Windows Weekly 939: The House Hippo

Summary

Podcast Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
Episode: Windows Weekly 939: The House Hippo
Release Date: July 3, 2025
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, Richard Campbell

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of Windows Weekly, hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, and Richard Campbell delve into significant developments within Microsoft, the latest Windows updates, and the expanding influence of AI in technology. The discussion is both informative and entertaining, providing listeners with in-depth analysis and firsthand insights.

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Microsoft Layoffs and AI Strategy

The episode opens with a somber discussion about potential layoffs at Microsoft, rumored to affect approximately 9,000 employees. Paul Thurot elaborates on the situation, highlighting the company's strategic shift towards AI-driven efficiency.

• Paul Thurot [03:50]: "There is nothing there of that note."

The hosts express concern over the vague communication from Microsoft's leadership, particularly Phil Spencer’s email regarding the layoffs. They speculate that the layoffs may be part of a broader strategy to integrate AI technologies, thereby reducing the need for a larger workforce.

Paul further explains the context behind the layoffs, mentioning previous rounds in May and earlier in the year, emphasizing the significant impact on Microsoft's workforce compared to other tech giants like Apple.

• Richard Campbell [11:01]: "It doesn't make sense. Right now their market cap is $3.7 trillion."

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New Windows 11 Version 25 H2

Transitioning to Windows updates, the hosts discuss the release of Windows 11 version 25 H2. Unlike previous major updates, 25 H2 is positioned as an "enablement package," aligning features across different update streams more seamlessly.

• Paul Thurot [28:09]: "The next version of Windows will be Windows 11 version 25H2."

They explore the user interface changes, such as the redesigned search box with exaggerated rounded corners, which received mixed reviews for its aesthetics.

Leo mentions the ongoing improvements to the Windows Backup app, aiming to facilitate smoother PC migrations, especially from Windows 10 to Windows 11.

Microsoft Copilot on Mac

A significant highlight is the introduction of Microsoft Copilot on Mac. The hosts discuss its availability through the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, primarily intended for work and school accounts. While integrated into Office applications, Paul expresses skepticism about its necessity for casual users.

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AI's Impact on Development and Productivity

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of AI in software development. The hosts discuss tools like GitHub Copilot, which dramatically increase coding speed but also present challenges related to code quality and dependency.

• Paul Thurot [15:02]: "The problem with AI is not that it's never going to get there, but just that if you start to see good results and then you drop your defenses and stop challenging it and you just accept what it does and that's when it's going to bite you in the butt."

Richard Campbell adds that while AI tools like Copilot enhance productivity, they require skilled oversight to ensure the generated code is accurate and secure.

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Passkeys and Security Management

Passkeys emerge as a critical topic, with detailed discussions on their implementation and integration with password managers such as Bitwarden and 1Password. The hosts debate the balance between security and convenience, highlighting current inconsistencies in passkey systems across different platforms.

• Paul Thurot [56:12]: "It's always this balance between convenience and true security."

They explore the challenges users face when recovering passkeys and the importance of having multiple authentication methods to safeguard accounts effectively.

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Web Browsers and AI Integration

Leo and Paul examine the latest updates to Microsoft Edge, including the integration of Copilot into the search functionality and new tab page. While these features aim to enhance user experience, some users find the changes intrusive.

Paul criticizes the aesthetic alterations, such as the search box's new shape, which he finds unappealing.

• Paul Thurot [34:10]: "You don't like the search boxes change shape... it's terrible looking."

The discussion also touches on alternative browsers like Arc, which are reimagining the browsing experience with AI-driven features, offering a contrast to Edge's more conservative approach.

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Xbox and Gaming Developments

A significant portion of the episode focuses on recent moves within Microsoft's gaming division. The closure of game studios like the Initiative, which was developing titles such as Perfect Dark and Ever Wild, marks a strategic pivot in Microsoft's gaming strategy amidst ongoing layoffs.

• Richard Campbell [109:54]: "This one was a game, right?"

The hosts speculate on the future of the Halo franchise under the newly renamed Halo Studios, formerly known as 343 Industries. They anticipate announcements related to new Halo titles and discuss the implications for cross-platform gaming and Game Pass offerings.

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Canadian Whisky Segment

In a delightful departure from tech, the hosts feature a segment on Alberta Distillers and their exceptional 23-year-old rare batch whiskey. Paul Thurot provides an in-depth exploration of the distillation process, emphasizing the challenges and uniqueness of producing 100% rye whiskey.

• Paul Thurot [130:57]: "They're famous for making true hundred percent rye."

Richard Campbell adds historical context, explaining how Prohibition severely impacted rye whiskey production and how Alberta Distillers has pioneered methods to overcome these challenges, maintaining high-quality standards despite higher production costs.

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Quantum Computing with Azure CTO

The conversation briefly touches on advancements in quantum computing, referencing insights shared by the Azure CTO. They discuss Microsoft's focus on cloud-based quantum solutions tailored for specific large-scale customers, highlighting the niche yet impactful nature of these developments.

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Conclusion

The episode wraps up with the hosts reflecting on the intertwining paths of technology, AI, and business strategies. They emphasize the continuous evolution within Microsoft and the broader tech landscape, urging listeners to stay informed and adaptable in the face of rapid changes.

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Thurot [03:50]: "There is nothing there of that note."
• Richard Campbell [11:01]: "It doesn't make sense. Right now their market cap is $3.7 trillion."
• Paul Thurot [28:09]: "The next version of Windows will be Windows 11 version 25H2."
• Paul Thurot [15:02]: "The problem with AI is not that it's never going to get there, but just that if you start to see good results and then you drop your defenses and stop challenging it and you just accept what it does and that's when it's going to bite you in the butt."
• Paul Thurot [56:12]: "It's always this balance between convenience and true security."
• Paul Thurot [34:10]: "You don't like the search boxes change shape... it's terrible looking."
• Paul Thurot [130:57]: "They're famous for making true hundred percent rye."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from Windows Weekly Episode 939, providing a clear and engaging overview for those who haven't tuned in.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell is here. We'll talk about the second, or is it third round of layoffs at one of the most valuable companies in the world. Could be happening again. Also, the new Windows is here. You'll love the name. I'm just teasing you. And we'll talk a little bit about Microsoft Copilot now coming to the Mac. All that and more coming up next. And Windows Weekly.

[Unknown]

Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurot]

This is Twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 939 recorded Wednesday, July 2, 2025. The House Hippo. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we're covering the latest news from Microsoft. Hello, all you winners. There is Paul Thurot.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody said I can't call people dozers anymore. It's rude. But it goes with winners. Winners and dozers. Get it? Windows. Anyway. Hi, Paul. Thorat.com. good to see you my friend in lower Makunjee.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I appreciate you finally explaining that after two years or whatever it's been.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't know. I thought it was.

[Paul Thurot]

Some of them are a little slow on the uptake.

[Leo Laporte]

Windows winners and do sirs. Anyway. Also Richard Campbell, who has already celebrated the fourth of July because Canadians are that way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's the first of July was confederation.

[Leo Laporte]

We sang oh Canada on the show yesterday.

[Richard Campbell]

That's nice.

[Paul Thurot]

We're not really big fans of the confederation around here, but I see what you're saying.

[Richard Campbell]

You guys have a revolution. We in the form it's a little more civilized.

[Leo Laporte]

I decided I used to have, you know, on our. On our lower thirds, we have the locations, everybody's actual locale and you know, so you know, you. Richard Campbell's in Mad Park. Paul Th didn't write his in, but he's in.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

But I decided. I used to say Petaluma, California, usa. Now I'm saying Petaluma, the free state of California.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh boy.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the path we're on.

[Leo Laporte]

We're all flying the bear flag from now on.

[Paul Thurot]

Here we are in the Bear Republic day.

[Leo Laporte]

It's totally after the day after. All right. Actually I'm being. I'm being levitous. Is there a word, a noun? I'm being lavacious. I'm.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm explovacious. I don't know that that's the word.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe I'm trying to spread levity.

[Paul Thurot]

There you go. Love it.

[Leo Laporte]

You're being the news this morning was kind of gloomy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean we knew this was coming, right? We heard about this in advance. I thought we'd just kind of rip the band aid off and get rid of this one right up top. But Microsoft has started implementing the layoffs we've been talking about for a while. I will tell you, they're maybe predictably a little touchy about this because we had written what we wrote and they actually contacted us and they were like, where did you hear this? Where did you hear this? They wanted to talk about sources and some of the claims we had made. And it was like, okay, so some of this we can't actually tell you. But anywho, through our own sources, through third parties like the CL Times, Bloomberg, Windows Central, etc. The story that is emerging is that approximately 9,000 employees will be. Are being laid off. Many of them, Microsoft says, not most of them, but I have at least one source who has said it is in fact over 50% of them, but whatever are from Xbox, Microsoft Gaming. This is about 4% of the workforce. And this compares to.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of people. Holy cow.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean it was especially on top of 6,000 that were laid off in May and then whatever the. What was the earlier one? February or March or whenever, early early in the year.

[Leo Laporte]

This from a company that has historic profits.

[Richard Campbell]

They are they most highest backer cap in the world.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna address that in a sense because one of the things that leaked that I didn't get personally, but has been published in many places was a letter from Phil Spencer to the team, Phil Spencer being head of Xbox kind of explaining it. This is a. I don't want to not masterclass, but this was almost like written by. If AI was the legal department, this is the summary they would have written. And it's very careful not to be specific in places where people like me and you guys would be looking for some hint about the future and what this says about their strategy. And there is nothing there of that note. But he does sort of address kind of up front the, the juxtaposition I guess of the most successful company on earth. And then this business which thanks to Activision Blizzard now has more people playing games, more games, more hours spent gaming, etc. Than ever before. Okay, but why, you know, and he really, I don't want to say punts it, but he kind of pushes it out to the broader corporate strategy. Right. Based on tough decisions we made previously make choices now for continued success in Future years. Key part of that is discipline, prioritizing the strongest opportunities. If this sounds familiar, it's because what Microsoft says generally about layoffs in this, especially in this AI era, and this isn't in the notes anywhere, but there was a recent internal communication that was like, you are using AI, so if you're not, leave. And if you think you're going to work here, know how to use AI, because everyone is using AI here. That's. And one of the things they're very careful not to say is that these laughs of anything to do with AI, But I don't know, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

So what are they just right, sizing. I mean, what are we doing?

[Paul Thurot]

So if you were to summarize. So I used to say this about like Asatch and Adela's speech right when he first became CEO. Like if you put this in a word and like use the summary thing, it would come up with a blank document because honestly it doesn't really say anything of import. Like in other words, it doesn't say like for example, one of the challenges we've had in Xbox is selling hardware. So we're really going to back off from that and go at this from a game publisher perspective, which by the way, is absolutely what they're doing. But they can't say that, right? They can't say that for so many reasons. But the big one is it would probably submarine the entire, you know, business if they did that because a big chunk of the user base is still very much wrapped up in, you know, the Xbox hardware, the consoles and things like that. So I think they're trying to ease into it. So, you know, the Xbox alley thing, and then Microsoft will or will not make one too. And then myself and others have supposed or you know, guest or educated guests, whatever, that they are going to do third party hardware, Windows basically for consoles and then that will let them kind of back out of it gracefully. Right. They're not abandoning that market. In fact, if anything we're expanding that market. You know, this, this, you can kind of see the, the marketing that's going to occur there. But man, you read this and it's like it really, it doesn't say anything. The success we're currently seeing, meaning in Xbox or Microsoft gaming is based on tough decisions we've made previously. Now parsing that, I would say this.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean buying Activision Blizzard.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, the success that Xbox is seeing meaning games, like actual games, and also that meaning on other platforms was the result of X, you know, Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard. Right. The Success Microsoft Xbox is not seeing is not addressed here. Right. And that's hardware sales. That's like they literally don't. He doesn't really say that. I mean, hardware is in here.

[Leo Laporte]

Are most of the people hardware people that they're letting go?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, we don't know anything about that yet. No, no. It looks like this is pretty broad, honestly. So sort of tied to this. This is way later in the notes, but there's a game studio, it's called the Initiative, and they were making a reboot of Perfect Dark. Perfect Dark was OG Xbox. And I think Perfect Dark Zero, I believe, debuted with the Xbox 360. So they were going to go back and redo this thing. They've actually shut down that studio and they've canceled that reboot and. Yeah, I don't know. So. And there's a whole. And they also made or were making something called Ever Wild, which I think was like an open world kind of a game. But. Yeah. So it's not. No, it's not just hardware. Right. This is more kind of broad gaming industry layoffs or whatever. Even Raven. Right. Which makes some of the Call of Duty games or parts of some of the Call of Duty games is experiencing layoffs. Right. So I. It's likely in the next few days, weeks, whatever, we're gonna learn about maybe more studios either contracting or disappearing. Even games that we were expecting not happening. It's still kind of fog of war. Like this is just, you know, happening. Like as we started writing about this today, we were getting more information in, you know, as the day went on. So I guess we'll see. But yeah, the Phil Spencer email, or I guess, I guess it's an email, is interesting to me only in that it really doesn't say anything, you know, prioritizing our opportunities. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is legal putting.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what I mean. That's what I mean. Someone. Yeah, so, right. Someone had commented, like, I really like this guy, but man, this is so mealy mouth. This is blah, blah, blah.

[Leo Laporte]

Like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I don't know that he had a choice. I. Look, whatever anyone thinks of Phil Spencer, he is a plain spoken everyman. He's not a, you know, he doesn't make stuff up. He doesn't bl. You know, talk. He's not a marketing idiot. He's, you know, he's a real human being. This doesn't read like something he would say, you know, it's just. I think he had to do this, right? What. What else could you do.

[Richard Campbell]

So well at this particular Moment. Everybody's, you know, you really get the sense that they're very worried about a legal labor lashback. Yep, Yep. In this 9,000 are a lot of foreign workers, which were really part of the May ones. And it's taken this long to get it through just because it's harder to lay off in anywhere other than the U.S. the U.S. is a, is, is a, you know, at will work space. Everyone else has more rights than that. So it's just taken time to process those things. But yeah, I mean, they still seen the numbers coming in.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. There are little things that kind of address this. It's interesting you say this because employees that are being let go are encouraged to explore open positions elsewhere inside Microsoft gaming where their applications will be given priority review. Not language I've seen before. Right. And it seems designed to like, yeah, you're probably getting ready to get a class action going. But hold on a second. You know, this is a business decision, you know, whatever. I don't know. He talks, it's just, it's bizarre. He talks about opportunities, he talks about momentum, he talks about success. And it's like, guys, you're. I mean, look, let's say 50 is correct. Let's say it's less than. Let's say it's only, you know, 40 or whatever. 45. You're laying off several thousand people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, it's. I again, I, we will someday know what happened this year or this couple years. But right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Right now, it doesn't make sense. Right now their market cap is $3.7 trillion.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

They've had record quarter seven.

[Leo Laporte]

It's already up that high.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Holy moly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

So what is it for the year? 25, 000 people? Something like that.

[Paul Thurot]

20 at least. Yeah. It's probably close to 20.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't have any 18 to 20, something like that. It was 2,500 in January. But those are performance layoffs.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Another 6 and 9 is 15 May. That's 17 5. So yeah, it's probably somewhere close to that.

[Leo Laporte]

The number two market cap company, Apple has laid off. Nobody. Really.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So this is a thing with Apple. I mean, they, when we came out of the pandemic and big tech started laying off, Apple was like, yeah, we don't really try to. They did do a hand, you know, small amounts of layoffs at some point, eventually. But you know, they, they act or operate a lot like a startup. They have small teams working on things. They're isolated from each other. They, you know, they they may, I don't know how many people they employ. Microsoft is, you know, hundreds of, what is it now, 250,000 somewhere in there. It's a big, it's a pretty big number or whatever it is. You know, Apple has always run itself more leanly, if that makes sense. I mean, but I, but I also feel like given all of the push with AI, given that you, and we'll say invested, you spent $68 billion on Activision, you're going cross platform. I mean it seems like this is the time to spend, you know, like this is when you actually, you know, let's, let's plow this success that we're seeing in this momentum as, you know, opportunity, momentum, success. Right. And actually invest in the business. This is like a holding pattern kind of an approach. It's actually worse. It's a scaling back. I don't know, it doesn't make sense.

[Richard Campbell]

There's another, the spin on this is that the company culture is not changing fast enough towards the focus on AI and so they just keep smashing away at the company culture. Like that will make it better.

[Paul Thurot]

We're just going to hit this point though where maybe you're some low level programmer working on Microsoft Word or you're in a game studio working on some open world game or you, it doesn't matter where you are and you're like, look, you know, they come down and say, look, you said you were going to do this thing, it's not done yet, what's going on? And you're like, yeah, it turns out it's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. It's going to take some more time AI, it, it's like, yeah, but it's not, you know, like, I think we're actually getting to the point where AI is just the answer now to everything, you know, And I again, they're being very careful not to say that they want, they very much don't want the messaging on this to be. Microsoft lays off several thousand people because AI. Right, right. But they're also at this moment requiring everyone to use AI to make themselves more efficient. And one of the ways you can be more efficient is to have less, fewer people doing more things, I guess, you know, with AI or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

And so yeah, I mean you argue, that's the part of the argument is cut the teams back. So the only way they can still make their milestones is to utilize a. Yeah, right. I got, I got to tell you, I've been working with some folks these past couple of weeks where they have, they, I have literally watched them in a day do a six week sprint.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And just deliver that much code because.

[Richard Campbell]

Of AI because they're using, they're able to use the tools at a level I've never seen before. And just literally as fast as we can write the specifications, they're spitting the code out.

[Paul Thurot]

This suggests a belief that this stuff is better slash, more accurate than it really is. And this is the, I think today is the problem with AI not that it's never going to get there, but just that if you start to see good results and then you drop your defenses and stop challenging it and you just accept what it does and that's when it's going to bite you in the butt.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it's absolutely part of the problem is that they Unique is a very skilled person and I've been working with a few of them to keep the tools in line and to get the results that you need. But the bottom line is that particular skilled person is working at a staggering rate. We talked about 20, 30% performance benefits with GitHub Copilot a couple of years ago.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And today it's, it's a hundredfold. It's just so stunningly fast.

[Paul Thurot]

I, you know, this falls into that category of I'm just resisting and I can't explain why. Like I literally have no good excuse.

[Richard Campbell]

But I'll also say it's a very known problem that they're working on. It's very much a forms over data problem. It's a lot of rote work and the tools can pull it off. And by the way, these are not necessarily Microsoft centric tools. These are a variety of tools. But it is possible.

[Paul Thurot]

And operator, for whatever it's worth, this is also not just Microsoft. Right. Google is doing this exact same thing. Apple is talking themselves into doing this thing. I mean they've been moving kind of slow. Amazon is a little more opaque. It's hard to say. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were also moving down this path. I mean it's, it's just a, it's a hard thing because if you looked at this business and said look, we're, we're, we're just throwing money away. We've got all these employees and all their benefits and all their whatever it is and they're not being super efficient and if we just automated some of this stuff, we could be more successful. And it's like I could see that, but they are the most successful company on earth. I, I already, yeah, Yeah, I, I, it's, it's just what makes this kind of bizarre. It's very strange.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it is.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, for example, like Perfect Dark Zero. So instead of canceling the game, you know, do you cut the studio in half and say you can do this with AI now and you can do it in half the time, so prove me wrong, you know. But no, they, in this case they just got rid of it and so there's more going on there that we don't know about, obviously. But it's, yeah, I think, I think the, the big problem here is just the unknowns. You know, it's just like I keep saying, I like to be able to say, well, I know it sounds off, but this is why, you know. And in this case it's like, I know it sounds off and that's the end of that sentence. It sounds like, I just don't, I'm having a hard time understanding Maybe they're using chat GPT5 and it's working great. I have no idea. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. I feel for the folks and I, I see, you know, at the same, I'm looking through LinkedIn to see the wave of it's me, it's me, it's me. But I'm also seeing, right. A lot of folks from May saying happy to now be at. And you know, they're moving around.

[Leo Laporte]

Didn't they promise when the FTC that they, that the acquisition of Activision wouldn't result in a bunch of layoffs? I think they said that. They didn't say that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, they didn't. The FTC claimed that this was part of the agreement, which it wasn't. And at the time, what, you know, look, you're integrating a gigantic business that has overlap with your existing business. Obviously there are going to be redundancies. Going to be redundancies like this was. Yeah. So at that time, whenever that was probably a year ago, December, something like that, I was like, so the FTC is telling Microsoft they're not allowed to lay off anybody. Now it's like this is, there's never been a corporate acquisition of this scope probably, period. But there's never been a corporate acquisition like this where there weren't layoffs because of redundancies. There have to be. Right. I mean that's understand like that to me was, that was like a year and a half ago. Like that was understandable. Now we're at the point where it's like guys like it's kind of, it's mostly going great, it seems like. I don't understand what's happening here.

[Leo Laporte]

Was, were there people laid off from Blizzard? Activision, the King people. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. That's what we know about so far. But also like I said, Raven is part of Activision. Blizzard is part of this. Yep, yep. So we're going to, we're going to know more. I mean even the, the Phil Spencer email mentions in the days ahead they're going to learn more internally and then we're going to learn more externally too. Right. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know. But I, yeah, I wouldn't want to be working on Xbox hardware right now personally. But I do think they look, they're the biggest game publisher in the world right now actually. Right. I mean that part of the business is actually doing great. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't, I, there's definitely a future there. It's just that, you know, it's not the business that Microsoft started, you know, 25 years ago and it's certainly not the console centric business that a lot of fans still seem to kind of pine for. But I feel like that dream is over, you know, like that ship sailed. How else could I say that? You know, we've moved past that, I guess, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, Nvidia is now the number one market cap. Just, it's a race between Microsoft changes every day, Apple any, any day.

[Paul Thurot]

It goes back and forth. It's. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Just for completeness.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I do remember Micro saying that the acquisition of Blizzard would be a vertical acquisition, that they would retain independence and so they wouldn't have redundancies. But.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, well I, I don't, that was, I don't remember. I, I wrote about this at great length at the time. But I, I could go back and.

[Leo Laporte]

Just look, I think if you want. Often, in fact, almost universally the case that during these trials companies say oh no, your honor, we're not going to lay anybody off. And then as soon as it's over.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it's also normal really not to do that for the first year anyway. While you just takes a while when you have to figure out.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, yeah, what, what do we, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Right now they're saying, well, Blizzard was going to lay those people off anyway, so it's all part of the plan.

[Paul Thurot]

By the way, at that time what the FTC was complaining about was an elimination of 1900 jobs, which today we might refer to as the good old days. Yeah. So Microsoft structured the Activision Blizzard deal as a vertical acquisition only to meet the needs of antitrust, where if it got rolled back, it would be easier to roll it back. But they, they didn't actually promise not to lay anyone off. That's, I mean, no, you couldn't make that kind of a promise.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. Should you that be. It would be.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, you just couldn't. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You're a public company. You can't say stuff like that. Just not a thing. Yeah, but it's not only gaming. Right. There are other parts of the company. But I also think a bunch of this A hangover for May.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And, and they're. But, and, but I'm also hearing it's the beginning of the new fiscal year. This is it. That this is the last of it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I'm just looking at this now because I'm just, I don't remember things like this, but when Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard, its cost of operations in gaming went up by 38%. Just, just running that business just added.

[Leo Laporte]

Dramatically to their costs without adding significantly to the revenue.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, no, it did, it did add to the revenues. I mean, I, I, again, this is one of those things. I don't remember. I did the math on this before the acquisition and then it's kind of shown up. There was a period of time, remember, when Microsoft would call out the Activision Blizzard impact on their earnings specifically.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And it was obviously big for X. Well, for more personal computing, which is part of, you know, where it's located in the business. But for Microsoft overall, like revenue wise. No, it wasn't that. It was a single digit percent, you know, single digit percentage difference. But for more personal computing and for Xbox especially, it was big. And more importantly, it was profitable. Right. That part of it. Without the cost of, you know. But that's the operating cost rise. 38% is, that's redundancies. Right. I mean, most. Right. So, yeah, I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break so we can all mourn in style and then we can talk about other things.

[Paul Thurot]

Happier things.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurot]

No, I just did a hands on Windows episode about that and sadly now they've actually announced the real name, so. Oh, well.

[Leo Laporte]

But I mean, it's just a number. What is it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, it's even less than a number, as you'll soon discover. But yeah. So, yeah, the next version of Windows will be Windows 11 version 25H2.

[Leo Laporte]

We have a name.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but it makes sense that it appeared in July.

[Leo Laporte]

Now that white smoke is coming out over the buildings in Redmond.

[Paul Thurot]

I feel like this could have been communicated back in March when they switched the, the dev channel over to the new build stream and blah, blah, blah, whatever, but okay, that's fine. It's water under the bridge. I don't know why I keep saying stuff like that. It is what it is. So it's not going to be Windows 12. That will be next year at the earliest now it seems. And how do I best say this? So 24H2 was a big update. Like it was a major. It was a feature update, obviously, but it was a major release. New foundation, compatibility issues, et cetera, et cetera. This one is going to be an enablement package. They are going to keep 24N 25H2 aligned feature wise, which, you know, they've been doing for the past couple of years, ever since they brought copilot into Windows 11. And that kind of makes sense too because we see dev and beta channels both being updated with the same exact features all the time. And 24H2 is on beta channel now 25H2 is on dev. So that does make sense. So come October, whenever this is officially released, it will be quick and easy. You're going to feel a small brick and then you have to reboot and then it will be. You'll be on 25H2. So this is just the difference between features being automatically enabled by default, which they will be on 25H2 and then them rolling out over time on 24H2 through CFR. And then as we go forward from there every month, everything will be on a CFR meeting. Features will roll out to both and we'll see how that goes. It's going to be different on every computer because we don't like certainty, apparently. So there you go. I think that's everything there, but I'm just kind of happy it finally happened. Like, I, I don't know what took so long, you know, but here we are. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I wonder if they were literally waiting for a July 1, like that, that was a thing for them.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. Yeah. It just. Why not just. What's the big deal?

[Richard Campbell]

We kind of know that date's coming.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, it's not, we're not, not sneaking up on us.

[Paul Thurot]

If you look at the support life cycle for Windows these days, which is a pamphlet, it's not very long. There's two years of support for the consumer versions, like so Home Pro, basically, and then three years for Enterprise, and then I guess if you use Pro with an enterprise agreement, and that, that explains why 22H2 is still being kind of supported with most of the same features we see on 23 and 24H2. That will go out of support in October, I guess, technically November. So as of this, once October goes by, we will have 23, 24 and 25 H2, and that's kind of the world. But for consumers it's basically going to be 25, 24. Right. And then they'll be kept up to date with each other. So it doesn't, it kind of doesn't matter which version you're on, especially once you get past 24H2, because that has the big foundational change, which they still, by the way, have not really discussed a lot, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think you and I Both agree that 24H2 is effectively Windows 12. Yes, it's an OS change. It's huge. It is. I've got interviews where they basically admit that, like, yep, just a huge change.

[Paul Thurot]

That is the only thing in the Windows 11 time frame that has been consistent with the past, which is that Microsoft has never done that well. So you have Things like Windows 3.1 was a humongous update, you know, and. Or, you know, Windows 2000 Wasp 2. Yeah, exactly, humongous update. And then you just have these things that are presented like, it's just Windows 11, it's fine, don't worry about it, you know, and then for the next six, eight months we have all these problems, you know, because actually there were compatibility issues and there were blockers and I think as of today, I think we're on. I think I'd have to go look, but if I go look at Microsoft Learn, it probably will tell me that they are past almost everything as far as compatibility issues. So should be good to go. 24H2 was also unique because they did an initial release, remember for Snapdragon mid year last year, and then it was still in the Insider program for, you know, x64 computers and didn't ship broadly for everybody until whatever that was. October, probably. So that's not going to happen, I guess, this year. You know, 25H2 is, you know, functionally, I think is kind of a big deal. We've been talking about this every month. Like, it seems like there's a lot of new features, but you'll get those in 24H2 as well, so it doesn't really matter. But that's the other thing that's kind of weird. This is true in Windows 10 as well. You know, when we're doing multiple versions of the same os, essentially when you have those minor versions that aren't an underlying code change and have no compatibility issues, you would think instantaneous upgrade for everybody. Like if you're on 24H2, you're just going to get 25H2. And I bet that doesn't happen, only because it has never happened in the past. And I can't explain that. But I. I don't know, maybe part of it is just people who got the upgrade and then added some peripheral or, you know, whatever it is, external hard drive or something that maybe has some minor blocker on it and it works fine, but it's not going to let you go to 25H2 for that reason. Something like that. But for the most part, you should just get it. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, now the other thing is people are just jumpy because 24H2 was so big.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And just. And kept twitching around. It's like I would be hesitant now because you just don't. What kind of H2 is this one?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, this. Well, this is the minor one. This is what you want to hear. You want to hear.

[Richard Campbell]

And they know that package.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like reboot a bit. Flips and.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no biggie. No, no. Search boxes change shape. Stuff doesn't move around your screen.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. One of the weird things I've noticed in the dev channel, which this computer is actually on, is they did change the shape of a circ box. It's funny you say that. So in the Settings app, I think on Stable, there's a search box that's in that left rail, like the navigation pane. It's small, it's probably just a normal rectangle, but with slightly rounded corners. But now it's on the top of the window in the middle and it's got exaggerated rounded corners and it just looks terrible. It's terrible looking. It's really bad. Like, it's bad enough. I don't even understand why they shipped it. But it's not. It's not.

[Richard Campbell]

It's on the dev channel.

[Paul Thurot]

It's on.

[Richard Campbell]

It's where things are supposed to be a little ugly.

[Paul Thurot]

It's terrible. It's really bad. Like it's just.

[Richard Campbell]

But unfinished.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Yes it is. Okay, so, all right, so now we know what we're doing, finally. And so.

[Richard Campbell]

Or at least we know what it's called. I don't know that we know what you're doing, but we know what it's called.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, that's fair. I didn't say this explicitly last week because honestly I was a little confused by this. But if you look at the calendar, last Tuesday was week D, the day. It was the Tuesday weekday. That is when we should have gotten preview updates for Windows. If you go back over the past year and a half, you will see things like the latest or the newest version, I guess, or whatever it is often would not get it. That day would come a day to three days later in the week. Like that happened a bunch of times. But this, that Tuesday came and went without any Updates for Windows 11 or for Windows. I should say in the Insider program. I'm sorry, no. In the Any preview Updates for Windows 11 or Windows? Just Windows broadly. There were no preview updates. So when I was putting together the show notes, I was looking at the calendar. I always doubt myself. I'm like, wait, wasn't this week. So last week was weekday and that day came and went without an update, nothing. But then we did the show Wednesday and then on Thursday they did release optional preview cumulative Updates for Windows 11, 24H2 and then another one for 23 and 22H2.

[Richard Campbell]

I thought 22H2 was out of support. Paul, why are they doing updates to 22H2?

[Paul Thurot]

Because it's supported for enterprise. I honestly I. The feet, the features that are new on 23 and 23 H2 are not going to be enabled by default. And if you're in a business you probably can leave them disabled that you'd probably specifically configure it so you'll never see these things. But you know, they like to, they like to spread the wealth so. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And honestly, other than security updates at this point, because you're looking at October, you're all about replacing hardware and changing OS's and you don't care about any of these things.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? Right. I mean it's not like any business has ever used a non supported version window.

[Richard Campbell]

Honestly.

[Paul Thurot]

So what this means though is that we now have an early peak. A slightly lesserly peek at the patch Tuesday update that we're going to see I gotta look at the calendar. I'm so bad at this because we're in July now. Yes. So next Tuesday, July 8th is Patch Tuesday. Right. Second Tuesday of the month. So I looking at this honestly, nothing major. So last couple of months, major. This one is not, not too bad. And I've already talked about a bunch of this stuff, although I'm losing track if it was here or the other podcast. But Ask Copilot has been added to Click to do on a Copilot plus PC. So when you Windows key plus click something and this text and images, whatever it gives you, these actions you can do. Ask Copilot just puts that thing into Copilot and then you can go from there. It's not particularly useful. Microsoft is updating the Windows Backup app, which right now is pretty lame. It doesn't do much, but is tied to that thing we were talking about earlier, where they want people to use this to migrate between PCs and the coming case between Windows 10 and Windows 11. Right. Kind of a big deal. So they're adding PC migration features to it. This release has the features that are in Windows Backup. It does not have the features that will be in Windows Setup, which is what you need to bring it back on the other side. So you can kind of get an early look at what they're doing. But you can't do anything with it yet because when you go to reset, you know, if you reset the computer, you won't see the other. The other half of it. Right. So I haven't seen that yet myself, but I'm kind of curious about this because this is going to be a big part of the Windows 10 to 11 migration story, at least for individuals. So it's important. And I don't remember when they did this, but Windows Backup was something they had added to Windows 11, whatever it was a couple years ago. They've improved it over time. It's still pretty lame. But then they added it to Windows 10 and everyone was like, why are you doing that? And this is why. Right? They're going to smooth that upgrade. Some taskbar stuff. The big one here, ironically, is sort of the return of small icons, right? This is something I would use broadly on my Windows 11 computers if I could, but it's not what I want. So in Windows 10, and I guess in previous versions of Windows, you could go in and say, I want to use small icons. It would make the taskbar smaller, right? Kind of a low profile taskbar. But if you enable that option, which is so smaller taskbar buttons if you just turn it on, it makes the icon smaller, but it keeps the taskbar the same size. Guys, come on. Like, what are you doing? So it's not what I want, but okay, well, we're getting there, you know, and, and there are actually registry hacks you could do, I think third party utilities that will give you actual small. Like, like small taskbar.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

But that is not. Yeah, it's not there. And then just beyond that, just, you know. Narrator. Improvement, settings, improvements. Windows Share gets updated every two weeks from what I can tell. So this is the one where they show you the preview of linked web content. Like they show your preview of images as well and then you get those compression choices for images. And I was talking about how it's like, I forget the wording, but it's like small, medium, large basically. And like large compression or whatever it's called is actually awesome because it reduces the file size by at least 50% and the image quality is pretty much perfect in most cases that I've seen. So it's kind of a nice option, but that's about it. So actually nothing major. We waited for it and then it was disappointing. Yeah. So typical Microsoft, so. Yeah, exactly. So there you go. And then. Is that everything? Oh, no, no passkeys. Right. So the build that Microsoft released where they were like, oh, by the way, this is 25H2, that's just a throwaway. They also have the first that those builds. So this is dev and beta, meaning this feature will come to 25 and 24 H2 is integration with third party passkeys. So right now it's, it's a terrible system. It doesn't work very well. But if you sign into Windows with a Microsoft account, it creates a passkey on your computer. And it's actually that passkey that does what I'm going to call pass through authentication to things like Microsoft Edge or OneDrive or whatever, which is nice. It's doesn't really. There's not much interaction with it. But if you had to interact with it, you would use Windows hello to authenticate yourself. That's how that works. There are some passkey providers that use Windows hello for authentication. Like Chrome does this, for example.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is always the problem with passkeys now, right. It's like you don't know what's popping up to pick a passkey. Is it Windows? Is it your browser, Is it your password manager? Like it's a war.

[Paul Thurot]

It's worse than you're describing. And the reason is it's also Inconsistent within an individual passkey provider. So, for example, I use my password manager to save passkeys. So I'll bring up a new computer and I'll sign into Chrome and it will say. And it just pops in. You want to use one of these passkeys? Yes, I do. And I click the Google account and I sign in. There's nothing else for me to do. Like, it just works. It's awesome. Love it. But I'll go back to that computer later maybe. I haven't used Chrome for a while. This just happened to me this morning. And it's. I bring up Gmail, it's like, oh, you got to sign in again. You're like, cool. This is going to be one second. I have a passkey. It's like, you want to use a passkey? Oh, yeah, I do. And it says, good, here's how you can do it. You can use a phone. Wait, but you saved a passkey in the. In my password manager. It's right there. It's in the browser I'm using right now. Nope, gotta use a phone. So it shows you a QR code, you bring up your phone, take a picture of it. You're like, okay, great. I guess now that took, you know, 30 seconds instead of two seconds. It still worked fine. I guess it will be good for a little while now. But yeah, this is, this is a problem. Because, you know, pass keys are awesome when they work and are consistent, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurot]

So it is a problem. The passkey implementation that Microsoft has right now in Windows 11 is bare bones to say the least. But the thing they're testing is you're coming to Windows with a password passkey manager. It's going to be, well, 1Password is the one they're testing with right now. But eventually all those companies, Dashlane, Bit, Warden, Proton, whatever, whatever you're using will absolutely work.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm in Bitwarden. I'm waiting for Bitwarden.

[Paul Thurot]

I cannot wait to see this. Yeah, so this is actually very interesting. So this is, I guess it's how it works on mobile, right? When you're on a mobile device, you install an app for your password manager and you can do passkeys that way. And all the other stuff like Autofill, whatever. When you do it on a desktop system like Windows or a Mac or whatever, you typically install the desktop, the browser extension. And it works in the browser, ideally. I mean, and some of these, most of these guys actually have a standalone app, too. It's just that it's not always super useful. You know, you don't really have to sign into standalone apps that much, although I guess you do sometimes. And so this will require you to have that app. So there's a beta version of the 1 password.

[Richard Campbell]

This is what you run into with your phone too, is when you have real apps on your phone, you need the standalone manager.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And that's the thing I really. That's. That's a nicety on mobile. That's not currently the case on Windows. And I guess with this it will be so cool, right? It looks, you know. Well, it looks. I have a screenshot of it in Settings, so I guess I was gonna say it looks good, but actually it doesn't look like anything, so I will see. But the, the goal here now is that again, you're not going to have to use this too too much, but maybe you install. Well, a lot of apps do that kind of web authentication thing, right? So Visual Studio, you sign into GitHub or Notion, you sign in on the web, Zoom does this. They sign on the web, you go through a web browser, even though it's a standalone app, and then it goes back to the app. And this will I guess just let you do it right there. And maybe there's a middleman attack there that I'm not aware is possible that they're going to mediate or remediate, I guess through this method. But this is one of those things that, like I said, we use this on mobile. It works great. I. Yes. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know if it works great, but it's getting there. Like it works. You've got multiple vendors, different suppliers. Like they've all got to try and figure out how to work and play well with each other.

[Leo Laporte]

It's because I don't think Microsoft itself supports passkeys. Right. I mean, they do Windows Doc. They do Windows does.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but I mean for logging into Microsoft.

[Paul Thurot]

No, they do.

[Richard Campbell]

They do.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't have to use Authenticator and number and all of that.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So that's the more common way. It's. That way is actually technically better because it will work anywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Whereas you have to have Microsoft Authenticator. Whereas I can use Bitwarden for my passkeys. By the way, it's my sponsor. I'm glad you used that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Warden. Because it's really good too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's really. So if I. That way I have it everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. This was like I had written something about Windows security last week because of this Windows Resiliency Initiative. I don't know if we talked about this in the show. I don't think we did, but between shows. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in Windows that if you just kind of leave it alone and accept the defaults, it's, it's probably for the best for you in a security kind of way. But there are a couple of features in Windows like you actually do have to go in and manually enable and some of it's privacy related, which is one of those things a lot of people would think Microsoft would not actually be good at. Right. Low level security features you can enable in this Windows security app that actually requires a small amount of anonymous data to go back and forth with the cloud, which for it to work properly, perhaps, you know, something like that. So, but with regards to like, you know, password manager, use a third party password manager. Right. Passkey support. What do you use for that? Right. So I use passkeys in my password manager, but I do also have two FA authentication and I use an authenticator app for that. I could use my password manager for that. But I, you know, someone said, well, why don't you just use the same thing for both? And I'm like, that would be like storing the key to the vault in the vault. What do you mean? Like, like the other, the third part of that is there's. There actually is a master password, which I hate that there is, but to when I have to sign into my password manager, that username and password combo is not stored anywhere. That's in my brain.

[Leo Laporte]

In your head has to be.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And that's this system is why this works, you know, from a security perspective.

[Richard Campbell]

And I also have a Yubikey set of Yubikeys.

[Paul Thurot]

That would be the other way.

[Leo Laporte]

Even better. Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I just, Yeah. A Yubikey hardware security key is, you might argue, is kind of the original implementation of. It's also portable because you bring it with you. You know, like it's portable with you.

[Richard Campbell]

And you have more than one because if you have one, you are doomed.

[Leo Laporte]

Doomed. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You lose that one, you're really in a bad place.

[Leo Laporte]

You're doomed.

[Paul Thurot]

That's an interesting idea for like an article or a discussion. It's like the things people do that they shouldn't do. So for example, technically if you use a PIN on a computer or a phone, you should have a different PIN on every single one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

And I bet you almost same PIN everywhere.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody uses different pins.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's part of my Social Security number.

[Paul Thurot]

Nobody says that that's amazing. It's the same combination I have on my luggage. Yeah, the two guys are like so. Yeah, I mean, I. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't do that.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry. You just said something that was very similar to that. Which is, look, I'm doing the best security I can do. I have a physical hardware security key. Right. Nice. Do you have like two or three of them? One in a vault? No, I just have one.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to have at least two.

[Paul Thurot]

But I mean at least two. It's the same thing. Like, it's the illusion of I'm doing the right thing. But actually you've created a new vulnerability.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bought some. I don't think Yubikey does this, but I bought some other hardware keys and they require you to buy two. Google requires you to buy two because one's never enough. Because what if you lose?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but if you buy two, the smart thing to do is put both of them on the same keychain. So you.

[Leo Laporte]

That way if perfect. Right.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's just common sense.

[Leo Laporte]

It always makes sense that way. Actually, Steve, maybe I misunderstood, but you were saying don't put your one time password in your password manager. So use a separate thing for that. Is that what you were saying? Or was that my.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so I, I do, I do, you know. No, you're not hallucinating. I do use my password manager for pass keys. I do also have. Because you're supposed to have multiple level, like multiple ways to authenticate. Right. So I still use Authenticator apps and I actually use two because the.

[Leo Laporte]

Go now you're doomed, by the way. By the way, that's bad.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, not for the same ones. I mean, for different accounts. Right. So the Microsoft Authenticator app is actually best for Microsoft accounts. The way that thing works is pretty amazing. And it randomizes the way it authenticates you so that sometimes you type in a code, sometimes you're agreeing to a number, sometimes you click on a, you know, whatever it is, but click it.

[Richard Campbell]

Have a choice of numbers. Yeah, they always move.

[Paul Thurot]

I like that. I think that's smart. But they do backup and not sync. Right. And so one day when Microsoft does finally figure this out in a secure way that they can sync account data, I will just use Microsoft Authenticator. But I use Google for my other accounts because it syncs. And you know, if you think about that, like maybe your phone gets stolen or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Now the, the exercise for me is you dropped your phone in the ocean.

[Paul Thurot]

So now what do you do? You have to kind of step through this Because I think most people maybe don't appreciate how important your phone number is to. And your phone, but your phone number to your personal security. With regards to online accounts and all this stuff, it's astonishing how many things are tied to this. So ESIMs are wonderful for this, but you could, you know, go to an Apple Store, buy it something, you know, buy it online, whatever it is. You could get a phone, download an esim, be online, sync with your Google account, and have all of your two FA codes within minutes. And like, to me, that is huge. It's just, it's huge. And I want it to be something that if I get hit by a bus, my wife and her kids could probably figure it out. I still need to make that, you know, eventuality document or whatever we're calling it, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

You have backed up your Microsoft authenticator.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, yes. You should do that, too. Yes, but where did you put.

[Richard Campbell]

The question is, where did you put the recovery codes?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I put it in my Microsoft account, Richard. Obviously.

[Richard Campbell]

Obviously.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, so. But I actually did. But, but, but the reason is that a Microsoft account is the only cloud service that I use that has that extra authenticated encrypted space that's good for this kind of thing. Right. I only have a few accounts in it. Every one of them has other methods for me to authenticate. It's just a little more tedious. So I'm actually not. I mean, look, if they take away my account, they take away my account.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but you need your recovery code somewhere other than authenticator, because you need those recovery cords when you're restoring authenticator without the original source.

[Paul Thurot]

I understand. Yeah, yeah, it's a. We. This is part of my next book is going to be called 10, go to 10. And I don't, I don't really have a good answer to that. But yes, all of these accounts, all of these. I'm sorry, all of these. I'm going to call them. What are they? Security solutions. Whether it's like a 2fa app, like an authenticator app, or a password manager or whatever, has these recovery. Different recovery methods.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And some of them involve a recovery code. I just created a new Microsoft account for the book and it gave me a. I'd never seen this before, but as part of the account creation, actually gave me the recovery code. It really wants you to use an existing account. This is something we talked about before, but if you come to Microsoft, you're like, look, I'm getting an Xbox or whatever, for some reason, I need a Microsoft account. But I already have this Google account or this Proton account or whatever the heck it is. Doesn't matter. Microsoft really wants you to use that account. They really, really want you to. Because that's like a built in recovery method right there. You already have this thing that's protected in various ways. But if you come to Microsoft and create a brand new account now you have outlook.com, whatever the account name you chose, and now you got to go through and secure that thing. Like it's a multi stage process. And they really like the first time you sign into a Windows computer with a new account like that, it's fine. Like you do the thing, you authenticate, blah, blah, blah, and then you reboot and you come back, it's like, nope, you got to do it again. Like they, they really want you to secure this thing before you use it full time. It's a lot of work on their part. So it's better for them if you come to it with, with a good account. So I should ask you, Richard, since you asked the question, how do you, what do you do to. I store them in Bit Warden and Bitwarden. Oh, and Bitwarden. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And I don't secure Bitwarden with authenticator. I secure it with the Yubikey.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. There you go. Okay, I was going to ask. The security key has to be in there somewhere. Okay, that makes sense to me. So this is one of those.

[Leo Laporte]

You still have a master password or no. Do you not have master?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, but then I also have the Yubikey asset.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So does it require both?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

This is probably. Most password managers now probably support a passwordless version of the account.

[Richard Campbell]

I just never turned it on.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And it's possible, depending on the solution, you might not be able to after the fact. You might actually have to start a new one to get there. I mean there's some complexity to it, but.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm not unhappy with the situation that I'm in right now. I feel like I have.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

All of those sensitive numbers and things are sitting in Bit Warden and I can access Bit Warden with a redundant set of UB keys.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So I use Pro Time Pass.

[Richard Campbell]

By the way, all of this is way more complicated than needs to be. Like, it's only because I hang around with the Sami Lay hos and, and these kinds of serious security guys that we, they walk me through this that I got to this place where it's like, okay, that's important because you have.

[Leo Laporte]

To know your threat model.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve, we've Talked about this on security now when it came up, should I store one time passwords in my password manager? Which is very convenient. You know, Bitwarden will let you do that and then it fills it in and it fills that in.

[Paul Thurot]

And I know why they do the.

[Leo Laporte]

Threat model is that, well, that's a mistake because it's a single point of failure. But Steve's conclusion was, look, if Bitwarden is properly encrypting everything and they're secure and their vaults are secure, that's fine. And for somebody who doesn't have a. If you know, not a member of Congress or a social dissident or something, that's probably adequate.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's what you have to think is, well, it's maybe not perfect security, but is it adequate security?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's always this balance between convenience and true security. And most people veer way too wildly to convenience. This is why people have no password on their phone or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Most people listening to this show might veer too far to the security.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, so I'm trying, right. To me it's just a common sense thing, but Proton Pass only just this past week started adding the ability to add any item into the password manager. So I probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that.

[Paul Thurot]

I'll probably put my recovery codes in there now. But it wasn't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, recovery codes are in there, passports in there, Social Security cards, numbers, all that stuff.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I would just say for now, look, you. Any online account that's important, Microsoft account, Google, Apple, Amazon, whatever, secure it how you can. But there are gonna. You, you need multiple ways to authenticate yourself. That's the end of that sentence. You just do. You have to, right? You can't because if you lose one, you're not getting into the account. You have to have multiple ways, right?

[Richard Campbell]

You have to have multiple.

[Paul Thurot]

As simple as like a backup email account where you can, it can send an email and then you get, you know, get into there and then you type in the code it sends you or whatever something does. You gotta have something. It can't just be the one thing.

[Richard Campbell]

No, but. And it's. The whole thing is like I have. I think the passkeys ends up being the low friction approach that you'll use most of the time.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh God. It's the best when it's there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah. Like the UBK approach is a pain in the ass. Not only do you have to have the physical piece of hardware, but the interfaces are terrible. Yeah, but it's that, oh, I need to make this work. The low friction weight isn't working. For whatever reason, I know this will work.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? Yep. I, I think I described this earlier but you know, like I said, when I bring up a new computer you just like install a browser, whatever it is, sign into Google for the first time. Like usually by going to Gmail. I don't type anything. I don't type anything. I'm just signed in, I'm authenticated. It brings me, it shows me the. I have two passkeys I can choose from. I click on the one I want and I'm in. That's it. I mean this is like global entry for traveling. It's like everyone else is standing in line and you're like. And you're ready and you're done. It's one. It's wonderful. So yeah, anyway, this is something that probably comes up more on mobile than it does on PC. But I do like that they're adding this night and maybe we'll see less reliance on the web for this kind of authentication. I guess because you can store a. I guess you could do it now. I don't know how you would. I mean well, soon you just do it through one password or whatever using. Right. Just have access to the thing you are using. It's better for look browser password manager, whatever. You're better off using a third party thing than the thing the platform maker makes. And this will enable that in Windows broadly. Right. Because you'll be able to use it at the system level with Windows. Hello. Which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to make this poster for your. Your office there for best in security, always store your backup right with the original. Thank you, Paul. Actually our club has come up with a couple of interesting tips. Out of sync mentioned that and I didn't know this that if you needed the thousand Bing bucks for getting your security updates after October of this year, all you need to do is open the Outlook desktop app. Make sure you sign up for Bing rewards points first. Of course. And he says you get a thousand points just for opening the Outlook desktop.

[Paul Thurot]

That's the real reason they're doing it, Leo. They want people to use the new Outlook. You just found out the reason?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we found out.

[Paul Thurot]

We knew it was something.

[Leo Laporte]

The other really good tip that I did not know about and I thought I was a pretty good expert on Bitwarden is that Bitwarden and by the way other password managers. I'll show you one. Passwords have a page for like writing down this important security information. Yes, they have a editable PDF which you could store, you know, somewhere and let your. Let your loved ones be aware of it and all that stuff. I think this is a. As I. I just downloaded it. I'm going to put this up on. I don't know, put it on the wall so that burglars can see it.

[Richard Campbell]

The sort of emergency kit. The Ready.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, I've renamed it in case of my death or dismemberment.

[Paul Thurot]

Like your go bag.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And it's just information digital so that they can. Because, you know, they can get into your stuff if they need to. And I guess 1Password has something similar. I think that's a really good idea. So. Thank you. This is why you want to be a member of the club, because there's good, there's use. These people in here are great. Everybody's helping everybody out. It's like a giant user group because they all listen to you guys and they're inspired. That's what I'm saying.

[Paul Thurot]

Or depressed. But yeah, either way, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it could go either way.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, whatever. The influence is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And here's the. Here's the 1Password. Get to know your emergency kit. So 1Password has something similar. Another. Another of our. We have two sponsors, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

This is an afternoon of work, right? Yeah, it is on a Sunday. Sit down with this site, work through all the steps.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Put a game on or whatever and just make notes while you go because you're going to need them later. This is because once you get it done, you're not going to think about again and you will forget.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, Right, right. Although probably good to kind of make a note to update it from time to time, just in case, because one hopes you're changing your master passwords once in a while and things like.

[Richard Campbell]

Once in a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Not too often, no.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And then make sure you store it in that same place. You'll be fine. Just.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's put it right there with everything.

[Paul Thurot]

And go to 10.

[Leo Laporte]

I like the name of your auto. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell this episode brought to you by Red Canary. When cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com difference to learn more. Today's show is brought to you By Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Paul is. One of the things Paul does to me is he forces me to change browsers on a regular basis. I don't know if that's for security or.

[Paul Thurot]

Go on.

[Leo Laporte]

So what's new with Edge?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I've been, I kind of struggling with this one because my gut tells me no one should ever use Edge ever.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you.

[Paul Thurot]

Thank you. I appreciate it. That bad? I mean, yeah, that's the thing. It actually isn't that bad. And like Google Chrome it's doing all the tracking and stuff and there is that in certification stuff in Windows where they drive you to use Edge if you're using another browser. And the likewise terrible thing where you are using Edge but you're not using it the way Microsoft wants and they keep prompting you to, you know, maybe configure Bing as the default search or blah blah blah, whatever. Okay. But if you can get, if you can get by that stuff, honestly it is the browser that comes with the operating system so it has these integrations that are really nice. The. I don't really find a use for it too too much but it does have the copilot stuff built in if you want that kind of stuff. I like the look of it. To me it's, it's just kind of modern. It's got that one UI3 kind of look to it. Um, so I actually, I found myself using this browser a lot this year and then, you know, hating myself and crying in the shower later. But it's, you know, whatever. So it's, it's, it's on the same, it's. Yeah, it's just, it's a lot of back and forth but it's on the same release schedule as Google Chrome. Right. It's a Chromium based browser. So the most recent release which came out this past week, Edge138 has several, I'm going to call them AI search related features. The most important being this is on device which is kind of interesting where it actually uses natural language search. Now if you want to find something in history, right. So this is kind of like a low boil, a low, I don't know, low contact version of, you know, recall in a way where you just kind of not talk to it but you just describe what you're looking for rather than trying to remember the name of the site or something. And it will hopefully work. Well, I've not actually used this yet. And the other thing they're doing is integrating Copilot into the search box and into the new tab page, which by the way, no one should ever use. The edge new tab page is hot garbage. But. So even if you're going to use this browser like an idiot, use a new tab replacement like I use something called Bonjour. Momentum is good, you know, whatever, but okay. Bonjour.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Because the Microsoft page is just a black hole of Microsoft services, terrible news stories from msn.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the old newsstands in on the streets of New York that were just tabloids. That's what.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, okay. I was right.

[Leo Laporte]

Those are the days, baby.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

The national examiner, if that was news.

[Richard Campbell]

JFK Jr has alien baby.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. You know, Bat boy. Yep. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what it looks like to me. And then I turn, then I turned on Bonjour and suddenly realized how much stress that default page was.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, Exactly. I could just have the seven or eight links I need and I'm done. Beautiful photo every day. Sounds good. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

And, and the weather and the time and just like, thanks, thanks. You made me hate my machine less.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Instead of turning it on and going, oh, yeah. The other problem is that stuff doesn't sync properly. Like not all the settings on that new tab page sync between machines. So you get confronted by the garbage every time you go to a different computer. Whereas if you configure Bonjour, you'll get a pop up that says, hey, are you sure you want to use this as the new tab page? You're like, yeah, I am sure. And you'll never have to deal with it once.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll follow you.

[Paul Thurot]

Exactly. That's really important to me. So it's going to be interesting to see this. Another thing I have started writing but haven't published is I'm thinking about web browsers and how they're about to change dramatically because of AI. And there are examples from the browser company like Arc India that are, I don't want to say radical, but a rethinking of the browser and then things like Opera Neon, which is another look, you know, we make browsers. What does this mean for this AI or you know, let's think this over. Whereas, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple are taking a more conservative, subtle approach. Right. So this Is, you know, there's a sidebar for Copilot and Edge, which is whatever. It's easy to ignore. You can turn it off. It's, you know, that's good. Right. But there are these capabilities that you do get through Copilot, which are useful and they want to integrate more of that into the browser itself, which does make sense. And maybe this becomes a reason to, or a reason not to, you know, use Edge in the future. I guess we'll see. But they want to give you those kind of intelligence features, you know, right. In the browser. So we're starting to see that. And, and it's like, again, it's not in your face. Like maybe the browser company stuff is. Not yet. But yeah, they're. They're heading down that path, I guess is the way to think of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So should I use it?

[Paul Thurot]

No, no, no, no, no. A lot of times, you know, like, it's like when you read it, like you, like someone will review like a low end smartphone and they'd be like, oh, I would never use this piece.

[Leo Laporte]

But. But it's great for you, right?

[Paul Thurot]

No, this is the opposite. It's like, no, I'm using it and honestly, it's fine. But I think I know what I'm doing. And you do too. Right. But I mean, but I. Yeah, no, there's no reason. I don't know. Don't do this.

[Leo Laporte]

You got me on ark. You got me on DIA just in.

[Richard Campbell]

Time to have it taken away.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was sad.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know. I don't, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

DIA is not going to be my default browser, I got to tell you.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, but once they add that sidebar thing back. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's Arc Light. Yeah. Once it's arc, like, yeah, they have.

[Paul Thurot]

Said they're doing that. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're gonna put all the ARC looks and. Because I user. Which is a Firefox.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

ARC clone.

[Paul Thurot]

It's identical. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

And I, and I like it a lot. It's not 100% stable.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's pretty, pretty close. I mean, look at this Firefox.

[Paul Thurot]

To me, more resources usage and it doesn't run as fast. But the, but the UI of Firefox is right. Yeah, it's identical to. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's got the workspaces, which I, Which I really actually like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. They need to figure out a way to onboard people into this and let them ignore it if they don't want it because it's a little too Disruptive.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

And like one of the vestigial features from ARC that's in DIA that I hate and I haven't figured out how to work around yet is Control tab goes to the last four whatever tabs, not to the tabs in order. And that is not how browsers work. And that makes me crazy. And in arc, there was a way. I can't remember how I did it, maybe in flags or something to enable.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's a setting, actually.

[Paul Thurot]

It's got to be. But I. It's not. It's not there. Like, it's not in settings. Like I looked, because there's a ds.

[Leo Laporte]

What do you want? What do you want it to do? The neck.

[Paul Thurot]

The. I want it to go in order through the tabs as they appear, as.

[Leo Laporte]

They are lined up.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, you know, like a normal person. But I, you know, I. It makes me crazy that it doesn't do that. But other than that, it's okay. It's fine. I'm letting it learn about me. It's probably just going to come back and be like, look, it's. It's not us. It's not you, it's us. I. We're just not. This isn't working out. They're going to say no to me.

[Leo Laporte]

I think, I think the thing about DIA that bugs me, although, I mean, I'm a big AI guy, as you know, I'm a proud AI user. It just a. It's so AI focused.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, it's like, yeah, well, that. But this is the bet that, you know, like, yeah, I kind of. I will say, when they first came out with arc, they were talking about this notion that the browser is essentially an Internet computer. That for many, many people, you do all or most of your work in the browser and this should be more sophisticated, yada, yada, yada. I was like, you know what? 100%. And then, you know, d. They're trying not to be as disruptive with the ux, which I sort of appreciate, but they're. But they're thinking ahead to like, okay, AI is going to change everything. How can we use this to make your life browsing more efficient?

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever will be essentially an interaction with it at a chat.

[Paul Thurot]

But maybe browsing doesn't happen any. Browsing might be one of those things that becomes a past task, you know that.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's kind of. I mean, I made perplexity my search. Maybe I'm going to go back to cocky, but every search is an AI conversation now. And I can see the Value of that. But a lot of times when I search, I want.

[Paul Thurot]

I just. You want an answer and you want to be done. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I just want to go to that page. I don't.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there needs to be like two different kinds of searches.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. They need to be well. Or one that it knows what you're doing and gives you the right. Right. That's the intelligent answer to that. And that's why I think Google will eventually do fine in this world.

[Leo Laporte]

But their AI search summaries are awful.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they are. They're unbelievable. Terrible. It's. You know what? I don't know if we brought. I brought this up last week, but it's fascinating to me that now that we have AI or AI chatbots, whatever, that can code that everywhere. Like, it's everywhere when you. I ask. I Google questions about coding all the time. And it will actually give me the answer now in that AI summary. Yeah. With code. Yeah. And it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's so cool. And it gives you a little cut and paste icon too. It's so great.

[Paul Thurot]

It's kind of interesting. I mean, it's a little like a middle finger to stat, you know, stack overflow in the corner. Like, you know. Sorry. Sorry, guys.

[Leo Laporte]

We just took all this.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, we. We just scraped it off your site. Basically.

[Richard Campbell]

I.

[Leo Laporte]

So I, you know, every once in a while, just as a mental exercise, it's kind of like crossword puzzles for me. I do coding challenges and this advent of code thing. It's once a. It's only in December, but I'm so slow.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm. You know, we're still plowing through. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm doing day 15 right now. So December 15th. But I had a bug that was driving me crazy. Just a little bug. And. And Darren Okey in our discord. I'm mentioning it to them. They're my. Kind of my mentors, Darren and Paul. And they. And Darren ask Claude code.

[Paul Thurot]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

What's wrong? I said it. It's. It'll be interesting experiment to see if you can understand what you've done so far in common. Lisp. No yet. No less. Not even normal language. And figure out where you went wrong. And it did. Oh, yeah. You just didn't load in all the input. There's three more lines.

[Paul Thurot]

So the. The next. The next level version of that is you try to figure something out. You have a problem. Whatever it is. It's like this thing is not doing what I want it to do. Can you please fix it? Like. Oh, yeah, sure. And it's like, blah, change this, change this, and this is why, and blah, blah, blah. And you're like, oh, that's amazing. And then you run it. You're like, okay, this doesn't work. So you go back and you're like, this thing that you just told me to use doesn't work. And they're like, yeah, sorry, I. We missed the. You have to initialize this here. And you got it. Now it's going to work fine. And you're like, all right. And then you try that. You're like, okay, it works. You know, it's like sometimes you have to, like, berate it a little bit. Like, yeah, thanks for this piece of junk method you gave me, you know, and like, sorry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't let it edit the file. I just said, what's wrong here? And it said, you should put this. This code would be better because you're missing some lines of code, lines of input. And I went, oh, you're right. So I just made the change myself. But because I have had an experience where it's taken my beautifully crafted code and put its own little imprimatur on it. And I don't like that.

[Paul Thurot]

A lot of times, like, when you're writing a line of code, it's not. Something isn't resolving. So you little squiggly thing, whatever it is, and you get the error message in my case from Visual Studio will say something like, you know, whatever. It doesn't matter what the error. Like, this has to happen before this is going to work. Something, whatever it is. You're like, okay. So you're like, all right, copilot, fix it. And then what it does is it just removes the line that had the offending code, which I put in because the thing wasn't working to begin with. And it's like, okay, you got rid of that problem. But I'm trying to solve.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little superficial.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Like, it's a little too.

[Richard Campbell]

It's being very literal. It's like, solve the problem. I took the line away, problem solved.

[Paul Thurot]

I. Look, we're gonna, like. We are. If you're a developer, you are the canary in the AI coal mine. There's no doubt about it. Like, we are. The things that these people are doing right now are a preview of what just basic productivity is going to be. Or some people.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not there yet. Exactly.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's getting there, but it's. This is what's happening. Like, it's. Yeah. And it's going to be, oh, I had to write a, you know, 30,000 word essay on whatever for school or God help you, a legal filing. And it's Monday morning at 8:30 and it has to be done and yikes. And they're going to use it, you know, like, you know, they are.

[Leo Laporte]

Well along those lines. I see. Now I can, I use Perplexity, I use Claude, I use Chat gp, I pay for all of these things.

[Paul Thurot]

Things.

[Leo Laporte]

But now I can use Copilot on my Mac. Do I pay for it? How do I get that? How do that work?

[Paul Thurot]

So there, there's already a Copilot app on the Mac that came out February, something like that. And it looks and works a lot like the Copilot app in Windows. I don't know why anyone would use that. But now there is a Microsoft 365 copilot app. Right. So this is the one you sign into with your work and school account. You know, enter ID, it's part of M365. Yep. And that's actually there are good reasons to use that. You're working, you're using it for work. So maybe you use a Mac, you're using, you know, work's paying for it and you're using it for whatever reasons like you're gonna want that.

[Richard Campbell]

So, so in some ways it's kind of shocked it's taking this long.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah, I, I mean I guess they.

[Richard Campbell]

Charge 20 bucks a month for like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I guess. I mean you can go to the web I guess. But yeah, in, in Windows this is just built in. It's part of the OS now. Right. So back in the day this was the Office app. It became the Microsoft 365 app. Now it's the Microsoft 365 copilot app. But it has kind of front ends to the very, you know, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. With templates and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the, I think the bigger piece there, the integration piece is really well, and recent documents and all that stuff. But is the, the chat stuff. Right. The, the co pilot capability. So yep, you can get that on the Mac, you know, if your Mac is not stable enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Which, what do you do you use them all? I use them all.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I, I am humiliated to say again, I don't use AI almost at all. And it is not a strategy. It's not, it's just, I just don't find myself doing it. I mentioned this to my into Perplexity all the time. My wife uses it all the time. I said this to her the other Day and she goes, I use it more now than I ever have taken.

[Richard Campbell]

Her off the search engines entirely.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I'm finding is folks that get on that path and perplexity especially.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They just never search again.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I mean I obviously for images. Yes. Okay. And like that's something that is, it's a one to one replacement. Like I would go to Shutterstock or whatever those sites are to find an image and those are fine. But they're also images that anyone can have, you know. And one of the nice things about the AI imagery is that it's yours. Like it's. It may look stylistically like other images. Right. They all look the same. But you describe what you want, you get these sometimes crazy results back. One of them is like this inspired insanity and you're like, yes, this, like that Halo picture with the Last Supper. What the frick was that?

[Richard Campbell]

So brilliant.

[Paul Thurot]

Awesome. You know.

[Richard Campbell]

But have you played with Frame Pack yet?

[Paul Thurot]

I have not.

[Richard Campbell]

It's on GitHub and it's video diffusion. So you take your mid journey image or however you're making your images, you feed it to Frame pack and give it a set of instructions of what to do to make a 10 minute, 10 seconds video out of that. Just to add some animation emotion.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. This is. Yeah. So that type of thing is starting to become common and people or companies or whatever are using it to take these old photos that might be black and white. And the big thing before, and we did this for my parents, I'm sorry, for my wife's parents anniversary a couple years ago was you take their wedding pictures are black and white.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And take them and colorize them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

And nice. Like that stuff is really cool. It doesn't have that fake color like problem we've always had for a long time. But now you can also take them and turn them into short animated video.

[Richard Campbell]

You can tell it to do the sepia color too, if that's the look you want.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, you may be right. You may be looking for that. But it's kind of amazing. And so like there have been movies where they. Well, like Ken Burns, remember, would pan through still images and do that Ken Burns effect right. Where he's kind of give it some.

[Richard Campbell]

Sense of, some sense of depth. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But there are documentary movies like there. I know, like the guy, what's the guy's name? The guy from Weta that made the Lord of the Rings. Jackson.

[Richard Campbell]

Jackson.

[Paul Thurot]

Jackson made that World War I document.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that was so amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

Which is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

That was Amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

And like, I think these things all kind of fall into the same general category where you have this content. Maybe it's still photo in this case that maybe it's old, maybe the corners turn off or, you know, it's black and white or whatever it is. And not only can you make the thing look modern and beautiful, but now you can turn it into a video. And I got to tell you, like, if it's a loved one and they've passed, maybe and now you have this video of them kind of interacting with other people in a, you know, it's like, oh my God. Like, this is, it's crazy, right? I mean, some of that stuff is really impressive.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And, and it's, it's still clumsy to do, but we're just not that far away from being able to.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. I haven't done it yet, but I think the Google one, I think is called Veo or Veo Vo. Yeah. And I believe it does what we're.

[Leo Laporte]

Just saying it's mind boggling. It's mind boggling.

[Paul Thurot]

And. Yep. I mean, this is, look, that's going to replace browsing. Right. I suppose you could sit there, you're sort of watching tv, but what you're really doing is browsing through Facebook or something. Now you could just go back and like animate old photos of, you know, maybe your grandparents or someone who has passed on by now or whatever it is and oh, we'll have incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll have virtual people all over our lives.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Soon. Like in the next few years.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. Like, if you're a little too excited about how well things are going on in life, you'll have like a Paul, a thing that would make you depressed.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it could be better, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's like, I mean, you're pretty good, but this other guy's doing better than you are.

[Leo Laporte]

So I don't know you really, Microsoft's.

[Paul Thurot]

Doing pretty good, but Nvidia, I'm just saying, they don't give out silver medals for second place. Oh, wait, yes, they do. Anyway, yeah, this is, it's, it's astonishing. I, I, it really is astonishing. And you know, there are still, people are like, it's not real, it's a scam. It's like, okay, but look at this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting hard. I'll tell you what, it's getting hard to, it used to be you could always, oh, that's fit, you know, AI, it's getting really hard.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Because 15 minutes has gone by this Is not like this is. Remember when Jurassic park came out and it was like, holy crap. Like, that looks. That looks real. Like that. And my takeaway from Jurassic park was, they can now make anything on film like, this is. They've done this.

[Richard Campbell]

That's over.

[Paul Thurot]

But if you go back and watch Jurassic park today, still looks great. Right? That's the thing that's amazing about that. You would think something like that would start looking dated somehow. And I feel like AI is like that. It's like all of a sudden, it just happens like it's on.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, if you want a real flashback on that, go watch the Canadian PSA House Hippo video on YouTube.

[Leo Laporte]

What House Hippo is it. Is it all AI generated?

[Richard Campbell]

No, because it's from the 1990s. It is a hand visual effect.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Let's find this.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

This is about a hippo. Is this it? There's a cat in a kitchen, but here comes the house hippo. It's the size of a mouse.

[Paul Thurot]

So is this. This wasn't stop animation. It's digital.

[Richard Campbell]

It's editing.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. So it's like a Jurassic park style special effect, except in reverse light size wise.

[Leo Laporte]

I want a house hippo. Where can I get one of those?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it's the best. This is one of the best PSAs ever. This is a. Talk about deceptive television. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, to teach you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It was a public service management psa.

[Leo Laporte]

Good old Canada.

[Paul Thurot]

I think you'd probably snap your finger off, though. You got to be careful on hippos.

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

You've seen their teeth. They look like they're, like, long.

[Paul Thurot]

That thing has like.

[Richard Campbell]

They're lethal.

[Paul Thurot]

Like that tensile strength of like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't. They're saying here, don't believe the house hippo when you see it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Although.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's anti children's advertising. Oh, that's cool.

[Paul Thurot]

A little shadow running around in the kitchen. It's probably a rat, not a house hippo. But I.

[Richard Campbell]

Love about that one is it looks good.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's none of that technology. It looks that technology.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but that's what right now on your iPhone, you could make that video. Oh, yeah, no, that's what's.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's easy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's unbelievable.

[Leo Laporte]

Here is more VO video. These look as real as can be.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Except you could tell his T shirt is.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, is right. Right. I love that. That's the mistake. It still has, like, the misspelling.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, actually, it's the name of the. Of the Website. But these, they're made, they're talking, they're acting.

[Paul Thurot]

We can make realistic video. We can't do integer math. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

How many hours of strawberries? I have no idea.

[Paul Thurot]

But I don't even know what a strange strawberry is.

[Leo Laporte]

But you know, you know what? I. It strikes me that because this is a good example of this is that it ingested so much influencer video.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That it's really good at this.

[Paul Thurot]

Thus ensuring that this will be entertainment for the rest of our lives.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Idiot who knows nothing in some place talking to someone immaculate.

[Unknown]

Do you ever give to the poor? I gave my slave a compliment once.

[Paul Thurot]

She cried.

[Richard Campbell]

You're welcome.

[Unknown]

Would you let your daughter date a gladiator?

[Paul Thurot]

I wouldn't let her date a Greek. Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an ancient Rome influencer. Interviewing people in ancient Rome.

[Paul Thurot]

That's good. Be humble, but also name a whole month after yourself. That's awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable what they're doing. I swear to God, it's awesome. It's amazing. That's also impeccable, which is, I guess, a. A YouTube channel.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's Joanna Stern of Wall street at the Wall Street Journal turning herself into A. To Dr. Chip, motherboard robot designer.

[Paul Thurot]

The film you're about to see, including Chip and all the other visuals, this.

[Leo Laporte]

Is all made up, but this is inserted into live action, which is kind of like.

[Paul Thurot]

Like the hippo.

[Richard Campbell]

It's impressive.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's kind of amazing. Anyway, yep, we're living fun times. That's why we changed the show right after this show from this week in Google, which was getting pretty dull, to be honest.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

To intelligent machines.

[Paul Thurot]

So if I hear you correctly, you're suggesting that this should be Microsoft 365 copilot weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be.

[Paul Thurot]

No, I mean, I'm not saying I would do harm to myself, but. No, I am saying I'm not super interested in that. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You saw that Apple. Well, this is a rumor from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. He's usually pretty good. That Apple's talking to. I don't think they're talking to Microsoft, but they're talking to OpenAI and Claude.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And this series is repackaged.

[Richard Campbell]

Perplexity. I mean, they basically.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Or Mike. By the complexity.

[Leo Laporte]

I want. I don't want them to, because I love perplexity.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. When you were talking about perplexity, I almost said so. What are you going to do if Apple buys them?

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, I'll be devastated.

[Paul Thurot]

I know. Well, look, I. Whatever they do, they do, but I obviously According to Mark Ehrman, I mean, they're moving forward with their in house work on models. They apparently made an offer to Anthropic and they came back asking so much money and wanted it on like an ongoing basis, which is so against the Apple way of doing things that they were like, this is no way. So they went to OpenAI and I. OpenAI is an interesting option only because of the Microsoft angle to me, like this is a way to play another Gigantis company off Microsoft and maybe help facilitate that inevitable breakup, you know, But I don't know, you know, this is just talk until it happens, I guess. So I feel like at some point in the next whatever number of months we're going to hear something about Apple actually going in this direction. Right. I think they want to get the stuff going.

[Leo Laporte]

Kind of an acknowledgement that they've failed with Siri. They failed to make Siri into the chat.

[Paul Thurot]

So I would say it's a deeper failure than, than that in a way because what they've really failed doing is creating these models in house that they, you know, their model of doing everything in house, so to speak, has paid off big time for them. And this is one case where they might have to go with a third party to realize the, the dream they had for this product. Right. And, and I guess that's part of it because they've at least within the anthropic cloud stuff and I would assume also chatgpt, but they've asked that company Anthropic to create special version of it that will run on their private cloud compute that they run themselves.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, so that way they keep it private, you're not.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, and specifically tailored for the tasks that they want Siri to be good at, which has to be more than Is it raining and. Or tell me a joke or whatever stupidity.

[Leo Laporte]

Siri, is this analog to what Microsoft did? I mean, Copilot, Microsoft has its own models, but Copilot's OpenAI.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? Yeah. So Copilot, I mean, look, actually the truth is we don't know what the mix is right now, but yes, certainly at the beginning when it was Bing AI and then the beginning of Copilot, the way Microsoft described it was OpenAI models and capabilities and then their secret sauce, which is gross but is like the secret sauce you get on a Big Mac. I guess it's orange and weird looking and it tastes vaguely pickly, but it.

[Richard Campbell]

Was basically ketchup Pickles.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, but they were doing whatever tailoring of the prompts, but also using Bing Search on the back end for those search results, which, you know you need. But also it's Bing, you know, so you might have made the argument that, I don't know, maybe the ChatGPT version of whatever the services we're talking about at the time might be better because. Because it's not using Bing on the back end or whatever. I don't know. But yeah, I mean, Microsoft since then has, you know, jump started their own internal Microsoft AI group with Mustafa Suleiman and those guys they brought in. That guy that used to run. I can't remember his name, sorry. He was a builder. John Jan. Yeah, no, this is at. No, the Microsoft guy. The guy who I think he used to run the infrastructure at Metal. Yeah, I can't remember his name. But yeah, there were rumors some months ago that Microsoft's models were allegedly there, but I've heard since they're not even close. And we'll see. But yeah, I mean, the goal is to wean themselves off of that stuff as much as possible. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

In my mind. We'll talk about it later on Intelligent machines there's. So Meta's doing something similar too. Meta had its own LLM llama, but now Mark Zuckerberg is going out and spending money trying chiefly to acquire the top 12 guys, mostly from OpenAI to start a whole new division called Superintelligence. It almost feels to me like these big companies thought it would be easy to make their own AIs.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And in fact anthropic. OpenAI and maybe to some lesser degree, Google kind of have a lock on it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

So they have to go to these other people, these third parties. They don't want to.

[Paul Thurot]

I listen, I. We keep ragging on Apple, but I do think there's a version of this where, yeah, they partner with someone and maybe that looks bad for two seconds, but the truth is there, if they run this thing through private cloud compute.

[Leo Laporte]

I would do it.

[Paul Thurot]

Tailored it to some degree. Yeah. For their specific workloads. It's going to be fantastic.

[Leo Laporte]

I would immediately.

[Paul Thurot]

And yep. And I think today, I bet. I mean, it'd be interesting to see what the numbers are on this. I bet Apple doesn't want to talk about it, but Apple Intelligence is on whatever number of devices you can optionally go in and sign into ChatGPT. You don't have to pay for it, but if you do, you get whatever benefits you get through that. And I bet a lot of people do it because it's better, you know, it's just better I mean, in the same way that we all use Google Maps, knowing they're tracking every single moment or direction we take. And now we suspect, and almost certainly are true is are correct that it is taking us in directions that are better for traffic, not better for us. You know, like, like we just drove back to and from Boston and at some point I was like, what's this leaf thing on the screen? And my wife's like, oh, you're taking the most, you know, gas friendly way. And I'm like, I want to take the fastest way if I could fly to this place.

[Leo Laporte]

So ridiculous.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, screw that. And I turn that thing off. And then it was, oh, your travel time went down by 20 minutes. I'm like, seriously. But there'll be these things, oh, you can save some time if you take the side road. You can do this. And like, in the past it seemed kind of crazy, but it usually worked. And these days, oh, well, at least on this trip, it, it kept going back up to the original time. And it was like, I think they're just directing traffic to smooth traffic. I don't think this is for me anymore. I think this is for the general good. And I got to tell you, I don't care about the general guy. I want the best thing from the.

[Leo Laporte]

Tragedy of the commons. It all came down to a leaf.

[Paul Thurot]

Screw everyone else, man. I just want to get there. If I could fly over them and blast them with the exhaust from my jet on the way by B is.

[Leo Laporte]

Rolling Coal, ladies and gentlemen.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice. Just want to get there, you know, I don't know them. Oh, oh, well, yeah, Grammarly.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at Grammarly. They're an advertiser or we're an advertiser. They acquired another advertiser, Coda.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. That was a weird one because if you are familiar with that deal back in December, they acquired that company, but it was really a merger and the CEO of Coda became the CEO of Grammarly, as announced by the now former CEO of Grammarly, who apparently was okay with that. And part. And they said this at the time, but they were like, you know, we have bigger aspirations than being like, you know, spell checking, grammar checking, et cetera.

[Leo Laporte]

So kind of smart, right? I mean, in this age of AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they're going to get steamrolled. I mean, that capability, which good, bad, indifferent, whatever anyone thinks of Grammarly, whatever. But it's going to be built into everything. You on your Apple Phone messages has. Right. Tools built in, Windows has built. Yeah, everyone's going to have this. So that specific Feature not necessary. But now they, they talked about and then did get some billion in funding back in whatever that was, may maybe with an eye toward further acquisitions. And then they just purchased a company called Superhuman, which I've never heard of but they make a very expensive by the way email solution which is all, you know, AI native is the term that they use. And now they're talking about we're going to go for the whole AI native suite, you know, productivity.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

So this is not necessarily unique in some ways notion is doing something like this. You could argue that Proton is kind of doing something like this. They don't all 100% overlap yet, but they're all kind of, you know and I.

[Richard Campbell]

This is an existential threat. You know what's happening with AI is going to destroy Grammarly if they don't do something.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. Jumping on the. Exactly right. Yep, that's exactly right. They're doing, they're doing what they should be doing because otherwise they would disappear.

[Richard Campbell]

They would just disappear.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

But I mean arguably putting Coda in charge, the Coda CEO in charge is like we need to be an AI.

[Paul Thurot]

They looked at those guys and said.

[Richard Campbell]

Look, here's a whole bunch of customers, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they need more funding, they need more resources, whatever it might be. And we can realize this vision or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a high, it's a high risk play, but it's a high risk play because this ru die.

[Paul Thurot]

So if you think. I don't know what the year was, but whenever Google came out with what is now called Google Workspace, it was huge because they were taking on Microsoft as monolithic super successful office business. Humongous with the Fortune 500 especially but just with everyone really. And Google Workspace saw and still sees I think some success with what I'll call startups and very small businesses.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

In that space. I'm sorry, 2020. Well no, but, yeah, but the, but.

[Richard Campbell]

The G suite before that G Sweden.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean I probably goes back at least 10 more years from there. I don't remember exactly but, but the, the point was to provide kind of a low cost web centric as Google would do take on office productivity that was really big on email calendar but also had the docs and spreadsheet and all this stuff and okay, like that, you know, whatever. Obviously pieces of that are very successful. It's worked out pretty well. But this stuff like this is interesting to me like notion which I think of as like the everything app buys an Email buys a calendar company and then buys an email company and it's like, wait a minute, what's happening here? And then Grammarly, which is almost left field because literally spell checking and grammar checking buys Coda and then buy Superhuman and is now talking about an AI native productivity suite that will take all of those things on. Right. And that's really interesting. And so, you know, notion Grammarly, proton, et cetera, what I think of as little tech. And then we get big tech, Microsoft, Google, whatever this might. I'm not saying it's an existential threat to Microsoft. No, no. But, but it is interesting that there's more competition like this all of a sudden.

[Richard Campbell]

And what this is, the, the play here is make an AI centric productivity suite.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the exit is, and you succeed, start eating some of Microsoft's lunch and they buy you.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's the nice thing about being a tech giant. You don't have to figure this out. You wait for someone else to figure.

[Paul Thurot]

It out to see who figured it out. Yeah. Okay, that's fair. And there's also, by the way, is.

[Richard Campbell]

The plan in the boardroom of the little guy. If we nail this, one of the big guys will show up with a 3 comma number.

[Paul Thurot]

Hopefully not Salesforce, but yeah, one of them, you know. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. I just thought of this as we were talking. I didn't write this anywhere, but I guess you could view this to like what I'll call Office productivity, which is very email centric still. Right. In the same way that you look at like DIA or Opera Neon for web browsers. It's like we have this thing, we understand it. It's probably going to change a lot because of AI. What happens if we just go into it with that as the focus? Like if you were going to start this thing over right now, a thing Microsoft would not do. Right. I think Google probably would not do. They're kind of entrenched. You know, what does that look, this isn't.

[Richard Campbell]

But this is an exercise that Microsoft people, senior Microsoft people do occasionally then look at. Like, does it make any sense?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is the, this is what competitive analysis looks like. Like if you had a chance to start over, what would you do? What would it look like that lets you look for threats.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean there was a big push for a web based or a Java based Office suite from Microsoft in the late 90s, early 2000s. They played around with it and eventually the leadership of that part of the company was like, actually, this thing is not going to destroy our business. It just makes sense for us to keep going with what we have and have it work with Office document types, et cetera, et cetera. You can publish to the web or whatever it is. And it seems like it's worked out. I mean, obviously, you know, as the cloud era happened, Microsoft 365 now is, you know, gangbusters. It's gone great.

[Richard Campbell]

And the focus of Office365 all along was to compete with the G suite. That's who they were afraid of.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it's definitely what drove them. And that's why they had iOS and Android versions of the of Word and Excel in 2011.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They weren't allowed to release them until when it failed. That's as soon as win 8 failed. They came out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Suddenly meeting customers where they were started to make sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they there they were told by certain people, you're not going to need any of that because Windows 8 is going to Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are going to sweep the market and it'll all be Office all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

We were so innocent then.

[Leo Laporte]

It was a simpler time, Paul, for simpler people. Well, I know what I want and you're good. I want our Xbox and gaming segment and I want it badly. But before I do that, I just should tell everybody. You're listening to Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, and we're so glad you're here. We hope you'll keep listening. We do the show live for your delectation. If you want to watch live, you don't have to.

[Paul Thurot]

Most people don't.

[Leo Laporte]

They mostly download the podcast. But if you want the absolute freshest version, every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. And we stream live on eight different platforms, of course, in the club Twit, Discord for club members. But there's also YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. So. And if you're in the chats in any of those places, I see you. I see you, Jamie. And some knucklehead in YouTube. That's his actual handle or hers. I feel like Romper Room. I feel like Miss Nancy. And I see you, Chocolate milk Mini Sip. And I see you, L, Rao and Joseph and all the people in all the chat rooms of all the world joining us every Wednesday for Windows Weekly. So glad you did. Thank you. Thanks to our club members for making this all possible.

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[Leo Laporte]

Now I've, I've delayed long enough. It's time for the Xbox segment. Mr. Throt I see you, I don't have a magic mirror or anything, but.

[Paul Thurot]

I mute and then I forget.

[Leo Laporte]

I mute. I mute.

[Paul Thurot]

I misplaced one of the stories. Just real quick. If you're familiar with the Cursor AI code editor.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yes.

[Paul Thurot]

Based on Visual Studio code, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Paul Thurot]

They just announced something called Cursor Web this past week, which is actually for, well, desktop or mobile. It's not cursor on the web. But what it is is a front end to the ability to manage, include, including create cursor agents. And these are the things that run in the background and do complex tasks for you. So I sort of think of it like the Adobe Firefly. Firefly, yeah. Firefly mobile app. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Generator.

[Paul Thurot]

You're not going to sit there and, you know, do complicated graphics on your phone, but you might be out in the world, be like, oh, I have a really good idea. And then you, you can say it or type it into the thing and have it create images and you can go back when you're at your desktop and work with them in the full experience. And this is sort of like that, but for the AI agents that will work on your behalf.

[Leo Laporte]

Cursor is very popular for coders. I like Claude code, which is command line, but cursor is very popular.

[Paul Thurot]

That's interesting. Yeah, Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think. Yeah. I haven't used it in a while, but my couple of experiences with the cursor were actually very positive and the amount of feedback you got, because one of the things I think they did first, it was certainly the first I had seen, was it's kind of what I think of as like, whole project code. Not triage, but code quality. You know, kind of look at the whole thing and then come back. Because, you know, a lot of times with code, you'd be like, here's a method or a line of code like, how can I make this better? And it's like, it would examine multiple files in an entire project and come back with this gigantic list of, like, here's all the things you need to fix. Or that could be better. And it's a little depressing too, but. But impressive, right? I mean, there's things you could do, like. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Tests for me, that are really useful.

[Paul Thurot]

Right? Yep. Yeah. Time savers. Like, just smart. So it's not the full cursor experience, but, you know, again, you're on the. Look, we all have whatever lives we have. You're thinking in the back of your brain about work, and suddenly this idea strikes. You're like, oh, and you can just throw it in there. And next time you sit at your computer, bring up cursor and you can see. You know what?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really excited, though, about my idea of having this AI server in the closet that you are.

[Paul Thurot]

I. You really want your local AI. The local thing is. Blows my mind because it's the one thing. It's just not really there yet.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but.

[Paul Thurot]

But given the speed at which this stuff. I mean, look, not. Not every single week, but almost every single week, there is an announcement from someone. It could be Microsoft fi. It could be anthropic. It could be the llama stuff there where they take this tiny model that is now as good as what used to be an LLM that had to run in the cloud.

[Leo Laporte]

I bought 8 terabytes of storage. It doesn't have to be that tiny. And I bought 28 gigs of RAM. It doesn't have to be minuscule. It's not running on an iPhone.

[Paul Thurot]

But actually the reality for your machine as well as any Computer really is. You're not going to be running any model. You're going to be running dozens of models, all of them tailored to specific things. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

The thing I'm excited about is the idea that it will have all the context. See, I have to start different conversations. Then the context is fragmented. But if it's all in that one.

[Paul Thurot]

Box, right, you need like an aggregation thing where whatever conversation you have with Chat, GPT or whatever you're using somehow makes its way back.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, they are working on that right now. The idea of having consultation among the.

[Paul Thurot]

Various AIs today, we call that exporting bookmarks, but it's very small.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems to be upset today. Do you know anything about that?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. He was trying to find a shirt the other day and could not find the right color.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll be like that Pixar movie where all the emotions in your brain are fighting it out. It'll kind of be like that. I have a feeling inside my home AI box. Anyway, I just. It's an experiment.

[Paul Thurot]

You seem like supercharged about this. I just think the problem is local AI is amounted to like nothing so far.

[Richard Campbell]

I know.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, this is the only.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, some people use it. I'm. Some of our. Some of our. Darren likes his Oakley. I think it takes some work and tuning. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. No, but just like general chatbot stuff. You can do this right now. Visual Studio code, AI, whatever it's called. AI Studio, whatever. But I'm sure there are multiple ways you just. You can download models and then just interact with them from the command line as if it were. Because it is. It's chatbot. It. You do. You interact with it the same way you interact with chat, GPT or whatever in the cloud and, you know, mixed results. Right. I mean, it depends on. It depends on a lot of things, I guess. It depends on what you're doing. Right. And. And they probably get better all the time. I'm sure eventually it will be fine. But I don't know, like, you want to. You want this to go from being like, barely acceptable to being good enough and then to being kind of roughly on par, at least for what you needed to do, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, you don't always want to be behind with it, but. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we'll see. Anyway, that's AI redux. We thought we were done with the AI, but, like bad breakfast burrito bowl dragging me back coming up.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Now can we do the Xbox?

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Now, now, Sorry. So I already mentioned that Microsoft was shutting down the initiative, which is the name of that game studio that was working on Perfect Dark and also shutting down a game called Ever Wild, which is Rare, which is the company that made Perfect Dark, if I'm not mistaken. The original one, I think. I think this is. I think it's all the same. Yeah. So that's happening. Whatever. That's too bad.

[Richard Campbell]

This one was a game, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. This is an open world. Like, what do you call. Mm.

[Richard Campbell]

So the Initiative is a studio, but there was Ever Wild and Perfect Dark are two different games.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. I'm sorry. Right. And two different studios technically. I mean, like, Rare made the original Perfect Dark, and I think Perfect Dark zero. But then the Initiative is doing. Was doing the. Was doing the next one, the reimagining or whatever it is, whatever it was, because it's not happening. So the Xbox 360, we don't talk about this console enough because it came out 20 years ago.

[Richard Campbell]

Really old.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's really old. But they're updating the dashboard. Don't worry, it's not to make it faster. They're. They're actually going to try to sell you a new Xbox because This thing is 20 years old. Literally 20 years old.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I don't have any left. I think.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I'm surprised anyone does, honestly, given how unreliable keep it running. Yeah, yeah. It's probably good as a space heater, though.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm I at 20 years. I would expect the traces to start becoming off the board now.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right, right. It's like the Atari computers. You got to drop from like a height of 6 inches just to seed all the chips, you know, that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. I wouldn't drop an Xbox, so the thing would probably explode.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's one way to get a new Xbox drop the old one happened.

[Paul Thurot]

It's. I guess it had trouble in Call of Duty. Something was the best selling Xbox of all time, by the way. But okay, so there's that. It is July now and. Nope. Well, I'm skipping ahead. I'll skip it. Who cares? So we have new Game Pass games. All the different consoles. I want to point out again, you know, Game Pass, whatever those versions are. Game streaming. Well, Xbox Cloud gaming, which is Game streaming. Xbox consoles, typically Series X and S, but still Xbox One. And then what we're now going to call Xbox on Windows. I know Windows. Let's call it Windows. So, yeah, so we have a bunch of new games there. Some of these you might have actually heard of, we were making fun of and talking about the Tony Hawk stuff. So that's there games, man, you can't make. I'm just. Just for no reason, really. It's just standard bully activity. Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is now, I mean, one of the precursor games. It just keeps coming. It's crazy like how many times this has been everywhere. Everywhere? Yes, everywhere. I've been noticing in the Xbox app on Windows that Call of duty World War II, which was the most recent World War II era call of Duty game, is now available through Game Pass. So that's a first for that game. I think they probably announced that last couple weeks ago, but that's actually still a good game. Like I. The problem once you've played like the Modern Warfare games is like you have all these advanced weaponry and like drones and airstrikes and stuff. And then you go back to. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

You're back to an M1 grand. Good luck.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, it's five shots, need to reload. It's stupid. Like, hold on, I'll kill you in a second. It's standstill. But that game actually did a nice thing. They kind of balanced it out so it actually made sense in a modern context. Even though it was kind of classic weapons and stuff. But that's a good one. And then this is crazy, but the studio that is making Halo games now has been renamed in the past year, I think to Halo Studios and used to be 343. 343 came about when Bungie left Microsoft. Right. Microsoft kept the Halo franchise and then created 343. Now Halo Studios, they have teased that they will later tease what's coming for the franchise in October. So it's a tease of a tease, I'm gonna guess. Going to limb. It's probably going to be a Halo game, you know, a game that begins with H and ends and O.

[Richard Campbell]

Crazy talk.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. But they had sometime, I think it was late last year, shown off some early graphics of Halo ported to the Unreal engine, which freaks some people out. Just like Edge running on chromium or whatever. Freaks some people out, but awesome. And it wasn't just graphical quality and all the other things you get with that. It was really about getting developers that understood the engine. Because one of the big problems they had bringing people into 3.43 at the time was Halo had its own engine, which was unique and kind of weird and no one knew how to use it. So it took months to get people up to speed on this thing. And now they're hoping they'll be able to go to market more quickly. October is interesting because we know that Xbox ally will be out by probably around that time frame. Microsoft has talked publicly about new hardware, specifically portable like Xbox Ally type hardware, but also next gen consoles. Working with amd. I think it was Richard who pointed out that semi notable. We don't see a lot of big franchise games and some of the bigger ones have been delayed Right. Until next year and that these things may all be pointing to whatever the next console is probably PC based. Right. As we've been talking and that Halo, the next Halo would be part of that, as it should be. I hope also as they're doing this that they do something on mobile too because as I keep harping on, they bought Activision Blizzard allegedly in part for this mobile stuff and have done nothing with it. And they do have a handful of really good franchises, Halo being the best. And obviously there are some Halo games on mobile, but they're not like what I would call real Halo. And I'm sorry, but my iPhone and iPad and whatever else, whatever mobile device you have could play those games very effectively. So we'll see, but we have to wait.

[Richard Campbell]

And Blizzard's got Diablo Immortal, which is, you know. Yeah, it made the Diablo fans angry, but it was, it is a pretty good mobile game and it's a contemporary game. It's like.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's actually a fun one. Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah. I mean to be fair, Microsoft, the Xbox games like. Sorry, the Halo games like Halo Spartan or whatever it was called or sort of like, sort of like that. The top down view, you know, the guy runs around. They're, they're okay. I mean you get to see all the familiar, you know, vehicles and characters and stuff. Yeah. But we want, hey, you know, we want first person Haley over the. We want the thing. We want the real thing, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, how long has it been since we had a genuinely new Halo game?

[Paul Thurot]

The first one come out. 2000. 2001. Yeah. Maybe.

[Richard Campbell]

It's been a hot minute, man.

[Paul Thurot]

It sure has.

[Richard Campbell]

They're far more likely to do a remake or, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So actually I, I do think part of the announcement is going to be another. I don't know if it'll be like a Master Chief box set like they did previously for Halo, but if not, certainly the first game, maybe the first three games, whatever. But another remastering, upscaling, whatever, quality improvement, maybe port it to this new engine kind of a thing. And that means PlayStation, right? Has to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm.

[Paul Thurot]

And has to and look, I get it. I can already hear people groaning. But you know what? That's if you care about the stuff like you want it on, you want it on, it everywhere. You want it there, you want. Yeah, I want it on iPad. I want it everywhere. Yeah, exactly. We'll see. This is. That's just speculation. But I. Given the way this year has gone and the games that have come, you know, cross platform and the other ones I talked about that haven't yet, I think. I don't know, I think it has to happen. I think it's the right thing to do. So we'll see. Did I mention layoffs? There were some layoffs.

[Leo Laporte]

So refreshing.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, who wants to talk about layoffs? Honestly?

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

I have been playing Expedition 33 on my game Pass. I was very happy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So what is that was available?

[Paul Thurot]

What type of game? You mentioned this earlier.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a role playing game. It's French, so it's not like anything it's done in Unreal Engine. You know, you're out there. I don't know, it's. What would you. What would you call it?

[Paul Thurot]

Is it like. It looks like it's like a fantasy world thing. Like elves?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. No, no, no, no. You're a person. There's a bad person called the Paintress who has somehow co opted the world and slagged it over. And you're on an expedition with a bunch of other humans to go to her island to find her and destroy her. Because one of the things she's doing is when you reach a certain age, you turn into rose petals and disappear.

[Paul Thurot]

So you just described a mashup of the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. And yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S got a little final fantasy to it. It's a turn based rpg, says Anthony Nielsen. That's what it is. The combat's turn based, but the rest of it is kind of a lot of cutscenes, a lot of real time story mode thing. I don't know. Anyway, I was pleased to see that Instead of paying 50 bucks for it, I could play it on Game Pass. And I did. Last night. I mentioned before the show began that I hadn't used my Xbox in some time.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And logging in was a great big fail.

[Paul Thurot]

I did this recently myself, but I didn't go through what you went through. I just wanted to make sure it was up to date or whatever to.

[Leo Laporte]

Just it had been keeping itself up to date. I was very pleased.

[Paul Thurot]

That's what I found too, in my case. Yeah, I guess I left it on the inefficient power mode where it's always like, you know, sitting there sucking the bandwidth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I was really pleased because normally when I turned, I used to be for years when I turned on the Xbox, I'd have a 15 gigabyte update.

[Paul Thurot]

You're like, I want to play Call of Duty. Like, nope, it's getting up this week. I'm going to be rebooting a couple of times, buddy. It's going to take a while.

[Leo Laporte]

So I was thrilled. It actually had updated itself. It had the latest update. But when I logged in and put up a QR code, when I, when I said, okay, I want to be, it knew who I was. But it said you have to re log in. I put up a QR code. So I took a picture of the QR code, took me to the Microsoft site. It said, enter that code that's on the screen.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm just, I don't mean to interject but I mean, obviously had a seamless excellent experience that worked great.

[Leo Laporte]

Before I could enter the eight characters, it said, Nope, time's up, right?

[Richard Campbell]

20 seconds, go faster.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it starts request a new code. I said, yes, stop, time's up. I did this four or five times and I was screaming louder and louder each time. So I went out and I googled it and said it turns out this is a common, this is not, well, I don't know common, but it happens. This too short timeout for the code and they said the fix is to either possibly removing your account and re entering it.

[Paul Thurot]

It can't be.

[Leo Laporte]

But the best fix is just reset the whole machine, which I did.

[Paul Thurot]

Man, I feel like that could have been fixed otherwise, but.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if it happens again, I'll call you.

[Paul Thurot]

I just did this myself like I said, but I don't remember what I.

[Leo Laporte]

It was extremely frustrating. Anyway, I feel like it just once I got it going and then I downloaded of course 800 gigabytes of worth of game because it's.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But I was able to play this game and I spent some couple hours last night enjoyable hours. So now I'm saying, you know, I pay for this game. Pass. What else can I do with it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff on there now.

[Leo Laporte]

New games are out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Oh, sorry. We, I, I sorry I did this one earlier. I skipped ahead.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you skipped ahead.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. I, I did.

[Leo Laporte]

I wasn't paying attention.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sorry I did this in the disjointed way. That was my fault.

[Leo Laporte]

You just joined at the Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that's what happens, man.

[Richard Campbell]

I know it's crazy, but.

[Paul Thurot]

Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you use a butcher's knife to disjoint it?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's like when Steve Jobs took the Apple logo off his Mac because he was mad and it's like a gouged hole in it. That's what I did.

[Leo Laporte]

Really? Is that the truth?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Did that happen?

[Leo Laporte]

He gouged the apple out of his Apple Mac?

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Also late, when he came back to Apple, someone asked him if he wouldn't mind signing his Apple keyboard. And he said, sure, but I'm going to remove all the keys I would never put on there. And he took off the entire function row. The four arrow keys thing looked like a. Like a. It was destroyed. He goes, here you go, Steve Jobs.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's your toothless.

[Paul Thurot]

Enjoy your stupid Apple keyboard with a numeric keypad on the side. And what else was on it? Yeah, that's hysterical. He was a good guy. I miss him.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, before we get to the back of the book then, because that's what's next, right? Or did you not do everything? Did you do everything?

[Paul Thurot]

I'm sorry that I've introduced uncertainty. That is the next thing. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Hey, if you just do uncertainty and don't fear, do fear and doubt, I'll be happy.

[Paul Thurot]

I am. I didn't mean to embrace chaos. I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let me tell you, folks, I would like to embrace our club, Club Twit time. Let me give a plug for the best darn club in the whole wide world. Club Twit is how we. How we make this all happen. To be honest with you, we realized, Lisa, we. Not me. Lisa, our CEO, our wonderful esteemed business manager realized at Covid that advertising was kind of starting to disappear. It was getting. Turning into rose petals and flying, fluttering away. And we thought, we're gonna be. We're gonna be. We won't be able to make payroll next week. So she said, let's do the club. Let's give our audience a chance to support us. And that has been a huge success. Now almost a five years in, we are so thrilled with our. The response. And I think we've given you a pretty. A good deal on this. The club now pays, literally subsidizes 25% of our overhead. So without you, we would have to cut shows, we'd have to cut people. So it's really valuable 10 bucks a month now because you're giving us money. We don't have to show you ads or in any way track you. So you get tracker free. You get your own unique tracker free feed with no ads, not even this plug for Club Twit in it. So you get a pristine version of this show. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord, which I gotta tell you is more and more fun to hang out in. Smart people, interesting people, really into, you know, all the geeky stuff that we're into. And in the club we do a lot of events, all the keynotes. The Microsoft Ignite keynote was in the club, as was the Google IO. The WWDC keynote we're also doing. And I should mention this because we've been talking a lot about AI.

[Paul Thurot]

It won't.

[Leo Laporte]

The AI user group will normally the first Friday of the month, we're moving it to the second Friday because guess what, the first Friday of this month is the fourth of July. So we're going to do it July 11th this month. That's a great place to get club members get together and we could talk about how we're using AI best practices. We did a lot of vibe coding last time Lou Maresca joined us. He's the guy who's putting AI into Microsoft Excel and Python and so he was great. I think we're going to talk a little bit about prompts and stuff and chat bots on the 11th. We also will be doing right before that actually. Photo time with Chris Marquardt, our photo expert. Micah's Crafting Corners coming up on the 16th. That's a chill place to hang out. We've got Stacy's book club coming up yet. Last week we did a thing on music, digital music versus vinyl.

[Paul Thurot]

Vinyl.

[Leo Laporte]

It was really fantastic. And you could also see this. Oh, we've got a date for the book club. Thank you, Anthony. This is how you lose the time, words, the book. Fascinating book. Quick read too. It's only a few hours on Audible. August 8th, 1:00pm Pacific. August 8th, 1pm Pacific. So all of this is a way of making it fun to be a club member. But also I think the idea is giving you a reason to join and support us. And really that's the most important thing you do in the club with the club is you show. It's like a vote for what you want and what you want more of. And we really appreciate it. If you're not a member, please do me a favor. Twit TV Club Twit. We would really like to have you in the club.

[Unknown]

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[Paul Thurot]

This is one of the most spectacular.

[Leo Laporte]

Venues with all kinds of character and hospitality scenery. These people in this Gitas valley, they.

[Paul Thurot]

Love when you come to see what.

[Leo Laporte]

They have to offer.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm JJ Harrison, Ellensburg Rodeo Clown and.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to invite you to the rodeo.

[Paul Thurot]

Come hang out with us in Ellensburg. Great rodeo. Great time. Two performances on Saturday. One is the Extreme Bulls of the Year event. Do not miss the Ellensburg Rodeo August.

[Leo Laporte]

29Th through September 1st. We'll see you there. Enough said. Now let's go to the back of the book with Mr. Paulie Thot.

[Paul Thurot]

Paul yes. So I have kind of a combination of tip and pick, if you will, based on or tick tip. Yeah. So I've been looking at, you know, the stuff Apple's got coming out, iPad, but also Mac. And you know, Mac is, it's got its pros and its cons. I still find Windows to be better. But if you look at, if you ever get that kind of Mac envy thing going, aside from just buying like a Surface laptop Instead of a MacBook Air or whatever, from like a software perspective, I was thinking about like, what were the things I liked about the Mac and like what could I do to make Windows more like that. So for example, the Mac has this full screen mode which I really like, although it's inconsistent with other multitasking things. But basically the way they do it is they use their version of virtual desktops called spaces, where full screen apps each have their own space and then you can three finger swipe on the touchpad to go between them. Pretty cool. You can do that on Windows if you have a touchpad, you can do a three finger, you know, altogether tab kind of a thing. It works similar. It's not as good, but whatever it does kind of work. But you know, we have this taskbar thing that's on the screen, right. And so I was like, all right, let's get rid of the taskbar. Kind of like in Mac os. Like I'll be like, let's get rid of the menu bar, you know. But what I found in both cases was that when those things aren't there, I miss something I didn't realize I was using all the time, which is the stupidest, simplest thing in the world, but it's the time. And so, you know, the taskbar has the time and the date down in the corner. And on a Mac, they have it on the menu bar up on the top. So there are utilities that you can just put the time somewhere on screen, floating, whatever. And so I use one called dsclock, which is actually pretty amazing. And I've started not displaying the taskbar on my computers. And you get that kind of space back, you know, you can use the full height of the screen, etc. I'm trying it. Right. If you are not ready to take that step, there is a utility in the mi. In the. Yeah, the Microsoft Store in Windows that is called. What, Paul? It's called. I think it's called TB Translucent. Let me just make sure. Yep. Our translucent tb. This will make your taskbar translucent or transparent.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sorry, when I hear tb, I hear tuberculosis.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, exactly. It's. Yeah, it's probably the same toolbar.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So this is, you know, on the Mac, they've made the menu bar transparent because that's what somebody wanted, I guess. I have no idea. But to me, the single greatest feature on the Mac from a kind of UI or usage perspective is Spotlight. So Spotlight on the Mac is where it's. I think it's the command key plus space. And then you just type. Right. And we have this. Right. So PowerToys has had this thing called PowerToys run forever, and now they have a newer version called Command Palette, which is extensible. And it can do, you know, run various shortcuts of different kinds and do different things. And if you have apps, they can plug into it, et cetera, et cetera, but by default they want to use alt space. I change it to Windows key plus space. That makes more sense to me as a launcher. I wish I could just kind of get rid of the Start menu, frankly, but that's not a thing. But you can use one of those tools. And to me, this is pretty much everything that's good about Spotlight, but it's. We've had that on Windows forever. So there are these things, like just little things. So you can just maybe make Windows more bearable or at least hold down that desire to spend a couple thousand bucks on Mac hardware and software or whatever. But that's the thought. And then this is almost apropos of nothing, but about a month ago, I started testing Feed readers again. As I do from time to time. And I have stuck with the same thing I was using ever since Google Reader went out. Right whenever that was 2013.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a while ago.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, a long time ago. And I at the time picked something that I don't think I know anyone who uses called the old reader. And it is a super spartan ui. But you know, you could import from your feed from Google Reader at the time, which I did. And I've been using it ever since. Until this year. So past month or so the old reader was down for like a full day, which is bad. I actually use this thing all the time. And then it went down for another day and I was like, okay, I gotta. Oh no, something out. There's a lot of good choices there like feedly and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the thing I settled on, not settled actually I really love it is called. Well, I'm actually not sure what it's called, but I know Reader. You know Reader.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I know Reader. I love Inno Reader.

[Paul Thurot]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the RSS feed Reader.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. So it's. They have different views which are all, you know, which are interesting. Some of them are a little more like a magazine style thing. But I just have a kind of a nice list view. It's fairly spartan, you know, right click to open it in a different tab, all that kind of stuff. But the kind of. Almost the game changer for me on this one is there's a mobile app and I didn't have a mobile app for the old reader. And so I would just use the web view. But it was like the desktop web view, they didn't have a mobile version. So it was always kind of terrible. So I didn't do it that much. But now that I have this on mobile, I can keep up with my feed when I'm not like in front of the computer. And I actually kind of love that and it has read it later stuff. I don't use that. I use Instapaper for that. But you know, you can just. Instapaper integrates with it on through the extension. So you just.

[Leo Laporte]

This is my feed. So it's all the new stuff that.

[Paul Thurot]

I have to look for. You have. If you go to the top right, the third icon in. I think from the. Right. The third one in is probably the different views.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. So I think I used list expanded columns. Magazine.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that one. I'm sorry, that's it. Yeah, Magazine. It's just, you know, it's nice, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's Pleasant. It's a pleasant read.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. And it also, like, auto updates. So if there's like an update, like if there are new articles in the feed, you just go to that tab and at one second it's like, oh, here they are.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's ironic because this is really what Google Reader was, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Until Google gave up. Because no one uses RSS feeds.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I rely, I've, I use RSS all day, every day.

[Leo Laporte]

Every day. It's how I check the news for all of our shows.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

It's not the only thing I use, but honestly, it's the primary thing. It's. Yeah, it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too. I do it on my iPad. Yeah, right. I have it.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I have this thing everywhere now because of the. I love it. I love it. I, I, My iPad is mostly for reading. And so every, most every app in my dock is a reading app of some kind. And that's in there now. It's wonderful.

[Leo Laporte]

And now I save it out to Raindrop, which then has a little zapier script which puts it in a spreadsheet, which the producers then put into a rundown. Because we don't use Notion on other shows, we use Google Sheets. But it's a very easy workflow and it has a little button I can just click and it's great. Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I've gotten smitten with Raindrop.

[Paul Thurot]

That's just a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't Raindrop the best? I swear I was a pinboard, you know, devotee, have a lifetime subscription, but I feel like Raindrop IO I pay for it. You know, it's worth. I pay for no reader as well.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. See, I don't have to pay for it yet. It's the free.

[Leo Laporte]

Free does most of what you want.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's mostly like a number of article or number of feeds you can have. I think it's 150 on innoreader 20. It's. It's 100 on most other ones. And it's fine for, it's, it's fine for me, but I don't use, like, if I use the other stuff in the app, like, I might, you know, I would, I'd be okay paying for it, but I just don't have to. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Good choice for your app of the week. I love it. Now let's say hello to Richard Campbell.

[Paul Thurot]

Hello to Richard Campbell.

[Leo Laporte]

And run his radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Where did this Jewish mother come from?

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know who I am. I don't know who or what you.

[Paul Thurot]

Don'T need to know enough.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't need to know what? Do you have some. Yeah, have some noodles.

[Richard Campbell]

What's wrong with the other show.

[Leo Laporte]

Run as radio? You had a pretty good guest there, it looks like.

[Richard Campbell]

It's one of my. One of the build series. Mr. Recinovich dropped by, which is always a great day, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Now who is this man? No one's ever heard of.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody's ever heard of this guy.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you ever read his mysteries or his novel?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they good?

[Richard Campbell]

I even hijacked one of my own run ads just to talk about his books.

[Paul Thurot]

He was a little. They're a lot like the Daniel Suarez stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

Honestly. But he hasn't written one in forever. It's been a long time.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I think he proved his point that he could do it and then he moved on. It's not a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's no way to make money to write writing book.

[Paul Thurot]

He's okay with the money, but he.

[Richard Campbell]

Also did the old fashioned way. Like he wrote it and then shopped it around for a publisher. Yeah, he didn't bother. He felt like he needed the advance or anything. Right, so.

[Paul Thurot]

Right, right, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

He did just fine. But you know, he's got a. He's got a pretty cool job these days as Azure cto and he runs this group called the Azure Innovations Lab. And a lot of experimentation happens in there. And so I don't know, every other year or so I check in with him. It's like, what are you, what's, what are you working on? What's fun for you right now? And we ended up in a long conversation, probably the first, the first half of the show, really talking about what they're doing with the optimized hardware in the cloud, the ARM chipsets and things like that, and the fact that he has certain large customers that, that matters to them, like ultra large memory, ultra multi CPU configurations for these specific customers. And then after they see how they operate for a while, they might make it a publicly available product. So, you know, the right customer comes at them with the right problem space, they will literally build an innovative set of hardware or set of solutions for them and then decide whether or not that's going to come available. So when you see these new lines of configurations for virtual machines and things in Azure, that's where it's from. It's from these experiences and that's where a lot of the ARM chipset stuff is living right now, is that they are running with these custom implementations for specific customers before they decide exactly how they're going to land it publicly. So I appreciated that conversation just from a viewpoint of this is how products get developed at this scale and in the azure space. So that was good fun. We did talk a little bit about the build side of things and he loved the material science demo where they came up with the new non conductive fluid.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, wasn't that cool? I loved it too.

[Richard Campbell]

It was, it was a great play and so he had a role to play in that. So we talked a bit about when it went on there, this idea of actually developing material science things through, through generative AI software. And finished out the show talking a little bit about Quantum because of course they had the announcements at Microsoft Quantum on their new hardware design and if and when that's going to appear. And he's like, you know, you're never, you're very unlikely to ever see this stuff in a machine at home. This is going to be live in the cloud. And it. We did end up speaking a bit about the whole when will you use Quantum versus when will you use some other supercomputer? The hiccup, HCS or HCI configurations, things like that. And the idea that eventually we'll have a coordinator to decide how to run our software for us, that we won't be making those choices and that, you know, it'll be a based on cost, time of render, available resources, that kind of thing. So it's like it's not up to you, you don't care. It's what's the quickest I could do it or what's the cheapest I could do it. And off it goes.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

So yeah, another great, you know, can't go wrong with Mark, full stop.

[Paul Thurot]

And we're starting.

[Richard Campbell]

Well then I could, you know, I see this on the stats, right? As soon as that show dropped late last night, it was a double download immediately. Yeah, you know, I get a base download, I don't know, 25, 30,000 normal. And then it's just already. This is already over 50.

[Leo Laporte]

It's funny, how do people know? I mean, how do they. Oh wow, Sinovich.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I think, I literally think people have searches on the name, right? Oh maybe they grab it. So they're not subscribers. Like that subscriber is the, you know, you see that big hit when you drop the show, the subscribers kick in within the hour and then you see this next wave and then some, you know, it's. I find it really interesting sometimes some of that stuff makes press and you get another bump.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

One, one of my other shows from a couple of weeks ago just got a press bump. It's just all of a sudden another 2010,000 downloads out of nowhere. So those are good days.

[Leo Laporte]

We, speaking of CTOs, we have a John Graham coming. The CTO of Cloudflare is going to be joining us in about half an hour for.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. AI filter.

[Paul Thurot]

What exactly how long is that going? We need that yesterday, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Paul Thurot]

That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

So that'll be, that'll be interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

I like this thought that it might even be honey potted. Like you're going to poison the AI like that.

[Leo Laporte]

They did that. They've done that, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, without a doubt.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's not what we're doing now because today it's Whiskey day.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's Whiskey Day every day.

[Paul Thurot]

It's Whiskey day every day.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also just past, it's the day after Canada Day. So of course I have to talk about a Canadian whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

And you mean there's something beside Crown.

[Richard Campbell]

Royal out there and there, you know, and crown's awesome. And you know, I've done what, two or three different crowns? So I've given Crown a lot of love. And I have talked about this week's distiller before. Alberta Distillers. I just never talked deeply about the distillery. But this particular whiskey, I do not have a bottle here. It was at the Canada celebrations. I rat they were doing a tasting so I had a taste of it, immediately wrote it up. This is Blair's Distillers, 23 year old rare batch number one. And what's rare about it? Well, for starters is a 23 year old whiskey from Canada. That's weird. And it was pretty darn tasty. It was also 100% rye, which is odd, isn't?

[Leo Laporte]

Is? I thought all Canadian whiskey was rye whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they're often called rye whiskeys but they're not all rye. So let's, let's get into that first, you know, talk a little bit about all order distillers. They're not one of the nouveau distilleries. They've been around since 1946. They're founded in Calgary. Three partners. Max Bell, who was a rancher. Okay, Alberta, that makes sense. Frank McMahon who is an oil man. Oh yeah, okay, Alberta, yeah, that makes sense too. And George Rifle, who was the distiller and a very skilled distiller. He'd worked in Japan, he'd worked in Scotland. He was making beer in his own spirits and they recruited him in, in the founding of the company back in 46, when they built it on 23 acres at the edge of the city of Calgary. Today that's now kind of the middle middle of Calgary. They expanded to 42 acres in 1975. They picked that location because A, they were all Albertan, so they wanted to be Alberta and B, it was right on two separate rail lines. So they're. All of their materials come in by rail because of course they're inland. They're also at altitude that's the east side of the Rockies there. So they're at about a thousand meters or 3200ft or so, which means that this is not Denver by any stretch of the imagination. But it's high enough that it does impact the environment that the whiskey is going to mature in. And so they build temperature controlled warehouses because the wintertime in Calgary can get extremely cold. Negative 40 it does occur in a place like Calgary. They get nice summers, famously in wintertime there's these winds they call the chinooks, which are a warm wind on an icy cold day. So they're. And their warehouses are massive.

[Paul Thurot]

600 barrels. You are a warm wind on an icy cold day.

[Richard Campbell]

And they, they do both rack and palace. Now this is not a place for a tour Alberta Distillers. This is very much a factory. And they've gone. But they've gone through the normal things that happen to whiskey companies over the years. They were acquired by American Brands in 86. Of course, American Brands became Fortune Brands in 97. And then in 2011 the entities were reshuffled again. And that's when Beam acquired all of the spirit products and then Beam itself, that's Jim Beam out of Kentucky that was then acquired by Suntory in 2014 to make Beam Suntory. And then recently in 2024 that was renamed to Suntory Global Spirits. So that's the company and Column stills and Pot stills. So their main products are a line of vodkas like Banff Ice and Northern Keep and Alberta Pure, typical names for, for vodkas and in whiskies, Alberta Premium, Alberta Springs and Rifle Rye. After the distiller Mr. Rifle. They also make whiskey for a lot of other companies many you've heard of like Canadian Club, Masterson's Rye, Jefferson's Rye and whistlepig. I also think that Pendleton Rye, which we've talked about here before, came from them. They make Whistle Pig and they make Whistle Pig. And that's known like they admit that big. This is this big facility that produces an awful lot of whiskey. And remember, the whiskey travels, it used to at least travel easily back and forth across the border. Right now nothing travels across the border particularly well. And I also mentioned in another Canadian whiskey called Bare Face. And when they, when I looked at the description of how bareface, that was the one with the big slashes in the bottles.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, I remember that one. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I remember when I was looking at how they were making the whiskey because they're in British Columbia now. You come out of nowhere with a seven year old plus whiskey. It's that they were, I was pretty sure they're buying from Alberta Distillers a 7 year old whiskey and then they're doing a finishing step. They split it into like wine casks and Hungarian oak casts and age it for a year in the British Columbia wilderness. All very cool. But you know, that's where it comes from. Because Canadian distillers, not just Alberta distillers, but several of them do this thing that's different from the way Americans make whiskey, which is that they don't do mash bills. They don't combine different grains into a mash to produce the wort that will become the whiskey. They actually keep them separate. And Alberta Distiller specifically is famous for making true hundred percent rise. Now, why is that weird? And it's because rye is a very difficult grain to work with. The reason is that it has two things that are very important about the grain rye when it comes to whiskey making. One is that it's mostly composed of complex polysaccharides, which really is a way to say they're even longer chain carbohydrate sugars that are very difficult to break down into sugar that can be digested by yeast. And those long chains tend to make very sticky, thick mashes that stick to the equipment and don't flow through pipes well and create lots of foam. And so it's hard to make a bunch of it when you're doing a fermentation. If you ever get a chance to go to on a distillery tour where a ferment is running, you'll notice that the, the mash ton literally looks like it's boiling. It's not, it's not even, it's not warm enough. It's only about 30 degrees centigrade in there, but there's enough carbon dioxide being produced that it's constantly turning over. Well, the rye mashes are so thick that instead of having this steady turnover that keeps the temperature even so the yeast stay healthy. It's so dense it heats up in the center and kills off the yeast because it can't move around. And so they have to use stirring equipment to keep that the mash evenly mixed and keep the temperatures even, so the yeast stay healthy. But it sticks to the stirring equipment, which damages the equipment. Like it's really difficult to work with. And this is the other aspect of rye besides the polysaccharides, is that it doesn't have a hull. And normally whenever you make a grist, you combine a certain amount of fine ground flour with a medium grind and some hull. And the hull is mostly about creating spacing to keep that the mash a little more fluid so it's easier to move around. And so the result is you just can't use as much rye mash per batch, which means you produce less alcohol, which means it's just a more expensive product to make. It's also a more expensive grain. I looked up today what the price per ton was for commercial grains. The cheapest is corn at about $165 a ton. Barley's number two at 170. Of course these temperatures change, these prices change. Wheat's at 195, rise at 220. So rye is more expensive. You can't use as much of it per batch. It's hard on your equipment. It's just why would you do this to yourself when you can combine it with a few other grains and make your life easier and make a good product still. So 100% grain wise are just weird. I also read a great piece about how prohibition devastated rye making. That the, the rye whiskey makers, the few companies that were good at making rye, most of them went bankrupt through the, through the prohibit prohibition period. And so when people started back up, there wasn't a lot of people knew how to make rye and nobody cared. They were just in a rush to make whiskey quickly. And so that's when corn really emerged huge as the, as the approach to whiskey for most places. And rush rye never caught on again. Now Alberta Distillers again is famous for making 100 rye because they came up with a reliable process for it. So they don't malt the rye, which is something you can do, you soak it in water, let it sprout, and then try it to help break down the sugars. And that was used to be an older approach, but they don't do that at all. They only make a fine flour. So they don't do a mixed grist. They use a hammer mill grind on melted rye down to a fine flour. Then they add water and a custom made proprietary enzyme called gluco amylase. So Alberta Distillers employs a microbiologist. Her name is Shannon, Dr. Shannon Thomas. And she has matured this unique enzyme that's primarily glucoamylase, but also has a bunch of what they call side enzymes that work together to help break the rye down into sugars that the yeast can digest and also introduce the set of flavors that people like from rye that tends to be a little spicier, a little more interesting, and then that successful digestion. So you don't make any methanol, you're just producing ethanol can then be pushed as a wart into stills. And in Alberta Spray, Alberta Distillers uses both column stills and pot stills. You knew that because they make vodka, you need column stills to make vodka and then pot still. So they do this mixed combination where they make a more high distillate and a mid distillate. They do a little finishing in the pot stills and then they split up the aging batch too. They use a bunch of ex bourbon barrels. They will also reuse bourbon barrels after they've run through because they have a different flavor profile. And also new white oak out of Missouri American oak. They're also not afraid to go in at fairly high alcohol levels. So traditional, traditionally new bourbon goes into new American oak barrels at 62.5. And then the Scots and most everyone else when they're reusing bourbon, barrels will go in at 63.5 because they can pick off a few other flavors. Under certain conditions, Alberta Springs will go as high as 78 going into the barrel. But because they're high and dry in places like in, in Alberta, they actually lose water faster than they use alcohol. So their barrels are known for increasing alcohol levels rather than decreasing alcohol levels. And it's a typical because of a low humidity, relatively warm environment at certain times of the year. In the cooler times, it can go the other way. They can lose alcohol. But this is the same problem Kentucky battles with. Although I would point out they have actually bottled an 84%, 168 proof, which apparently was a hit at the time when they made it. So it's a. In some ways it's more Kentucky ish because it does deal with that high dry environment. They are willing to go to different alcohol levels. They're doing different kinds of extraction on the barrel. They also tend to go shorter term. Most Canadian whiskies are not aged more than three or five years, maybe seven Right. There's literally a standard commercial product that Alberta Distillers makes for other whiskey people, including folks like, like Bareface. That's a seven year old. And then you do other things with it. Except for this old rare batch. This old rare batch was barreled in 2000. It's been sitting ever since. And they did a bottling in 2023, which is why it's a 23 year old. And it is one of the most unusual whiskeys you'll ever taste because it's a very old, pure rye whiskey. It's bottled at 50% ABV and it is only sold in Canada at about $150 a bottle.

[Leo Laporte]

And so we can't get it here in the States.

[Richard Campbell]

Thanks a lot, Rich.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to come for a visit.

[Paul Thurot]

Stupid Canada.

[Leo Laporte]

They're not a problem with a lot of Canadian whiskeys nowadays, right? Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You have to get to a certain production level before it makes sense to ship south anyway. Just from the cost perspective.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and you have removed all American whiskeys from your shelves, so at the moment, yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Hopefully these days that will pass.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a trade war, and a.

[Paul Thurot]

Foolish one at that.

[Leo Laporte]

Benefits no one, especially whiskey drinkers.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty sure it's hurting everybody right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Every once in a while, a bird flies through the web.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I was just noticing that. It looks cool. The opening screen of a video game.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's great. You know, it's not all the time.

[Paul Thurot]

Is that Half Life 3 home screen?

[Richard Campbell]

They don't have a page for this old batch one.

[Leo Laporte]

I was looking at their retail products.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I looked around. The only ones I found are showing on reseller sites. But it's like I said, it's a relatively rare whiskey state. But they are. I can get them. There's none on the coast or I would have gone and grabbed a bottle. There's a couple in the city which.

[Paul Thurot]

I won't get to for another week.

[Leo Laporte]

When I was in Toronto, you have to go to a special state run store to buy liquors.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the lcbo, the.

[Leo Laporte]

The CBO is everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

Every province does it slightly differently. For a long time BC was like that as well. But we've started having third party licenses for some spirits.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

So my, my favorite whiskey store in Vancouver when I go is a place called the Legacy Liquor Store.

[Leo Laporte]

It's such a. It's such an artifact of an earlier age.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the blue laws in New England where like you can't buy fish on Tuesday.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like, it's like yes. Unless you Live near the New Hampshire border. Then it's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Richard Campbell as always. You make you make Windows Weekly fun at least a little drunker. Anyway, at least that Richard's at run his radio.com and of course he does that show with Carl franklin.net rocks. Both are at his website runasradio.com. you're going to be home for the summer, huh?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. A few more weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Although I am taking a little jaunt tomorrow down to Snohomish to sit amongst the artillery fire that you call July 4th. There's nothing like a rural July 4th.

[Leo Laporte]

It scares the dogs and the military vets. But the rest of us go hey yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

This is the special time of year where there are pop up tents selling fireworks all over Pennsylvania like in parking lots.

[Leo Laporte]

Got rid of that in Petaluma.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact a kid just a few days ago was seriously injured in Petaluma with.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah. This is the. This is the place.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The we coast. We don't allow fireworks at all because of the fire hazard. It's just too much forest here. Right. There are a few spots in Vancouver that have of like city based fireworks that are typically on the water.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As they should be.

[Richard Campbell]

So in their land it's bloody dangerous.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a friend who grew up in the Pennsylvania farm country and they used to set up bleachers out in the cornfield.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

And Uncle Jim, they sometimes call him Three Finger Jim would go go out there and do a homemade display. Was apparently quite amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

I wonder how far away we are from simply drones replacing our firework displays.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. They're not as fun. They're cool.

[Richard Campbell]

No. They're not as loud.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And which the dogs and the vets like. But.

[Richard Campbell]

But also not as dangerous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I don't know. It seems like it takes some of the spunk out of.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know we also used to not bother with pro sports. We had hanging and gladiators.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. Things are. Yeah. Paul Thurat is at the T H U R r o double good.com become a premium subscriber for the extra goodness. The cherry on top as it were. His [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. A lovely little kind of walk drive by History of of Windows through its programming frameworks. Let's see. We do this show as I mentioned earlier, Every. Every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. If you don't watch live you can always get a copy of the show at our website, Twitter TV WW. There's a YouTube channel. You see a link on that page, by the way, that's dedicated to the video. That's great for sharing clips. If you want to tell the world, you know, tell your friends about the show. Best way to get any of our shows is subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. It's no charge to you. But there is I do have a request if you would. If you're using one of those like Apple Podcasts or Pocketcasts or give us a good review, leave us five star review and tell the world about Windows Weekly. A special thanks to our club members. Thanks to you Paul and Richard. Thanks to all you Windows winners and you Dozers. We're glad you are here. We'll see you next week on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Our family at Phillips Cruises and Tours.

[Paul Thurot]

Wants to say thank you to the thousands of people who have shared their.

[Leo Laporte]

Glacier cruise experience with us online and across social media.

[Paul Thurot]

Guests from around the world commented that our tours were the highlight of their Alaska experience.

[Leo Laporte]

Our staff works hard and takes great.

[Paul Thurot]

Pride in sharing Prince William sound with our guests.

[Richard Campbell]

So let us provide the smooth journey for your next Alaskan adventure.

[Leo Laporte]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.