Windows Weekly 921: Regret as a Service

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 921: Regret as a Service

Podcast Information:

• Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
• Host/Author: TWiT
• Episode: Windows Weekly 921: Regret as a Service
• Release Date: February 27, 2025
• Description: Leo Laporte hosts a discussion with technology experts Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell, covering the latest Microsoft news, AI integrations, and more.

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Introduction

In Episode 921 of Windows Weekly, hosted by Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, and Richard Campbell, the trio delves into the latest updates from Microsoft, emphasizing the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Windows. The episode, titled "Regret as a Service," blends technical insights with light-hearted banter, making it both informative and entertaining for tech enthusiasts.

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Week D Releases: Microsoft’s New Windows Versions

The discussion kicks off with the anticipation of Microsoft's Week D releases, referring to the new versions of Windows. Paul clarifies, "We are still in this window where if you have a machine enrolled in the beta channel, you have the option you don't have to accept updates for 24H2 instead of 23H2" ([07:06]).

Key Points:

• Release Preview: Both Windows 23H2 and 24H2 are receiving updates, with 24H2 introducing AI-driven features.
• Patch Tuesday: Upcoming minor updates are expected on Patch Tuesday in March, focusing on fixes and minor enhancements rather than dramatic changes.

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AI Integration in Windows: Copilot and Semantic Search

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Microsoft's integration of AI into Windows, particularly through the Copilot feature and semantic search capabilities.

Copilot Features:

• AI Models: Copilot utilizes several language models (referred to as AI updates) to enhance search functionalities.
• Taskbar Sharing: A new feature allows users to share documents directly from the taskbar's jump list, streamlining collaboration ([04:22]).

Semantic Search:

• Enhanced Search Capabilities: Semantic search aims to improve the accuracy and relevance of search results by understanding the context and intent behind queries. Paul mentions, "It's a combination of image recognition in the case of images" ([11:10]).
• Integration Challenges: Despite the promising features, both hosts express skepticism about the practical effectiveness, noting historical struggles with Windows Search: "Steve Jobs made fun of this with macOS tiger like 25 years ago and we still haven't caught up" ([10:25]).

Notable Quote:

"Semantic search is one method by which AI might solve this problem for us." – Paul Thurot ([11:10])

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Recall Feature and its Evolution

The Recall feature, initially introduced to help users manage their workflow by capturing screenshots and screen recordings, has undergone several updates. Initially, it allowed users to revisit past screenshots, but recent changes aim to integrate more AI-driven functionalities.

Updates:

• Data Deletion: Microsoft announced the deletion of existing recall data to implement significant updates, although specifics remain undisclosed ([17:48]).
• Functionality Enhancements: Features like "Click to Do" have been reallocated elsewhere, limiting the practical use of Recall for day-to-day tasks.

Notable Quote:

"Recalling is fine. We will stop talking about it again. It's like, wait guys, you got to start talking about it." – Paul Thurot ([17:48])

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Framework Laptops: Modular and Upgradeable Systems

Framework's latest offerings in the laptop market were another central topic. The discussion highlights the company's commitment to modularity and upgradability, allowing users to replace components like the processor, RAM, and ports easily.

Key Points:

• Modular Design: Each component is a separate module, enhancing customization and longevity.
• New Releases: Three new products were announced, including a Ryzen AI-based module and their first desktop computer, emphasizing the expansion beyond laptops.
• Market Reception: Framework laptops are gaining traction among enthusiasts who appreciate the ability to upgrade their systems without purchasing entirely new devices.

Notable Quote:

"Everything can be replaced. Neat." – Paul Thurot ([53:05])

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USB Port Standardization

Paul and Richard discuss the proliferation of different USB port types in modern laptops, expressing frustration over the inconsistency and lack of standardization.

Key Points:

• Current Scenario: Laptops often feature multiple USB types (e.g., Thunderbolt 4, USB 3.2, USB 2.0), leading to confusion and inconvenience.
• Framework’s Approach: Framework addresses this by offering uniform USB modules, allowing users to customize their ports without incurring additional costs for various dongles.
• User Experience: The ability to configure ports as desired enhances usability and reduces reliance on external adapters.

Notable Quote:

"Guys just use the best one all the time, everywhere." – Paul Thurot ([58:46])

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Transition to AI Features and Personal Experiences

As the episode progresses, the conversation shifts towards personal experiences with AI tools, the challenges of integrating AI into daily workflows, and the potential future of AI-assisted computing.

Key Points:

• AI in Daily Tasks: Paul shares his experimentation with using AI to manage and summarize content from extensive sources like his own articles and books.
• Custom GPTs: The idea of creating personalized GPT models grounded in specific datasets to answer tailored queries was explored, highlighting both the potential and the complexities involved.
• AI Challenges: Concerns about the reliability of AI-generated summaries and the technical limitations of current AI models were discussed.

Notable Quote:

"This is running slowly time evolution on a slow boil." – Paul Thurot ([42:48])

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with a light-hearted exchange among the hosts, touching on topics like AI-generated content and personal anecdotes related to technology use. They emphasize the continuous evolution of AI in Windows and the importance of staying updated with the latest technological advancements.

Closing Remarks:

"Windows Weekly – more in a moment, but first, a word from our sponsor..." – Leo Laporte ([32:12])

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Speaker Attribution for Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot: Offers technical insights and personal experiences with AI integrations in Windows.
• Richard Campbell: Provides supplementary commentary and critiques of the discussed features.
• Leo Laporte: Hosts the conversation, guiding the discussion and interjecting with humor and additional insights.

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This episode of Windows Weekly offers a comprehensive look into Microsoft's latest Windows updates, the burgeoning role of AI in everyday computing, and the innovative approaches of companies like Framework in the hardware space. Through engaging dialogue and expert analysis, listeners gain valuable perspectives on the current state and future directions of technology.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about Week D, the releases from Microsoft new versions of Windows. We'll also talk about putting AI to work. The Amazon Echo now has an AI era. And then. No, you're not going to be able to get Office for free, supported by ads. Or are you? I don't know. Paul will explain next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurada and Richard Campbell. Episode 921, recorded Wednesday, February 26, 2025. Regret as a service. Hey, all you winners and dozers, gather round. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Microsoft news. Week D version, not weekd version. Week D version. Paul Thurat is here from thurat.com. hello, Paulie.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm afraid to say anything. This is like the eighth time we've tried to start this recording.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello. Except everybody watching. Also from beautiful Madeira park, British Columbia, Mr. Richard Campbell. Hello, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Hello. And say it is beautiful. I'll give you the outside shot if you like.

[Leo Laporte]

This I.

[Paul Thurot]

This.

[Leo Laporte]

I always. I feel. I always. So jealous.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it is. It's a pretty day.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a beautiful day. And there, if you look close, the sea lions are out there. They've been eating herring and they're rafting at the moment. They're all holding on to each other in a big hole.

[Leo Laporte]

How fun.

[Richard Campbell]

And they regulate their heat by holding one flipper up in the air so they all look like sharks. It's weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's a beautiful few, Richard. Thank you for sharing that with us. And now on with the show.

[Paul Thurot]

Very natural, Leo. Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

That is the best segment in my life.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you are the master at this.

[Richard Campbell]

As good as it gets.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome to Week D. Is there a Week E ever?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there can be. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Four times a year, theoretically.

[Paul Thurot]

A couple of weeks a year where you have a four times a year.

[Leo Laporte]

How does Microsoft judge that? Do they start the weeks on Sunday or Monday?

[Paul Thurot]

It's either Monday or Sunday. I'm not actually sure, but either one works well.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, that's how we, you know, either one's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Getting a fifth week would require extending into a Monday, I would think.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Yeah. So maybe it is Monday. I don't really know, actually.

[Leo Laporte]

No one.

[Paul Thurot]

You have stumped me. Yeah. I will ask Chachi PT what it thinks about for purposes of the service life cycle. Does Microsoft begin Its Sunday.

[Richard Campbell]

Seriously, it's probably Tuesday because that's when the thing's supposed to deploy, so. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, no. Okay. Actually it kind of doesn't matter because it's the fifth Tuesday of the month. So the month is a thing and it doesn't matter what the week starts on the Tuesday. That will always be the fifth Tuesday, regardless of how they measure.

[Leo Laporte]

But not every month has five Tuesdays.

[Paul Thurot]

You have not stumped me, Mr. Laporte. I figured there will only be four.

[Richard Campbell]

Of them in a given year.

[Leo Laporte]

I see you have the new AI enabled Amazon Echo. That's why, right?

[Paul Thurot]

No, this is the non AI engineered Google, whatever it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm looking at one as we speak.

[Paul Thurot]

Every third picture is a black screen that shows nothing. And then when I say to it, hey Jay, I'd like to not see that photo again, it says, I'm sorry, we don't know how to do that on this device.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you just have to enjoy the blackness. It's a brief period of rest. So there was, let's see, Weekd preview update. Am I wrong on that?

[Paul Thurot]

No, you're correct. Well, you're correct unless you actually wanted to get it. I have yet to see it on any of my computers. But 23, 24 H2 are getting the same set of updates essentially. And it's what we talked about before. So this has made its way into the release preview channel in the Insider program and now it's here in preview form. And then in two weeks on Patch Tuesday in March. I can't believe it's already March or almost March. We'll get these in stable. So for now you can avoid it. But then in about two weeks you can not avoid it. So in keeping with the Patch Tuesday from this past month, I guess technically from this month, minor updates. I did a little episode on Hands on Windows about the Patch Tuesday updates from. I guess it's February and March and potentially beyond probably June by the time you see that. But at some point we'll be able to go through that. So there's not anything dramatic. Like I said. So sharing from the taskbar. If you have an app that's open or pinned to the taskbar and you right click and it has a jump list with documents. You'll see a share item next to those documents. So you can share right from there.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a nice feature.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's about it. That's important. I mean the spotlight has changed in a minimal way, both on the lock screen and on the desktop, just for ease of access to the identifying that image that you're seeing, you can snooze Windows Backup and File Explorer. So if you've chosen to turn off folder backup for one or more of those folders, you know, it has that kind of annoying little icon like Start Backup, you can say, hey, turn this off for a little while. You can't turn it off, but you can snooze it. So better than nothing. And that's most of it. I mean, there's more obviously, but most of it's just fixes and minor changes. So nothing, nothing dramatic, which is, you know, a good, good way to start.

[Richard Campbell]

The year and just in the, in the air of completeness. There are five Tuesdays in April, July, September and December this year.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'm glad you did the math. Thank you.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just, I want to double check.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you ask Emacs for that or was that.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I did. I looked at a calendar. It was weird, I know.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's a. Weird. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeez, man.

[Paul Thurot]

What do you not use technology away? I flipped through a paper calendar like, like a caveman and then I burned it for fire because I'm over here. So. Yeah, actually, in terms of Windows servicing, if you think about it though, the, the months that follow, the months that Richard just noted are a little bit of a break. Right. Because those weeks, there's actually a three week break, if you will, between week D and patch Tuesday.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we'll get the first one of those in what, May. I think you said April is the first one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, April's versus the first 50. So yeah, May I have an extra. It'll be a little delayed.

[Paul Thurot]

We'll muddle through it somehow. So increasingly, thanks to Microsoft, I feel like I occasionally have to say things that I feel like people will be listening to, maybe in their car out walking and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about. Right. But I'm going to launch into it anyway because what else are you going to do? So in the Insider program, we are still in this window where if you have a machine enrolled in the beta channel, you have the option you don't have to to accept updates for 24H2 instead of 23H2. And what that means is people in the beta channel, depending on what they've done, will see different updates going forward. So if you have moved forward into 24H2, you are getting the same builds that we get in the dev channel. And I've signed on to the dev channel myself on my Surface laptop because I'm trying to test these features that are unique and some of them to copilot plus PCs, right. Like recall and click to do and so forth. And then you also just get whatever features that are coming down the pike. So I'm a little forward from most, I guess, in this capacity. I'm actually behind most in other capacities, but whatever. So dev and beta, if you're in 24H2 this past week got an update to what Microsoft is not actually now calling. Semantic search. That was the name for a little while, but we don't know what the name is going to be. But I'll keep using that term until.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't imagine how they didn't use the word AI. Like, it's insane to me.

[Paul Thurot]

Copilot search. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So obviously, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So I think possibly going back as far as within a couple of months of the initial, what was then called Bing Chat introduction, Microsoft started talking about this thing which has different names now, its names are legion. Custom GPT was the initial name. It's a little technical of a name. Some of the AI vendors are calling these things apps, you know, but the idea is that you are grounding the AI in a specific set of documents or maybe a folder on a computer, whatever it might be. And of course, as soon as I heard that, I thought, well, I'm going to do this because I have this ginormous hundreds of gigabytes archive of work data going back 30 years. Ish. And I often have to find things and I can't. Right. And so now you'll be able to prompt a query, AI, whatever the AI is when this system is enacted and, you know, get information out of it. Right. So I feel like this is technically possible somewhere today, somehow, something, something. But in Windows directly, what they're doing is they're adding this feature which again, may or may not be called semantic search. So you can search from the search box on the taskbar, which opens the search pane, which is now Windows key S. Right. I got to make sure here. Yeah. On this computer, I have the wrong computers. Yeah. So up through 24H2, up through Copilot + PCs, Windows key + Q or S would launch the search pane. Right. With search highlights, et cetera, et cetera. This. I don't know why I'm looking. This. I already know this one doesn't have it. And then you can search in the File Explorer. Right. And if you've used this search, you know that neither one of these Things works worth a damn.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's search on Windows. Don't be silly. It doesn't work at all. Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, Steve Jobs made fun of this with macOS tiger like 25 years ago and we still haven't caught up.

[Richard Campbell]

Guy's been dead for a decade and still funny.

[Paul Thurot]

He's still right. Yeah, yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. It's unbelievable. But you know, that's the. I guess that's what we live with here in the Windows world. So semantic search is one method by which AI might solve this problem for us. Right. It's the technique basically behind recall. You know, this notion of you're not actually searching. Well, technically it is metadata. Right. But it's not metadata in the files. Like you have a photograph and maybe the metadata has like the date taken. And if you were an idiot, you might have went in there and typed names of people that are something.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not going to do that.

[Paul Thurot]

No. No one does this. Right. So what it does is some combination of image recognition in the case of images. I don't know how it's doing this with text, but I mean it would.

[Richard Campbell]

Make sense for when it takes the snapshots for it do as much analysis at the time to create a set of tags essentially. To make that.

[Paul Thurot]

Create that surgery. Exactly. To make the search fast. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't actually know that that's how it does it. It kind of doesn't matter. But integrating this type of search into Windows Search. Right. Which again you could access in those two different places is a good idea if it works. I mean, it's a good idea. We never really solve the index problem. Right. So on my own computers I do the full disk index thing. You can turn that on. It's something I bet most people don't do.

[Richard Campbell]

If you have an to have your computer up to stuff when you're not using it. And it's a way.

[Paul Thurot]

Before we moved to SSDs it was a way to create like a chattering.

[Richard Campbell]

Sound because you're constant noise from your machine. Now all it does is speed up the demise of your SSDs.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Now we have SSDs that are played enough to die silently so we don't have to worry about that. It's fine. Yeah. So they've been rolling this out slowly and of course it's Copilot plus PC only. Right. Because it's using these on disk. I keep wanting to look at this computer. I have the wrong computer here. So I'm sorry. So if you have a copilot, PC, Snapdragon or X86, you can go into your Windows Update history and you'll see the four. They're LLMs or SLMs. They don't call it that. They're called AI updates that constitute the models used for this purpose. And also for recall, there were many more models on the computer. I actually don't know how to find any of them. But those four are in. You can see them in Windows Update. So it is using those. I do know that. And I also know that it does not work for me. I have not gotten this to work. It is slowly rolling out to see if you have it A. You have to meet those qualifications. But if you go to File Explorer and go to that little search box up in the corner or if you bring up the search interface, there's a search bar at the top. It will have that little pink, purple, glittery thing we were always doing for AI because apparently this is a musical theater from the 1970s. I don't know. But whatever we've settled on this Scholar scheme.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know, it could be the Technicolor Dreamcoat or Cool.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. The Wiz, something like that. Look, I have to say this in sort of a theoretical sense. I think this is a cool idea. I hope this solves the problem. The other way would be literally to use an AI and not train it, but have it assess this data and index it, essentially.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think no retrieval Augmented generation RAG is the, is the mechanism for having it available without having to retrain the model over and over again.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So we're going to talk about this a little bit later in the show.

[Richard Campbell]

The combination of RAG and semantic search together is supposed to be the magic, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep. The simplest version of this is you could open Copilot anywhere. You get Copilot or go to ChatGPT or whatever and you upload a document and then you start asking it questions. Right. So imagine that. But for your whole, you know, file system, kind of, you know, kind of cool.

[Richard Campbell]

This kind of something we'd actually want. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Like, yeah, something I want for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Tell me more about my stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, yep. And I listen, I. I spend so much time looking for something I wrote.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, I've been doing this for 30 plus years now. I have a lot of documents. I have the entire books I've written over many years.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, we used to have. Used to be able to buy a Google appliance. It was a one year blue box I got a few of them over back in the day. You stick it in Iraq and it would do indexing on your file store. It was what we wanted.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They had us briefly had a browser plugin for individuals that would do something like that as well. Right. In addition to, you know, Internet search. But now these companies have those desktop clients for the storage things they do and whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

That kind of went away, but it's coming back now. It's just software and we call it, you know, large language models and RAG and semantic search. But it's just software.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. And I. The language of AI is so foreign that now I know what it's like to listen to me talk to someone else about tech topics because I'm like, what. What are you talking about? You sound like you're speaking Dutch.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Recognize every one of the words you're saying. I just don't know what they mean in the.

[Paul Thurot]

But they don't mean anything together. And I wish you would stop doing that. You're freaking me. Yeah. So anyway, this is in the Devin beta channel on 24H2 if you're in that. But it's CFR so it's rolling out over time. You'll get it when you get it. I have it partially on my search.

[Richard Campbell]

And I like this idea that it's like. It's almost an element of recall which is really doing photo scanning of your screen captures. Now actually scan the photos in my OneDrive so there's information available to them.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. Yeah. And that's how. Right. So I should set up.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what it should have been all along.

[Paul Thurot]

You mentioned a crucial part of the story which is that the initial release of this, which, you know, this is. It's preview. It's not even. They don't even call it a beta. Right. But was for text and for different document types. And now the update they added this past week is for photos that are in your OneDrive. Right? That's exactly right. Yeah. So you might, you know, you go to search and it's just like the, you know, I have to make things up but green sweater. And then it will look through your photos now in addition to whatever documents you might have. And of course in Windows Search you can confine it and say I just want this to be files and it will find things that match and it's interesting to do. Again, what I really want is that RAG functionality that Richard is talking about where I can point an AI at something. And you know what? I'm sorry, we're going to talk about this a little bit later. I don't want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but this is something I've always been interested in. I feel like we're right on the.

[Richard Campbell]

Cusp of they're getting to. After two and a half years of hardcore hype, we're getting to features people will actually benefit from.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Taking a while, but we're getting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So two weeks ish ago, some time ago they issued an update also to dev and beta. I think it might have been the first of those releases that went out to both where they said, hey, you know all that recall data you have that you were storing so you could find stuff? We're going to delete all of it and it's because we're going to make a big update under the covers to recall and we'll talk about that later. Okay, so this one has that big update to recall which they have not discussed in the slightest. So I have no idea what it.

[Richard Campbell]

Because not explaining recall has gone so well for them so far.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, exactly. Well, now that we have all accepted it, recall is fine. We will stop talking about it again. It's like wait guys, you got to start talking about it. Like so I'm sure they will have a separate post at some point. In fact, I would be surprised if maybe what they're actually waiting for is build and where they want to do some set of announcements, whatever it might be. But yeah, I mean it's fair to say that the recall they announced last June has appeared very slowly and has changed and has been updated and is better and all that stuff. But I also will say having defended it as much as any human could, I also find myself never using it. This may be tied to something again, to that topic I keep alluding to. I apologize for doing that continuously, but I struggle to use AI on kind of a day to day basis, which.

[Richard Campbell]

I think and I can advocate once again for recall is the perfect tool for just enough administration where when you're in an elevated privilege level, you want screenshots of everything you're doing because you don't want to be there longer than you absolutely need to and you want absolute proof of what you did.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I think the best thing that's happened to recall this sound a little ironic is taking features out of it and putting those features elsewhere. So like click to do when they first announced it was a feature of recall where you could bring up a shot from the past and then do things with the text and images you could see on that screen. And that's fine. But I want to do that live. I want to do that in the system. And now you can again only in preview. It's not in stable yet or anything like that. But that. So they, they pulled that out and I think that this semantic search is a little bit like that as well. Right. You know that this is kind of. They started it with recall, I think, you know, I can only imagine or conject, you know, what they were thinking. But I'm sure at the time they were at kind of a rushed schedule and we want to have something that's cool that we could announce. You know, with these new PCs, everything.

[Richard Campbell]

Around that whole Snapdragon launch was botched. The dev kits were late. The feat nobody really defined a useful feature.

[Leo Laporte]

Late for non existent.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, late and then so late it became irrelevant.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that was on Qualcomm by the way. But yeah, you're right. I mean the whole. It's unfortunate. It's too bad because that's when it.

[Richard Campbell]

Landed on Microsoft too. Like honest to goodness.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, I meant the.

[Richard Campbell]

Just indexing content in OneDrive and stuff. Like just start with that something that everybody already has the problem.

[Paul Thurot]

I think, I think it was a time to market thing and I thought. And because we're only getting, remember this is a long time late, we're just starting to get these things.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

They also at that same show announced the. What do you call it, the Windows Copilot runtime and then never released it. Right. And so now it's in a very. It's in an experimental version of the Windows app SDK. And honestly it's in really good shape. It's just not available to everybody. So this stuff takes a while. I think they were looking for a little bit of a win. And the thing that makes me feel bad about that is that we've kind of lost track of the fact that like the computers these guys shipped were awesome. Like they're good, awesome battery life, great performance.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I just wish I could get a desktop in that with that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I know, I know. So I really itching to build a.

[Richard Campbell]

Machine and they're just not making it easy for me to do. Yeah, well what process do you pick right now?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I mean, well, and then to me the next step here and again I do this every year, Richard, so you get used to this in time. But we always, I always say, you know, maybe at build they will announce that they're bringing these copilot plus PC capabilities to computers with GPUs.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

What a concept. You know, that'd be nice because of the tops.

[Richard Campbell]

Please.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. Because it feels like that's the time for that kind of announcement. But I don't know anything about that. And I would say if you were to go back and find. Every time I said something like maybe it build, I was wrong. Like 90 something percent of the time or something, it's. It just doesn't seem to ever happen. So yeah, Copilot plus PC and this stuff, it just seems like it's on a slow boil. So anyway, sorry. And then one minor update to the Stimping tool in Canary Endev. But it doesn't say beta, but they run the same. I don't know. Anyway, it's an app, so you update that app through the store. So Stimping tool takes screenshots, but it also does screen recordings. And they're adding the ability to. It's the most basic and obvious thing in the world to trim the beginning and end of the video. Right. So a lot of times when you record the screen, you're trying to capture.

[Richard Campbell]

Whatever it is, you have that couple of seconds when you turned it on and get yourself in position. You want to cut that off and.

[Paul Thurot]

You want to just cut it. Right. So I've been, by the way, talk.

[Richard Campbell]

About a machine learning model. Make everybody happy to automatically default to. Hey, can I just trim this to this for you? Is that good?

[Paul Thurot]

You know that's coming. I mean, and it's probably in some tools already, but. Yes, absolutely. So we'll get there.

[Richard Campbell]

The low hanging fruit for folks, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So in the beta channel now, this is for The People on 23H2. If I could editorialize for two seconds back in. I'm done. That's two seconds. No. So back in Windows 8, they added a bunch of new features, a lot of which kind of disappeared obviously, but some of which persisted. And one of them was this notion of system wide share. And for share to work, especially back in the beginning, what you needed was apps that would communicate to the system that they were targets for certain types of sharing. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's no different than cut and paste. Right? Like cut and paste is actually.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's kind of. Yeah. Next gen cut and paste, I guess you can call it or whatever. But you know, the idea was I have this image right click Share. Maybe I want to share it via WhatsApp, which is an app you might share with or Outlook or whatever. Right. You might want to share it to an image editing App and that would be one, you know, that's one. Okay, so this is a common thing we do on phones and mobile devices. Microsoft obviously years long attempt to make Windows simple like that work similarly and share, for whatever it's worth, Share used to be, you know, remember over on the side. But the, that was. I just forgot the charm bar. I almost called it the Captain Crunch bar, the Lucky Charms bar there in the corner. So that, that disappeared. So now in Windows 10 and now 11, it shares more of a, like a pane or window that pops up. They've added things like nearby sharing, so if you have computers on the local network, you can share from computer to computer, which I do a lot. They added to Richard's point copy and paste to this interface. Right. They've done a lot to try to get people to use this thing. It's pretty clear that no one's really using it because they keep trying. So they took all the meta apps like WhatsApp and Facebook or whatever and made them share targets for things that are compatible with those apps. This is something Meta did not do. Microsoft was just like, you know, we think people will use this, we like to do this. So they added it for meta, probably for free, right. Just to get it going. You can share to your phone, right? So no one's using this. So in the beta channel in 23H2, not in 24H2. Curiously, they're testing a new way to share. They're not getting rid of the old way, but in the same way that you drag a window around and you get that little bar at the top for snap where you can pull it up and you get the layouts and you can use one of the layouts if you, you can drag a file. And if you drag a file now instead of a window, you'll get a different pane. And this is a drop target for share. So it's a different way to share. They will get you to share somehow.

[Richard Campbell]

The joke, everybody wants this, right? Like you always have this problem. It's just that you don't think to use it and every time you try and use it, it doesn't work.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And I think this is to me.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that companion app in Windows to connect to my Pixel 9 phone any given time that's doing something different. Mostly it's annoying me because I haven't configured the way it wants it configured. It wants to notify me all the time about everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry, but it's very much that dynamic of, hey, I just want to throw a picture over here. And it turns out easier to just go to Google Photos and go download it than it is to try and.

[Paul Thurot]

Make the tried and true Email yourself, which, by the way, is one of the options in Share hello, which is sort of a capitulation of sorts. But the issue I have with this is not that I don't think it's a good idea or whatever. I feel like this should be one way to do these things. And if you think back to the original version of Windows 11, when you did a right click on a file or folder or whatever, or you looked at the command bar in the File Explorer, the common actions that you might use on files like cut, copy, paste, and Share didn't have captions, right. So nobody knew what they meant. They were like Egyptian.

[Richard Campbell]

They were little random icons. It could be the top or the bottom of the dialogue.

[Paul Thurot]

So those are easy to ignore. So now 24H2, they've added those back. They've added them to the. At least to the context menu, but I don't think they're in File Explorer in the Command bar, but whatever. And they've improved Share innumerable times. I don't, like I said, I don't think anyone's using them, using the feature, whatever. But I don't know, I don't like having too many ways to do the same thing. I kind of feel like they should standardize.

[Richard Campbell]

You've been talking about Microsoft for many decades and you have a problem with too many ways to do things like, this is a good way to demonstrate it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So, look, one of the goals of Windows 11 was to reduce that kind of thing. It's a support nightmare, too, Right? Not just for the people that support, you know, users, but also just for Microsoft itself. I mean, you have all these different UIs for the same thing, and it's like guys, you know, figure out something.

[Leo Laporte]

Like Larry Wall calls that good in Perl. It's. They call it Tim Toty. Right. There's more than one way to do it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah, but that's Perl, and nobody really wants to use Pearl, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Right. So it clearly worked out fine for them.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, maybe. I don't know. So. So anyway, we'll see what happens. It's possible they'll test this. People won't like it. They might not put it in Windows. Then again, knowing Windows, they'll absolutely put it in Windows. They're also screwing around with the All Apps view in the Start menu. Right. And so now there's a grid view, which to me isn't really much of a grid. But instead of having like one app per line, all the apps in A and C and E, whatever the letters are just like in Windows Phone right back in the day. And then there's a view that's much like, what's it called, the app library in iOS, where apps out of order, well, they're grouped logically to somebody. And just like on iOS, you don't get to screw with it. You can't decide what goes where or where they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like I put my stuff in folders on iOS, but it's never those folders. Those folders are suggestions recently added social, productivity, utilities, creativity. I mean, it's just, they're all right.

[Paul Thurot]

So what you just read was a non alphabetical list of folders. It's unclear why those things are for us. So I'm telling you, Microsoft emulated that almost perfectly. Nice job. Because in their screenshot it's productivity, social, creativity, utilities, it goes on.

[Leo Laporte]

But maybe there's a standard taxonomy that we just don't. That you and I just don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

I can tell you what the standard is. It's not don't do what I want.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you always use alphabetical?

[Paul Thurot]

In what way? You mean like on a home screen or something?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, like, well, or in your start menu. You like alphabetical, right?

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, I don't care about that. Honestly, I'm more of a visual adhd. I kind of like having the Office icons together, you know, even though.

[Leo Laporte]

So you do like categories then?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that kind of thing. But as far as the all apps view goes, whether it's an Android, iPhone, whatever, Windows, that should be alphabetical. And if you're going to use groups, like categories would look like folders. I think that should be alphabetical as well, other than maybe the most recently used thing you might have at the beginning or whatever. But yeah, they're apparently going in our own little direction and they were very specific, like, no, you're not going to be able to customize this. You either turn it on or turn it off. It's up to you. But okay, I don't know. Look, we're still messing around with this. Windows what? Windows Computing.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a new paradigm for all of us.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll catch on. One of these days.

[Leo Laporte]

One of these days I'm going back to.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm going to go back to vision and like, you know, text mode, windowing. I just don't, I can't, I don't know what's going on.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, to make it extra bad for me on the iPhone anyway, I've turned off labels on the icons, so it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Very hip these days now.

[Leo Laporte]

I just don't know what the hell.

[Paul Thurot]

I can't. I can't. I could never.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a pile of crap.

[Paul Thurot]

So the biggest mistake, I just did this. I've been screwing around my home screen on the phone, so on iPhone, I. I went in and said I want the background to change every hour, and I want it to be like, nature photos from my collection.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

So then 10 hours in a row, some picture came up and I'm like, I have no idea where that is. So I was like, all right, fine. I'm going to change it a little bit. I'll add cities to it too, I think. Cities and nature. Right. I think I'm hitting about a 30%. I'll show it to my wife. I'll be like, do you have any idea where this is? And she's like, nope. Is that one of your photos? I'm like, yeah, no, we went there. I don't know what this is. They pick the most obscure photos and.

[Leo Laporte]

There'S no way to, like, long press it and see what it is.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So I glossed over this earlier, but in this week D update, one of the updates is to Spotlight, so you can more easily see what that picture is.

[Leo Laporte]

Perfect.

[Paul Thurot]

What an idea. Yeah. You can't do that on iOS.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just a picture. Why do you need to. What do you want?

[Paul Thurot]

It's your picture. How come you don't know what it is? I don't know. That's why I have recall. I don't know. I. I'm lucky I could find out.

[Richard Campbell]

I was going to remember stuff. That's not a thing.

[Paul Thurot]

That's why I took a picture. I'm never going to remember it otherwise. Now I still can't.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I want to ask you about the new Framework laptop. There's some more hardware and stuff, but we're going to take a break and come back. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. One hopes their lips are synchronized.

[Richard Campbell]

Don't get crazy now.

[Leo Laporte]

Not together.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I see.

[Leo Laporte]

Independently, my mistake. Yeah. Well, if you want to sink lips while we're doing the ad, you go right ahead.

[Paul Thurot]

Paul. We are close, but go on. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, did you see the video? Who made that? The Pika video of you and Richard in Puerto Vallarta and they did an AI and you, like, reach Over.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I showed that to my.

[Richard Campbell]

It's this split shot too. So he's in Mexico and we reach across the Pride. Yeah, it's wild.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you do that, Anthony? Somebody did it.

[Paul Thurot]

Don't do you dare show that.

[Leo Laporte]

He showed it to me and then I. Oh, that's the one. This is AI generated. They're in different ones in Canada, ones in Mexico, but they love each other. It does. Fortunately, neither of you look like yourselves in it, so.

[Richard Campbell]

No, and the objects in the background are not my objects. Like, I like that.

[Paul Thurot]

You're almost like a Steve Buscemi if he had like an older brother or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, something like that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's very strange. Unfortunately, Anthony said, oh, there's a new AI thing you're going to have to get. And he told me about this and he showed me that and I did. I spent 200 bucks for a year, tried it about eight times, gotten terrible results.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I deeply regret that purchase.

[Paul Thurot]

Hey, that's what AI is all about. Regret.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's about generating regret.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Generative regret as a service. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show. Here's something you won't regret. Our great sponsor, 1Password, has a new product that's really, really great called Extended Access Management. I can, I can explain why you need this by asking you a simple question. Do your end users always work on company owned devices and IT approved apps? They're good, aren't they? They never bring their own phones or laptops into work. They never have any rogue programs running in the background. Right. Okay, let's get real. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged devices and all those shadow IT apps? Is there a way? Yes, there is. 1Password has an answer. Extended Access Management. 1Password. Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM just can't touch. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. You've got those lovely brick paths between the ivy covered buildings. Everything's neat and tidy. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. But then, as on every college campus, there are the paths people actually use. They're the shortcuts people really want. They're worn through the grass because they're the shortest line from building A to building B. Of course people are going to do that and they're going to do it in your company. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps. The non employee identities. Like contractors, most security tools only work on those happy little brick paths. But many security problems, you know, occur on the shortcuts. 1Password Extended Access Management is the first security solution that takes those muddy little paths, those unmanaged devices, the apps, the identities under your control. It assures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every App is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits. It exceeds the standards set by all the various authorities. They're of as you know, a leader in security, extended access management and security for the way we work really work today. Generally available now to companies who use Okta or Microsoft Entra. It's in beta for Google Workspace customers. You got to find out about this secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged [e-mail] WindowsWeekly that's all lowercase. The number 1p a s s W-O-R-Com WindowsWeekly we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and you support us when you use that address. Then they know you saw it here. 1Password.com/Windows Weekly. Let's talk laptops. Oh, Paul, you're muted. You're muted. I think that's France. So is that France?

[Paul Thurot]

I think it might be Pittsburgh, like France or Pittsburgh.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris or Pittsburgh. That would be a fun game.

[Paul Thurot]

We play this game with people here. It's like Mexican or American, you know. And I know it sounds like this would be horribly obvious, but honestly, sometimes you'd be surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Now we have two really good show titles. Regret Service and Paris as or Pittsburgh.

[Paul Thurot]

The other game my wife and I play when we're out all the time. But it's especially good here because of the language barrier. Is. Are they on a date?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a great.

[Leo Laporte]

And I just love doing that. And then you have to say which date first date.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. You hear people talking about themselves in a way that would never do with a girlfriend or spouse or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

And it's really. Yeah, I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa and I do that too.

[Paul Thurot]

The AI would be good for that. This is, this is. These are the deep learning problems that AI is solving. They don't understand the resistance.

[Leo Laporte]

AI would never be able to do that, I think. Sad to say. Yeah. Anyway, Lenovo has a new thing about jigger.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Lenovo and HP both announced their earnings kind of late in the cycle. You know, we go through this every quarter. We, we still don't have hps. I would imagine by next week we will. But Lenovo actually had kind of a blowout quarter, which is interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

These are big numbers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, these are good numbers. So their revenues and net income, which is profits, are both up 20% year over year. The part of the business that's responsible for PC and smartphone sales, but mostly PCs. Right. Operating profit of a billion dollars, up almost 10% year over year. Revenues there were 13.8 billion, which is. I didn't do the math on this, but their total revenues were 18.8. So 13.8 billion. Why Lenofo?

[Leo Laporte]

That's amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They are the. I mean, the world's biggest maker of PCs by. I almost said by volume weight, by unit sales, by nubbies, by little, by numbing. But yeah, I mean, they. And they had some stuff to say about AI PCs, which include Copilot Plus PCs. They said that 15%.

[Richard Campbell]

It couldn't have been Copilot Plus PCs that made the difference here.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, not overall, but you know, PCs that have NPUs. Right. So 15% of total notebook sales were AI PCs in the quarter. They expect AI PCs to be over half of all of their global shipments by late this year and over 80% by 2027. So they, you know, they. That's what they expect. But Overall revenues from PCs were up 10% in the quarter. They have hit a high for market share, 24.3%. And also gaming PCs are doing pretty great for them. And this one, I can't. There's no data to support this, but they said that commercial PC sales benefited from the Windows 11 refresh, driving recovery in that segment.

[Richard Campbell]

And maybe, I don't know, is that a tap to. Microsoft wanted them to say that. Is that what, that.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what it feels like. It feels like a relationship quote, you know? Yeah. I don't know how much you mean to me, Richard. I just wanted to say.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

PC sales. So I don't know, something, something.

[Richard Campbell]

But they.

[Paul Thurot]

The.

[Richard Campbell]

Their AI server sales are up huge, too.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Like almost 60%.

[Richard Campbell]

That seems like the big driver. I mean, it's good that all the numbers are up, but the. This is huge.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So this is.

[Richard Campbell]

Is this. Vendors desperate to buy anything called AI in the server space, and all of.

[Paul Thurot]

These companies buying the third or fourth stringer. Look, you're a PC maker, right? You're hp, you're Lenovo, whatever. Unless you're Apple. This is not a business that seems like a big growth area. Right. You've kind of plateaued here. So yeah, we're going to have ups and downs like we're seeing here. A bit of an up, which is nice. But. Yeah. So obviously Lenovo has been very active in the phone space. I can't say that they've been super successful, but Motorola is probably in the top. Well, now that we have Chinese companies, maybe not anymore, but outside of China certainly would be in the top five, but not generating a lot of news, a lot of interest. Right. And they're getting into servers. Right. And you see that with the chip makers too. So intel not doing so great, but AMD gone gangbusters. They're going after Nvidia. So yeah, I mean these companies are trying to all be part of that. So 59% is great. But then again it's 3.9 billion in revenue. So it's also relatively small.

[Richard Campbell]

Small compared to the rest of the business.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's growing fast. But. But growing.

[Richard Campbell]

Your big units are growing a bit. Your small units are growing a lot. Like somebody needs a bonus here. Like they've had a very good year.

[Paul Thurot]

They're doing good. Yeah. And for, you know, for them to be as dominant as they are in whatever the small pond that piece is, is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they definitely have got the red nub cornered.

[Paul Thurot]

They get the rhythm.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they still use. They still put the nubby.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So all mainstream thinkpads still use it. They just announced a. I think I might be reviewing it soon. I don't remember the name. I think it's a ThinkPad X9 which has a slightly different design. I believe that one does not have an oven. So we'll see. These are the things that are, you know, Lenovo always had the function key and the control key flipped and they didn't move it for a long time because that's what their die hard customers expected. But if you want to grow and you know, it's weird and I know they have a software switch where you can flip them around but my argument was always make the weirdos that like those in the wrong place flip them around like they should be in the normal place for everyone else. So they finally did fix that. So we'll see. Anyway, obviously they make great computers and we've got Mobile World Congress coming up.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're not going more.

[Leo Laporte]

I just bought a. A knuck.

[Paul Thurot]

A knock like an actual nuc, which.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's from System 76 but it's a nuc. It's, you know, it's.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's going to be a server. It's not even going to have a GUI on it's going to be headless.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I want to run Emacs in my iPad and I think that's the only way I can do it.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, I talk a lot about mental health and adhd. I don't know if you've ever been diagnosed or anything, but shouldn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, wait a minute, shouldn't every home have a server? Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. And I have the. My setup is a nas.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe we go nas.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I have a nas.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not. Got the most powerful processor.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true, that's true.

[Leo Laporte]

I have the nice Synology nas, but I don't really. And I also don't want to expose it to the public, to the outside world either. So I have. Because I have a business class ISP, I have a static IP that can be kind of DMZ'd from the rest of it. And so I want to put a server on that. Yeah, so that's. But then Framework announced their little baby computer and I thought, oh crap, did I buy the wrong one?

[Richard Campbell]

But then I know 76 is like an Ubuntu guy, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. And yeah, they have their own Ubuntu.

[Paul Thurot]

I think that's interesting because they're going to make sure everything works properly with the os.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, it's actually. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Is it popos?

[Leo Laporte]

No, it is POP os.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but that's based on what, like Ubuntu.

[Leo Laporte]

It's an Ubuntu downstream.

[Richard Campbell]

But you can run.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to take it off and put Arch on it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you can run Barabuntu on it too.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, like, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. If it supports Linux in any flavor, supports all the Linux it supports Linux. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's nothing wrong with POP os. I just don't need a GUI and I want a rolling distro because, God, it's nightmare.

[Paul Thurot]

I love that we're back to the no adult needs a mouse conversations of the early 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

Not only do I not need a mouse, it doesn't have a keyboard, mouse or monitor.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be headless.

[Paul Thurot]

It's going to be headless.

[Leo Laporte]

But I just feel like, I don't know, maybe that's old fashioned. I feel like everybody should have a server in their house and I want to publicly expose it so I can put, I don't know what, something you.

[Paul Thurot]

Want to have from your devices when you're out in the world. Yeah, yeah, no, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that crazy?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the Cloud does that?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but it's very old fashioned.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I'm not even sure that's the right term. It's very technical.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, yeah. I mean not a normal person wouldn't do it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm supposedly technical but I'm, I'm, I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

In the clear, Leo. Like I'm not going to expose my synology even though it's got lots of room to run more things on it and stuff. Stuff. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't really control its updates.

[Richard Campbell]

If I'm going to put a machine into dmz, it's going to be doing only DMZ things.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And it's going to be running a hardened arch and I'm going to. That's why I want a rolling distance.

[Richard Campbell]

Not so important and not important enough to you that you couldn't just turn it off because you're. Because of any concern.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's been a while but let me see what Windows Home Server is doing these days.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you love that Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

It was great. That was a great product back in the day. That was a great product.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean this thing could be a Plex server. I mean if need be. And I always think audiobooks. We were talking before the show because today's the last day that Amazon lets you download your Kindle books so you can.

[Paul Thurot]

I love all these how to articles about how easy it is. You know, it is not easy. And let me tell you something, you need an article.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not easy.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm trying to understand the cross section. Like you make a Venn diagram. You're like here are the people who buy books on Kindle. Here are the people that want to strip DRM from any content and you know, so they can put it in a different service. And here's the little. Those things, those two circles are way over here. Then there's no, there's nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

There's so many articles for those that intersection point on the Venn diagram.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe it's people like us who really want Amazon to pay for making this impossible. Like look at what's going to happen.

[Paul Thurot]

Look, there are examples of content changing. For example, one of the big ones for me was the James Bond books which if you go back and reread like oh, they took stuff out past 10 years. Well the, the originals are kind of offensive in many ways. Right. They made them woke but I think is, you know, as the owner of the book or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to. If Ian Fleming was a racist. That's Ian Fleming. We gotta.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. No, I remember. I Literally at the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Next you're gonna tell me that handshot first.

[Paul Thurot]

No, same thing. Right. So actually that's a good example. That's a more modern example. Same thing. And so the content maker, I guess this is what we're doing. And you have this thing on a device and if you put it online, you're going to get the update. I'm sorry, you're getting the woke version of James Bond, which I think we can all agree is fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is we're rolling all that stuff back.

[Paul Thurot]

I know, yeah. Just wait.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah, the other thing, not to rip on this topic, but I mean, this feature comes out of a time when the Kindle first came out, which was the case of. With the iPhone as well, at that time where it couldn't do all the stuff itself. You had. The computer was at the center, so you would download things to the computer and sync it to the device. So now we use it for piracy and now we're outraged that Amazon is getting rid of this.

[Leo Laporte]

I dare you.

[Paul Thurot]

It's crazy, but that's the kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Thing I want to put. I want to have a server that's going to have my Kindle books on it and I can. That's gonna have my music on it, it's gonna have my audiobooks, it's gonna have all that stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

And really.

[Leo Laporte]

And it could all be in plex, but not if it's DRM'd and et cetera, et cetera. So I just. I feel like it all goes hand in hand, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, this is what I'm talking about with that. I mean, I'm doing the NAS thing this year again, and I'm working around all the stuff you're talking about. Same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not the guy who's saying I'll.

[Paul Thurot]

Never use the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't trust the cloud. The cloud's not the, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

No, not at all. No.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a heavy.

[Paul Thurot]

No, my deal is I'm gonna keep using that stuff, but I want that to be secondary. I want my primary. I don't recall. Source of truth. What's the right term? We can't use master or anything anymore, but whatever that word is. My main. Yeah, our main bathroom. You know, kind of just think of it as my bathroom.

[Leo Laporte]

I had that conversation the other day. She says, you can't call it the master bedroom anymore, right? I said, but where am I supposed to sleep if not the master bedroom?

[Paul Thurot]

You're like, but I am wearing Robes. I don't understand. Where will they. Where will they lie? Lower me into the honey bath. Right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So then after I did it, I thought, oh, crap. And Anthony's telling me this too. I should have bought an AI nuc. Like something with more AI capability, because then I could have my home AI server. And actually that's why this Ryzen framework.

[Paul Thurot]

Or you could use a external gpu, by the way, which probably work okay. Right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an Intel Core Ultra 5 on this thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So I got a lot of ram, but I, you know, in hindsight, maybe I should have bought something like.

[Paul Thurot]

I think you're early on. Yeah, we're a little early on the curve for that stuff, but yeah. Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Too early.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In a couple of years, I feel like I. And I know Richard will have a home AI server.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you probably already do, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I mean, if I can get around to actually bothering to configure it. But that's what that Snapdragon was going to end up being, right? I know.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny. There is a program called Full Moon you can put on your iPad. I put it on my M4 MyPad Pro that runs Llama locally and it runs it quite credibly.

[Paul Thurot]

That's great. That's funny. I went with the 64 gig iPad, so I can't really use anything.

[Leo Laporte]

But with an increasing number of open source AIs and increasing hardware, better and better hardware.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you have to have an Nvidia GPU to do this.

[Paul Thurot]

I think that's the streamlined way to do it because it just works with everything. Right. I mean, if you want to run Olama, whatever it is, and you want it to run effectively and everything, you want to work. Yeah, I mean, I think the Nvidia is the best choice.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's sad because this new Mac mini that I got has a lot of RAM directly accessible to an AI model. Has the AI stuff that doesn't do CUDA cores and all this AI stuff needs cuda.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, a lot of Those open source AIs locals do work on Macs because those guys are all using Macs. Right. So that's another probably reasonable choice. I mean, it might not have the performance.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that one could be the inside server.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Make that the inside AI.

[Paul Thurot]

I like that you have multiple servers.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, let me know when you said it.

[Paul Thurot]

You have a server front. Your next statement will be, every home needs a server farm and every server has to have a very specific Use case.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I've got a cluster in the basement.

[Paul Thurot]

So you have a DMZ and that has maybe three servers.

[Leo Laporte]

And Richard's going, I just shut down my exchange server.

[Paul Thurot]

What are you doing?

[Richard Campbell]

I deracked my life and I'm happier for it.

[Paul Thurot]

Is it funny? Because I actually have that in my house.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe we're crazy. Richard, you can talk me off the ledge anytime.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I'm with you. Every home does need a server, right? At least for home automation.

[Leo Laporte]

I have some kind of J Green. You told me to get the home assistant. I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

And then the file store, which is your synology, like those are the fundamentals. And just because the LLM workload is so heavy right now, you need a dedicated machine for that, that's got the.

[Leo Laporte]

GPU in it and a public facing computer. I don't know if you're going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Play the DMZ game and I waffle on that one just because, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Going in a slightly different direction. But yeah, I mean, that's one strategy. So in the PC space, I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Want to say if all of a sudden the lip sync on these shows goes to hell, it's because I got that server.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm eating up all.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, then we'll just do fake lips anyway and it'll just be like an AI talk.

[Leo Laporte]

Clutch cargo.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, go ahead. We didn't talk about the framework.

[Paul Thurot]

No. So one of the big things that happened this past year was right around the fall time frame at ifa, intel. And to a greater degree, AMD released new chips for PCs that have incredible integrated graphics and GPUs that merit the Copilot Plus PC spec. So good. The AMD ones are incredible. And then Christmas came, or the holidays came and CES came around, and then they were like, hey, we're not done. We have even better ones. It was like, guys, what are you doing? They're on a tear. So Framework, I think most people know, hopefully is they're really driving the right to. It's not even right to repair, it's like right to upgrade. So completely componentized PCs. The big one is a laptop 13, which is a 13.5-inch screen, but, you know, everything's a module. So you can pop out the processor, the ram, the whatever, you know, USB or whatever ports you might want to have. Screen, the keyboard, whatever. Right. So colors, the panels, everything, you know, it's. Everything can be replaced. Neat. So they've been slowly expanding and then yesterday they went on a tear. They announced three new products. So for their classic laptop 13, they have the Ryzen AI based module now and build your own systems and complete systems. Right. And this is the latest gen Ryzen stuff, which is awesome. So if you bought an intel whatever, 13th gen or newer whatever module in a Framework laptop, you could pop it out and spend whatever that amount of money is, 4 or 500 bucks I would imagine, and have a completely new experience, which might be worth doing, by the way. So that's cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Although this new framework here is a rack mount of four of them has soldered in RAM and soldered in CPU and gpu.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's not upgradable, which is interesting. Well, very.

[Paul Thurot]

It's soldered into that module though. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's soldered onto the motherboard. So you can replace the motherboard.

[Paul Thurot]

You can replace the. Yeah, so that's how this motherboard, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Could always replace that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. They explained this. It has to do with the design of those Ryzen chips and that's, you know, we've seen this in the Copilot plus PCB PC.

[Leo Laporte]

They say they really tried to make the RAM up, but of course you don't get the bandwidth unless you solder it. And that's what Apple's done too. It's, it's.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's Apple's integrated it, I would say. Right. I mean phones started it. But as far as making it mainstream in the PC space, Apple absolutely was the inspiration for that. So yeah, you see laptops that used to have two RAM slots maybe gone. It's all sorted on, you know, and.

[Richard Campbell]

It used to be saving costs, but then when you actually got performance benefits from it as well, it's like, okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Because odds are you're not lighter, less heat. It's, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, there's a bunch of good things about that and the heatsink solution is a big part of that.

[Leo Laporte]

I have 128 gigabyte SKU.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. But you have to know what you want. You know, you buy it at purchase time. Right. So yeah, there's that thing. They also introduced their. And this won't be shipping I don't think until mid year. Their first 12 inch laptop. This is intel based. So you're going to get the Core Ultra 2, I would imagine on that one and then their first desktop computer. So it's, you know, and their description, this is really interesting to me because they say, you know, It's a mini iTech, so it's fairly small for a desktop, but has expansion cards and all the modular stuff. And you know, their thing there was. Well, you know, people. Some. Some people are going to ask. Well, I mean, desktop PCs are inherently modular in a way. Not. Maybe not like a NUC or a. Well, NUCS are fairly modular, but. But maybe not like a Mac Mini or something like that. But, you know, this is kind of the next. It's not really small form factor. It's, you know, mini itx.

[Richard Campbell]

But mini ITX is like eight by eight. It's pretty small.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's pretty small, but it's. But it's fully modular. Sorry. So I think this is going to do pretty good and I think it's going to do good with people who want to play games especially. And I would even work like as a AI workstation kind of a thing because of the almost infinite upgradeability of it. Right. I think is. I think it's kind of interesting. So they're expanding pretty well. So here's the question.

[Richard Campbell]

When you go to upgrade this Mini ITX machine, so you're really just going to get a new Mini ITX board, they're going to make a new generation, you're going to want it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

What do you do with the old one?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's a good question. I'm knowing this company. I would imagine they allow you to sell it back to them to recycle.

[Richard Campbell]

A core swap would be awesome.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Some kind of a credit.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's a practice of mine to find a kid who needs a computer and have them. Computer with my spares.

[Paul Thurot]

But that's tough with a module because not everyone.

[Richard Campbell]

You'd have to be all in on the module. Right, right, right.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. That's a. That's a. Yeah. I don't know if LEO knows how they handle that, but.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I mean, yeah, I used to.

[Leo Laporte]

Have the framework 13. Loved it and did do the upgrades. And you could upgrade the RAM and upgrade the cpu. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So the other thing this betrays, by the way, is one of my big complaints. I have several, I guess with modern computers, laptops that I review is you'll have a situation where you don't have at least one USB C port on each side. That's starting to shift finally. But years into this. Whatever. But the bigger problem is you might have. You could have as many as three or four different types of USB ports. So you have like a USB C, that's Thunderbolt 4. You get one that's only USB C 3.2, blah, blah, blah, whatever. That has less bandwidth. You might have us a. That's literally a 2.0, like a. What is that, 480. You know, the old school. The old. Yeah. Slow, but designed to charge a phone or something. And, you know, my argument has always been like, guys just use the best one all the time, everywhere. I don't understand why you would have supports. So the difference is that for a PC maker, they sell. They save 13 cents or something, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And if you buy these USB modules from Framework for your Framework laptop or desktop, I would imagine they're all the same price, so they're not making money on that. And in fact, I think they mostly just sell the best one there is, so. Or it's some combination of that. But you won't pay more for Thunderbolt 4 than you would for. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And you'll pay less for one of those modules than a bloody dongle too. So you might as well get the ones you want, even spare, because you can change.

[Paul Thurot]

So in other words, like, I would want at least one on each side and I'd probably want two on each side, honestly, for whatever. But being able to configure it the way you want it, I'm surprised this isn't more of a thing I've said this to. Well, it's a Lenovo and hp. You know, you've got these big laptops. You always put a. Almost always put a numeric keybridge. I don't want that. Make that modular, you know, let the person buying it choose if they want that or not. And if they don't, maybe they get better speakers, maybe they just get a flat plane, whatever it is, in the keyboards, in the metal. But give, you know, you're the. One of the biggest PC makers or the biggest on earth. Like, why can't you do this? You know, but they're always. I think it's a margin thing for them. And, you know, they're always kind of. I don't know, it's kind of a.

[Richard Campbell]

Tough business, I guess, but it's an interesting idea. And they. Their site just about tipped over yesterday. They clearly. News cycle.

[Paul Thurot]

It did tip over. I didn't get in yesterday, so I was put in a wedding. I tried a couple of times. It's like you're. You're on the. You know, you're on the list.

[Leo Laporte]

List.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm on the list to get to the website. Like, look.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I remember when they did that for like buying World Series tickets, but right now they were doing this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I've never. I haven't seen something like that. And. Yeah, interesting. Good for Them, I think it's great for them. I love what they're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

At least they're doing something different in this space.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And hopefully having an impact. Like I, you know, the big PC makers are good about recycling and using recycled materials, but yeah, I'd like to. Modular.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. If they start core swapping boards out and kicking out inexpensives as a byproduct, then more power to them. I'd buy them like in a second for that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Compared to what I would call a mainstream Ultrabook style laptop, the framework doesn't weigh a lot more. I mean I think it's about 3.1 pounds if I remember for like a laptop. 13. So yeah, you could get a ThinkPad X1 carbon which is using alien technology and somehow it was only 2.4 pounds now, which is crazy. But that thing costs like 2 to $3,000. Like they're, you know, you're paying for that. These guys line up really well with what I would call mainstream business class, whatever Ultrabooks. It's good. Okay, so that's the hardware bit and then just on apps, I mentioned this when it was in preview but now in stable. On Opera 1 you can get sidebar apps, I think they call them add ins for Blue Sky, Discord and Slack. And this allows you to have kind of a push model for notifications without having to leave a tab open. Right, right. So it's probably for now it's a little weird because some things you'll have in a tab and some might be in the sidebar. But I, you know, as someone who uses a lot of browser tabs and keeps several pinned all the time, I actually really like this model and it's an interesting idea. So. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Which Opera trying to be distinct now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, you should. I don't know if you looked at the Opera. What's the, the light version of Opera called?

[Leo Laporte]

The Opera Calm Edition.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's. It's actually really pretty. Like I really like it.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually that's one of the things I like about ARC is that it is kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

It's so clean.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's nice. Okay. A bit of, bit of confusion yesterday or the day before, I guess maybe the day before there was a website had an article about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You see an ad supported free version of Office.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So I'm like I have to try this, right? I have to see this. I never use this myself but this is an interesting kind of a thing and it happening on the back end of Microsoft switching to this AI credit mode, where you as a subscriber to Microsoft 365 can use a lot of these copilot features for the month. I was like, oh, maybe this is, you know, tied together somehow, whatever it was. So I tried this on two different computers. I never got it to come up like this. So when I wrote about it, I was like, well, I'm sure it's coming, or whatever. These guys write about it, they have pictures. But it didn't work on the systems that I tried. And then Microsoft got back to me and said, yeah, we're not actually doing this well, we're testing it. Which I think means they are going to do it. But if you think about the mainstream versions of Office today for like desktop, obviously you have the desktop apps that you download from Microsoft as part of your Microsoft 365 subscription and that's the full suite. And then you have the web apps. Right. And it's mostly core apps. So it's like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and actually, I think OneNote. Right. Still has a web client, I think. But okay, fine. So this was sort of in the middle, right. You're not paying for Microsoft 365. You download the suite from them. You only get those three core apps. They'll have. They have a persistent advertisement pane over the side, according to that site. Throws up a video sometimes, like an ad video, whatever. But it's free and. And it's not the full 100 set of functionality. Some of the more advanced features for each of those apps is not available in the free version.

[Richard Campbell]

I see like Excel pivot tables and things like that.

[Paul Thurot]

That's exactly. That is one of them. Yep, yep. And, you know, varies by app, obviously. And then probably more features than are in the web app, which everyone's wondered why they don't make these into fully installable apps that people can use. Nobody knows. Not as full featured, but also not as expensive, obviously, as the full suite.

[Richard Campbell]

So isn't the main ad they're going to run, you should buy Office.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, it's a house ad. Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a lost leader for getting you into an M365.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, they're trying to. I get it.

[Richard Campbell]

Trying to find a vehicle. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, they're doing it with Outlook. Everyone loves that app, so why not? Why not screw with the other ones? So anyway, that kind of. We'll see. We'll see. Amazon had a set of services that were meant to compete with Microsoft 365. I think one of them wasn't called Workspace. But it was something like Workspace. They killed that last year. Workday, maybe work. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Nobody used it. Who cares? And then they had this communication service called Chime, which is basically their version of Zoom. So if you were to take all of the people who worked at Amazon that used this product away, you had a negative number of users. So they got rid of it. Amazon had quietly also contracted with Microsoft for Microsoft 365. So they've been moving to that. They paused it, remember, at the end of last year, internally, concerns about security and whatever. So they've figured that out. Microsoft obviously jumped all over that. Whatever their concerns were have been met. So that rollout is continuing. It's weird to me because they're paying for Microsoft 365 and get Teams, but they're going to use Zoom internally. They will use teams for their customers that do use teams. So when employees want to communicate externally, they'll be using teams, which I would say, well, just use one of them. I mean. But then again, if you think about it, and Richard knows this better than anybody, I bet you have every one of these things installed because you talk to different people from different places and they use different things. And so in my case, like, in any given week, I use Zoom, I use teams, I use Slack, you know, it depends, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's usually Zoom or Teams. I mean, the point being, if you're in the teams ecosystem, then you want to use teams, and if you're not, but you are not installing teams, so you'll use.

[Paul Thurot]

So they're going through this complexity because I think they're going to install both. I don't know if that's the way I took it. It's kind of a little strange, but Amazon, whatever, they made something called Chime. I mean, come on, what do we do?

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody's trying to make their own work Docs. Was the. Was the Amazon workdocs.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I knew it was Work something. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Obviously.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I'm surprised. I don't remember it. It was such a huge hit.

[Richard Campbell]

Such a hit. Listen, both guys who used it really liked it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And then they switched from that to the thing Meta was doing. Surprise. Yeah. So same problem, Right. This reminds me of the early 90s or whatever, when everyone was trying to compete with Office right at the time. Like, everybody needed their own Ray, Nuda, Norda, whatever his name was at Novell partnered with or. And. Or bought, I don't know, Novell, so they could have a Suite that would compete with Office. And I think that killed him, actually. I think that might have put him in the grave, but didn't work out great. Yeah. So everyone tried this for a little while. I think we kind of accepted the old world order, I guess we'll call it. This is related to nothing other than Amazon, but Amazon also this past week killed the App Store for Android, which raises some interesting questions. To be clear, not on Kindle devices, right? So if you have a Kindle Fire or tablet or a Kindle or a Fire TV device, they're still using their own stupid app store for that, the one no one wants. But that's what they use.

[Leo Laporte]

Notably used the Kindle App Store was Microsoft for its long lost, long departed Android subsystem for Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

And nobody wanted it there either. Right. This is what's weird.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, I don't think it's part of the whole Kindle realignment across the board.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So I wonder, right? So I'm kind of wondering chicken and egg on this. Did Microsoft get some kind of advanced view that maybe we're walking away from this outside of our own little ecosystem? Or was Microsoft maybe one of the nails in that coffin? And whatever. You have to think that people out in the world with like a Samsung phone or whatever normal Android phone were not installing this app, so they had yet another way to install apps. Like they. Those guys already have two ways to install apps, so it's not surprising that didn't do well. I think if I remember correctly, when I first launched, you would get like a free app every day or something that was, you know, like you could build up an app collection pretty easily, but I don't think this thing had any support at all.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm betting they got the heads up and that's why they killed it in advance.

[Paul Thurot]

That's my guess too.

[Leo Laporte]

The heads up from Amazon.

[Richard Campbell]

Amazon has made a plan here to realign this.

[Leo Laporte]

That was like a year ago, wasn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

I know, but, well, Amazon moves pretty slow sometimes.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, so Amazon said, guys, maybe you don't want to use the App.

[Paul Thurot]

Store, or maybe literally we're getting rid of it, so you can do whatever you want. I'm sure Microsoft had hoped to get Google involved in this, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we never really understood why they killed the subsystem.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I can tell you why. It's because they hate each other. Oh, you mean Google and Apple, Google and Microsoft hate each other, but they.

[Leo Laporte]

Killed it because a good thing, wasn't it? Or no.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but the Point of it is to fill in the app gap. Right. So the Amazon App Store was never going to do that unless you wanted to run a slightly better Kindle app, I guess. But you know, but people wanted Google Play, right. And obviously there were hacks to kind of make that work, just like there were hacks to make it work on.

[Richard Campbell]

These are all this USB way to side load stuff like that was about. And Microsoft announced killing it a year ago, but they only actually are killing it like next week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they still have it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's been.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, because it's part of Windows. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They gave the long lead time.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah, interestingly, the time of death, if you will, is closer to this announcement.

[Richard Campbell]

Right along now it all starts. Lines up.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's really interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

This is an FTC fodder here, man. You could talk about the collusion if you want.

[Paul Thurot]

I've never.

[Leo Laporte]

Except nobody made any money.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, nobody cares.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's all make no money on this thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. It was just always second rate. It's too bad this is not official from Google. But there was, I think it was maybe Business Insider or Forbes or someone reported that Google is going to drop text messaging as an option for two FA application. Good. They're going to move to QR codes. This caused a bit of confusion with my readers who seem to think they would have to point their phone at a phone to take a photo of a QR code. They were curious how that was going to work. I explained that you use a mirror for that. I mean, some kind of an idiot. No, but you.

[Leo Laporte]

No, you don't.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, you don't. No, I'm kidding.

[Richard Campbell]

But that's a good answer.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I'm like, this is not obvious.

[Leo Laporte]

Have your friend look over your shoulder.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. And read the QR code. What you do is you draw a picture of the code and then you take a picture of that. Come on, think.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm going to confess, I didn't understand how this works either. So explain to me.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no. Right now Google does a little bit what Microsoft does where depending on the service, depending on the day, the phase of the moon, whatever it is, you have to authenticate for whatever reason. Right. So if you.

[Richard Campbell]

Conditional access.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Sometimes you just have to prove you're you again. Right. I just did it for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I use my two factor authentication app. Some call the Google Authenticator.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. So that's one way. Right. You could use a passkey. Well, I have to say That I.

[Leo Laporte]

Also use one of the.

[Paul Thurot]

When they let you do it and it's most of the time they do on desktop. I just did it on this exact computer before we started. The little pin tabs I have for Gmail and Google Calendar had little white circle. I had to re authenticate. I didn't have to do anything other than click yes and then the little proton pass key slid in. Yep, that's the one. And I was no problem. Right. If you're on a Windows computer, you can use Windows hello. To authenticate against Google. If it's Google. We are talking about Google. There's different ways. So I think the most common, well, sadly the most common mainstream way probably is a text message. Right. But what it should be is A2FA, an authenticator app. Ideally it would be a passkey, but there's all different ways. And so most people will have I don't know what the number is. Two to five different methods. Right. So if you were to go into your Google account, you could probably authenticate by sending an email to a secondary email address where you get a code.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have Google running on your phone, you can have, have it pop up a single sign on message.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right, because the Google app, the Gmail app, Android operating system.

[Leo Laporte]

But how does the QR code work? I don't.

[Paul Thurot]

The QR code is for when it's on your computer.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. So it's only.

[Paul Thurot]

So the idea is you have your phone, you take, you know, you use the, you don't take a picture but you use the phone app, you click the link and then that passes through. And ideally on your phone you've already sure how it works. It's probably a. By the way, here's another picture. I have no idea what this is. Probably in New York City, Pittsburgh or Paris.

[Leo Laporte]

Show it, let's see.

[Paul Thurot]

No, this one's definitely. It's a big city looking die. It's got Pittsburgh city.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's New York City for sure. That's New York City.

[Paul Thurot]

It's got to be New York City. Yeah, I don't recognize that. Did I take. I think they show me other people's pictures anyway. I mean it's a pretty good picture. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is still using your phone to authenticate in arguably a lower friction way than pulling up the authenticator app and typing in a number.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. And I would say, well yes, and definitely more secure than sms. Right. So the next thing I'm going to talk about very briefly because I don't want to get into this too far is that in going through my single sign on accounts that I use through my Google account and trying to sign into each of those online services that I've been using with Google, you have to confront something which is what's worse, right? You're funneling everything through an account that could be taken away from you, but it's super seamless and convenient. It works great. The sign in with Google or you take that away and now you have multiple passwords to manage, which you're using a password manager for. Right. And that's protected with two FA and whatever. So good. But every one of those services supports some subset of these other forms of authentication and it's different for everyone. Some of them only support text message based authentication. Still to this day it's stupid. So there is no good answer here. This is kind of a weird problem. So I actually, I have to say I think from Google's perspective as a primary online account, like in the upper echelon of the most important online accounts, they're probably the number one or two. Right. Especially because of this sign in with Google thing or maybe in addition to that or whatever. But good for them for taking this away. Google has long supported every single method, including the hardware security keys like I think Richard still uses and I know Leo has used. It's not something I would like. My wife's never going to use that.

[Richard Campbell]

It would and I'm not recommending it anymore anyway. We're inches away from passkeys being really quite good. So the thing is done.

[Paul Thurot]

The problem with passkeys right now is just the inconsistency of implementation.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And even in, even Google, which I would hold up as the best, will do this weird thing where most of the time what I described earlier, where I get, get it through my password manager, no problem, works fine. But I would say 5 to 10% of the time the option I have is it actually puts up a QR code. I have to use a phone. I have a. Now I do have the passkey on my phone, so it's fine. But it's. I signed in with Windows, hello. I have it right on this computer. Like I don't. Why, why? And I think part of it is just keep me on my toes. No, I think, I think they're trying to, I think they want to vary it a little bit. Like when you get a code, sometimes you have to type in something but sometimes they give you the thing and you know, they try to make it a little different, make it a little less Easy to spoof maybe. I don't know. Anyhow, I think what they're doing is good. I will say I can't say this definitively but having now removed some hundreds of single sign on connections, I'll call them with my Google account. I've never run into an online account where I couldn't get into it otherwise.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Even though I think some of them I have never signed in otherwise. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's often some pretty deceptive like, like phishing methods to get you to give them your Google sso. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

I know it's not great because they.

[Richard Campbell]

Get additional data from you on that.

[Paul Thurot]

The problem for me is if I was positive. Well, it's two things. So I can't be positive that there isn't an account out there where I won't be able to get into it yet because I haven't done them all. But I've done enough of them now I'm thinking this is how the system works. I can't say it definitively but I don't think there is going to be an example where I couldn't get into it. So. So okay, good. Most of the time it's going to involve them emailing me a code. Right. And then I can, I don't know, maybe set up a password at that point, whatever it is, depending on the account. So there's that. But the truth is if I thought I was going to get rid of that 100%, I would probably install like a browser plugin that hid single sign on opportunities from me. So I never was tempted to do it. But I also think I'm not going to get rid of all of them. Right. I think there's going to be some handful of accounts for me anyway where I'm like, you know what, I'm actually going to keep using that Google SSO thing. So I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Basically I'm just kind of going down some path. I'm doing the work and I'm not even sure what the point of it is. So I don't know. There's no good answer with this stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess maybe, maybe that's it's a battle. Yeah. And I'm even up to, you know, maybe I'm over optimistic on passkeys. There's plenty of opportunities to screw that up too.

[Paul Thurot]

So yeah, no, you don't have to look too far to find out to find a service that screws up passkeys for sure. Like I said, even Google is not 100% consistent. They're one of the better ones. But, yeah, it's not. It bugs me when I can't. I know it's there. I can see it. I literally can see it. I mean, it's there twice, actually. It's in my computer. It's in Windows, because Windows stores one as well. And it's in my password manager, which is always available. Why can't it use that? Yeah, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, at least they're not using sms. And, you know, this is a current issue because.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

The government has now announced that they can't get the Chinese hackers out of our phone system.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Apple can't even stop a spam text that says, hi, who are you? You came up in my contact. So what the. Guys, this is not social engineering.

[Leo Laporte]

There's three things that will survive a nuclear attack. One is the rats in the New York subway, the cockroaches in the New York housing, and the Chinese hackers in our navy.

[Paul Thurot]

Figure it out. This is the simplest thing in the world.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, a lot of it is.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, one of the issues is in order to upgrade the equipment, they'd have to upgrade the equipment because the equipment they're using is bugged and they can't fix it.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, I'm just talking about something simple. If it says something like I just said, who are you? You're in my. Just don't show it to me.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that.

[Paul Thurot]

Of course, that's never going to be a human being. Yeah. No, I don't mean like, yes, listen, we're. We have AI now. You could sound like a human being. That person could talk to you. They would sound like the representative of a bank or whatever. Yes. People are going to fall for that. No doubt about it. But who's. Who this. Who this new phone.

[Richard Campbell]

Who is God?

[Paul Thurot]

Come on. Like even I could write something to block this. Jeez.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a bit of an aside before we go into the break, but we had an earthquake this past week here in Near Seashell. Yeah. And all of our phones went off after the earthquake.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but also get the alert.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, but you know, that alert's supposed to come out ahead, so it was a bit late and it was. We were really close to it, too.

[Paul Thurot]

We were.

[Richard Campbell]

I was in a pub at the time. It was lunchtime. And all of the sports screens flipped over to an emergency screen as well.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. That's what you want to see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. They all arrive too late.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Without.

[Paul Thurot]

And then it said, welcome to the United States of America.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. 51st state comes up. No, I've had several experiences with this earthquake alert in the U.S. one was right before an earthquake.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And everybody in the restaurant kind of went, what's going on? And then, then we had an earthquake. The other one was everybody went and the school. We're across the street from a school. They got all the kids out of the school and everything. And then there was a tsunami alert. And I told my son who lives in a houseboat, I said, go have lunch somewhere uphill.

[Paul Thurot]

Somewhere. Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

And nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Nothing happened, you mean.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, nothing's a pretty rare.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, not even an earthquake. I mean they shut down the school. But I like the premise and once it did work, it actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because you didn't feel the earthquake doesn't mean there wasn't one.

[Leo Laporte]

The speed of light is faster than the speed of quake. And so in theory, if they sense a quake, they can send an alert.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. I don't know United States. But here in Mexico, if you got an alarm that means this is less than three minutes away. Like if it happens, it's happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's going to happen quickly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean they only can outrace it by a few.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the USGS has a technology called a P wave detector. Yeah. And so that actually picks it up before the shaking starts.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, the network is not straight line.

[Paul Thurot]

It takes a while purpose cats. The cats can pick up squirrely.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I'm waiting because we live on a hillside and jury's still out about.

[Paul Thurot]

You're waiting for like your. The neighbor up the hill to come colliding.

[Leo Laporte]

Will we be going for a ride or will they be going for a ride or.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Anyway, it was a nice little 4.8 and on a fault line nobody knew about. So they. Yeah, the, the geology analysis of. It's all very excited. But yeah, they woke everybody up.

[Paul Thurot]

Up.

[Leo Laporte]

So you felt it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, definitely. I know it was a good little shaker.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it said, hey, wake up.

[Richard Campbell]

Let's get ready for an earthquake. Little late, dude. That's fine.

[Paul Thurot]

The worst one I've been in is still the one that happened in New Jersey, New York last year. And I, I don't know how we've avoided that here. But I mean by and large. But yeah, we're.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, well, Richard and I are on the ring of fire. I mean we are really on the fault lines.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and the kicker is I don't.

[Paul Thurot]

Know if the day we got to PE City is. But it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you on a fault line. There it is.

[Paul Thurot]

The entire country is a font line. It is the worst possible.

[Leo Laporte]

I think also you're built on a swamp, which is not the best.

[Paul Thurot]

A swamp that's been drained completely and it's just empty space. Yeah, it's perfect. You know, it's. What could go wrong here? It's like a sinkhole with buildings on top.

[Leo Laporte]

At least we're on bedrock. And that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this is the rock the ice couldn't crush. That's what you have to keep telling yourself. But yeah. And then, you know, when we got to Puerto Vallarta in January, the first night. Six. There was a six.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's why Paul was hanging on to you.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Well, that happens. Anyway, separate issues.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat in Roma Norte, Richard Campbell in Madeira Park. More in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, the folks who quite literally bring you this podcast. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Cashfly, our content delivery network. For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track record for high performing, ultra reliable content Delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. We know this because almost since the beginning we've been using Cash Fly. Because when you use Cash Fly, those podcasts, they must roll. They will roll. They will get to you. And have you noticed, you know, Slack's been down all morning, but the podcasts keep on coming, right? We've been using Cashfly since the beginning. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. CacheFlight is the only CDN literally built for throughput ultra low latency video streaming, as an example, which can deliver video to over a million concurrent users with latency of less than one second. Second, that's amazing. Lightning fast gaming, which delivers downloads faster with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. If you have a site that has images, you'll love mobile content optimization because it's automatic. It does it, it's simple, it does image optimization so that your site loads faster on any size screen automatically. The thing that made a big difference for us, it was early days. We didn't know what the bandwidth would be like, so they were willing to give us flexible month to month billing. As we figured it all out. And then as soon as we knew we got exactly what we were going to need, we got discounts for the longer fixed terms. The whole point really is you design your contract when you switch to cash flow delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. It allows you to shield your site content in their cloud and ensures a 100 cash hit ratio. We've actually been doing that. I think we must have been a beta because we've been doing that for years. When we upload our software, we don't put it on our site and then they cache it. We it's stored on Cash Fly so there's never a cash miss. That's a great feature. And with Cash Flies elite managed packages, you get the vi, everybody gets the VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation. Reliable 24. 7 Support when you need it. Good news is you probably won't need it. We rarely have to call them. I don't think. I don't think I've ever called them for support. Come to think of it, it just works. Learn how you can get your first month free at cash fly cashfly.com twitt how many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cash Fly@ cache flashly.com thank you so much Cash Fly. We are, we are big fans. Back we go to Winders Weekly. Paul and you're in a while, huh?

[Paul Thurot]

It's been a while.

[Leo Laporte]

It's been a long time. How have you been?

[Paul Thurot]

The winters.

[Leo Laporte]

I got blinders on my winders, so. It's been a long time since you talked about AI. What do you think?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I think it's been like 17 seconds. So at least. Yeah, so I think it was last week. I'm trying to use AI, right? And by trying to use AI, that's like saying I'm not using AI, Right? That's what that really means. So I'm trying to figure this out, right? And so I just wrote an article about some of the things I came across recently where, you know, in one example, there was a. I was out half the day yesterday. So when I got back last night, I had, you know, 100 and whatever items in my feed. There was the stuff to kind of sift through. I wrote a couple things and then, then there was this stuff I just kind of put off for the morning. And one of them was an Xbox announcement of some sort. That was a video. There was no accompanying text, you know, and I thought, what, like what is. How am I going to do this? I can't take time out of my day to watch a video. It was only 20 minutes long. But I'm like, you know, back in the. Not back in the day, back in yesterday. You know, as long ago as yesterday, what I would have done is read the transcript, right? You go to YouTube, get the transcript, paste it into whatever. So I did that. And as I was doing it, I thought, wait a minute, I could use AI to summarize this, right? Why don't I do that? And that worked great. And then I asked it this question. I'm not really sure what made me think of this, but I got the summary, which is good. And I said this was in the form of an interview on a video podcast. So it's a new guy in the Xbox executive suite and then a person who works for Xbox but does these podcasts. And I said, do they discuss anything you would consider news? And they said, yeah, there's four topics we think might be newsworthy. And one of them was the thing that Laurent had written about yesterday, which is that the fable been delayed reboot has been delayed, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Although I guess now we don't have to. So that was, you know, that's useful. I mean, maybe I'll do more of that kind of stuff. I asked a few other questions.

[Richard Campbell]

I wrote, here's my problem with summaries. How would you know if it was a bad one?

[Paul Thurot]

One. Yeah, I know, right. So you gotta, you gotta get asked, you know, you gotta keep probing, I guess. But yeah, you know, Leo, I think it was last week mentioned if I'm not mistaken, a three hour long video.

[Leo Laporte]

About three and a half, my friend. Three and a half. So worth watching.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So coincidentally I had watched a shorter video. It was probably like an hour 20 minutes, but similar, you know, kind of thing explaining AI. Good. You know, and of course once you watch something on YouTube then you're. Your thing has changed forever. And you'd probably see those videos. Yeah, yeah. Tied to this. I also, you know, you guys probably know who Dave Plummer is. The Dave Baraj YouTube channel. Former Microsoft engineer. Fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a great.

[Paul Thurot]

He did a three and a half hour interview with Dave Cutler from nt, did a. Wow. It was a two, two and a half hour interview with Raymond Chen, another luminary who's still working at Microsoft, by the way, which I've watched actually both of those repeatedly. Fantastic. Recommend them. But he's been doing a lot of stuff, stuff around AI lately also worth watching. Right. And so I have all these AI videos now in my stream and I came across one called Generative AI in a How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI, which is actually kind of an Older guy who kind of latched onto Chat GPT earlier than most and is one of those people kind of figured out like you have to use this thing differently. And I've not done this, but I think we're. I know it's weird. I, I can tell this is getting mainstream because I know normal mainstream, like non technical people who pay for Chat GPT and use it like all day long every day. And so one of the stories this guy told in this video is that when, when he has something to figure out, in other words, you try whatever it is. Like it could be anything. Right. Because it's, it's not always like math or science or engineering. It's whatever, some, whatever. The thing is, is he goes for a walk and he uses ChatGPT as a sounding board. So he starts by saying to ChatGPT, always respond with the word okay unless I ask you for something. So it just listens and it doesn't interrupt him and he kind of dumps his thoughts out. And when he gets back he asks for a summary of that conversation that he just had with himself. And then they have a back and forth of some kind and he gets recommendations for, to do items and things like that out of this. And, and I said this to some guys yesterday I was with, but like, you know, we used to see people walking around in the streets talking to nothing, but they had like a little headset on. We thought they were insane.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And now is it schizophrenia or is it Bluetooth? It's hard to know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And now it's going to be as a schizophrenia, as an AI because they will, will literally be talking to nobody, but it will be their buddy chatgpt.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't wait. I'm dying.

[Paul Thurot]

Interesting. Yeah. So the next thing though I want to do, and this is tied to this is when I was saying up front we're going to kind of hit on this briefly later is when I think about my archives and how I want to be able to access them. I don't really think of that as like a public facing thing, although maybe someday it would be. But I do have like these smaller bodies of work that might be interesting for like custom GPTs, like the Windows 11 field guide. Right. So let's say you bought the book or maybe you're a threat premium subscriber so you could go to a website and instead of you could, you could read the book. You could look things up if you wanted. But if you had a specific question, how do I bypass the hardware restrictions in Windows 11? Ask the custom GPT, that question and then it will give you the answer based on the grounding it has in my book. Right. So Leo knows exactly how to do what I just described.

[Leo Laporte]

I do that all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. But I want to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what I found? These things now are such generalists that I don't need to do the rag I used to do so. Well.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Remember I had a lisp chatgpt, but I just the other day asked the new Claude coding assistant to write me some common Lisp code to solve one of the advent of code problems. It did it very competently without any rag.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, I understand that, but what I'm saying is I want to create a service that people could hit on my site. Maybe. Oh, literally parses my query.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you want virtual Paul.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, virtual Windows 11 field guy to start and then maybe we.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you listening to this? This is hysterical. What do you think of. Of the idea of maybe having a virtual.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know who this Paul guy is, but he sounds like a freaking idiot.

[Leo Laporte]

I was just talking to my buddy. Don't.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

So tomorrow there's going to be like a Windows 11 field guide. Virtual Assistant or a virtual presence can lead to many creative ideas and solutions. What specific idea are you thinking about regarding a virtual concept? I'd love to.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, my buddy Paul has a website and he just wants to feed all his articles to you and then let people ask you questions about that. They would ask Paul, but ask the AI instead. You think that's a good idea? She's a little slow, so sometimes I.

[Paul Thurot]

Can tell you my website search is terrible. So it's a fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's going to be better than the website search.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. That sounds like a fantastic, fascinating idea. Having an AI like me answering questions based on Paul's articles could provide fast informative responses to users, making the information more accessible. It could also free Paul from having to answer repetitive questions directly. How do you think Paul would feel about this setup? I. I appreciate you considering my feelings, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds a little like Helen Mirren, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

It. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I had it sound like Neil Gaiman for a while, but that creeped me out in the long run.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, That's. That didn't age well.

[Leo Laporte]

But this is. I mean this is. This is that B computer I'm always talking about. But this is the. It's the very little seed of an idea, which I think is great. It's not just for your Website, it's for you. It's like you can.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I'm kind of baby stepping into that. But yes, that's me too.

[Richard Campbell]

Getting closer. Like another words to her. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Let's ground it in something finite because you're going to get the best results and we're going to limit it to this thing. And so if it's do that now, I really do. Well, you can. The trick is publishing it like.

[Leo Laporte]

And would it be reliable?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, the testing I've done so far where I just ask a question, you know, whatever the AI is, I've done a couple of different ones. It work. Yeah, actually it's good. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the benefit of the stuff I wrote. Say to it specifically, do not make anything up. Every answer must come from the source.

[Paul Thurot]

Materials or just if you paid for ChatGPT, you make your own GPT. Right, right. But I did. I don't actually know how to do.

[Leo Laporte]

It on a website.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, there are services that will do this for you, but I have to find something that actually is legal, you know, legal use of that, whatever technology and something that I don't get a bill for $6,000 after, you know, people start using it. So I got to figure that out. But to me, this is an interesting idea and it ties into that notion we talked about earlier of kind of grounding it in some collection of documents, whatever it might be. Like my entire.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what this is. It has a bunch of lisp documents that I've uploaded to it. Yeah, that's right. And then furthermore, I've given it instructions about how to answer. And this prompting is everything, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, that's right. So I used to.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can really tell these things how to be.

[Paul Thurot]

I bet if you were to query the audience right now, 90 something percent of them would cringe visibly when someone said the phrase chat engineer or you know, or whatever prompt engineer. But you know what? There might be something to it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there definitely.

[Paul Thurot]

It's creative. I mean it's not like it's not really even engineering. It's almost. I don't know what to call it, but there's a creativity to it.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to have, you know, we have, as you probably know, the show that follows this one is all about AI intelligent machines. In a few weeks we're going to have a friend of mine, Harper Reed, who wrote an article about with the prompts, how he pair codes with an AI. And it was a very thorough explanation of what prompts to give it. And it was also A multi layered thing. I mean, there's a.

[Paul Thurot]

There's something to it. And the video that I referenced briefly is, you know, the guy is whoever he is, but he is onto something. It's interesting. Like I. Some. Sometimes one of these will be good enough that I actually mentioned it to my wife. And I'm like, you should probably actually watch this video. I know it looks a little geeky and technical, but you get these little tips, you know, it's kind of interesting. You know, we were out with these guys yesterday, and one of them, he talked to ChatGPT all day long, you know, trying to find out things to do in a particular place, or if you had to choose between this and.

[Leo Laporte]

This, which is where we got here. Did I tell you this, that I was making breakfast for Lisa and I wanted to make sure that I had the best possible hash Browns. So has ChatGPT01. Deep research.

[Paul Thurot]

I love it to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at all the pages of research.

[Paul Thurot]

Do you have any idea? You brought down the power grid in Dubai so you could figure out hash browns.

[Leo Laporte]

I put a small village in the dark into darkness for this. And it asked follow ups. And it said, how are you going to make them? And look for this? 14 minutes. It researched.

[Paul Thurot]

Jeez.

[Leo Laporte]

But it gave me basically a book.

[Paul Thurot]

There better be a duck fat thing in there somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

I couldn't read the whole thing. It was too long. So I said, just give me some bullet points. All right.

[Paul Thurot]

He's like this, just tell me which one to buy frozen.

[Leo Laporte]

But I want to point out that one of the things it. Did you see these? These are references. So that is a good thing, right? I mean, it's not just completely whole cloth. It's always got some references in it, which I think is great. It also allows me to dig deeper.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So, I mean, for the one I was thinking about for the book, it'd be kind of neat if you could link to where it was in the book. And then somebody who wanted that answer might want to read some of the other stuff around it or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the next version of the field guide. It should be that. That.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's just gonna be me talk, walking in a park, talking to my phone, like a homeless person, you know, but, you know, 20 bucks, by the.

[Leo Laporte]

Way, and would have been better had I followed the instructions to the letter. And I thought I was smarter than the AI and I was not.

[Paul Thurot]

So. Anyway, I.

[Leo Laporte]

You should do this, Paul. I. This is a perfect example of rag I am trying. Use the book, I think. Not the website, the book.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, that's right. I'm trying, I'm trying. Like I, I still, you know, you mentioned the software development stuff. I have the stupid app thing I'm doing. I'm. This is a complete kind of side thing to the main point of it, but I'm trying. You know, the, the text position in a text box is not a column row like you would expect or whatever. It's, it's. It uses this weird system, but you can kind of calculate column row and I have to do it in reverse. And so finally this morning, I was like, I went, I. What did I use? I think I used ch. I pt. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. But I'm like, could you just write me a freaking thing in C that does.

[Leo Laporte]

I need a pivot table, please.

[Paul Thurot]

Done. I'm like, okay, yeah, I spent two weeks on this like a jerk, you know? Yeah, it's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's mind boggling. Now, Richard, one of the problems with AIs is they have a limited space for tokens.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul's book is pretty long.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it might be too big to fit into.

[Paul Thurot]

That's been one of my issues. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you would. The process of creating your rag is vectorizing all of that into a form that can be fetched. Right. Rather than trying to tokenize the whole thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they don't tokenize it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

They do.

[Richard Campbell]

They store it in a different way. Okay, so you're worried about tokens because you're thinking in terms of his book as a part of a prompt, given this gigantic prompt. What about this where in a RAG model it's actually vectorized already. So does that.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God, that's crazy. But that is what you're doing. It's post training, isn't it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So the, the free services is, will usually say something like. They're like, yeah, throw us all your documents, we're happy to steal all of it. And then they're like, you know, it's a little big. Do you think you could split this up? Yeah. So I've run it.

[Leo Laporte]

So Anthony says RAG is different than putting it directly in the context window.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is what I basically just said.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Thanks, Anthony.

[Richard Campbell]

Anthony. And I agree.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't understand it. So I'm just.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how, that's how Home Assistant works with the AI interface, is that it's basically adding to the prompt the entire.

[Leo Laporte]

Description of the house in the context Window instead of rag.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

So, but RAG often. Maybe it's just a commercial limitation. I mean, like I can't put more than 12 documents, I think in chat GPT.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you can go. Yeah, it's, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're running at home, you could have an unlimited.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So is RAG tokenized? And then.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

So the context window is vectorized. RAG is tokenized.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they're both tokenized, but that vector storage is how you store the tokens efficiently so they can be fetched as part of the rack, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

And that has to be in ram.

[Richard Campbell]

Doesn't have to be, but it depends on the size.

[Leo Laporte]

How big is your book, Paul?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I don't know. It's big.

[Leo Laporte]

How many gigabytes?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so, right, you know what? I don't, I don't have this.

[Leo Laporte]

It's big.

[Paul Thurot]

It's thousands big.

[Leo Laporte]

It's thousands of pages.

[Paul Thurot]

I think one of the file limits was like 100 or. No, it was 50 megabytes. It's probably 173 or something. So it's 1100 and something pages, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

It's doable though, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Ricky Richard Yeah, it's totally.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, no, I've done it. I actually have done it. It's doable. But I'm trying to find one that makes sense, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you also have to put it on the web, right?

[Paul Thurot]

That's right, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I did find a service called Every week you wait, it gets easier, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. So something called PMFM AI that allows you to pick the LLM you're going to use and do what I'm describing. And most of them, you would have to pay, you know, something. And I don't want to just throw this thing on my site and have people use it and be like, yikes, you know, I need to figure out, like, what will this cost me? Ideally, it would cost me nothing.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, clean pub, sophisticated enough to ask them.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, that seems not sophisticated enough to return an email, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

So, no, there is no. I mean, that seems like a feature.

[Paul Thurot]

They're good, they're good people. But they're not yet.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're not wrong. This should be what publishers get into to try and stay relevant.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I bet you anything Tim O'Reilly is thinking about this.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right. Which, by the way, semi related to this is a service, it's called 11 something maybe or something like that, where you have an ebook.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, 11 AI. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And it will make the voice audiobook.

[Leo Laporte]

They're really Good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. So I'm thinking about doing that for Windows Everywhere. So we'll see. But first I want to figure out this. The Windows. The field guy. Look, my goal is to not ever work again. So I'm thinking eventually, how's that working out for you? Is going to do it good or bad? It's going to take my job away.

[Leo Laporte]

So it does a good job. But I don't know if you want to listen to the field guide for Windows.

[Paul Thurot]

No, not the field guide, the Windows Everywhere book.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Windows Everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Because the one that's more of a narrative.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

See, Tim O'Reilly could take this Learning Python.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, yeah. But who would want to listen to that?

[Leo Laporte]

Like, you wouldn't want to listen to it, but you would want an AI that you could query, right?

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I don't want to read all thou. This is thousands.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. No, you have a question. You're using Perl. You have a question. How do I do that?

[Richard Campbell]

You can kill small animals with that book. That's huge.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Paul Thurot]

You could kill yourself if you're.

[Leo Laporte]

The funny thing is, I learned Python when this book was half as big. And then I said, oh, I gotta learn Python 3. And I said, good Lord, I've missed a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they've been edition.

[Leo Laporte]

The first edition was this thick.

[Paul Thurot]

I'll just recommend again. Scott Hanselman and Mark Roch have a podcast and one of the conversations they got into that I really thought was funny was Scott said something to the tune, well, it's not like you're going to use this thing to create code in a language you don't understand. And Mark said, I do that every day. What do you mean?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly what you can.

[Paul Thurot]

And he said, well, I think the example he used was Python. And he said, I don't know anything about Python because I can tell you what works. Make me a function that does whatever, because it's used a lot with AI stuff, I guess. And then he just tells it several times, make it better. And it does.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. That's one of the tricks, isn't it? Okay, that was a good start. But improve that. That.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So he's like, no, I do this every day. He's like, I'm not learning Perl or Python, I'm just going to do it this way.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, as I said, I.

[Paul Thurot]

He's one of the smartest people we've ever met. So if he's doing this, I mean, I think, you know, I got Claude.

[Leo Laporte]

To write a very good answer for My Common lisp. This is day seven for the advent of code. And it wrote it in Common lisp, which I do know. That's the language I use. But not only was it well written, but I ran it and it worked.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's nice when that happens.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, I don't have to really do the advent of code anymore. I'll just have.

[Paul Thurot]

I think you've misunderstood the point of.

[Leo Laporte]

The advent of code. You know, actually, this was great because I could learn from it because I was trying. I was a little struggling with this one because it's dual recursion. And I thought, oh, I don't know. And now this helped me understand it considerably. And by the way, look, here's the explanation it did on it.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I know. That's the thing. It's really good at documenting it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Much better than I am.

[Paul Thurot]

You ask it a question, spits out the code, and it's like, this is what we're doing here. And it's like, yeah. Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

It's amazing. This is why I wanted to do an AI show. It's interesting because something's happening. By the way, Stephen Wolfram will be our guest in about an hour.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, like anyone's heard of him.

[Leo Laporte]

Ray Kurzweil. In two weeks, we're getting some good people, heavy hitters on.

[Paul Thurot]

As I said.

[Leo Laporte]

Harper will explain how he uses ChatGPT to code. Cool. But what's interesting to me, really kind of an overarching thing, is a lot of this behavior is kind of unexpected.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it's better than one would expect.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. I don't know why I keep referencing it, but that short video I mentioned at the end, he says something to that tune. He says, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about it is I don't. You know, the people that made this didn't expect it to do this stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, in some ways, there's some sort of emergent.

[Paul Thurot]

That's property. Exactly. There's something going on here that's very interesting. And, you know, I welcome RAI overlords. It's fine. It's all good.

[Richard Campbell]

I think emergence is a perception thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

On our part.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Of course. We're just. We anthropomorphize anything, like, you know, pets, whatever. Of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Stop now.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right. We're good at it. It might be one or.

[Leo Laporte]

I do it the opposite direction. We have a inflated opinion about what we do as human beings. When we think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And we think there's some magical thing going on. And actually off. You throw enough computer.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, no, it's. You're. You're like the cuckoo thing that hits the thing, you know, like, that's your brain in action. It's not, Right. Yeah, well, it's certainly my brain in action, except I missed the thing.

[Leo Laporte]

So emerging it. Just saying, wow, it's. It's almost as good as we are. Which.

[Paul Thurot]

And then, you know, then you fling the feces at your friend and you're like, yeah, yeah. How did it. How did it raise to this level? I. You know.

[Richard Campbell]

Honestly.

[Paul Thurot]

Unbelievable. Okay, so moving right along. Yeah. We got to hit the top of the hour here. So let me. I'm gonna to race through a little bit of this because most of it doesn't matter.

[Richard Campbell]

Tell me about Panos. Tell me you watch this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did you. You can't watch it. You had to be there.

[Paul Thurot]

Nope.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I did not. Well, I will say in the past, I've been invited to watch it remotely. Did not get an invite this year. I'm sure it's not related to me crapping.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the Verge got all the invites. There were like five Verge people there live.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, Amazon Amazon live logged it. I mean, you know what? So Amazon, Alexa plus. The good news here is it's actually free if you have a Prime account. I was afraid it was going to be an additional thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I didn't. Yeah. But did they say when is the real.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, a couple of months. I think end of March or something or. It's coming. It's not here. Right. Like, not today, but not six months from now. It's just a month or two. If you don't have an Amazon prime account, then I have no idea why you would pay for this, but you could pay 20 bucks a month, which I don't think anyone's ever going to do. Do.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know. It's what we do for chat, GPT and cloud.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So why would you go to the Amazon playground? I mean, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus, it seems like you need an echo with a screen and a camera and.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, it turns out Amazon sells you some things, so. I'll make this better. Yeah. So. Yep. Yeah, I'll. I'll look at it. You know, I don't. I'm not super excited about that because Amazon hardware is crap. I. The problem here is the good news is Amazon's pretty consistent. They're good. They put a. You know, they do stuff. They're not. Like, Google goes off like a. A kitten distracted by a laser light. Like Amazon you know, they're. They get. They do stuff, but also I've seen the stuff they do and it's crap. And I just don't, you know, like, these devices are terrible. So I don't. They did.

[Leo Laporte]

And they didn't announce new devices, did they? Just. Just.

[Paul Thurot]

So. But they don't have to. Right. Because none of this is local. Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they don't need to.

[Paul Thurot]

That stuff. Yeah, yeah. You know, that may change over time, that you'll have devices that maybe are.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's the real question. How many times did Pano say he was pumped?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I don't know. Because I refuse. So I don't know. I assume he did. How many embarrassing videos of his daughter did he show? How many weird pairs of sneakers was he wearing? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Would it be worth spending $400 for the 21 inch Amazon Echo that hangs on your. Your wall?

[Paul Thurot]

Not to me, but I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of pricey.

[Paul Thurot]

I do like the idea of a 15 inch smart display based on the.

[Leo Laporte]

Fact you can get the 15 inch.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. That's not made by Amazon. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they have made by Amazon.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I know. Yeah. 300 bucks. I mean, that's probably okay, look. We'll see. They appear to be a little ahead of Apple, which granted, low bar these days, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Poor Apple. They're missing the AI pretty good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah. They're doing okay financially, though, so don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Feel somehow they're getting by.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. OpenAI said that they now have over 400 million weekly active users.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

Not bad. I think at least 4 or 5 million of those are paying. But whatever the figure is, I mean, it's a good user base. That's good. There was a. A heavily misunderstood story, mostly because there's no way to really know, but there was a report that Microsoft has canceled some of their AI data center leases for the coming year. I actually don't think this means anything, frankly. What it sounds like is, oh, it's finally slowing down. The only thing Microsoft will say on the record is that, look, we already said we're going to spend 80 billion bucks this fiscal year. We are spending at least that this fiscal year. So it's going to be more than that. But whatever, whatever. It's most likely that. To me, anyway, my opinion is that they have let OpenAI go off and use other people's AI infrastructure. They get the right of first refusal, but it's going to ease up their needs. And I think some of the. These are These were things where they hadn't actually exchanged money. This was like a forward leaning type of a thing. They were probably just making sure they could have capacity if they needed it. It mostly for OpenAI. Right. And so they're probably not going to need as much of it anymore. So I don't think it's anything I don't think we're seeing. There's no indication at all that big tech is slowing down the spending on AI. So it will happen eventually I would think, but I don't think today is that day. Anthropic, which is really kind of interesting in that they're super highly regarded among like technical people for their LLMs came up with their first reasoning model. This is the type of model where you can kind of see it thinking, so to speak. It kind of shows you how it gets to its answer eventually. Except that they're not doing it as a separate model. So they have a new version of their Cloud Sonnet Model 3.7 I think. And it actually just has a switch. You can go back and forth between faster and maybe less accurate or slower and you get to see the text and more accurate. Right. And it's your choice. And of course if you're a developer developer, there are APIs that will do that for you and all that stuff. So good. These are just semi related. I feel like this all happened kind of back to back. But things that were paid are suddenly becoming free, which is not what we would expect with AI because we were always told how expensive everything is. And then in one case, one thing that was super stupid expensive is now just normal expensive. So Gemini Code Assist, which is their version of GitHub Copilot is now free for individuals and it's pretty much wide open. I mean they technically have limits. I don't think anyone could code this much and not sleep to use these limits or hit these limits. So it is effectively free. Like GitHub Copilot has usage restrictions each month, then it resets and I've never run into those limits on GitHub Copilot, but so I mean, whatever good for them. I mean so Google Gemini, you can get that for free. That's cool tool. Think Deeper, which is the, you know, Microsoft flavored version of the OpenAI ChatGPT Reasoning Model no longer has usage restrictions before they had monthly usage restrictions. And also the voice capability, same thing. That is interesting. And then the deep Research feature which was previously only available to chat GPT, I can't remember which what it's called.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe Pro $200 tier.

[Paul Thurot]

The $200. Right. Is now available to all of their paid customers. No matter which plan you're on, like $20 a month for individuals, you get access to that. Now there are restrictions, of course. I think it's off the top of my head, maybe 15amonth or something or whatever it is. But you could do Leo's deep research into hash browns.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Or some sciency thing, whatever. It might be awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a lot of science in hash brown. I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But you don't need to do more than 15 researches into hash browns a month. So.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the free.

[Leo Laporte]

Funny.

[Paul Thurot]

The free tier is probably good enough for that one.

[Leo Laporte]

It's pretty funny that it took 14 minutes longer than it took me to make the hash to make it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it's funny. Apple has been going through a series of iOS and also iPados and Mac OS.

[Leo Laporte]

I would never ask Siri how to make hash browns. I could tell you that right now.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sorry, I don't know what the temperature is right now. What.

[Leo Laporte]

Get a rubber eraser.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like a person like who has both like hearing loss and dementia. You know, like if you want that in this, in a model or you know, a chatbot or whatever this thing is called now at Siri is right there with you. So 18.1 was the first to add some features. I think 18.2 was the big one. 18.3 came out. So now they're testing 18.4. This was the one that was supposed to close the loop on the Siri functionality. They talked about last year at wwdc and it turns out that that's not going to be the case. So there's going to be a future release.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very possible for Apple. But yeah, they clearly said they were going to do something before they knew how they were going to do it and now they're fighting to try and deliver.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, look, if you're an Apple customer, use these products. I think. I guess the good news is like they're going to get it right and they're not going to ship it until it's kind of there, I guess is the idea. But it's taking a long time. I mentioned that service 11, whatever it was 11 public whatever, blah, blah, blah. That will take, if you're an author, will take a audio. No. An ebook. Right? No. Yes. It will take an existing book and turn it into an AI narrated audiobook. Spotify is also offering this service. Nvidia partnered with actually two other companies and did some work with the Rochester Institute of Technology where my son went to give away a service called Signs and I think it's signs AI. Let me just make sure. Yep. No, sorry, signs-AI.com that will help you learn American Sign Language for free.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I saw that. That looks so cool.

[Paul Thurot]

That's a neat thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I was going to ask you what you're son thought of that. I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So he was, he was excited that RIT was involved in this. And they're doing a thing where you can sign up if you know sign language. You can optionally go in and say, I will help you train it. And they'll. You do, you go through some exercises, you do various signs and they try to find the ones that are most accurate and use that to train them, train the model. They, you know, the goal is to make this thing as accurate as possible. Right. They're going to grounded on that data. Right. And so it's, you know, the American. I'm sorry, it's the American Society for Deaf Children. And then there's a company in the back and it has a strange, I'm sorry, I don't know the other company, but Nvidia. Right. So Nvidia is obviously donating a lot of technology to make this happen, but cool. I mean this is, you know, this is great. They also, I, my wife is more involved in actually everything than I am, but I threw this quote by her. Her, it says the American Sign Language is the third most prevalent language in the United States. And she's like, no, it isn't. It's not. No, not even close. I don't know why they say that. So obviously English, Spanish, but after that it's like Portuguese, Italian, it's the whole thing. I don't know what the numbers are. I shouldn't say numbers, but it's actually not even close. And she knew that right off the top of her head. She's like, yeah, that's not.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course she did.

[Paul Thurot]

AI probably wrote the press release. It's fine. What else? Because I asked about this last week. So Microsoft did belatedly ship well to me belatedly net 10 preview one. Right. So now I think every six weeks through November we're going to get more previews and whatever. But this one was weird. I don't know if you, you must look at this, Richard. Like this is the first time I think I've ever seen this where there was no announcement post describing things. They just had links to each of the whatever's in this milestone and those links all went to GitHub which is inscrutable. I went through the list and I was like I don't think there's anything new here. I don't know what this is of note obviously. Well, this will be a long term servicing version of. Net so that's cool but that's not going to help you in the preview. Then when I look for the things I care about like things like WPF or some minor Winforms change or, or stuff they're doing in Net Maui just language changes to C sharp, et cetera, there's not a lot of meat here. It's a lot of text. But I don't know, this one was a little strange for me. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you did complain last week that they hadn't posted anything so I guess they felt they needed to post something.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah, it's not even in the top 10.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well I did say spoken maybe if I didn't say spoken.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel like a no.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I, I, I when she told said this to me I looked up languages and I found five immediately that had more users.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

In the United Active users. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But there is a video coming of the you know what's in preview one that might be a little less inscrutable.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah I think I might take from outside like way outside is that I think they're, I think they might have finally, you know, they, they're on a pretty tough cadence. I mean it's possible that once a year for the entire stack is not necessary maybe anymore they haven't just caught up. It's so much better than it's ever been. I mean maybe it's time to start thinking about not having a made every year just of the Well I would.

[Richard Campbell]

Also argue that Preview 1 is usually all the stuff that didn't make it it like which there are epics. There are bigger features that that are worked on across multiple versions and you haven't heard from any of those. Right. Yet because they're still gauging where they are on them to say is this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, clearly they wanted to get this up before the end of February something.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, this is the normal time for preview one to come out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. So maybe you know, preview two, Preview three, whatever will be more meaningful. I, I know. I mean just because I cared so much about it Last year they did the WPF stuff in preview four or five. I think I remember that one of the two.

[Richard Campbell]

But that was also timing with the announcement of build. Right. The build that kind of said, hey, we're going to make a big push on wpf.

[Paul Thurot]

But then there were no other updates and then it shipped and then it was like, oh, here's a couple of new features for wpf. It's like, guys, I mean, you couldn't have thrown that in a month earlier? I mean, yeah, I think there's a.

[Richard Campbell]

Real struggle for what gets done in the time frame.

[Paul Thurot]

I think so. Too aggressive.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there's a sort of philosophical debate here of do you ship to a date or do you ship to a feature set?

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And for a long time Dev Div lived on a ship to the feature set world. But it also meant that you didn't know when stuff was going to appear.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Right. So there's a reliability obviously to a yearly schedule. But I mean, look, maybe it's time for an 18 month schedule. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

There's certainly an argument around that because it's not like they're trying to make annual revenue, you know, milestones here either.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no money here. There's no direct revenue associated with this stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also a part of this is also keeping people on the current version to decrease the amount of security patching they need to go back on and so forth and clts and all that. Like getting this commitment to the three year cycle. Like you're talking about a big thing to change to be able to expand that out.

[Paul Thurot]

But we're on version 10, which I guess is technically whatever version, because this was net core. Well, I guess it's still 10, right. Still been 10 since more or less.

[Richard Campbell]

They skipped over nominally five.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, look. Okay, so we're about a decade into this. It's succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. I think it's incredible since the rewrite. Yeah. Maybe now it's time to rethink. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, if you have Net questions, that guy on the right there, Mr. Richard Campbell's the King of Net. His podcast.net rocks@.rexnox.com I am the court jester of Net.

[Paul Thurot]

Thank you for mentioning that.

[Leo Laporte]

If you have an Xbox question, the guy in the middle is the one you're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat. Richard Campbell. Well, we're glad you're here, you lovely winners and dozers.

[D]

The IRS is the largest collection agency in the world, and with April 15th fast approaching, it's more aggressive than ever. In 2025. Enforcement has ramped up, and if you owe back taxes or have unfiled returns, waiting is not an option. The longer you do, the worse it gets. Ignoring your tax troubles is the worst thing you can do. April 15 marks another tax year that has passed you by. Getting ahead of this now is the smart move, but never, never contact the IRS alone. Instead, let the experts at Tax Network USA handle it for you. Why? Because not all tax resolution companies are the same. Tax Network USA has a preferred direct line to the irs, meaning they know exactly which agents to deal with and which to avoid with proven strategies to settle tax problems in your favor. Whether you owe $10,000 or $10 million, Tax Network USA's attorneys and negotiators have already resolved over $1 billion in tax debt. Talk with one of their strategists today. It's free. Stop the threatening letters, stop looking over your shoulder and protect yourself from property seizures and bank levies. Don't let the IRS control your future. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com April 15 is just around the corner. Act now before the IRS acts first.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurot]

Well, that's not good.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's so much good news too.

[Paul Thurot]

Why? Unfortunately I yeah, so we already mentioned that Microsoft delayed Fable, the reboot of Fable as part of this bizarre video Interview. Just a weird way to do it. And it's hard to know where to land on this. Phil Spencer talks about this a lot. Like, we want to give these studios the time they need to make the game right, make it well. And the alternative, of course, is what we see across the industry, which is server games that are three years in where they're like, yeah, we're not doing this. They just give up on it. So that's obviously a fear as well, but, okay, fine. And as part of it, I only know this because I use ChatGPT, but they talked about the broader strategy at Xbox and bringing games to more platforms, and there's nothing new to say there. But I think it's one of those things Xbox as an organization feels like they have to keep repeating because at some point you have to reach these people who are just like, no, no, I want console and I want it exclusive. And I don't know. I don't know how we bridge this.

[Richard Campbell]

Gap, but I don't know that anybody actually wants exclusive per se. That isn't a game producer. Regular people don't care where the games run. They just want to run on their device.

[Paul Thurot]

You would think that, but my readers are really negative about this. They associate with Xbox as a brand. They see what Sony did and the successes they've had with these exclusives, and they want that for themselves.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is more about. This is more about the conversations you'd have with your therapist than it is about software.

[Paul Thurot]

Then I am with you 100%. I agree. No, I look at this logically and I say, look, yes, it would be wonderful if Xbox as a console was going gangbusters. It was great. It's not. So what can we do? And I think they have come. We'll see what happens in the real world. I think the strategy is correct and that Xbox ultimately is. Is really. They don't want to say it this way, but it's what Activision Blizzard was right with the nuance of our parent company is Microsoft. They have this cloud stuff and data center, and we're going to be doing cloud streaming games. We'll talk about that in a second. We're going to be doing AI generated content. I didn't put this in the show notes, but one of the things Activision finally admitted to was that they put out all this in game content for Call of Duty. And it comes out at such a clip that people are like, come on, you must be using AI for a lot of this. Like, how are you doing this? And they Were like, yeah, some of this is made with AI and the sum of this is stuff like little decals and hats and guns and things or whatever you can buy in the game that just, you know, don't really impact anything. But yeah, you know, people like to like that stuff. Yeah. Stuff, you know, I don't know. I don't spend money on anything like that. I get the game, but then I just kind of play the game. I don't know, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

You call yourself a gamer?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, I usually try to do air quotes around it. Small G. But yeah, you're a gamer.

[Leo Laporte]

I call you gamer man.

[Paul Thurot]

Thank you. Game over. Game over man. Exactly. So Xbox Cloud gaming, which is the former Project X Cloud gaming. X Cloud, Yeah. I don't know why that sounds weird when I say it. Yes. X Cloud is still. Is something you can only get as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Right. So if you pay for the most expensive tier you get.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is expensive.

[Paul Thurot]

It is expensive. It's 20 bucks a month now. Right. It's expensive, but you get all the PC games, you get all the Xbox games and you can stream a chunk of them through the service. But it's continually in beta. It's not really changed too much and they just announced an update to it, which in the scheme of this thing is actually fairly major. So you can invite people from within these stream games to come and stream with you and play games with you. So that should work anywhere you can access Xbox cloud gaming. So cross platform, which is pretty cool. I love the network quality indicator, which will do what my iPhone does and tell you that you always have five bars even though you can't connect anything. Yeah. If you've ever used like Xbox cloud gaming, unless you are the perfect storm of upstream and downstream and right place, right time, whatever phase of the moon, you know, it's kind of a dicey endeavor. There's a lot of latency issues there, so whatever. And then they've made new titles available that you can stream if you own them. Right. So one of the features they did fairly recently was that thing they promised probably two years ago, which is that if you have. If you own games, digital games, you can stream them through the service as well. You don't have to have them on a Xbox somewhere and stream them from the console. And I'm looking at this list, honestly, I don't recognize. Well, Tomb Raider 4 through 6 is remastered. That's cool. Kingdom Come, Deliverance 2, several others.

[Leo Laporte]

Subnautica Deliverance, the game Deliverance.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, not that. Not The Deliverance.

[Leo Laporte]

Squeal like a pig.

[Paul Thurot]

No, that was the first one. No, it's Kingdom Come.

[Leo Laporte]

Play that game.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody wants to play that game. Nobody.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody.

[Paul Thurot]

Kingdom Come, Colon. Deliverance two is the. Ah, not Deliverance. It's the. Yeah, it's a. What do you call. It's like a.

[Leo Laporte]

You got a purdy mouse like a woman.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. The tennis. Was that the Tennessee Valley Project or whatever? Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They were going to flood it and.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, and then they would have flooded those guys.

[Leo Laporte]

So Burt Reynolds decided this is a good time to take a little kayak voyage down the mighty river. Yeah, that's a great movie.

[Paul Thurot]

It is a great movie. A little uncomfortable in places I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Know how well it ages. You ever watch old movies and you go, wow.

[Paul Thurot]

All the time, and you're like, oh, my God, I love this one. When I was a kid and what happened?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we're doing that right now because the Day of the Jackal is on. You know, the TV show.

[Paul Thurot]

There are multiple versions. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So the original new TV show with Eddie Redmayne, and I'm saying. I'm telling Lisa, that's not. This isn't. It didn't happen. What. Because I read.

[Paul Thurot]

So the original one is the. What's the French leader from World War II.

[Leo Laporte]

De Gaulle, they were going to say. So we're watching the original 1973 movie.

[Paul Thurot]

That's pretty good with every. I think it's Eddie Fox. Yeah, the other Fox, the one that's not in every movie you've ever seen in the 90s.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a wonderful movie. But, yeah, it's a little. Lisa's going. You know what would make this really work? A drone shot.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, so. All right, so there was a fairly modern remake with, I think. Was it Richard Gere?

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, there's a new version.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, modern era, not new.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, is it still going after Deaul?

[Paul Thurot]

No, it's. They changed up the plot. But actually, if you've seen the movie the American. Right. With Clooney. Right. If you think about Clooney and his character in that movie and him assembling weapons and going around, it's actually very much like the original. The original movie to me, Day of.

[Leo Laporte]

The Jackal, there's some little. In the TV show, which is a 10, 10 hour extravaganza.

[Paul Thurot]

Is this on, what, Netflix or.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. No, it's Peacock, I think, or Peacock Oddball. But it's good. It's just, you know, it's not. It's not the original.

[Richard Campbell]

I found the Ending disappointing and deeply unsatisfying.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not well written. They're like he gets hit by a car and then the next scene they.

[Richard Campbell]

Cut away, he's walking around. I think they ran out of money. They literally couldn't shoot.

[Leo Laporte]

That must be what it is.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So it's. Oh, it's Bruce Willis. Bruce Willis and Richard gere were in 1997. So not modern, but, you know, more modern.

[Leo Laporte]

Watch the Original Universal Pictures 1973 starring Edward Fox. The Day of the Jackal Classic movie be.

[Paul Thurot]

I think Redmayne getting and Edward Fox is that guy. You'll be like, I seen him. But he is a brother who's an actor and they look very similar. And I always forget Fox always plays.

[Leo Laporte]

Royals now like he's King Charles.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, he's. I was gonna say looks most like the Andrew actually. But anyway. But yes, yes, yes. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry. No, no, that's. That's it. That's what I got got.

[Leo Laporte]

Folks, before we go on to the back of the book, there's a fabulous brown liquor. Pick a coming. It's a coming around the mountain wench. Oh, look, they're tiny. Hello guys. We're just little. Little Richard. You know, if you want these little guys to grow up big and strong, there's one thing you can do today to help them and that's to join clubs.

[Paul Thurot]

Tell them to stop smoking.

[Richard Campbell]

That's your great growth.

[Leo Laporte]

The club. By the way, $7 a month gets you ad free versions of all the shows. You get additional content. Tomorrow we're doing Stacy's book club. That'll be a lot of fun. I always like doing that. I have to read a 700 page book in the next 24 hours, but that's par for the course. We have the photo guy, Chris Marquardt doing a wonderful photo segment every month. There's a lot of extra stuff for.

[Paul Thurot]

The for the club.

[Leo Laporte]

Plus of course, access to the club Twit Discord, which is the behind the velvet rope access to all of our hosts. But most importantly, that seven bucks a month makes up the difference between what it costs to do these programs and what we make on advertising. The advertising doesn't cover it all, but the club makes up the difference. We thank the club members and we invite you to be part of the club. It's really, really a great club. Seven bucks a month. Twit TV clubtwit. Or scan the QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen.

[D]

The IRS is the largest collection agency in the world and with April 15th fast approaching, it's more aggressive than ever in 2025. Enforcement has ramped up, and if you owe back taxes or have unfiled returns, waiting is not an option. The longer you do, the worse it gets. Ignoring your tax troubles is the worst thing you can do. April 15 marks another tax year that has passed you by. Getting ahead of this now is the smart move. But never, never contact the IRS alone. Instead, let the experts at Tax Network USA handle it for you. Why? Because not all tax resolution companies are the same. Tax Network USA has a preferred direct line to the irs, meaning they know exactly which agents to deal with, with and which to avoid with proven strategies to settle tax problems in your favor. Whether you owe $10,000 or $10 million, Tax Network USA's attorneys and negotiators have already resolved over $1 billion in tax debt. Talk with one of their strategists today. It's free. Stop the threatening letters, stop looking over your shoulder and protect yourself from property seizures and bank levies. Don't let the IRS control your future. Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit tnusa.com April 15th is just around the corner. Act now before the IRS acts first.

[Paul Thurot]

Hey, prime members, Are you tired of ads interfering with your favorite podcasts? Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon music app for free or go to Amazon.com ad free podcasts. That's Amazon.com ad free podcasts to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, back to the little fellas. It's time for the back of the book, starting with Paul's tip of the week.

[Paul Thurot]

I just got an email, by the way, that's told me that AI is a better cook than I am.

[Leo Laporte]

So it might be.

[Paul Thurot]

You're onto something, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

The AI made better hash browns than I did.

[Paul Thurot]

That's for sure. This is kind of apropos of nothing. I just want people to know that this happened. So some years ago, a guy. Some guy started the, like a UNIX preservation society and Dennis Richie. I don't know why that's hilarious, but okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Dennis Ritchie Eunuch is doing okay. I'm just saying, I don't know if it needs to.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, is it. I mean, UNIX isn't really. I mean, the original unix. I don't know. I mean.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul, next time you do your banking, you can thank. Okay, well, Dennis Kernahan and.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, Dennis.

[Leo Laporte]

Dennis Richie and Richie and Tom Kevin Thompson and whatever Kernahan's name was.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yes. So Dennis Ritchie in 1997 donated to this guy a set of old, what he called deck tapes, which were backups he had made on a PDP 11 back in the 70s, which included a bunch of the original source code for unix. So the first two versions of UNIX were actually written in pdp, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Assembling.

[Paul Thurot]

Assembling language. Yeah. And then of course, they invented the C programming language and subsequent versions were written in C. So this is not actually the oldest version of unix. They found handwritten notes about the source code for the original. Original one of the like 1.0 versions, scanned it, got it onto an emulator, and it works like they got it to work. But this what they. So this, these tapes have been here around for, well, for 40, 50 years, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Huge discovery.

[Paul Thurot]

But he started handing them off to a different guy who has specific skills around, like recovering data off of these tapes he found on them. It collected, not in one thing, but he collected what he needed to find the oldest machine readable version of unix. It's a beta. They didn't call it beta at the time, but they didn't have version numbers at the time. But between V1 and V2, sometime in 1972. So V2, I guess, had some fundamental changes to the operating system that hadn't occurred yet in this version. So it's really kind of a 1.0, something like 1.5, whatever. And he, he got it running in an emulator and it works. So you can go see the source code, you can download it. He has all the instructions. You have to run this thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Emulator right here. I should see if I can get it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's really interesting. So to me, the story is, to me, what's most interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Now, this isn't the one from the napkins. This is from the tapes.

[Paul Thurot]

This is from tapes. The point of this was like, this will almost certainly be, given the passage of time, the oldest version they've ever recovered from actual physical media and got into it.

[Leo Laporte]

Era begins in January 1, 1970. But 72 has to be one of the earliest. You know, for years I have cherished this book. This is called the Lion Book. It's Lion's commentary. It's the Unix 6 source code.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's actually, you could see it's a dot matrix printout. But lion, lion wrote great commentary.

[Richard Campbell]

There was a guy who still has a running PDP 11. I wonder if we could get that UNIX loaded on that machine.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a pidp, it's running a Raspberry PI, but it's emulating its full.

[Paul Thurot]

So I could be getting this wrong, But I think V1, the first version, actually ran on something called the PDP7, which curiously is an 18 bit minicomputer system. 1965. Right. I think it was programmed with Egyptian hieroglyphics or something. Something. But yeah, 70.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's much.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so it's V2 and. And this. Well, it was ported later, the PDP 11, which I guess was much more powerful.

[Leo Laporte]

The funny thing is, in 1984, when I started working for KNBR Radio in San Francisco, they were generating their music playlists on a PDP8. Oh, geez.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And the software it ran on was on this giant 8 inch floppy. So I would come in as music director. You'd have to put the floppy in, clunk, boot up to the floppy, and then the PDPA would generate on dot matrix teletype, a playlist for the DJs to play.

[Paul Thurot]

That is incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was such a pain to use, I accidentally broke it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no.

[Leo Laporte]

And we got a PC. Because this is 1984, kids. It's time to get with the. I think we got a Mac, actually.

[Paul Thurot]

We might have. The microcomputer revolution was happening.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. But yeah, you have to use a PDP. And you know who else loves the PDP 7 and 8 is Steve Gibson.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And he actually said at one point, I don't know if he'll really do this, that his dream is when he retires, to take a PDP8 and rewrite the operating system.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, geez. Yeah, that sounds like a good use of time, man. That Dave Plumber guy from Microsoft brought up a PDP 11. He bought one and brought it back to life.

[Leo Laporte]

This is how they grew up, right? This is their first experience.

[Paul Thurot]

This is like, you know, other types of people might buy a muscle car, you know, the same thing, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Or I might buy an Atari 400. Yeah, yeah, right. You might buy Amiga.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. An Amiga. Yeah, I did, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

See?

[Paul Thurot]

Interesting. And then.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this. This is. Can you look at it online?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, you can go read the assembly, you can download it, you can run it in an emul.

[Richard Campbell]

That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

That is really. I'll have to get it. Yeah, that's cool.

[Paul Thurot]

And then this is not a Windows app or anything like that, but I didn't want to do the browser. The same browser again. So this is actually kind of a big release. But Adobe actually put out Photoshop, like actual Photoshop for the iPhone this week. And I don't know if you've looked at this, it's pretty. It's pretty fricking good. Now, I believe you have to have a paid Photoshop plan to access it, but it has all the same icons as Photoshop. And like, if you use like a modern. Like, if you use Photoshop today, like Elements especially, the default UI is not the. The workspace. You know, it's one of those like, what do you want to do next kind of things. And so it sort of works like that. So you. You open a file, basically, and then it gives you all the icons.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it more like Photoshop Elements?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, probably. I'm not really even sure anymore what the difference is, but it's. It's. Well, you know how they had like Photoshop. They had a mobile Photoshop app called something. Photoshop.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they've had Photoshop, but it was not full.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but it's something else. It's like Photoshop Essentials or Photoshop.

[Leo Laporte]

This is now available.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, this is literally Photoshop iPhone, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, I know it's right. And. And it. I. It also works on an iPad. So we're getting it. We're getting it. Yeah, it's getting kind of interesting now.

[Leo Laporte]

We're got. We have something.

[Paul Thurot]

If you didn't see this, this is worth. Yeah, this is worth looking at. Like, it's not. It is not the stripped down nothing that you think it is. It's actually.

[Leo Laporte]

I picked a bad time to give up my creative cloud subscription, didn't I?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, that's always the way, isn't it? I mean, it's. It's interesting. This is. This was more. This was better than I thought it was going to be. Like, this might actually be a. I don't want to say the term game changer. It's a little overused, but it's. It's pretty amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and you know, people do stuff on their phones. There's no two ways about it.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got to be the thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Impressive.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I think so.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it is a statement about the amount of horsepower in an iPhone these days.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And thank God they don't have those stupid small screens anymore. Now you can actually see the damn thing. I know this is sore spot for some people. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. All right, you ready for some run ass?

[Paul Thurot]

Mm.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this week's run, as I did on Exchange Server, because it had been a while.

[Paul Thurot]

I know the on prem.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, this was what the debate became Right. Michael Derogia from the Netherlands does a definitive book, the Exchange Administrators Handbook, and does a lot of. There's a lot of scripts. If you were operating Exchange Server, you've run some of his PowerShell scripts. It's kind of inevitable, right. He is the guy. And so we've been talking a while, but I really want to talk about Exchange, just what it's like in 2025 because there hasn't been an on prem version of Exchange servership since 2019. Right. They're overdue. And he made the point because of course he's very much an insider. So for he says, you know, they've already publicly stated that there will be another on prem version of Exchange probably this year, but it will be subscription based.

[Paul Thurot]

So you are going to keep it on prem. But. But. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. And it's just. But you know, the bigger conversation in this, if you care to get in the nitty gritty and I do, was just how much work it is to run a mail server today that won't automatically get all of its mail rejected. Right. Like just because the new security rules and filters and all these sorts of things, there's really hard to maintain. Like it's difficult to actually make a running Exchange server today. And so once again, it's like all the encouragement is to go to the online product one way or the other. Right. But we went back and forth on this, just the challenges of what it's like and you make a lot of that pain go away when you can just go online. That being said, there's still no good hybrid mode, non hybrid mode. If you've come from on prem and you're moving online, you still end up with at least one server left behind in a weird state. Difficult to actually hang it up. It's an active directory. When you uninstall your last Exchange server and your on prem environment, it pulls all this stuff out of active directory related to mail, which causes problems. And so you kind of have to leave that in place if you're going to continue to function that way. Hey, no one ever said this stuff was easy.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the whole point. It's a Flex.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I run my own server at home. I run Exchange.

[Richard Campbell]

That's pass Flex into sort of a. I like abuse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's masochism. From Flex to masochist in one easy step. By the way, Paul, I got it running. Look at this. Hide background.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Removing background. Let's see. I mean, you could do this in the iPhone by just direct. That's okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

The screen. The thing that's interesting to me is like, on mine when I was using it, it was dark mode, but the, it mirrors the, like the Photoshop desktop ui. Like, it. I was like, what? Like, how is this possible? Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

This is actually. Yeah, this is not bad.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, Richard, you have 22 minutes and 15 seconds. Sell us some brown liquor. We've got, we've got Stephen Wolf in a minute.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm in a panic. Absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't panic. But the smartest man in the world is about to join us.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, kids, don't panic.

[Paul Thurot]

But I mean, maybe panic, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going back to my stomping grounds. So as you've heard me tell stories before, when I go to Scotland, I like to go stay at the Hotel Craig Hotel on the Spey River. And Rothes is a town in Moray, which is just north of, of the Craig, which is also on the Spay River. That town is old. It's been around since, like there's records going back to 600 AD for that town. And it's not huge, but it is whiskey central, right? This is the Speyside. So literally in within the limits of the town are the distillery Spayburn, Glen Turret, Glen Spay and Glen Rothes. The Rothay's castle, which is a ruin now built back in 1200, is right beside the Glens Bay, distinct still here on the southern side of town. So now on the way from the Craig Lache to Rothes, you're going to pass Abelauer, Macallan and Dewar's, so which is also, you know, where other whiskies are made too. And not surprisingly, because this is Scotland, they got the railway in 1858, which is sort of your catalyst for an awful lot of these things. So the original Glen Rothface distillery, built in 1878, 20 years after the railway came through from a converted sawmill and started producing whiskey. And long before the Diageos and United Distillers of the World, there was a group formed around Glen Rothays and an Isla whiskey called Bonahaven, called the Highland Distillers. And this is, you know, we're talking the late 1800s. So this is when France has its crisis in wine production, when they get the, the, the blight that kills a bunch of the grapes and drives the price of brandy through the roof. So whiskey sales go, go crazy. And these guys were right there in that hot time and they bought up a Bunch of other distilleries including Glen Glasow and Tom Dew. And then Even after the 1800s into the early 1900s, they bought Highland Park. They also own Glen Turt, which is famous grouse. And in the 90s they bought Macallan. But going back to the early times, they had all the usual problems for old style distilled distilleries, including explosion in 1903 that leveled the distillery and big chunks of the town. This is because you were vaporizing alcohol with fire and sometimes bad things happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it doesn't happen anymore because by the 1960s they go to steam for heating distillery. So the fire is outside the building and you're pumping hot water in and everything is safer. Right. It's the right way to go. 60s and 70s is when everybody converts to that, so fewer people die.

[Paul Thurot]

Die.

[Richard Campbell]

But you'll also notice if you ever go into these still buildings we do the tours, that they're open air.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That they're basically environmental temperatures because they always need to be vented. Right. In the early 1920s, a group called the Barry Brothers starts using Glen Rothes to make a. A blended whiskey called Cutty Sark, which is a fairly famous whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

I've heard of that, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also the early 1920s which is when Prohibition is on. So that immediately try and start selling it to the Americans. Barry Brothers been around a long time. Formed in 1698 as wine merchants and of course they got into liquor and so forth. And so they, they expanded into this market and bought into the space and were right through the prohibition making money smuggling Cuddy Stark into that. So they actually had a really good brand reputation when Prohibition ended. Now you can fast forward to the 1990s with this group called the Edgerton Group. So the Edgerton Group comes from Glenn Grant and a bunch of, or from William Grant and a bunch of the others. These were the counterpoint folks that were sort of anti Diageo, anti suntory, anti big conglomerate. They were Scots buying Scottish stuff. And so they acquired Highland Distillers, which at that point was over 100 years old and been around a long time and actually took the group private so got out of the public markets to help protect it. It was very much their mindset that they wanted to keep all of those, those, these different products, including Macallan. It's not a huge group. It's not like Diageo with 30 something distilleries. It's half a dozen but very nice whiskies. And they, they kept it private and in part of that process they ended up buying up. They. They actually sold off the Glen Rothy's distilleries back to Barry Brothers and then turned around in 2017 and bought it all back. So at this particular moment, Edmonton Group owns the whole. The whole cluster in Bray Brothers is out of that business. And they, including, you know, Cutty Sark is now over there as well. The distillery itself is interesting in the way that it operates. They don't do separate maltings the way that a lot of other distilleries do, but they do do it with one of their other distilleries, Tamdu, which is about 20km away. That's where the maltings happen. They actually do their own and then bring it back up to Glen Rothey's to do their own mash and mill and all the distillations they have single 5 ton mash ton with copper top, 20 washbacks of which 12 are Oregon pine, 8 are stainless. That ratio of 2 to 1 wood to steel is very deliberate. Part of their flavor profile. They use your favorite, the yeast cream to do a 55 hour fermentation to 8%.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite.

[Richard Campbell]

That's absolutely a thing, right? And then they now have over. Over the mo Literally Century have added stills to the point where they have five washes and five spirits all identical. The wash stills, slightly smaller spirit stills, which is weird. Normally spot wash stills are bigger and these are very tall neck stills with bulbs for maximized reflex because they keep their still running at a higher putting out a higher level product than most. They put out about 68 to 72% and they actually barrel at 68, which is unusual. Most whiskies are barrel. Most Scottish whiskeys are barrelled at 63. But almost all of their. That's really because of bourbon casks which they rarely use. They only do a little bit of bourbon. They mostly barrel in sherry. They also make their own barrels. They do not use any of the shared cooperages. Galen Raftes has their own cooperage now. When it was run by Barry Brothers. Berry Brothers did not do an age statement whiskey. They did these things they called vintages. They had their own names for them. But since Edgerton is taking it back again as of 2017, they are doing vintages. And I picked the base vintage which I've had called the Glen Rothes 15. This is almost entirely sherry cash. So it's very rich, dark reddish whiskey, 43%. It is available in the US if you can find it in specialty stores, usually running about US$100. And I consider it a super old school Scottish whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it worth it?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, this is a. This is a first drink whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it really peaty?

[Richard Campbell]

No, Pete. At all. It's a spaceide.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So very sweet and light dark colored. It's a nice drinking whiskey. But yeah, for a hundred dollars a bottle, have one and then switch to the fix to the famous Grouse, which you'll be paying the same guys, but you know, that's a $20 bottle of whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Or have a Cutty Sark.

[Richard Campbell]

Or the Cutty Sark. Yeah, work too. They own both. Both Cutty Sark and famous Grouse. So you have your choice.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell at a very nice episode of what we now are going to start calling Richard's Brown Laker segment. By the way, I like that Microsoft band jacket. I guess maybe you're a Scottish. I don't know what this is.

[Richard Campbell]

That sure looks like an RCMP surge.

[Leo Laporte]

It does. He's a Mountie. That's what he is.

[Richard Campbell]

He looks like a Mountie.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a Mountie with somehow working for Microsoft. Thank you to Joe Esposito once again for his lovely Photoshop skill. Not made on an iPhone, I have no doubt.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ricardo Campbell. The brown liquor segment. I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

I love it.

[Paul Thurot]

It's always true liquor.

[Leo Laporte]

But when I do, he does look like the most interesting brown liquor man in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Something.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute. Let's get Paul full size. There you go. And let's get him on the left. There you go. And then let's get me in there. And there's middle and no on the left. And then make you sick with all of that, ladies and gentlemen. They should never give me control of the mouse. I just want to say thank you so much once again, another wonderful edition of Windows Weekly. Richard Campbell [e-mail]. that's where you'll find his podcast.net rocks. Also the podcast he does with Carl Franklin. Run as radio.

[Richard Campbell]

I think you switched those up.

[Paul Thurot]

Vice versa.

[Leo Laporte]

You're the rez radio guy.

[Richard Campbell]

You and Carl.

[Leo Laporte]

Net rocks.

[Paul Thurot]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Paul Thurot [e-mail] that's easy to remember. T, H, U, R, R, O, T.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not easy to spell, but it's easy to remember.

[Leo Laporte]

There's two Rs, three Ts, an O and a U. Put them in any order and you'll get there.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, probably.

[Leo Laporte]

This works. You should Register all possible combination books are Windows Everywhere and Field guide to Windows 11 now with AI are [e-mail] maybe soon. I love that idea.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

And I like the idea of an audiobook of Windows Everywhere that you could do. That's easy.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't want to read it, that's for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, let the AI read it.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe they could train it on my voice and that would sound like me reading it.

[Leo Laporte]

I can get you Helen Mirren.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like dripping with sarcasm waves and then you're not going to believe what Microsoft did next.

[Leo Laporte]

We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live. The lip sync is not as good, but you can watch us do it live on a variety of platforms. If you're in the club, of course. Club Twit, Discord. Discord has the stream and also the chatting going on behind the scenes. But we also use YouTube, Twitch, Kick, X.com TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn. And I think I got them all anyway.

[Paul Thurot]

Is it on vine or what's left?

[Leo Laporte]

Vine weren't dead. It would. We're on everywhere we can because we want to make sure everybody gets a chance to watch. But you don't have to watch live. Most people listen at their convenience. The way to do that, of course, download a copy of the show, audio or video from TWIT TV ww. When you're there, you can also find a link to our YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. That's good to have for sharing clips. Just, you know, makes YouTube makes that very easy and, you know, everybody can watch it and it helps promote the show. So thank you in advance. You can also subscribe on your favorite podcast player. That's probably the best way to do it. Find a podcast client, whether it's Pocketcast, which I think a lot of people use, or Apple's podcasts or Overcast, or I can go on and on. Any RSS feeder should be able to subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically as soon as we're done editing it of a Wednesday afternoon. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Paul. If you're watching live, stay tuned. We're going to do intelligent machines in a few minutes. Minutes. Very special guest Stephen Wolfram will join us, whoever that is. Some smart guy, I don't know. One of the most accomplished people in the world. I really want to get the people who've been doing this for a long time to help us understand this stuff because, like you, Paul. I love it. I'm interested. I know it can do stuff, but.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm pretty sure it's just a magic trick. That's my level of understanding.

[Leo Laporte]

I need to know more. We asked Richard.

[Paul Thurot]

That was my car.

[Richard Campbell]

That is one very clever stochastic parrot.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes, exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

I knew I had a quarter behind my ear.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you next time on Dripping With Sarcasm Wave. No, I'm sorry. On Windows Weekly. Have a wonderful week.