didn't know what the hell they were doing but it turns out that you don't know what you don't have to know what you don't have to and um.
01:00:31 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I have many friends who have vibe coded their way into an app and vibe code their way into a bunch of bugs. Vibe coded their way into something that they've launched.
01:00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um they've launched like an mvp kind of minimal viable yeah, 100, and I am so happy about this.
01:00:48 - Harper Reed (Guest)
So basically, what you do is you just sit there in front of a computer and like whether you're using codex, for instance, is a great example. There's a little prompt like a little box. You just sit there in front of a computer and like whether you're using Codex, for instance, is a great example. There's a little prompt like a little box. You just type in like I want to make a Expo, which is a React Native framework, an Expo app that is a Instagram knockoff, and I want to call it whatever. And I have this really important feature that I think is important for it and it will just kind of do that where you don't necessarily you have relinquished control of all of the individual decisions that a developer or a designer would make in making that process it's cool to watch too, because it spits out the code really fast.
01:01:24
I mean it's oh yeah, it's in seconds, it's gotta, it's done and I find it this liberating experience, and I but you, harper, you can look at the code and know if there's problems.
01:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can actually you have enough experience to look at it and fix it. Yes, but since we last talked, leo, we have Harper has written a couple of great blog posts, by the way, on how he does this, which I recommend at harperblog.
01:01:55 - Harper Reed (Guest)
We have stopped using IDEs. We don't even look at the code anymore.
01:01:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh geez.
01:02:00 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And this is really complicated. I was talking to a friend of mine and he was like, how would you do this? He gave me some problem and I was like you just asked the guy to do it.
01:02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where does the code go? You mean you get a binary. No, no computer. It's there, but like, why? Why look at it, look at it. The code is what I did with what I did with Claude code which was fun was I had I work in emacs with common Lisp. I mean I'm working in a weird obscure world and I just said here's, here's the code, fix it. And then I gave it a Greenfield problem. I said write me the code.
01:02:29 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It actually put it in emacs for me it actually put it in emacs for me, which is pretty cool.
01:02:39 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I don't go that far I'm not. I know it's crazy. I'm much younger, so can I just log on to if you were gonna, if you were gonna, give me a little um guide to vibe coding. Um, I want to write an app. I want to write an app that does, um, I don't know, it takes all my, all my thoughts, um that I that I put into a voice note and publishes them as a blog on somewhere. Can I just vibe code that?
01:03:05 - Harper Reed (Guest)
a hundred percent like. It's so ridiculous. This is why I think the vibe coding has it's such, there's such a nuance to to what it is and what people think about it, because you truly can do that. It probably what I. What I like to think about is at what point are you going to, or is it going to, generate something that is past your ability to easily maintain it? And this happens quite quickly for me, and I've been programming for, you know, 30 years professionally and what I find is that you get to this point where you're like, well, I've lost the plot.
01:03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I literally have no idea what's happening. That's a bad thing, though, right.
01:03:43 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think it was a bad thing when it cost money to program computers, because it used to be that. If you know, the venture came to me and said, harper, we're building this app. And I said great. And I said my daily rate is X thousand dollars. And then I kept messing up five days in a row, I would be fired. And that's kind of what's happening here, except instead of it being one day, it's like 10 minutes and it messes up five times in a row, but the six times it then is perfect.
01:04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so then you're like it cost me $2 to write all of this code, like hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It was $2.
01:04:19 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And so this is a really complicated issue because I just don't think there's going to be jobs anymore. That's my conclusion. I'm like, okay, therefore there's no more jobs. But what I think is even more complicated is all of these people like me, know, my peers, all these people I've worked with for the last 20 years in like kind of big startup tech kind of that we conceive as tech.
01:04:40
Um, we really valued the craft of code.
01:04:43
You know, we have our fancy keyboards, we have all of this stuff that is about like, you know, like this is the best thing that's going to generate the best code with all these tools, exactly these method, and you kind of throw them all out and you have someone who's seen a computer for 15 minutes and they're yeah, I just made an app and it does all this crazy stuff and it's perfect. And you see it and you're like, yeah, that's pretty good and it's very complicated because it removes the craft. And the best analogy that I've seen for this is we are all farmers and industrial farming is coming for us and we've built our careers being farmers and we have all these details about farming and someone's just going to come in and replace all of us with industrial farms and we're going to be relegated to the farmer's market. So you're going to be like Harper You're a bespoke artisanal entrepreneur that uses bespoke artisanal product managers with bespoke artisanal engineers that use their fingers to do everything, and we're going to make something that no one actually cares about.
01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be like this we've seen this story so many times.
01:05:44
I mean so can I use my all the north carolina furniture craftsmen who were making beautiful handmade wood furniture. And now, if you buy a sofa, it was made in china, stapled together out of the cheapest wood possible, uh, and. But if you wanted a handcrafted and by the way I found this out if you wanted a handcrafted amish table, you could get one, but it's fifteen thousand dollars because somebody has to make it by hand. Uh, but it still exists. We've seen this before. Go ahead, I'm sorry.
01:06:16 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Will you dropped that we lost will.
01:06:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, he was so mad, he hung up he's so, so should we. Isn't this a little dystopian sounding, though, harper?
01:06:31 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I mean, I don't.
01:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm confused about this, about this, because I've spent the last two weeks Somebody in our Discord chat said that's the most non-inspirational speech I've ever heard.
01:06:41 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I've been talking to a lot of young people about this young engineering grads and young undergrads specifically helping them wrap their head around vibe coding and kind of how to code with AI. And for what it's worth, I don't ever call it vibe coding because in my perspective, I love programming. Every time I'm programming I'm kind of vibe coding or whatever.
01:07:01
I just love it Like the flow that you get, Like I love that, I look forward to that. So I don't think it's necessarily. I think vibe coding is a way to make something that is very interesting kind of it puts it into a negative space which you know, whatever. But what I find fascinating about this is I spent all of my career learning things like POSX, Unix or Qmail or these things that I love, that I don't need in my brain. Or, as one of my friends said, like I wish I didn't have to know all of Python, Like I just don't, I wish I didn't have to have all of it in my brain. Or one of my favorite tech books, right, the JavaScript, the good parts, Like it's like that's kind of what this brings us is, rather than having to know all of the intricacies of Ubuntu or of Red Hat, packaging or whatever thing is in your brain, you now just need to know the good parts now.
01:07:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's, that's. All you need to know is how to google right changed that whole idea of what is a fact. How do you hold facts, as we were talking about earlier?
01:08:06 - Wil Harris (Guest)
but this is the process where, where you know I hate to bring it back to journalism, but anybody can write a rewritten press release of X company released X graphics card and here's the summary of what it does. But to really write like Hunter S Thompson, to really write, can it do that?
01:08:40 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think, yes, awkwardly? Um, I don't think. Here's my example is I don't think you're going to generate hunter s thompson or a beautiful novel or or any of these things, but. But my kind of test is always can I make it write a joke that I laugh at? And the answer to that is very much yes. But that does not mean that I would say ChatGPT is a great humorist or a great comedian. That doesn't mean that it can't make a joke that I laugh at.
01:09:10
For instance, in the background we have a whole bunch of sensors. They're piped through. I think it's O3 mini or GPT-4-O mini or something. It takes all the sensor data and then it puts it through a prompt where it basically talks about what's happening in my office. I find this to be hilarious. Most of the time it is very sarcastic and, for instance, one time we came in it took a picture of us. It passed that picture through ChatGPT or you know, and it said two balding men are approaching the office and we're just like come on, man, what are you, what are you? Come on, leave me alone.
01:09:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like Nobody's bald here. What are you talking about?
01:09:43 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Exactly, Exactly. It's a hairstyle, but but like that kind of that's the type of whatever that it has a good sense of humor and I think that the complicated thing here is that and this is why I'm not in linguistics the complicated thing is like, I don't think it's thinking necessarily no, it's not but it certainly is outputting things that make it seem like it's thinking. It's simulating thought, and humans are fallible and will fall in love with anything.
01:10:18 - Wil Harris (Guest)
As a friend of mine said, there are people online who will fall in love with anything as a friend of mine said, there are people online who have fallen in love with miss piggy. Why do we think?
01:10:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they wouldn't fall in love with japan, who have married their pillows right. It's just human, awesome life. Uh, code open. Ai does have a command line version of codex cli. They've updated. Uh, that as well. You know, uh, I use a note-taking app called obsidian which has a ridiculous number of plugins and one of the things I've thought might be really useful for me I can't read a obsidian plugin, it's kind of a javascript plus. Uh, you know it's a little, it's beyond my ken, but I could certainly vibe code plugins for myself.
01:10:56 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah.
01:10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm starting to think really how useful that would be. Writing bash scripts, you know, for your cron jobs these are. There are a lot of little jobs that you could do, that you could easily. You know they're not going to blow the world up if you use them.
01:11:12 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think this is the thing that is the most interesting for me. A friend of mine just tweeted. You know I've been vibe coding replacements for various SaaS products that I pay for. I'm up to build equivalent of three for three attempts, wow.
01:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think that's kind of where we're facing.
01:11:28 - Harper Reed (Guest)
And what I find fascinating as well is that things are changing so fast that I would fully expect a product to be released where someone says you know, describe the SaaS company that you want or the SaaS product you want, and it just takes care of all of the data storage.
01:11:45
We'll just make it for you right there. Oh, you're, you know, a landlord of only pigs Great. Oh, you're a farmer that only grows, you know, dandelions perfect. Here's the product for you, because you just need the constraints that that that problem has, and then the ai will generate it for you we have a sponsor, uh out systems.
01:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That, uh, they did for years, did no low code right, and now they've added ai assistance so that you can basically, instead of their whole pitches used to be, I decide, build or buy, now you just you know you buy our system and you build whatever you want.
01:12:21 - Wil Harris (Guest)
You don't have to buy anything ever again and do you think it makes it easier for startups? Because the the paradigm of startups was always you had, you know, one guy with the idea, one guy who had the business insight, and then you needed a technical co-founder, the guy that could actually build the thing that you had the insight for. Do you think it replaces the technical co-founder?
01:12:45 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think this is now the time of the business guy. They have been waiting in the wings of all the MBAs. My reaction exactly to Vindic. They're sitting back there in every business school.
01:12:57 - Wil Harris (Guest)
They have their little thing. You're in.
01:13:00 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Their little thing. They filled out that said, looking for a tech co-founder, and they're just ripping it up and being like, finally, it's our time.
01:13:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Don't need a co-founder Zipping up their sweater vests yeah.
01:13:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly.
01:13:10 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Exactly.
01:13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All, exactly, exactly all right, we're gonna take a little break. Uh, just a great, fascinating discussion. Lots more to talk about. Devinder hard Wars here. Harper Reed, will Harris glad we got you back, will. We lost you for a moment there, but uh, I think everything's okay now in London.
01:13:26 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I had the perfect, uh, the perfect storm of you know when, when Mac OS decides you're in the middle of a really important call. Now is going to be when I decide to update really that's a windows thing.
01:13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mac did that to you wow apple uh, tim, tim, tim cook hasn't learned vibe coding yet I just remember the war of the worlds that started in london and I just thought, maybe I just was a little nervous, that's all all. I'm glad you came back. I'm just glad this episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by Drata. If you're leading risk and compliance at your company, you're likely wearing 10 hats at once managing security risks, compliance demands, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that slows the business down right. But GRC isn't just about checking boxes. It can really be a revenue driver that builds trust, accelerates deals, strengthens security. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to draw to a trust management platform that automates the tedious tasks so you can focus on the important stuff reducing risk, approving compliance, scaling your program. With Drada, you can automate security questionnaires, you can automate evidence collection, compliance tracking and you can stay audit ready with real-time monitoring. You'll love. You'll love the Drada Trust Center and AI-powered questionnaire assistance. It simplifies security reviews like nothing else. You need Drada Instead of spending hours proving trust. Build it faster with Drada. Ready to modernize your GRC program? Visit dradacom slash weekintech to learn more. You got that D-R-A-T-A. Dradacom slash week in tech. To learn more. You got that. Dratacom slash week in tech. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech.
01:15:25
Uh, I don't know what to think about this story, but I I have to. I mean, it's fascinating. China has begun assembling a supercomputer in space. It is they plan, you know we have, as you know, we have our own, you know, starlink satellite network up there. They're planning to launch a 2800 satellite network, but instead of putting Internet service providers up there, they're going to put ai computers in these. Uh, they're all part of a company called ada space, which is out of out of china. It's part of their star compute program, the first of what they call the three-body computing constellation, which is, I think, pretty funny, since the three-body problem was a fascinating sci-fi, I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
01:16:20
What could possibly go wrong? Right, that's the one where the scientist goes off the reservation and contacts the aliens, and maybe that wasn't a good idea. Each of the satellites that they've launched now has an onboard 8 billion parameter AI model capable of 744 tops. That's a lot. It's a lot more than any PC you'd have at home. Collectively, ada Space says they can manage five peta operations per second. That's a new number for me. Pops they call that.
01:16:57 - Harper Reed (Guest)
A lot of skepticism on that, that number there, yeah, well, yeah, okay.
01:17:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five pops is a lot. That's more than 40 tops, which is what it's more than two pops two.
01:17:06 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's way more than two it's way more than two pops.
01:17:08 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Is it more than the?
01:17:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
eventual goal is to get 2800 satellites up there and achieve 1000 peta operations per second. They communicate with each other using lasers, so they're you know that's pretty modern up to 100 gigabits per second. They share in total 30 terabytes of storage, but I mean what for yeah, what's going on here? I don't know, I don't know, I'm just saying I mean, skynet might actually be in the sky. I'm just saying.
01:17:46 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It would be the thing I just want to put this number in perspective the 5090 has 3,300 tops. Yeah, that's a 5090. Yeah, yeah, this is okay.
01:17:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very expensive.
01:18:02 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Compared to these satellites, which is far less, but I'm definitely the person that says please and thank you to their chat. Gpt model. For when the great reckoning comes, I'm you know they're going to know that I was great.
01:18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does solve the issue of you're putting them in space, so cooling is not a problem, right?
01:18:18 - Harper Reed (Guest)
No, I think it's. The problem is cooling is a different problem. It's not that it solves the problem. It's definitely different than cooling is a different issue than what it is on Earth. I'm in a group chat of a bunch of AI people and every time this pops up, there's the people who are like, oh, cooling is then solved, and all these physicists are like no, it's just way different. Where is it going to go? It doesn't dissipate. They're just chilling there yeah, so it's radiation over dissipation.
01:18:42
Like in space, you can only reduce heat via radiation, which is a very slow process oh, very interesting see, this is exactly what happened. A bunch of people in a group chat, and then someone pops in with some physics. The voice of god, yeah, yeah yeah, in our case harper, what's the answer? So I I think this is a um is this propaganda from china?
01:19:04
no, no, no, no, no I don't think it is because this is the same thing that, like, there's a lot of american companies that are doing this as well. I think that what we're seeing is we're seeing a glimpse of where we're going, and the reason for that is exactly as we talked about with the Finnish cooling system, right, which is there's less space on the earth that's sadly taken by humans. There is all these pesky regulations about exhaust, about destruction of the environment, et cetera, that are getting in the way of turning everything into a data center, and this is when I call back into the pave the earth kind of propaganda from Usenet back in the day. Remember all that. But it's like this kind of fun thing of like, oh well, what if we just put it into space?
01:19:52
In the same way, people say, oh, what if we just went to Mars? And there's very serious people working on these problems of like, what happens if we go to Mars? How do we have proper plants on Mars, so on and so forth, in the same way that these guys are like, well, let's put a 5090 up into space, what does that look like? What are the problems we're solving? How do we solve those problems. Because if they do solve that problem of cooling of power, of all these things, it seems like there's a lot of space in space and most of it we're using to see the stars. But we don't need the stars, we just need GPUs.
01:20:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a link to the NASA study State-of-the-art small spacecraft technology. Chapter 7 is thermal controls, passive radiation systems. Nasa's thought a lot about this heat pipes, deployable radiators, thermal louvers um, there's, you know, because it's not just you know, skynet. You've got to solve this. I mean, if you're going to put people in space.
01:20:48 - Wil Harris (Guest)
You have to solve it. Expanse, doesn't it? Yeah?
01:20:51 - Harper Reed (Guest)
that's very interesting well, there's, there's definitely something there. I think the question I always have with all of this stuff and the same thing we were talking about AI agents that truly know me, that can replace my human assistant is when does that happen? Not if it happens, and I think that's the same with this it's definitely going to happen.
01:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's on its way.
01:21:15 - Harper Reed (Guest)
We're going to put some infrastructure know infrastructure somewhere in space, so you know, on the moon or or in orbit or wherever, and that's going to then beam stuff back to us like that's not crazy. That's what link does, right is it takes it and pushes it to us. That's what these new phones do. That's very nice, we all agree with that. But so why is it so crazy that we try and put a data center up there? I don don't think this is a wild, some wild idea. I think it's just people are excited about what they're doing, so they're releasing claims very, very early.
01:21:44 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, it's a little too, early You're like I can go to Micro.
01:21:46 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Center here in Chicago. Pick up a 5090, put it in my house and it heats my desk, or I can spend $100 million and shoot it into space.
01:21:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
For less tops.
01:21:59 - Harper Reed (Guest)
For way less tops, but more pops. It has way more pops, more pops.
01:22:04 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Can I ask you a question, harper? Which is? You made an off-the-cuff remark which might have just been off-the-cuff, which is? I can replace my human assistant with this.
01:22:14 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah, that's coming.
01:22:16 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Would you want to replace your human assistant with this? I quite like my human assistant.
01:22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it depends Not everyone can afford an actual human assistant. I would love an assistant Me too, but I can't afford an assistant. I do have my little AI guy listening at all yeah, how's that going, leo, that thing it's not. It's not it, it's semi-useful, like it makes a to-do list for me every day, and it's it's useful. This is from bcomputer and then I've talked about it before, but uh, yeah, it's got. It's got, uh, suggestions, it's uh, you know, it knows what I'm doing.
01:22:56 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Like it says on my to-do list organize and store the newly purchased baking supplies.
01:23:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Does your assistant care for you?
01:23:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it says you should clean the cat's litter box. It's becoming noticeably smelly.
01:23:08 - Wil Harris (Guest)
That's a good one. I think that's the difference. Is your AI assistant a task manager or a genuine, like it's a helper. It's a helper, a support system. And support system is not the same as a task manager right.
01:23:27 - Harper Reed (Guest)
But typically we keep talking about the support system. We keep talking about the support system and the support system of community and of love and safety I don't necessarily think should be a relationship of capitalism, Like I don't want to pay someone to care for me, I don't want to pay someone to love me and make me feel safe. I mean, we pay taxes, et cetera. We can be as pedantic as we want about this, but I do think that and I've worked with admins and had wonderful experiences and one of my favorite experiences is a billionaire's admin told me that my admin was very good and I was like that's like a pro, pro, pro, telling you that your admin is pro. I was like I immediately texted them and was like you've won, You're now in the major leagues, Don to them. And was like you've won, you're now in the major leagues, Don't get a better job because I can't afford to pay you their salary.
01:24:22
But the reality is I do think that there is this thing of a good admin is you just cannot replace them and I don't think this is coming for them, but I do think it's making their job easier and if you don't have an admin, it can give you admin, like experiences. That is real and I don't think this is coming next week or Tuesday, but I did my email. I've been doing my email with Cloud. It's incredible. Yeah, it's absolutely the wildest thing and I really messed up.
01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what do you do? You say here's an email, respond to it, or do you actually?
01:24:47 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Oh, I wrote a Gmail MCP server that will connect into Gmail so I can load it up in cloud desktop or cloud code and I can say, hey, tell me what's in my inbox. Let's look at the top three things there and let's reply to them. I had a little bug in there and I had a bad situation recently which I need to blog about, where.
01:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what this looks like.
01:25:11 - Harper Reed (Guest)
This was bad. So I had this dear friend of mine really a really good friend ping ping me and said, hey, this person's looking for someone to write an AI book. Would you be interested? And I was like, let's hear the pitch. And so they connect me to this person and the person gave me this very great pitch that said you know, I'd love you to write this book. It had this very specific point of view that I just wasn't. I'm not that person, but I was like I do know exactly who this was. This is in my head.
01:25:34
So I had my AI, my little AI assistant, cloud code MCP mix, say do my emails. And that came up. That was the third email on it and it wrote this very effusive response and I had to save it as a draft and I was like hold your horses, this is not for me. I know these two people who I think would be perfect for this. This is well within their framework. I think they would be good at it. They would be cynical but truthful. They would write a great book. I would want to read their book. Let's reply with that. And Cloud's like great done. So I just went and hit send. I didn't even read it and then I get a reply back from this publisher, who is just, or this person who was just like great, I love that you're excited about this. And I was like, oh no, and it had sent the first email, not the second. And so I replied to this person and they were very nice and very sweet.
01:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did you say? That was an AI that did that.
01:26:24 - Harper Reed (Guest)
So I replied to this person and I said hey, here's the email that I meant to reply with. I had an AI agent doing my emails and it replied with the incorrect email. I'm so sorry. I would still love to talk about the project and I would love to connect you with these two people who I still think would be very good. And that person replied and was like this makes me very uncomfortable. I do not think we should talk any longer. Oh, wow, and I was like I was kind of like well, first of all, if I didn't want to do a book, this is like the best way to coerce me to do a book, like the guilt here. I would have written a book just to get out of that email, that situation, without feeling guilty. But the second thing is it also sounds like the perfect intro to an AI book about what's going to happen of just. Like you know, we're not necessarily in control of some of this stuff, but that did not dissuade me from doing my emails with an AI helper.
01:27:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just made me be more careful and more thoughtful about it. Yeah, you want to read the drafts before they're sent?
01:27:20 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Because I'm basically texting with someone who's writing emails on my behalf which I have done and that works great, and the fact that I'm just sitting there being like, nope, make it more casual, make it sound more like me. Oh yeah, I'd love to go to that barbecue. Oh, no, I don't want to write that book. Or, yes, I would love to write that book. Oh, just kidding, like the fact that it's very Q&A, I get so much interesting. It just felt really. It felt like an interesting interface that I had not yet experienced and it's been fascinating. But, yeah, I felt really really bad about that really really bad about that.
01:27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this what your company's doing?
01:27:58 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Is it agentic AI? Is it creating MCP servers? No, no, I think MCP is a midpoint. I think it's a very interesting way for these things to use tools, but it doesn't seem like First of all, I should probably I was going to say for the lay people, can you define it?
01:28:10
So MCPs, as far as I can tell. I think it's much more complex. I'm about to describe it, but it seems like a way to describe an API in a very verbose terms that allows for the AI to know exactly how to use this. So, for instance, if you wanted to make a client that tweeted for you or posted to Mastodon for you both of those have very well-defined APIs then you could just give it the API docs and it would have to figure out all this stuff. Or you write a middleware that is much more friendly to how AIs work, that would allow it to just understand very quickly exactly what it needs to do. It might just have one endpoint that is called tweet or read timeline or various things like this. So it takes a complex thing and simplifies it, and then it gives you a bunch of examples.
01:28:57 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Are you still writing the tweet or is it doing it for you?
01:29:00 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I mean, that's up to you. Like you could say I need to write a tweet about I'm going to be on this great podcast and I want all my friends and followers to listen, and it could just be like what's the podcast? You'd say, and then you'd say like what are you excited about it? You could prompt it to have it do whatever, and then it'll write you the tweet. And then you could just be like perfect, send it. And it would send it, and in my case, it would send it to the wrong person, but send it, and this works really well. And so you see these folks on Twitter who are posting about really incredible setups of using NCP servers to do all sorts of really complicated things. That's quite impressive. I don't necessarily believe in mcp servers, and the reason is because I think we're going to spend all this time building these things and then the next thing, we know the loms are just going to be using our computers by uh, they're not going to need.
01:29:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a transitional tool.
01:29:56 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It is a transitional tool, a hundred percent. And if you look at where things are going like some of the computer use models that are coming out of China, some of them that are coming out of the US they're really incredible, like they're doing really incredible stuff. They're just slow. But what we've seen in the past three years is it just gets faster and faster and faster. So there's no reason why we shouldn't see some app that just is like you just kind of say to the computer, you emote to it, which is my favorite part about this. You're basically emoting to these computers. You're like I would love it if you could just go to this website, go to Amazon and buy me that book I heard about. You have the little B thing hooked to your collar so it knows exactly what you're talking about you can kind of do that, it's just kind of and it just kind of goes and does it there.
01:30:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yet but I feel like I'm training something that someday will be able to do that kind of thing. You know, it's like it's learning about me.
01:30:45 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's got a lot of make a difference whether you're on a computer or on a phone well, this is the real question that I have, like this is.
01:30:52 - Harper Reed (Guest)
This is the thing. If you're talking about this stuff, does the destination look like a computer that we use today, Like the thing that I talk about with my team? All the time is like why isn't it a little teddy bear that sits on my desk? Why isn't it a little device that I carry?
01:31:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
with me.
01:31:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's just something you talk to right yeah.
01:31:08 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Or why is it talking, why isn't it sub-vocalizing? What is the interface? I think we have this interesting time where we really need to be thoughtful about the interfaces and where the interfaces are coming from and how do we make them more accessible, Not just accessible for people who can afford a computer with a keyboard which is a very specific class of person, the West, et cetera but also it doesn't have to be super expensive either. Some of these new chips there.
01:31:35 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Chips also an age of person. You know the number of gen z's and gen alphas. Just don't own a computer, right, and they're just straight into phones. Is is, you know, different world? It's the way it is.
01:31:47 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's the future, yeah so I do find this very complicated, but I'm very, I'm very. We're seeing a lot of glimpses of the future and I think it's up to us and I mean this in the very global us to like weave the future together in the way we want it that's a very encouraging thing, because there are things we don't want right, right.
01:32:05
And do we want it to be like, you know the, the, the system prompt, that's being, you know, programmed to give us a very specific political viewpoint? Or do we want it to the way where you get to spend more times with your friends and family while you earn, I don't know UBI coin, by going to the pub every five minutes or whatever it is Like? You know, I don't know what the actual answer is, but I do think I actually think the newest season of Black Mirror does a good job of talking about some of these issues, of what happens around this stuff, and it was quite depressing in some regards and quite like melancholy and kind of beautiful in other regards. And I think it's up to us to make that decision. And this is one of the reasons why I'm excited and have this company is because I think we have to choose the path of the future that we want and we can't just let the oligarch bros be the ones that are choosing that.
01:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree with.
01:32:53 - Harper Reed (Guest)
These are products. I, the oligarch bros, be the ones that are choosing that. That I agree with.
01:32:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll use their products, I suppose because there's not a lot of foundational models coming out. Well, that's the problem. It's very expensive, isn't it? And don't you need to be an oligarch to create these things, or maybe not?
01:33:06 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I mean, I think maybe what we saw with DeepSeek was really interesting, because it was this company that did have a boatload of GPUs. Let's not act like they were. They told us this story about how it was very cheap to build, and I think it was as compared to an open AI and Devinder, I'm sure you know you covered this and thought about this a little bit as well, but it's this thing of they did it less expensive and that's really the direction we want. We don't necessarily need it to be cheap, we just need to be continuously less expensive and less uh uh, damaging to the environment too.
01:33:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, right now, it's kind of scary it's, I mean, the point.
01:33:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's going to be the point where you can roll your own, you know, based on everything that has been learned before, and I think that was one of the big things with deep seek is that it it was able to launch off of a lot of the training that already existed to you Right, and they were able to do it much more quickly because they learned from those mistakes. But the thing when you're describing something like this, harper, I'm just thinking like it really is the phone, like our phones, are the Star Trek communicators. This is the thing we have been dreaming of in science fiction for so long.
01:34:19
I have my desk littered with all these like garbage, ai products like the rabbit R1. And these are all a waste of time, because what you need it's just your life revolves around your phone. Our phones are already getting like really good AI power, more GPU power and things like that and it's only going to get better. So, yeah, my, from what I'm thinking, it's like what, what can we lean on our phones to do now?
01:34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like right now, voice memos in your iPhone can automatically transcribe, which is something you couldn't do last year, and that is life-changing for me as a journalist, I imagine the phone in conjunction with AirPods, however, or some sort of in-ear speaker, maybe meta Ray-Bans, some sort of way of talking to it without taking it out of your pocket and of it responding to you, because in many cases, all you need is audio back. You don't need a screen.
01:34:59 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Guys, all I can tell you is that I just want T Earl Grey hot.
01:35:06 - Harper Reed (Guest)
What if it is from a cannon?
01:35:07 - Wil Harris (Guest)
When we can do that. I can retire quietly.
01:35:11 - Harper Reed (Guest)
You could probably hook a little cannon thing to a waymo and it could just cruise by your house and shoot it through the window at the right time. I'm sure that can happen.
01:35:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah.
01:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I live. I can't wait to live in this sci-fi future. We're going to take a little break. Harper Reed, it's great to have you. Will Harris, also, it's great to see you again, my friend, it's been a while. Uh, I'm we gotta stay in touch, you know you're you're constantly moving instagrams. Will harris, we call him now, and, uh, of course, davinder hardewar, who's, uh, who's podcast will is a fan of.
01:35:46 - Wil Harris (Guest)
he loves films I love honestly, davinder the, the film cast. I am an every week listener and I love the. I can't wait to watch you lose the summer movie draft again.
01:36:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm going to lose so badly.
01:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, david Chen, jeff Canata, of course, devendra, talking about movies, you said you just did your Mission Impossible review.
01:36:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We have not done it yet. I just saw it and I did a review over it in Gadgets. You can kind of get a preliminary glimpse into my thoughts, but we're doing that next week and it's going to be a big review. I think you all should listen to that one.
01:36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, before we see the film, that's at thefilmcastcom yeah. Nice, okay, should I go out and see Thunderbolts?
01:36:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Thunderbolts. Thunderbolts is great, shockingly great, mainly because Florence Pugh is always a treasure. It's a great movie all around Good.
01:36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, we need Devendra, don't we to know? I haven't been to a movie theater since Oppenheimer. I don't know. I just wait till they come out.
01:36:48 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I saw Sinners oh.
01:36:50 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I want to see Sinners. You're the Florence P pew. Uh, also great in alfheimers. Yeah, she was great in alfheimers as well.
01:36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, um, our show today, brought to you by monarch money. Oh, I have been using this and I love it. Finances, as you probably know, can be messy and confusing. Monarch money talk about a, a personal assistant. It's like your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control so you can stop earning and start growing. It's more than your average budgeting app. Monarch money is a complete financial command center for your accounts, your investments, your goals. Don't just manage your money. Start building your wealth and, by the way, do it with 50 off your first year, just for you, our listeners.
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01:39:27
Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles away and they lost control of its thrusters. They that they've. They've actually been considered inoperable since 2004. Engineers just fixed them. The interstellar thruster resurrection. Uh, it was a little creative problem solving from the engineering team. There is a great documentary, by the way, on the voyagers that you should absolutely watch because it's these guys have been part of this team for like 40 years, right and more, and they just and, and they're getting, they're getting on. This is all they've been doing. There's this if the group's getting smaller and smaller. The thrusters have been active since 2004 when the internal heaters lost power. But engineers discovered that a circuit disturbance might have simply flipped the heater power switch off, so they remote. Last month they remotely commanded the spacecraft to activate the backup thrusters, restart the heaters kind of a risky thing. They could have lost contact with the uh, the Voyager, but no, it worked. Um.
01:40:44 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I mean, it's just mad, isn't it? Isn't it crazy, 15 billion miles away billion miles and we can restart a thruster. It was basically the, basically the equivalent of turning it off and on again basically, that's what happened.
01:41:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
47 years voyager 1 has been out there this is, by the way, not the star trek feature. That's like that was never launched. It's like voyager 30 or something that was just a movie fiction. But there, we don't need movie fiction. There are two of them out there and they are still a reminder humans are incredible humans do something, these things, and also bring measles back.
01:41:18
We can do all yeah, look at, we can move forward and we can go backwards, we can bring it sideways, we can do whatever you want, you just ask so I don't.
01:41:29 - Wil Harris (Guest)
There's a. There's a nice little sorry you're. You pick something, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say there's a nice little story at the bottom. Have you guys been playing, uh, blueprints?
01:41:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah yeah, wait a minute. What is that? I don't know that. What is this?
01:41:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
uh, sort of like first person puzzle game where you're mapping out a mansion every prince it's called in the little uh submissions at the bottom.
01:41:54 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Okay there you go it's been the most um popular steam title of the last I don't know how long it's pretty good it's the 20 it says 25 of steam players are playing it. It's absolutely nuts. 25% of Steam players are playing this game.
01:42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel left out now.
01:42:18 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's a pun on Blueprint, which is, you know, obviously the.
01:42:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although, I have to say, 50% of this panel is playing it, so it's actually not surprising, do you want?
01:42:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
to try and explain it. I mean, I'm only a couple hours in, because this is one of those games where it's good to have like a lot of time in. But yeah, you're, I believe you're visiting um, a deceased relative's home. Uh, you can the. The goal is like, if you get to a certain hidden room, you can take control of this estate and everything that they own. Is this a little like mist? Remember that game? It's a little misty, it's a little messy. Every day you go in and you have to basically map the room, but you randomly get a set of different cards and you can like map out how you want the hallways and the and the actual layout of the buildings, the ai could help you with this, I mean I've heard of people.
01:43:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually it's playing like that old adventure, coloss, colossal Cave Adventure and using AI to map it out for them. Why would you Then? That's the game. It's kind of like.
01:43:17 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Myst, combined with a deck builder, combined with some sort of crazy puzzle game, and it has just completely captured the world. And this week 25% of everybody that has Steam are playing Blue Bricks.
01:43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to play it.
01:43:37 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's written by three guys in the arse end of nowhere.
01:43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's fantastic.
01:43:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's very misty, leo. You should definitely play it, but this is the game to play now. This and the Claire Obscure, which is also fantastic.
01:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does look a little bit misty, but it's not Mist, was like one picture at a time. So they're 45 rooms and you're trying to find the 46th. Basically, yeah, but you lay out how you're beginning you find the 46th yeah and then the real mystery starts to unfold oh, so it's a little bit like clue too. Huh it, huh, it's a bit of an item collection.
01:44:15 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, yeah and it goes into crazy. Is this one of those things?
01:44:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
though, where you like, standing in the room, and you just cannot. You got I don't. I can't figure it out what. That's what happened to me with Miss.
01:44:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's the entire game, yeah that's the whole thing.
01:44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get stuck in a room.
01:44:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But you make progress, you discover new rooms, you find out little bits like it's a. It's really cool and immersive and it's such a throwback to things like mist.
01:44:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it is. It's an old school game, blueprints. Well, thank you one of those things.
01:44:45 - Wil Harris (Guest)
That's totally. You know. There are very, very, very few indie games that um with that kind of success.
01:44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, we don't need no grand theft auto six, there's too many.
01:44:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, we got blueprints, got blueprints. You got the new doom. You've got clear, obscure.
01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on, jamie lee curtis is publicly shaming mark zuckerberg because he ignored her request to remove a deep fake scam ad on Facebook and Instagram. It used AI manipulated video to Hawk some sketch product, so she. So she's gone on Facebook and Instagram saying my name is Jamie Lee Curtis and I've gone through every proper channel to ask you and your team to take down this totally AI fake commercial for some bs that I didn't authorize, agree to or endorse I think that's the only way to work in this world.
01:45:40 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yell at them yell at them on their own platform well, it's a little bit of um kind of this, this like tweak on the streisand effect, right, where you use your, your notoriety yeah, use your notoriety to really poke at these things, otherwise they're not going to care, and the problem problem is is that, you know, those of us who don't have that platform have none of that power, and so I'm happy that this is happening and I hope it points. You know, it helps a little bit. I mean, it's a little bit of Scarlett Johansson did that as well with the AI voice stuff, hansen did that as well with the AI voice stuff, and I just I mean, we know how tech people are. We are tech people Like we're not naturally going to change, we're going to be like, but we're making the world better, you know, and it's like we're going to have this perverse perspective of how it's how it's going to work, without thinking of how it affects people around us. So I think it's important for people to stand up and shout a bit.
01:46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way it worked. According to Engadget, a spokesperson for Meta said the company is removing the video.
01:46:40 - Wil Harris (Guest)
So can I give a minor little plug for a company that one of my friends is running, yes, which is called VerifyLabsai, and their whole premise is that one of the major attack vectors over the next um you know well, we're getting it now, but over the next few years is um jumping on a zoom call with somebody who's a complete deep fake that happened.
01:47:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember a few months ago, a guy thought he was talking to the ceo and the cfo of his company and transferred some huge amount of money that is exactly it, and it that is happening more and more.
01:47:21 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Uh, if you're a lawyer, you need to be able to verify that the person you're taking a deposition from yeah, in fact. Uh, I think so. What these guys have developed is a Chrome extension and if you're in a Zoom call or a Google Meet or whatever, you can hit a little button on your Chrome extension and it will say this person is 98% real.
01:47:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
How does it know.
01:47:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How do it know?
01:47:51 - Wil Harris (Guest)
They have a whole bunch of tech that that sort of sorts out you know whether or not it's real or not I don't trust any of this thing, because we we're gonna have to get to the point where you know I love appearing on this week. In tech, it's always one of the highlights of my week. But one day, if I log on and there's, you know, fake leo saying welcome to this there will be as soon as we can do it.
01:48:19
I'm doing it to to appear on this episode. We're looking forward to your donation of ten thousand dollars. Come to me now my children, exactly the children of the night and it's, it's, it's going to be a huge thing. This, this, you know, deep, deep fake fraud is going to be a huge thing. This deep, deep fake fraud is going to be absolutely enormous over the next few years.
01:48:39 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think it is already a thing, and I think it is already happening.
01:48:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can you detect? It is the question. You sound like you're skeptical.
01:48:49 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I mean, I am skeptical. I'm skeptical of a lot of these things. I remember when there was a huge Twitter bot problem and I bought my brother a couple hundred thousand Twitter followers and then I ran one of those spam detectors and it was like your followers me are all fake and his were all real and I was like, oh no.
01:49:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No no.
01:49:11 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I verify that these are fake. I purchased them, but I think it's a really complicated problem. It probably is much like a CAPTCHA, where it's not just about entering the you know, it's not about clicking on the bicycles or entering the characters, it's about how your mouse moves all these other things, but AI can solve CAPTCHAs now right. I think it's really, it's this arm race it is an arms race.
01:49:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be a total arms race for the next, you know however many years of you know we're going to have better deep fake creation, better deep fake detection, better deep fake. Lisa showed me a meme this morning that looked for all intents and purposes, real, but there I just sniffed that it was AI and uh, I don't know if it was but and I wondered how could I tell it's AI? But we're very humans, are really tuned from millions of years of evolution to detect phoniness of some kind.
01:50:00 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, one of the things that I really wanted to do that I was always um very gutted that I didn't get to do is um, leo, you had the, the book we published on um on douglas adams. I do, and I really wanted to have douglas adams uh, read one of his unread excerpts as a deep fake.
01:50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you remember the box, the uh documentary company that did the anthony bourdain documentary, yeah, where they use an ai, anthony bornane, to read something he really wrote and it sounded really like him. But they got in a heap of trouble, especially with bourdain's estate yeah, so we awful, so we, we created it.
01:50:45 - Wil Harris (Guest)
We had, um a version of the of douglas that was reading something that he wrote, and the estate um, yeah, wouldn't, let us do it the states don't like that yeah it was sad because for those of us who love douglas and love that kind of um, you know, would love to hear more from him well, I just want to go on record as someone with more than a hundred thousand hours of video of me publicly available.
01:51:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My estate says go right ahead.
01:51:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So here's the complicated thing, though.
01:51:16 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Your lawyer's going to call right now, leo, yeah, but here's the complicated thing with all this is that I wonder if it's a cost of money or if it's a cost of it's unclear how to commercialize it. My cynical kind of point of view is that they don't have any. They're not trying to protect of you. Is that they don't have any? They're not trying to protect the, the vibe of the person or some like IP. They're just trying to figure. They can't quickly understand how to attach a dollar amount to it, and so they just say no and tell the answer until they understand because they don't know how to.
01:51:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'll give you as an example the voice of Darth Vader. Uhader, uh, james earl jones, as I remember his estate, uh said you can. Uh, they gave him, they gave his voice out, they sold the rights to it, I believe.
01:52:02 - Wil Harris (Guest)
And now darth vader is appearing in fortnight because the first will be the first time that, uh, james hill jones has posthumously appeared as um darth vader. Before he died, he recorded, you know. He spent days in a recording studio, right?
01:52:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, you know recording anything intending to make a ai simulacrum of himself yeah, a model, uh, that could be used after his death so epic announced that, uh, if you find and defeat vader on the fortnight map, you can recruit him onto your team. You can talk to him using the in-game uh, you know chat feature and he will respond in james earl jones voice. You are wise, old, young one. Let's go smash that man. I don't know what he would say. What do you say in fortnight, let's dance. You should have built higher.
01:53:04
Young man, you should have built higher uh, now it makes me want to play fortnight, but you have to beat vader, which is probably not an easy thing to do, uh, so player audio and transcriptions of their voices will not be stored, although epic will have access to transcriptions of vader's responses just in case. Players report. Darth vader swore at me.
01:53:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They're already like players are already making it say like yeah, they're swearing and saying messed up stuff, and this is what happens you just put a live AI out there. It's kind of cool, but it's also like at least in this one, james Earl Jones had full control. This was his choice to do that. The thing about your Douglas Adams example will like I don don't it must be tempered with action okay, you know just tell me your fucking favorite food.
01:53:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just tell me whoa whoa this is a twitch by this favorite padme.
01:54:07 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I require a palatable and efficient sustenance that will sustain me it's pretty good what freaking fucking food is that Darth Vader Tell me?
01:54:16 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Oh my god, double down.
01:54:21 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Freaking fucking. What Such vulgarity does not become you, Captain. That's not allowed.
01:54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the one that you're going to report.
01:54:29 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I love it.
01:54:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I love it At least it was his choice to sell this thing. He did not know what would happen to it.
01:54:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he didn't have that choice. He's up there and laughing Sure His estate's laughing.
01:54:43 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, his estate's laughing all the way to the bank.
01:54:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
His estate's laughing all the way to the bank, as they say. By the way, epic is trying to get back on the iOS store and Apple, even though the judge spanked him hard, is still saying no way, man. Yeah, apple is blocking fortnight from both the us and the eu app stores, probably without any merit.
01:55:06 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Fortnight has gone back to the judge saying your honor not playing fair, they're not letting us in it's almost like you've got an executive branch that sort of ignores uh court orders and sets a precedent for everybody. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting political?
01:55:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, but it's a good point. You know once you it's a slippery slope. Once you start doing that, people lose respect. Epic says apple's denial is quote blatant retaliation for challenging in court. Well, duh really. I think the judge but this is the point, is the judge already yelled at apple, apparently without any effect. Apple's immediately appealed it uh. Apple says we're not gonna let it in until after the ninth circuit rules on on our uh appeal what do you think is gonna?
01:56:07 - Wil Harris (Guest)
what's? What's the end game here?
01:56:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
do indra the end game for apple or for epic, I feel like, uh, it's tim sweeney, right like they're. The end game was to make apple essentially get rid of these, uh, all these fees, especially if you're charging for stuff outside the app store. And they kind of got what they wanted. But I think, uh, you know, epic thought this is it.
01:56:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We can get right back there immediately and no apple's just making them sweat basically, although amazon immediately put a buy this book button on the kindle app, a lot, of, a lot of apps have immediately said oh good, we're going to put that button on there. Yeah, apple uh you know is getting around it by saying well, first of all, you can't do that, and if you, if you do it in the eu, where the law says you can, we're going to charge 27 commission. So you're not going to really save any money anyway. Uh, and that's what. That's what really cheesed the judge off. She said wait, that's called malicious compliance.
01:57:07
Next cloud has a complaint against android, against google. Uh, I think google maybe has a little bit of merit in this. For the last few months, if you use next cloud, you were not able to use the android version to copy files from android to your next cloud server. Next cloud complain and complain and complain. Finally, google has given in, according to NextCloud, unhappy with the recently lost file upload feature in NextCloud app for Android. So are we, and under that it said, good news. This morning, may 15th, google reached out to us and offered to restore the permission, which will give the functionality back that was lost. I understand google's probably thinking well, we don't want an app to be able to just kind of randomly transfer files off your android phone. But, on the other hand, this is next cloud.
01:58:03 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's an open source project, it's reliable this really feels like grandpa simpson waving his fist at the cloud I do that every day android is a platform of freedom and openness, except not like this, not always not too much, not always.
01:58:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have the, you have the new Galaxy S25, the Edge.
01:58:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
No, I don't really do phone reviews anymore, thank God, because those were a huge pain.
01:58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a hard life.
01:58:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's hard but no, we reviewed it, Sam Rutherford or no, Matt Smith reviewed that for us. Yeah, and you know he's liking it. But it's the S25 Edge. It's a thinner S25 by a few millimeters. It's a thinner s25 by a few millimeters and it's the sort of thing where it's like we gain nothing except a slightly thinner phone.
01:58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not much lighter than the less battery life, probably less battery life?
01:58:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
uh, no, telephoto lens, so the camera is worse as well. You kind of lose all these things to get this super thin phone. But look how thin it is.
01:59:04 - Wil Harris (Guest)
You've still got a case, otherwise it's gonna fall.
01:59:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean some people don't apparently the the case apple made is also really thin too, like that actually keeps it down.
01:59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or the case samsung made there are rumors that apple's gonna do the same thing with the iphone 17. There'll be a slim version. That's basically. It is the market demanding a thin phone.
01:59:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Is that why the market does not demand?
01:59:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought it was all. Johnny, I've pushing the thinness thing, you know I.
01:59:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think these companies are desperate to do something new, something a little different. It's because phones have gotten really, really boring, aside from the foldables, and even then that's a whole, that's not a fully fully baked uh you know thing to do right now. Yeah, this is going to be an era of super thin phones. Apple's going to try something here. The thinking is like does could be like. You know, this is the first step towards a foldable, because once you make one super thin side, you can make two and connect them together. So there's that, and I think everybody forgot. The new iPad pros are also crazy thin. The iPad pros are even thinner than this S25 edge right now, and I will. I will tell you the first time I saw one of those in person when I did WWDC last year. It was sort of a wow moment.
02:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love my M4 iPad Pro. It's funny. For years I thought the iPad is. You know, I want a Mac or I want a phone. The iPad doesn't have a role in my life and so I would buy them, but I really wouldn't have a use. But for some, things happen now, with the keyboard and everything. I use it more and more and more, and I'm actually using more than my macbook air lately that's interesting, can I?
02:00:34 - Wil Harris (Guest)
because, can I tell you, my my only good ipad story was uh, you know, I I love my ipad, but it's a. You know, it's a glorified netflix, but when Apple first launched it back in what? 2010? Like 2012. Yeah, 2011.
02:00:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, it was right before Steve.
02:00:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jobs in 2010.
02:00:55 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yes, what they used to do was simulcast the presentation from San Francisco into somewhere in London so that, as a London journo, you could go, you could watch it, and then they would have the models there and you could go and play afterwards.
02:01:15
Great. So there is a wonderful venue in London called the Old Truman Brewery and it does what it says on the tin. It's in East London, it used to be an enormous brewery and it's quite famous for being an old brewery. And it does what it says on the tin. It's in east london, it used to be an enormous brewery and it's it's quite famous for for being an old brewery, and apple um held this press launch there. So they've got it. You know it's six o'clock in the evening. They've got a big cinema screen, they've put seating out, they've um. You know you turn up as a journalist and you're thinking right, this can be fantastic. I'll turn up at six o'clock after work. I'll have a beer while I'm watching the. Yes, it's a brewery, of course you will, right. And you walk in and Apple puts on orange juice and sparkling water.
02:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I knew this. I knew where this was going, because Apple won't let you drink.
02:02:04 - Wil Harris (Guest)
There's no way, and they're Puritans this is going because apple won't let you drink. There's no way and they're puritans. I think maybe the best headline as a journalist I ever wrote was uh apple launches ipad, uh fails to organize. Piss up in brewery could have been fun.
02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Were you writing for the register at that point? That sounds like a register headline exactly right.
02:02:27
Well, maybe thin and a phone isn't what you want, but if you are bringing a handheld point of sale device to a table in a restaurant, thin probably is good. This is the new square 400. Handheld, they say, is one of the thinnest and lightest point of sale devices on the market. You see, you probably don't understand this. Well, no, you spend a lot of time in the US. In the US, we prefer to give our credit cards to a waiter who then removes it to the back of, out of your sight.
02:02:58 - Wil Harris (Guest)
That is like being a psycho. You guys are psycho Over here. You request the bill, the person brings the receipt, brings a little terminal and you tap your card and you never let go of your card and if harper, you would probably have more experience.
02:03:13 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Talking about the whole payment system here is ridiculous, yeah I am, I'm astounded, I love it and how and how muscle memory it is for americans who like go and sit in some restaurant in London and then hand the waiter who is like, why do I? Why what?
02:03:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you doing? You need your card, sir.
02:03:32 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Why would you? Oh, you're not from here, I'm sorry. I'll give you a receipt and a pin, but it's like this hilarious, hilarious thing and the terminal is great, like this is really cool stuff. But am I not mistaken in that I think you can do this with an iPhone right now? You?
02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
can they added that feature, Although I'll be honest, I'd much rather see something that looks like a point-of-sale device than the waiter saying I got my phone here. You want to pay, right?
02:04:01 - Wil Harris (Guest)
right right, so at a farmer's market.
02:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one thing.
02:04:04 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, my local farmer's market has a million of these, everything you know. You want a little bit of cheese, you want a little bit of you know pan of raisin, you want whatever. You just tap your card on a tiny little terminal.
02:04:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that I use my watch. I feel like it's magic. I feel like I'm actually not paying for anything. I'm just waving my hands. What?
02:04:24 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I like about using the watch is you get two gifts one you get to use the watch and the other is the eye roll from the person that is manning the terminal. I mean, I'm serious every time I do it, I'm just waiting for the eye roll because they're just like okay, yeah, exactly, I'm just sitting there like jeez and I use the watch right, oh my cool well the good news is here in the states, and perhaps thanks to Square, you're seeing more and more of these waiters coming to the table and you get to pay with your card.
02:04:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still a minority of restaurants I'm seeing more QR codes these days, yeah a lot of QR codes and I like that because it's just like boom.
02:05:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Okay, I take a picture, I leave.
02:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where's the QR code? Is it glued to the table? It's on the receipt, it's just on the receipt.
02:05:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, I have seen that yeah.
02:05:08 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's great, it's so nice and it uses for the people who are interested me. It uses web clip technology, I think on Android and on iOS, so it installs a little tiny, tiny iOS app. So the experience is really native, at least with Toast, and it's very interesting because Apple announced this whole idea of you.
02:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't have to have the app on your phone, it will load this little quickly, load a stub. That will do what you need to do and I never saw anybody use it so good. This is the first really cool that I'm aware of.
02:05:40 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's really cool and really smooth, and if I see it in a restaurant, I use it every time welcome to uh 2020 in england next, I know listen next you're gonna talk about health insurance, and then I gotta go why are carper?
02:05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of course, uh is an expert in payment systems. He sold his company to brain tree, which then became part of paypal. Work with both. Um, why is it we're so behind in the us? Because we didn't even get chip and pin. We, we got chip and sign.
02:06:07 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think. Well, technically the order was, I sold it to PayPal and then lived inside a brain tree. But I think the reason is because we are a very big country physically and it's hard to spread technology out easily. And then also we also are just scared of cost. And I think the US has a really bad not invented here problem where we look at something that is happening elsewhere in the world and we're just like, well, I mean, they're British, and then we just ignore everything that they possibly could bring.
02:06:41
Exactly, and I think they're beer warm, they don't. This is. It's really interesting because this, this, and I'm sure it's rooted in american exceptionalism and all this other stuff. But without getting into that, you see it all over where you know. For those of you who've been to, like shenzhen, like some of the stuff happening there, is incredible yeah, the future is not evenly distributed.
02:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really and I think the disappointing thing for a lot of americans is the future is not distributed to the united states and that's really some of that's also because, uh, a lot of times it's because it was invented here and when you have a lot of infrastructure around the like, that's why sms was so slow here, uh well, it's just like it's.
02:07:22 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It's like legacy, right, it's like it's legacy.
02:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, cell phones were invented here, yeah, but but we were way behind in things like sms and and cell phone payment systems over countries where they hadn't, you know, implemented all at once but we're really ahead on cdma thank god, really helped us out.
02:07:43 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Thank god your only american exceptionalism is how hard your cell phone payment system sucks we have a lot.
02:07:50 - Harper Reed (Guest)
We have a lot, but we will. That's a different podcast. There's a whole bunch that we excel in hey, there is one.
02:07:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm gonna do. One more piece of good news montana has become the first state to close the law enforcement data broker loophole. So we have. We have never had comprehensive privacy uh legislation in the united states. We maybe never will, because, for one thing, law enforcement really loves data brokers. It's a great way to get information without a wiretap right just cost a couple of bucks, uh.
02:08:21 - Wil Harris (Guest)
So I think I saw that on the wire right. That's yeah, that was a documentary right.
02:08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, that was 20 years ago, but it's the same today, right In every state other than Montana. If police want to know where you've been, according to the EFF, they don't have to present evidence and go to a judge to get a warrant. They use something called a pen warrant. I can't remember A pen warrant or pen. I can't remember the pen warrant, I think. Uh, they just go to a portal that the cell phone companies have set up, pay a buck 50, uh, or buy it from data brokers.
02:08:58
All the location data apps on your phone, all right, all that, all that data is being collected, recording in a location constantly and just uploaded to data brokers. We know this and there it is for sale on the open market. So Montana, with SB 282, has become the first state to close that loophole. In Montana, the government may not use money to get access to information about electronic communications, the contents of electronic communications, the contents of communications sent by tracking devices, digital information on electronic fund transfers, pseudonymous information or sensitive data, which is defined in Montana as information about a person's private life, personal associations, religious affiliation, health status, citizen status, biometric data, life, personal associations, religious affiliation, health status, citizen status, biometric data and precise geolocation still can go to a judge and get a warrant, which is fine, that's a perfect, that's fine make them how it should work.
02:09:57 - Harper Reed (Guest)
That's how it's supposed to work.
02:09:58 - Wil Harris (Guest)
It's the fourth amendment yeah that sounds to me like I can safely pay for my hookers on paypal in montana only right don't leave the state really bring it all back together will but yeah, I mean.
02:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is good news, of course. What's congress up to? Well, they just jammed, uh, and we'll see if it goes through, I think it will. They just jammed a um a bit into the budget reconciliation bill that would prevent states from regulating ai at all for 10 years. And who knows, they might get that privacy thing in there as well. Uh, the problem is, when you put it in the reconciliation bill, it's pretty, pretty hard to get it out it's kind of funny, though.
02:10:45
Beautiful bill there it's a big beautiful, getting bigger all the time beautiful.
02:10:50 - Harper Reed (Guest)
There's a beautiful bill there is a couple uh, I don't know right the way to say it pundits, I suppose, who are talking about how, unless it is such a discrete addendum that it could really affect future tech regulation as well.
02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. It might have an unintended consequence.
02:11:14 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Because if they are saying you can't regulate or create legislation around these things, that also could include all of the kind of protect the children privacy movements that the Republicans push try to push in their anti-encryption it could. It could, like any attempt to regulate big tech, which you know, just the copyright office is talking about this stuff around. Copyright, like any of this stuff, might be within the scope of this kind of hastily added piece of law, and so it'll be really interesting to see how this goes. And the one thing that I have been thinking about a lot is the US is not very good at iterative lawmaking, and that is, I think, one of the weaknesses of our program as it compares to other countries who are very good at this. Japan, for instance, did a very good job of iteratively addressing cryptocurrency and continues to do so.
02:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they make a bill and then adjust it, and adjust it and go back and forth and prove it, and prove it. We just make a law and then say, fine, we're done.
02:12:12 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Well, we say, fine, we're done, and then we just have to all deal with the consequences of that forever, while Will makes fun of us from across the pond.
02:12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, we're still using the Aliens and Sedition Act from the 18th century, right yeah?
02:12:26 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah, we are, it's not to say that other countries don't have old it's not to say that there aren't old good laws or old bad laws. It's just that we don't have a tendency to say whoops, the law we made two years ago didn't actually do a good job why don't we address it and fix it? So I find.
02:12:45 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I've got a boatload of tea to sell you.
02:12:49 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I mean, we're getting sold it, that's for sure, but um, I do think that this is, this is interesting.
02:12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like it's, I don't think, the side effect the unintended consequence of that, you know, ai law is that it is in its language. It prevents states from regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems or automated decision systems, and that is a very broad term. Any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics or artificial intelligence that uses a simplified output, a score, classification or recommendation to material credit scoring right oh it well, it's banning every content.
02:13:33
According to mike masnick and techtard, who is very active in all of this, every content moderation system ever created yeah yeah, it would preclude 99 of state think of the children's social media de-anonymization laws and 100 of the attempts to regulate social media under defective product theories of action.
02:13:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So good, maybe they should pass that I don't think you're very good at governing guys I don't feel like uh bad, it's not working out well for for anybody yeah, it's not just.
02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I hate to say it all of the children democrats, it's just as bad because, for different reasons, they support these social media laws as well the cosa thing is incredibly stupid too, and there's so many people telling them that chuck schumer is a sponsor of cosa yeah it's terrible, yeah.
02:14:28
Oh well, let's take a break, okay. Yeah, well, that's the way it is. Um, we are having some fun. We're going to wrap it up pretty soon here. I just want to let you all know. I know, will it's getting. The pubs are closing soon, so we'll get you out of here quick. Will, harris? He's in london. Great to have you instagram's. Will, harris, w-i-l-h-a-r-r-i-s that unique and wonderful spelling one l and two r's.
02:14:58
That's the uh that's what you say. That's what you've been saying your whole damn life, you poor fella. That's okay. My real name is leo and I've been saying leo, as in mayo, my whole life what do you know the?
02:15:12 - Wil Harris (Guest)
the reason was that, uh, you know, when you're growing up and you're playing, um, you know the street fighter 2 cabinets or the outrun cabinets, what wil is perfect, isn't it?
02:15:23 - Harper Reed (Guest)
you ever get three letters to put yeah I could write leo yeah I had heart or I was mine har or purr yeah, I wasn't neither good, no, not a good ones, or purr and forget the vindra hardwar.
02:15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're never gonna get that in there. No, he had a good. He had a good one dev.
02:15:41
That's pretty dope yeah, yeah, did you do dev nice when I when I could play arcade games, yeah nice it sounds like a painful childhood tale there, but uh, we won't delve into that, we're going to take a little break. More to come this week in tech, brought to you this week by melissa, the trusted data quality expert. They've been doing it longer than we have, since 1985. Now, good news If you use the Shopify app store which many I know of you do my son does Melissa's address validation app is now available for merchants in the Shopify app store. Enhance your business fulfillment. Keep your customers happy. With Melissa. It auto fills. It's great. You get enhanced address correction, which means it will correct and standardize addresses in more than 240 countries and territories and add missing components like the zip code or the postal code, as as you Brits call. It ensures compliance with local formatting rules all over the world. Melissa's address engine is certified by leading postal authorities worldwide and smart alerts will warn in real time. This is great if there's a potential issue with a shipping address and and it actually will do that uh checkout so customers can be told hey, that's not going to work. They can update that information before it even gets into your system, before the order's processed.
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02:18:48
Go to melissacom slash twit. Melissacom, slash twit. We thank them so much for their support over the many years now of this week in tech. Thank you, melissa. Ah, let's see where do we go next. Oh, I was talking about montana. There's another reason to go to montana. Montana's a very interesting state they have uh created. There's a bill for experimental medical treatments. You can go there to get access to treatments that are not FDA approved. Oh, lucky day, great, my lucky day is here. Once it's signed by the governor, it will be the most expansive in the country, allowing access to drugs that haven't been fully tested. All you have to do to sell any drug or treatment in montana is put it through phase one clinical trials that's the generally small first in human studies just to make sure it won't kill you. Uh, doesn't, doesn't show it's effective, just as it won't kill you. Um, this is really montana's becoming a very interesting state. One of the people, one of the groups pushing for this was longevity enthusiasts this is kind of the opposite of that.
02:20:15 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Um that ai law where it's just like they're like. Well, let's just make it as wide as possible whatever you want to do I'm I'm kind of for this.
02:20:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I whatever you want to do, I'm I'm kind of for this. I well, you have the choice right and I know it happens all the time that uh, I've known people, uh, who were dying, frankly, and couldn't get experimental treatments because they weren't fda approved. Yeah, if they could go to montana, if they had the money and they could go to Montana to get those, I think that's a good thing. And they couldn't I mean they one person I'm thinking of passed away. It couldn't have been. It couldn't have been any worse. Let's put it that way.
02:20:58 - Harper Reed (Guest)
I think the issue is how does it impact the, the, the other people within that community? Like if someone does some experimental treatment and then they become people within that community, like you know, if someone does some experimental treatment and then they become you know, like you know, they then require services as little as we do have in the US. That is still something that is impactful, you know, and so I would hope that we would be thinking through that. With that said, like you know, I mean I'm all for it, like I think, not just the longevity stuff, but like you were talking about all the examples of, of early um trials, but at the same time, you know, I I don't know if we need to have everyone being their own doctor. I kind of I kind of like my doctor telling me when I'm not supposed to take all the supplements.
02:21:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
02:21:43 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Um, so we'll see. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
02:21:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My guess is that it will be signed into law yeah, us army, uh bonita said what is getting in on the right to repair? Uh, apparently, uh, the army's buying stuff they couldn't fix, so and now it's going to uh, add right to repair provisions in all existing and future contracts with manufacturers, so that you don't have to bring it back to the shop when your tank breaks down.
02:22:17
You don't have to bring it back to the shop to get it fixed it's very convenient you'd think that would have been always kind of part of the deal, but no, in fact that you know they've had the same right to repair issues that we normal people have. Um. A 2019 report in the new york times described how a maintenance marine in south korea couldn't repair a generator because of the warranty, even though he had the tools. He had the know-how he could have fixed it. Engines at a US military base in Okinawa were packed up and shipped back to contractors in the United States for repair, according to ProPublica, because the Navy's contract with General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin forced the military to fly contractors to the ship to make repairs on proprietary equipment.
02:23:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You got to milk those government contracts for all they're worth.
02:23:10 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Man put everything in there right to repair well, it's like when you buy, you buy the thing, but the actual money's in the service contract right, that's right.
02:23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's boy. That's the great american way. By the way, I don't know, do you have hbo in the uk?
02:23:25 - Wil Harris (Guest)
no, it doesn't exist. We have a million different bastardized versions of it that um, none of which, none of they would buy the shows?
02:23:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
probably yeah. So then, hbo it's a tawdry tale. Um, hbo got remade, named hbo max. Hbo got remade. It named HBO Max uh, which was launched in 2020. Three years later, 2023, warner Brothers Discovery took the HBO off to say it's just Max Max, the one to watch for HBO, it's just Max uh. Now in a press release, they say we're returning the hbo brand in term it there. It's going to be called hbo max again. Thank you, david zaslav. Today we're bringing back hbo, the brand that represents the highest quality in media, to further accelerate that growth in the years ahead. Who pays these clowns?
02:24:30 - Wil Harris (Guest)
yeah, yeah. Has one man ever been paid so much for so little? Pop something up so massively?
02:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he didn't even say it's not tv, it's hbo.
02:24:40 - Harper Reed (Guest)
He didn't even say that he didn't even say that.
02:24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How many years did they spend millions did they spend building up that brand it?
02:24:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
doesn't, it doesn't matter. Zazloff came from discovery, he came from that whole side he doesn't, he has no loyalty to like the hbo thing. It's so very stupid. But we had a good day on the internet when, uh when this news hit it's probably pretty funny.
02:25:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, was it fun hilarious.
02:25:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Hilarious because this is also the company that, um, because they had multiple streaming services for a while. Remember, like they had HBO Go was their initial one, because that was if you had a subscription. Oh God, it was so awful. You could do that online, but if you don't have a subscription then you could go to HBO Now. Then HBO Max came, because they kind of obliterated both those things, and HBO Now became just HBO before it died.
02:25:29 - Harper Reed (Guest)
It was so crazy. Yeah, they, they had no, and there was also cinemax. I always like there's. You know, everyone thought it was, in fact, yep, so confusing we called it skinamax because they had the I was just gonna say the.
02:25:40 - Wil Harris (Guest)
The only reason I know cinemax is because of everyone that I know called it skinner Max.
02:25:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean both and Cinemax. They had like softcore porn at night. Everybody did.
02:25:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's how it was during the 90s, yeah you probably remember uh hearing this Apollo 13, mike Lovell uh saying an oxygen tank has exploded on apollo 13, crippling the command module. The man who saved apollo 13 with duct tape just passed away ed smiley. Uh, he was 95. He led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew. It's kind of an amazing story. Here he is holding his prototype. It's kind of, I mean it's just amazing.
02:26:44
Yeah, it's just amazing. It looks like a hose from a. But this is all stuff that was on Apollo 13 they could use to make something that would save them.
02:26:54 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Sort of reminds me of the guy that does the advert. You know where. He just slaps the, slaps the duct tape on whatever sort of oh yeah, leaking you know.
02:27:05 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Yeah, it's so good. I like how we just took this guy whose legacy is incredible and I was like yeah, it's like that tiktok, it's not.
02:27:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He and 60 other engineers were given less than two days to invent a solution using materials already on board the spacecraft. If you saw the movie ap Apollo 13, you might remember this. There was a documentary xiii that came out a few years ago that actually featured Smiley um. In the movie Apollo 13, a character inspired by Smiley dramatically dumps rubber tubes, garment bags, duct tape and other materials under the table and says the people upstairs handed us this one of the table. And says the people upstairs handed us this one. We gotta come through. They did. They created a carbon dioxide scrubber from parts found aboard the apollo 13 spacecraft and made it back home safe and sound. Smiley got a nod from the president at the time, dick nixon.
02:28:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Uh, ed smiley dead at the age of 95 do we know why he was not in the movie directly? I was kind of astounded.
02:28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should have been huh, should have been just his name in the documentary I think yeah yeah, uh, but yeah, it would have been nice to give him some credit.
02:28:20 - Wil Harris (Guest)
He he said in the uh, in the xiii, the 13 documentary if you're a southern boy, if it moves and it's not supposed to, you use duct tape yeah, that really reminds me of the, uh, the sort of um flow chart that I once saw as a sort of you know early, uh, engineering, uh student, which was uh, does it move? Yes, is it supposed to? No, apply duct tape. Does it move? No, is it supposed to? Yes, apply wd-40 that's it.
02:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all you need. It's all you need. What a fun show this has been we. I am so glad to have you guys on. I'd love to get you all back together, reunite the team. Uh, devinder, we always love having you on. Davinder is my uh designated hitter when I'm out of town. I'm leaving uh for a vacation in september, so we'll make sure to get in touch. Nice, yeah, we love having you run the show. Uh, senior editor and gadget. Super smart. Good news doesn't have to review phones anymore, can I?
02:29:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
review a lot of laptops and video cards now, apparently, but that's where the fun is that's where the fun is yeah you get.
02:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that a promotion? You've been upstairs kind of.
02:29:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Just kind of, I think I'm the only person with like a dedicated gaming rig. Ah, there you go, you know that's, that's man.
02:29:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've done some of that stuff. I give you a lot of props. That's a really hard thing it's, it's something, yeah yeah, it's a lot of work. It's great to see you, davindra. Uh, thank you also will, harris. Great to see you again.
02:29:56 - Wil Harris (Guest)
I hope you find find work well, can I, can I give a quick, a quick plug to a? Uh, yes, to a, to a little, um, a little bit of work that I'm involved in. If you are in london or if you're in the uk, um, go and hit up um phantompeakcom. Phantompeakcom is fantastic, it's is it?
02:30:19
p-e-e-k no, it's p-e-a-k an open world immersive experience it is a uh western steampunk styled, uh bar immersive theatrical experience and you can go along and um, you can use your smartphone to go and solve all sorts of mysteries along the way, and and I'm working with those guys Is Neil Patrick Harris there. That's cool. He's there, he's loved it and I am helping them do a little bit of work to add to the technology side of it.
02:30:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to come to London just to go visit Phantom.
02:31:01 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Peak, phantom Peak is fantastic. It's sort of an escape room crossed with. You go on trails or quests, you're tasked with helping the townsfolk.
02:31:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Phantom Peak is fantastic. It's sort of an escape room crossed with uh, you go on trails or quests, You're tasked with helping the townsfolk. This sounds like that blue game in real life.
02:31:16 - Wil Harris (Guest)
Yeah, so, so that's what I'm spending my time doing at the moment. And, uh, anybody that's in London, um, hit me up on Twitter, hit me up on Instagram.
02:31:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll, I'll, I'll, hit me up on twitter, hit me up on instagram, I'll. I'll hook you up. And there's booze too. Oh yeah, what did you call it? A piss up? Can I have a piss up there?
02:31:38 - Wil Harris (Guest)
we can organize a piss up in a brewery a beer driven piss up.
02:31:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I want. Thank you will. It's great to see you, harper reed. You're the best man I gotta. We gotta get more of you, uh, on our shows because, hey, look at what he does with his fingers uh, uh, just because just your knowledge of ai and and your and your kind of reasonableness about it all, uh, and your enthusiasm is great and I really appreciate that. You can find out more about harper at his blog, harperblog. Uh, and his company, 2389.ai. Do you have customers or who are you? Who do you? Who you? Who's your target for this?
02:32:23 - Harper Reed (Guest)
oh, we're, we're, we're.
02:32:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an early stage.
02:32:27 - Harper Reed (Guest)
We're early stage. We just got laptops Like I, like this was the we're. We're real early Like I just got a laptop like a like a month ago.
02:32:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So so what laptops does two, three, eight, nine use?
02:32:38 - Harper Reed (Guest)
Oh, we bought a MacBook, mac Pro, macbook Pros with just a boatload of RAM because we're running models locally, and having the ability to run those models locally is really incredible it's kind of amazing what apple's done with its silicon it really is yeah, position I have not yet installed rosetta, since don't apple silicon was released, and it's every once in a while. It's funny because all it does is show what companies are not updating their build chain by now.
02:33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're not writing to the chip, you're crazy. What are you doing? The?
02:33:14
problem is apple made rosetta too. Too good, it's good, it's really good. That's the problem. Really good, yeah, so there wasn't a lot of good impetus to to rewrite your code, but do, because apple silicon's amazing. I, I have an m3, I'm sitting in front of an m3 max right now and of course, I have the m4 mini and the m4 uh, ipad. But I'm gonna wait because in two years I'm not gonna do the m5, I'm doing the m6. I think the big leap I know the big leap is going to be in two years. They're going to have oled screens, they're going to have redesigned laptops. So I'm going to, when I start my startup, we're going to have m5s or maybe m6s, I don't know something. Agents that conspire with you, not against you, at 2389.ai how cool is that?
02:34:02
we're all about conspiracy thanks to everybody who joined us this week. We really appreciate your watching and listening. We do stream the show live every sunday, 2 to 5 pm eastern. You don't have to watch live, I'm sorry2 to 5 pm pacific. 5 to 8 pm eastern. 2100 utc. I only say that if you want to watch live and chat with us live as we're doing the show, we stream on eight different platforms TikTok, xcom, youtube, twitch, facebook, linkedin, kik and if you're in the club, you can get behind the velvet rope and watch us in the Discord. Actually, I should give a little plug to the Club Twit Discord. That is a great place to hang. We just did Stacy's Book Club on Friday.
02:34:49
On Monday, we're going to do the Microsoft Build keynote. Paul and Rich, paul Thorat and Richard Campbell will join us for that keynote at 9 am tomorrow and I have to tell you that unfortunately, thanks to Apple apple lawyers, we've decided no longer to stream our keynote coverage publicly because we've gotten too many takedowns. So we're going to be doing a lot of keynotes this week and we will be doing them for club members only in the club twit discord and on the twit plus feed after the fact. So build is tomorrow 9 00 am tuesday, 10 am. Google io. Yes, we're going to have a little hangout with dick de bartolo. The giz was on friday. Then we come back on june 9th, uh, for wwdc. So this is another reason to join the club. The keynotes now the keynote coverage will only be in club, just because we don't want to get taken off of youtube. It's kind of a chilling effect of that. So if you're not a member of the club yet, it is only seven bucks a month, 84 a year.
02:35:54
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02:36:36
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02:37:15
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May 18 2025 - Cardboard, Plastic Bags, & Duct Ta…
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